Thomas More is one of the tragic figures of the Tudor period. First a personal servant of the King with a reputation as an honest and effective public servant, he was knighted and served as a key liasion between the king and diplomatic channels. In 1523 he became the Speaker of the House of Commons and expressed the first documented call in all of in human history for “free speech.”
More was a strict Roman Catholic in an age where theogical revolution was changing the western world. He was appointed Lord Chancellor to push for the King’s divorce annulment to be approved in Rome, but instead spent his time burning Lutheran heretics at the stake. When More refused to pledge his allegiance to the King as the head of church he resigned. When he refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn as the Queen of England, he was charged with bribery, conspiracy, and high treason, for which he was found guilty and executed.
More was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and canonized after a mass petition of English Catholics in 1935. St. Thomas More was delegated as the ‘heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians.’ His feast day is the 22nd of June—and for good measure, he also has a feast day of the 6th of July in the Anglican calendar of saints, who 450 years later decided to let bygones be bygones.
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Comments to this entry
Ralph Hitchens
June 23, 2008
2:25 pm
Curzon
June 23, 2008
3:14 pm
Lexington Green
June 23, 2008
6:17 pm
The language he used was typical of the level of disputation at the time, which tended to be vicious and scatological. Luther's was similar.
More did not want his martyrdom. He had a large family. To his credit, he used ever legal dodge he could to avoid being put to death. He would not say Henry was the head of the Church, correctly. But he would not say anything in public that would get him executed. It took perjured testimony to get him executed.
Ralph Hitchens
June 24, 2008
5:47 pm
Curzon
June 25, 2008
1:12 am
Lexington Green
June 25, 2008
2:20 am
The violence of the language, and the actual violence, of the era are distressing to contemplate. All very tragic.
A good study of the Era is Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625: Seven Studies by John Neville Figgis.
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/figgis/PoliticalTheory.pdf
It is very dense and I need to re-read it. But one main point is that it took a few centuries before everybody decided that it was a bad idea for professed Christians to kill each other over religion.
Another good book to look at is William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation In England and Ireland. Cobbett was not a Catholic, but he was sympathetic to the Catholic position, and hence wrote a reasonably balanced study, at a time when it was still difficult to do so.
http://www.exclassics.com/protref/protref.txt