Contributions
A lawyer, statesman and one of the greatest humanists of his age, Thomas More was the friend of Erasmus, who dedicated to him The Praise of Folly — Moriae Encomium, a pun on his name. In 1516 he published Utopia, written in Latin: the tale of an imaginary island with ideal institutions, the work founded the utopian genre and became a classic of European political thought, criticising enclosure, property and social injustice. The first layman to hold the office of Lord Chancellor (1529-1532), he was also a pioneering father who gave his daughters, notably Margaret Roper, a humanist education rare for the time. A friend and sitter of Hans Holbein, who painted his portrait and the lost group portrait of his whole family, he embodied the English humanist household. A formidable polemicist, he also took up his pen against Luther and against William Tyndale.
Significance
More is the figurehead of English Christian humanism, and Utopia has watered the political philosophy of Europe, from Bacon to modern socialist thought. But his greatness rests above all on his fate as a martyr of conscience: refusing to swear the oath acknowledging royal supremacy over the Church and the validity of Henry VIII's new marriage, he resigned, was imprisoned in the Tower of London, tried and beheaded in 1535 for preferring, in his own words, God to the king. Canonised in 1935, he is today the patron saint of statesmen and lawyers. The nuance does not fade: as Chancellor, this apostle of the tolerance imagined in Utopia pursued heresy with rigour, had Protestants burned, and waged a violent polemic against Tyndale. This contrast between the openness of the thinker and the intransigence of the magistrate makes him one of the most debated consciences of the Renaissance — and one of the loftiest.
Influence
Utopia founded a fertile literary and philosophical genre, from Bacon's New Atlantis to modern utopias, and lastingly shaped political thought. More offered the model of the martyr of conscience, taken up in theatre and film (A Man for All Seasons). Holbein's portraits fixed the image of the English humanist household. He owed much to Erasmus and northern humanism, to Pico della Mirandola whose life he translated, and to the classics — Lucian, and above all Plato's Republic, which inspired Utopia; the austere piety of his youth, marked by time spent among the London Carthusians, nourished his final steadfastness.
Anecdote
On 6 July 1535, led to the scaffold on Tower Hill, More kept to the end the wit that made his name. According to his son-in-law William Roper, he asked the officer to help him up the rickety platform — for the coming down, he said, he would shift for himself. Then, moving his beard aside from the block, he observed with a smile that it, at least, had never committed treason. Shortly before, he had declared that he died "the King's good servant, and God's first".