![]() ![]() ![]() More spent the last year of his life as a prisoner in the Tower of London, awaiting trial and execution on a charge of high treason. The first to appear was his Dialogue Concerning Heresies in 1528, while the fullest attack was mounted in his Confutation of 1532-1533, a work which runs in its modern edition to over a thousand pages. At the same time he began to publish a series of diatribes against Luther and his English disciples, all of which are unfortunately distinguished by exhausting prolixity as well as a brutal violence of tone. But by the end of the 1520s, acting as lord chancellor, he was calling for a fierce campaign of persecution against England’s earliest Protestants, several of whom he caused to be burned. In 1516, in Utopia, he had pleaded for a remarkably wide measure of religious toleration. Soon after this More’s religious outlook began to undergo a marked change. But he was deeply shocked when the opposition of the humanists to the Church’s shortcomings passed over into heresy and schism with Luther’s epochmaking outburst against the papacy in 1517. As a young man More was a sharp critic-no less than Erasmus-of the vices and follies of the Catholic Church. This book has had an influence vastly beyond its actual readership, for Shakespeare is known to have studied it closely, and it forms the basis for his ineradicable portrait of Richard as a hunchbacked villain, a tyrannous usurper and the murderer of his own nephews.įinally, More remains of interest to theologians as well as historians for his religious treatises, both his anti-Protestant polemics and his devotional works. And between 15 he completed the Latin as well as English versions of his History of King Richard III. First he produced, in 1516, his celebrated account of the imaginary island of Utopia, a book which has given its name to a whole genre of subsequent social criticism. And later he somehow found time in the midst of his busy legal practice to compose two of the most influential works of English humanism. While still in his twenties he translated four of Lucian’s satirical dialogues from Greek into Latin, publishing them in association with his friend Erasmus in 1506. More is also of interest to historians as a leading humanist, an outstanding exponent of the new classical learning associated with the Renaissance. He sees More as the moving spirit behind an ambitious series of reform proposals drawn up in 1530, which included a plan to curb the growing rate of inflation as well as a scheme for a state-financed system of poor relief, the first proposal of its kind ever put forward in England. Scarisbrick has recently argued that More was no less innovative in his work as lord chancellor. It was he who, in his capacity as speaker of the Commons, first secured the right of its members to enjoy complete freedom of speech in debating any issue submitted to them. One crucial contribution More made to the English system of government at this time has long been recognized. ![]() He became speaker of the House of Commons in 1523, served as a royal secretary and roving ambassador throughout the 1520s, and in 1529 he attained the highest office of state, the lord chancellorship. But once embarked on his new career he quickly rose to the top. He only entered the king’s service after prolonged and apparently agonized reflection-a process he describes and dramatizes in the opening book of his Utopia. More turned to politics in earnest in his early forties, after making his name and fortune as a lawyer in the city of London. In the first place his political career is of considerable significance. ![]() To a historian there are of course many reasons for paying attention to More. Anniversaries are traditionally a time for taking stock, so it seems an appropriate moment to ask what reasons there may be for continuing to think about More’s life and writings so many centuries after his death. This is the five-hundredth anniversary of Sir Thomas More’s birth. ![]()
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