NARRATOR

Thomas More was born in Milk Street, London on February 7, 1478, son of Sir John More, a prominent judge. He was educated at St Anthony's School in London. As a youth he served as a page in the household of Archbishop Morton, who anticipated More would become a "marvelous man. "More went on to study at Oxford under Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn. During this time, he wrote comedies and studied Greek and Latin literature. One of his first works was an English translation of a Latin biography of the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510.

      Around 1494 More returned to London to study law, was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1496, and became a barrister in 1501. Yet More did not automatically follow in his father's footsteps. He was torn between a monastic calling and a life of civil service. While at Lincoln's Inn, he determined to become a monk and subjected himself to the discipline of the Carthusians, living at a nearby monastery and taking part of the monastic life. The prayer, fasting, and penance habits stayed with him for the rest of his life. More's desire for monasticism was finally overcome by his sense of duty to serve his country in the field of politics. He entered Parliament in 1504, and married for the first time in 1504 or 1505.

More became a close friend with Desiderius Erasmus during the latter's first visit to England in 1499. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and correspondence. They produced Latin translations of Lucian's works, printed at Paris in 1506, during Erasmus' second visit. On Erasmus' third visit, in 1509, he wrote Encomium Moriae, or Praise of Folly, (1509), dedicating it to More.

      One of More's first acts in Parliament had been to urge a decrease in a proposed appropriation for King Henry VII. In revenge, the King had imprisoned More's father and not released him until a fine was paid and More himself had withdrawn from public life. After the death of the King in 1509, More became active once more. In 1510, he was appointed one of the two under sheriffs of London. In this capacity, he gained a reputation for being impartial, and a patron to the poor. In 1511, More's first wife died in childbirth. More was soon married again, to Dame Alice.

      During the next decade, More attracted the attention of King Henry VIII. In 1515 he accompanied a delegation to Flanders to help clear disputes about the wool trade. Utopia opens with a reference to this very delegation. More was also instrumental in quelling a 1517 London uprising against foreigners, portrayed in the play Sir Thomas More, possibly by Shakespeare. More accompanied the King and court to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In 1518 he became a member of the Privy Council, and was knighted in 1521.

      More helped Henry VIII in writing his Defence of the Seven Sacraments, a repudiation of Luther, and wrote an answer to Luther's reply under a pseudonym. More had garnered Henry's favor, and was made Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523 and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1525. As Speaker, More helped establish the parliamentary privilege of free speech. He refused to endorse King Henry VIII's plan to divorce Katherine of Aragón (1527). Nevertheless, after the fall of Thomas Wolsey in 1529, More became Lord Chancellor, the first layman yet to hold the post.
      While his work in the law courts was exemplary, his fall came quickly. He resigned in 1532, citing ill health, but the reason was probably his disapproval of Henry's stance toward the church. He refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn in June 1533, a matter which did not escape the King's notice. In 1534 he was one of the people accused of complicity with Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent who opposed Henry's break with Rome, but was not attainted due to protection from the Lords who refused to pass the bill until More's name was off the list of names. In April, 1534, More refused to swear to the Act of Succession and the Oath of Supremacy, and was committed to the Tower of London on April 17.  More was found guilty of treason and was beheaded alongside Bishop Fisher on July 6, 1535. More's final words on the scaffold were: "The King's good servant, but God's First." More was beatified in 1886 and canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint by Pope Pius XI in 1935.

Main article: Utopia (book)

In 1516 More wrote his most famous and controversial work, Utopia, a novel wherein a traveler, Raphael Hythloday (in Greek, his name and surname allude to archangel Raphael, purveyor of truth, and mean "speaker of nonsense"), describes the political arrangements of the imaginary island country of Utopia (Greek pun ou-topos [no place], eu-topos [good place]) to himself and to Peter Giles. This novel presents the city of Amaurote as "of them all this is the worthiest and of most dignity".

Utopia contrasts the contentious social life of European states with the perfectly orderly, reasonable social arrangements of Utopia and its environs. In Utopia, private property does not exist, and there is almost complete religious toleration. The novel's principal message is the social need for order and discipline, rather than liberty. The country of Utopia tolerates different religious practices, but does not tolerate atheists. More theorizes that if a man did not believe in a god or in an afterlife he could never be trusted, because, logically, he would not acknowledge any authority or principle outside himself.

More used the novel describing an imaginary nation as means of freely discussing contemporary controversial matters; speculatively, More based Utopia on monastic communalism, based upon the Biblical communalism in the Acts of the Apostles.

Utopia is a forerunner of the utopian literary genre, wherein ideal societies and perfect cities are detailed. Although Utopianism typically is a Renaissance movement, combining the classical concepts of perfect societies of Plato and Aristotle with Roman rhetorical finesse (cf. Cicero, Quintilian, epideictic oratory), it continued into the Enlightenment. Utopia 's original edition included the symmetrical "Utopian alphabet", that was omitted from later editions; it is a notable, early attempt at cryptography that might have influenced the development of shorthand.

Religious polemics

Utopia is evidence that More greatly valued harmony and a strict hierarchy. All challenges to uniformity and hierarchy were perceived as dangers; practically, the greatest danger he saw was the challenge that heretics posed to the established faith. For More, the most important thing was maintaining the unity of Christendom; to his mind, the Lutheran Reformation's fragmentation and discord were dreadful.

Campaign against Protestantism

For More, heresy was a disease, a threat to the peace and unity of both church and society. His early actions against the Protestants included aiding Cardinal Wolsey in preventing Lutheran books from being imported into England. He also assisted in the production of a Star Chamber edict against heretical preaching. Many literary polemics appeared under his name, as listed above. After becoming Lord Chancellor of England, More set himself the following task:

As Lord Chancellor, More had six Lutherans burned at the stake and imprisoned as many as forty others [4] . His chief concern in this matter was to wipe out collaborators of William Tyndale, the exiled Lutheran who in 1525 had published a Protestant translation of the Bible in English which was circulating clandestinely in England (Tyndale had also written The Practyse of Prelates (1530), opposing Henry VIII's divorce on the grounds that it was unscriptural and was a plot by Cardinal Wolsey to get Henry entangled in the papal courts).

In June 1530 it was decreed that offenders were to be brought before the King's Council, rather than being examined by their bishops, the practice hitherto. Actions taken by the Council became ever more severe. In 1531, Richard Bayfield, a graduate of the University of Cambridge and former Benedictine monk was burned at Smithfield for distributing copies of the New Testament . Further burnings followed at More's instigation, including that of the priest and writer John Frith in 1533. In The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, yet another polemic, More took particular interest in the execution of Sir Thomas Hitton, describing him as "the devil's stinking martyr."  Rumors circulated during and after More's lifetime concerning his treatment of "heretics", with some, such as John Foxe (who "placed Protestant sufferings against the background of... the Antichrist" in his Book of Martyrs, claiming that he had often used violence or torture while interrogating them. More strongly denied these allegations, swearing "As help me God," that heretics had never been given, "so much as a flyppe on the forehead." . However, Michael Farris in his book "From Tyndale to Madison" claims that in April 1529 a "heretic", John Tewkesbury, was taken by Thomas More to his house in Chelsea, and so badly tortured on the rack that he was almost unable to walk. Tewkesbury was subsequently burned at the stake.