Born in 1478, Thomas More was called the most virtuous man in British history by both Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. He was born into a comfortably off family, and – despite trying his vocation with the Carthusians – entered the legal profession, through which he rose to become Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII in 1529.
More’s natural affability and subtle intelligence were lit up by his piety. If summoned by the king in the middle of Mass, More would tell the messenger to wait until the Holy Sacrifice was over. Like Henry, More rejected Reformation theology, and he engaged in lengthy written debates with the Protestant apologist William Tyndale.
More thought that the denial of free will by some Protestants was a misunderstanding of the nature of God’s mercy. More said God was at the door of the sinner’s heart, “always knocking upon him to be by the free will of man let in with his grace into the house of man’s heart again”.
Dragged into the debate
More managed to avoid direct opposition to Henry’s divorce and civil remarriage, the break with Rome, the reform of the heresy laws and the declaration of Anne Boleyn as queen.
But when pressed to accept the king’s supremacy over the Church in England, More refused; he also would not accept that the king’s first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon, was invalid. For this he was incarcerated in the Tower of London. In 1535 he was convicted of treason and beheaded.
Comfort and tribulation
Separated from his beloved family; facing imminent death from a king who had defied papal authority; watching heresy tear through the Church while Ottoman armies advanced through central Europe – in these circumstances, More wrote his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation and a treatise on receiving the Eucharist.
If a great Prince came to one’s house, More wrote in the latter work, one would clean it from top to bottom. “How would we now labour, that the house of our soul (which God were coming to rest in) should neither have any poisoned spider, nor cobweb of deadly sin hanging in the roof, nor so much as a straw or a feather of any light lewd thought, that we might spy on the floor, but that we would sweep it away.”
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