Thomas More

Thomas More was a London lawyer, Erasmus’s closest English friend, speaker of the Commons, and Lord Chancellor after Wolsey’s fall, who resigned rather than accept Henry VIII’s supremacy over the church, refused the oath, and was beheaded in 1535, saying he died the king’s good servant but God’s first. Utopia, written in Latin in 1516, describes an island commonwealth without money or private property, in a dialogue that leaves the reader unsure how much its author believed. The Catholic Church made him a saint; Robert Bolt made him a man for all seasons; and Roper’s Life by his son-in-law is on the same lists.