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history, literature, politics
• wikipedia.org
Monday
July 6
2009
It was on this day in 1535 that Sir Thomas More was beheaded in the Tower of London for refusing to recognize his longtime friend King Henry VIII as the head of the Church. Thomas More was a barrister, a scholar, and a writer. He was the author of Utopia (1516), a controversial novel about an imaginary island named Utopia, where society was based on equality for all people. It is from this novel that we get our word "utopia."
Sir Thomas More was a champion of King Henry VIII and helped him write rebuttals to Martin Luther's attacks on Henry. More presented sound theological arguments, and he also said things like, "Come, do not rage so violently, good father; but if you have raved wildly enough, listen now, you pimp," and (also about Luther): "If he proceeds to play the buffoon in the manner in which he has begun, and to rave madly, if he proceeds to rage with calumny, to mouth trifling nonsense, to act like a raging madman, to make sport with buffoonery, and to carry nothing in his mouth but bilge-water, sewers, privies, filth and dung."
Thomas More was a staunch Catholic, and so for a while, he and King Henry were both aligned against Protestantism, and Henry made More his Lord Chancellor. But then Henry decided to break with the Church and declare himself Supreme Head of the English Church, and More refused to sign an oath recognizing Henry above the rest of the Church. Finally Henry had More beheaded.
Robert Bolt wrote the play A Man For All Seasons about the life of Sir Thomas More. It debuted in London in 1960, and in 1966, it was made into a movie starring Paul Scofield and Orson Welles.
In A Man For All Seasons, More says, "I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live."
Utopia (1516)
I must say, extreme justice is an extreme injury: for we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital,
nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal; as if there were no difference to be made between the killing a man and the taking his purse, between which, if we examine things impartially, there is no likeness nor proportion.
God has commanded us not to kill, and shall we kill so easily for a little money?
* Ch. 1 : Discourses of Raphael Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth
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