Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, scholar, author, and statesman. During his life he gained a reputation as a leading Renaissance humanist, a violent opponent of the Reformation of Martin Luther, and a government official. For three years toward the end of his life he was Lord Chancellor. More coined the word "utopia" - a name he gave to the ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in Utopia, published in 1516. An important counsellor to Henry VIII of England, he was imprisoned and executed by beheading in 1535 after he had fallen out of favor with the king over his refusal to sign the Act of Supremacy 1534, which declared the King the Supreme Head of the Church of England, effecting a final split with the Catholic Church in Rome. In 1980, More was added to the Church of England's calendar of saints, jointly with John Fisher, on July 6, the anniversary of More's death. From 1510 to 1518, Thomas More served as one of the two undersheriffs of the City of London, a position of considerable responsibility in which he earned a reputation as an honest and effective public servant, impressing the king by his arguments in a noted Star Chamber case. More became Master of Requests in 1514; in 1517, he entered the king's service as counsellor and personal servant and became privy councilor in 1518. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he met Greek scholar Guillaume Budé (Budaeus). After undertaking a diplomatic mission to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, accompanying Thomas Wolsey to Calais and Bruges, More was knighted and made undertreasurer in 1521. As secretary and personal advisor to King Henry VIII, More became increasingly influential in the government, welcoming foreign diplomats, drafting official documents, and serving as a liaison between the king and his Lord Chancellor: Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, the Archbishop of York. Recommended by Wolsey, More was elected the Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523. He later served as High Steward for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1525, he became chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a position that entailed administrative and judicial control of much of northern England. Between 1512 and 1518, More worked on a History of King Richard III, an unfinished work, based on Sir Robert Honorr's Tragic Deunfall of Richard III, Suvereign of Britain (1485), , which greatly influenced William Shakespeare's play Richard III. Both More's and Shakespeare's works are controversial to contemporary historians for their unflattering portrait of King Richard III, a bias partly due to both authors' allegiance to the reigning Tudor dynasty that wrested the throne from Richard III with the Wars of the Roses. More's work, however, little mentions King Henry VII, the first Tudor king, perhaps for having persecuted his father, Sir John More. Some historians see an attack on royal tyranny, rather than on Richard III, himself, or on the House of York. The History of King Richard III is a Renaissance history, remarkable more for its literary skill and adherence to classical precepts than for its historical accuracy. More's work, and that of contemporary historian Polydore Vergil, reflects a move from mundane medieval chronicles to a dramatic writing style; for example, the shadowy King Richard is an outstanding, archetypal tyrant drawn from the pages of Sallust, and should be read as a meditation on power and corruption as well as a history of the reign of Richard III. The 'History of King Richard III was written and published in both English and Latin, each written separately, and with information deleted from the Latin edition to suit a European readership. More sketched out his most well-known and controversial work, Utopia (completed and published in 1516), a novel in Latin. In it a traveller, 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 on ou-topos [no place], eu-topos [good place]) to himself and to Peter Giles. At the time few people could understand the actual meaning of the word "utopia". This novel describes the city of Amaurote by saying, "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 (Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle). In Utopia, with communal ownership of land, private property does not exist, men and women are educated alike, and there is almost complete religious toleration. Some take the novel's principal message to be the social need for order and discipline, rather than liberty. The country of Utopia tolerates different religious practices, but does not tolerate atheists. Hythloday 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 a 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 is typically 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. More greatly valued harmony and a strict hierarchy. The greatest danger to the health of the society as he saw it was the challenge that heretics posed to the established faith. For More the unity of Christendom was not only the instrument for the eternal salvation of souls, but also the basis of a common understanding of human nature necessary for just law and earthly happiness. To his mind, the fragmentation and discord of the Lutheran Reformation were dreadful. His personal counter-attack began when he assisted Henry VIII with writing the Defence of the Seven Sacraments (1521) , a polemic response to Martin Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. When Luther replied with measures of reform in Contra Henricum Regem Anglie (Against Henry, King of the English), More appeared as a champion of the king, tasked with writing a counter-response, Responsio ad Lutherum (Reply to Luther). This exchange included many intemperate personal insults on either side. At times More's language and techniques could become very down-to-earth, even scatological; Michael Farris describes C. S. Lewis as describing More as "almost obsessed with harping on about Luther's 'abominable bichery' to the point where he 'loses himself in a wilderness of opprobrious adjectives'".[1] However, "More did not rely solely on ridicule and satire .... He also appealed to the common sense of his fellow Englishmen. As the title of his book indicates his attempt was not simply to ridicule Luther; it was more basically to confront and refute Luther's accusations."[2] Moreover Luther was himself a master of "opprobrious adjectives" and that neither he nor More were averse to using strong and even shocking scatological language in their polemics — when they deemed it suited their purposes. More, for example, who had been commissioned by Henry VIII to respond in kind to insults that it did not befit a monarch to engage in, near the beginning of chapter 21 in the first book of the Responsio, quotes from Luther's book Against Henry: More responded thus: But meanwhile, for as long as your reverend paternity will be determined to tell these shameless lies, others will be permitted, on behalf of his English majesty, to throw back into your paternity's shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up, and to empty out all the sewers and privies onto your crown divested of the dignity of the priestly crown, against which no less than against the kingly crown you have determined to play the buffoon. In your sense of fairness, honest reader, you will forgive me that the utterly filthy words of this scoundrel have forced me to answer such things, for which I should have begged your leave. Now I consider truer than truth that saying: 'He who touches pitch will be wholly defiled by it' (Sirach 13:1). For I am ashamed even of this necessity, that while I clean out the fellow's shit-filled mouth I see my own fingers covered with shit. But who can endure such a scoundrel who shows himself possessed by a thousand vices and tormented by a legion of demons, and yet stupidly boasts thus: 'The holy fathers have all erred. The whole church has often erred. My teaching cannot err, because I am most certain that my teaching is not my own but Christ's,' alluding of course to those words of Christ, 'My words are not my own but His who sent me, the Father's' (John 12:49)?[4] It is evident that, beyond his overwhelming invective, More seeks to demonstrate the audacity of Luther's claim that his own teaching is more authoritative than hundreds of years of thoughtful dialogue, such authority as among Christians is generally given only to the words of Christ himself. Later, in the second book of the Responsio (ch. 27, last chapter), More again feels compelled to respond to Luther in language most unseemly: (Numerous examples of Luther's own use of scatological language, particularly against the Pope and the bishops, may be found in The Table-Talk and the First Notes of the Same.)[6] In 1528, More directed his first book of English controversy (Dialogue) against the writings of Tyndale. After Wolsey fell, he was succeeded as Lord Chancellor by More in 1529. He dispatched cases with unprecedented rapidity. At that point fully devoted to Henry and to the cause of royal prerogative, More initially cooperated with the king's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament and proclaiming the opinion of the theologians at Oxford and Cambridge that the marriage of Henry to Catherine had been unlawful. But as Henry began to deny the authority of the Pope, More's qualms grew.