For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of a sad gravity. The play’s title comes from something that Robert Whittington, an English grammarian and contemporary of More’s, wrote about him in 1520: “More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning. More is the subject of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (1960). More spent the five days before his execution writing a prayer and several letters of farewell, and when he mounted Tower Hill to the scaffold, he told his escort, “See me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.” His last words were, “The King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Traitors were customarily hanged, drawn, and quartered, and that was his sentence, but Henry commuted it to beheading. He was tried on July 1, 1535, and the judges - among them Anne Boleyn’s brother, father, and uncle - unanimously found him guilty. He wasn’t tried until more than a year later, but imprisonment suited his ascetic tastes he said to his daughter Margaret that he would have chosen “as strait a room, and straiter too,” had he been given a choice. He was arrested for treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London on April 17, 1534. He refused to attend the coronation of the king’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, and though he acknowledged that she was the rightful queen, he refused to take an oath that named Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England. When More resigned in 1532, citing ill health, it was probably due as much or more to his unease over the split with Rome. He was a devout Catholic who had at one time considered becoming a monk, and he grew uncomfortable with Henry’s increasing opposition to the pope. Even though he was not in favor of Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, he still remained the king’s trusted advisor, confidant, and friend he succeeded Thomas Wolsey as Lord Chancellor in 1529, when Wolsey fell from favor.
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Henry named him Speaker of the House of Commons, where More advocated free speech in Parliament. Henry appointed him to his Privy Council in 1518, and knighted him in 1521 one of More’s early services to the king was to assist him in writing his Defence of the Seven Sacraments, a rebuttal of Martin Luther. More attracted the attention of Henry VIII in 1515 when he successfully resolved a trade dispute with Flanders, and again when he helped quell a London uprising against foreigners in 1517. He is the author of Utopia (1516) and the unfinished History of King Richard III (1513-1518), which has been called the first masterpiece of English historiography and provided the source material for Shakespeare’s play Richard III (1591). More was a lawyer, philosopher, humanist, and statesman, and since 1935, he’s also a Catholic saint. On this date in 1535, Sir Thomas More was executed in London. “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth” by John Milton.