Sir Thomas, lord high chancellor of England, the son of Sir John More, knight, one of the judges of the King's Bench, was born in the year 1482, in Milk-street London. He was first sent to a school at St Anthony's in Threadneedle Street; and afterward introduced into the family of Cardinal Moreton, who in 1497 sent him to Canterbury college in Oxford. During his residence at the university he constantly attended the lectures of Linacre and Grocinus, on the Greek and Latin languages. Having in the space of about two years made considerable proficiency in academical learning, he came to New Inn in London, in order to study the law; whence, after some time, he removed to Lincoln's Inn, of which his father was a member. Notwithstanding his application to the law, however, being now about 23 years old, he was so bigotted to monkish discipline, that he wore a hair shirt next his skin, frequently fasted, and often slept on a bare plank. In the year 1533, being then a burgess in parliament, he distingued himself in the house, in opposition to the motion for granting a subsidy and three fifteenths for the marriage of Henry VII.'s eldest daughter, Margaret, to the king of Scotland. The motion was rejected; and the king was so highly offended at this opposition from a beardless boy, that he revenged himself on Mr More's father, by sending him, on a frivolous pretence, to the Tower, and obliging him to pay 100l. for his liberty. Being now called to the bar, he was appointed law reader at Furnival's inn, which place he held about three years; but about this time he also read a public lecture in the church of St Lawrence, Old Jewry, upon St Austin's treatise De Civitate Dei, with great applause. He had indeed formed a design of becoming a Franciscan friar, but was dissuaded from it; and, by the advice of Dr Colet, married Jane, the eldest daughter of John Colt, Esq., of Newhall in Essex. In 1538 he was appointed judge of the sheriff's court in the city of London, was made a justice of the peace, and became very eminent at the bar. In 1546 he went to Flanders in the retinue of Bishop Tonstall, and Dr Knight, who were sent by King Henry VIII. to renew the alliance with the archduke of Austria, afterwards Charles V. On his return, Cardinal Wolsey would have engaged Mr More in the service of the crown, and offered him a pension, which he refused. Nevertheless, it was not long before he accepted the place of master of the requests, was created a knight, admitted of the privy council, and in 1520 made treasurer of the exchequer. About this time he built a house on the bank of the Thames, at Chelsea, and married a second wife. This wife, whose name was Middleton, and a widow, was old, ill tempered, and covetous; nevertheless Erasmus says, he was as fond of her as if she were a young maid.

In the 14th year of Henry VIII. Sir Thomas More was made speaker of the house of commons; in which capacity he had the resolution to oppose the then powerful minister, Wolsey, in his demand of an oppressive subsidy; notwithstanding which, it was not long before he was made chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, and was treated by the king with singular familiarity. The king having once dined with Sir Thomas at Chelsea, walked with him near an hour in the garden, with his arm round his neck. After he was gone, Mr Roper, Sir Thomas's son-in-law, observed how happy he was to be so familiarly treated by the king: to which

Sir Thomas replied, "I thank our lord, son Roper, I find his grace my very good lord indeed, and believe he doth as singularly favour me as any subject within this realm: howbeit, I must tell thee, I have no cause to be proud thereof; for if my head would win him a castle in France, it would not fail to go off." From this anecdote it appears, that Sir Thomas knew his grace to be a villain.

In 1526 he was sent with Cardinal Wolsey and others, on a joint embassy to France, and in 1529 with Bishop Tonstall to Cambrai. The king, it seems, was so well satisfied with his services on these occasions, that in the following year, Wolsey being disgraced, he made him chancellor; which seems the more extraordinary, when we are told that Sir Thomas had repeatedly declared his disapprobation of the king's divorce, on which the great defender of the faith was so positively bent. Having executed the office of chancellor about three years, with equal wisdom and integrity, he resigned the seals in 1533, probably to avoid the danger of his refusing to confirm the king's divorce. He now retired to his house at Chelsea; dismissed many of his servants; sent his children with their respective families to their own houses (for hitherto, he had, it seems, maintained all his children, with their families, in his own house, in the true style of an ancient patriarch); and spent his time in study and devotion: but the capricious tyrant would not suffer him to enjoy his tranquillity. Though now reduced to a private station, and even to indigence, his opinion of the legality of the king's marriage with Anne Boleyn was deemed of so much importance, that various means were tried to procure his approbation; but all persuasion proving ineffectual, he was, with some others, attainted in the house of lords of misprision of treason, for encouraging Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent, in her treasonable practices. His innocence in this affair appeared so clearly, that they were obliged to strike his name out of the bill. He was then accused of other crimes, but with the same effect; till, refusing to take the oath enjoined by the act of supremacy, he was committed to the Tower, and, after 15 months imprisonment, was tried at the bar of the king's bench for high treason, in denying the king's supremacy. The proof rested on the sole evidence of Rich the solicitor general, whom Sir Thomas, in his defence, sufficiently discredited; nevertheless the jury brought him in guilty, and he was condemned to suffer as a traitor. The merciful Harry, however, indulged him with simple decollation; and he was accordingly beheaded on Tower hill, on the 6th of July 1535. His body, which was first interred in the Tower, was begged by his daughter Margaret, and deposited in the chancel of the church at Chelsea, where a monument, with an inscription written by himself, had been some time before erected. This monument with the inscription is still to be seen in that church. The same daughter, Margaret, also procured his head after it had remained 14 days upon London bridge, and placed it in a vault belonging to the Roper family, under a chapel adjoining to St Dunstan's church in Canterbury. Sir Thomas More was a man of some learning, and an upright judge; a very priest in religion, yet cheerful, and even affectedly witty. witty (A). He wanted not sagacity, where religion was out of the question; but in that his faculties were so enveloped, as to render him a weak and credulous enthusiast. He left one son and three daughters; of whom Margaret, the eldest, was very remarkable for her knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages. She married a Mr Roper of Wellhall in Kent, whose life Sir Thomas More was published by Mr Hearne at Oxford in 1716. Mrs Roper died in 1544; and was buried in the vault of St Dunstan's in Canterbury, with her father's head in her arms.

Sir Thomas was the author of various works, though his Utopia is the only performance that has survived in the esteem of the world; owing to the rest being chiefly of a polemic nature: his answer to Luther has only gained him the credit of having the best knack of any man in Europe, at calling bad names in good Latin. His English works were collected and published by order of Queen Mary, in 1557; his Latin, at Basil, in 1563, and at Louvain, in 1566.