Sir Thomas More - A Narrow-minded Hypocrite

Sir Thomas More - A Narrow-minded Hypocrite

"What did nature ever create milder, sweeter and happier than the genius of Thomas More? All the birds come to him to be fed. There is not any man living so affectionate to his children as he, and he loveth his wife as if she were a girl of fifteen" (Erasmus). Sir Thomas More is often viewed as a Catholic saint and martyr. He is viewed this way because More took a stand against King Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon and later was beheaded for his Catholic beliefs. Many people think of Sir Thomas More as the freethinking Renaissance humanist author of Utopia. However, there is a more accurate third view of Sir Thomas More; he is a narrow-minded hypocrite who persecuted those who opposed his views.

The only good quality that Sir Thomas More showed was loyalty to his beliefs. In the age of kings, More could have followed King Henry VIII and believed he was serving God. “In serving Henry VIII, he would be serving God. Or so he could allow himself to think, until Henry demanded he swear an oath acknowledging the king to be the supreme authority on all matters temporal and spiritual, thus severing the English church's ties with Rome” (Rubin). In Peter Ackroyd’s book The Life of Sir Thomas More, he viewed Sir Thomas More as a martyr; Ackroyd also sees no inconsistency between More’s worldly success and his devout religious beliefs. There are, however, inconsistencies which will be shown later.

Sir Thomas More may hold some Catholic beliefs dear to him, such as divorce, yet he does not embrace the more important belief of Thou shall not kill. His skewed views are apparent in James Woods’ Sir Thomas More: A Man for One Season. Woods’ writes, “as Lord Chancellor, he [Thomas More] had imprisoned and interrogated Lutherans, sometimes in his own house, and sent six reformers to be burned at the stake, and he had not done this just so that he might die for slender modern scruple, for anything as naked as the naked self.” Does this sound like a free thinking humanist and Catholic Saint? More’s actions against others who do not share his views speak for itself.

In the 1520’s a man named Tyndale wrote a translation of The New Testament. In Tyndale’s translation, he included some of Martin Luther’s notes.