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The following reference(s) may be useful when improving this article in the future:
Paul, Joanne (2025). Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England. Random House. ISBN978-1-4059-5363-4.
Text and/or other creative content from Thomas More was copied or moved into Beaufort House (Chelsea). The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.
I was surprised that Thomas More's theological work is described as "amateur" in the opening paragraph (".. social philosopher, author, statesman, amateur theologian, and noted Renaissance humanist"). This may be technically correct, but it is not clear why his theological work is singled out as if there is some significant distinction between the amateur and professional theologians of the 16th century. Could the sentence be improved by leaving out "amateur"? Mnjuckes (talk) 22:45, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Interestingly, that source has different content to the current article text and doesn't mention Psalm 51? That psalm is quite long, so not sure if we can assume he recited it in its entirely or not. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:18, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I expect he said or chanted it all but not loud enough for the crowd to hear, as he as not allowed to address them. And 19 verses is not so long: they had phenomenal memorization then. It would be the Latin, which More was fluent in. Reciting 51 was often given as the penance after Confession by priests, and he would have been well familiar with it. More's Palter (Gallican) is now in the possession of Yale University. Psalm 51 (in the old numbering, 50) was one of Penitential Psalms in his Book of Hours, so he would have recited it often.
Thanks. I see that Gallican Psalter is explained at Latin Psalters. Yes, I expect he would have known large chunks of the Bible in Latin. So what about "Pick up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office; My neck is very short, take heed therefore thou strike not awry for having thine honesty."? Martinevans123 (talk) 16:18, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that is a famous thing he is reported to have said. If you think it is interesting, put it in the article with attribution: I don't think it is very enlightening myself, but have no strong opinion.
It was the convention for the condemned to forgive their executioner in advance, and to encourage them, even to tip them, to do a good job. Having a clean strike was important, as having to take several hacks was upsetting for all involved (including the executioner), could mutilate the head, and risked an awareness of pain by the condemned. The high risk of something going wrong with the manual axe stroke was what lead to Dr Guillotin's invention. (When the execution sentence was particularly gruesome and spectacular, executioners would sometimes try to make sure the person was at least unconscious as soon as possible, as their job was to execute not torture. Horrible.)
"Gallows humour" (like his comment on not needing help to come down) is a real thing: the most famous was Saint Laurence when being grilled, supposedly saying: "Turn me over, I am done on that side!"
On the issue of different accounts: that is to be expected: someone in the crowd will not hear what happens on the platform. And hagiographers and opponents (like Foxe) are prone to making things up, or to present paraphrases into quotations. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 01:36, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I imagine a great many of these "famous last words" have been invented. The source you suggested for "My neck is very short... " is a blog. I was wondering if there were any other, more convincing sources, for that quote. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:20, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Roper is interesting because he perhaps allows a nuance about More's views that is often missed: More actually tolerated a partial Lutheran (Roper) living in his own home. (So much for the Wolf Hall fanatic...) As far as I can work out, More (and Erasmus') thing was that sedition and public heresy were evil, but that no-one should be blamed for having their own private doubts about religious things: in fact, that is one of the functions of friends as people you could express and work through your doubts and difficulties. (For example, Erasmus clearly never felt that transubstantiation made sense as as explanation of the real presence, which he certainly believed, and even made a joke about it to More after not returning a horse he had "borrowed" from his fiend.) More tried to rely on this private/public distinction in his silence about his opinion on the Royal Supremacy etc. of course.
I suspect you can see this same thing at work in More's raid of the German cloth merchants of the Steelyard district: Wolsey wanted it to be a coordinated lightening raid, but More left a full day between showing up with his posse and starting to search for banned books, giving plenty of time for merchants to rid themselves of incriminating material: it was the public performance of spreading heresy that should be criminal, not that the merchants were sympathetic to the Lutheran views 'per se' (which should be dealt with outside the criminal system.) Rick Jelliffe (talk) 11:14, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I won't judge the sources because I don't read English history or histories of the Reformation. However, the Legacy section is written in this glowing, heroic air rather than a dispassionate list of achievements and boils down to other Catholics singing his praises. In fact, I wrote a Unitarian's feelings on More's canonisation that someone undid almost immediately. Shushimnotrealstooge (talk) 23:44, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that some of the sections do read somewhat as hagiographies, but including lists of non-Catholics with an opposing point of view, as in your edit here, doesn't seem the way to go about fixing it—the point it's making wouldn't be obvious.
Just for interest: in response to your [Which university?] tag, AFAICS only University of Cambridge sent a delegate to Rome, and they actually publicly disowned him afterwards (according to the London Times), so the list of institutions that didn't go would be a long one. The tag requesting this isn't appropriate. AntientNestor (talk) 06:48, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've had another go at taking this out. The twentieth-century primary source sought "gleefully" to attack the Catholic Church because More's satire Utopia advocated euthanasia.[1] It was satire. WP:TOPIC applies.
References
^Dowbiggin, Ian Robert (2003). A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 92. ISBN9780195154436.
The assertion that Wolsey also had heretics burned at the stake is cited coming from Ackroyd, Peter (1999). The Life of Thomas More. p.299-306. However, I do not find such statements in my review of the book. Conversely in Thomas Cromwell. A Life (2018) by Diarmaid MacCulloch, it states Wolsey did not burn heretics. Additionally in Tudor Times [1] it states: "Wolsey, however, seems to have been disinclined to severe punishments for heretics. Whilst he was active in the searching out and burning of heretical works, primarily those coming in from Europe containing Lutheran ideas, he seems to have confined his punishments of heretics to either penance and forgiveness, or a whipping." Dash.wiki.IF (talk) 13:38, 6 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
You are right. Wolsey was notably merciful towards heretics, releasing them on parole for a chance to show repentance. Your quote from Tudor Times (is this a blog, BTW?) seems to sum up well. The statement should be deleted. AntientNestor (talk) 10:50, 7 April 2026 (UTC).[reply]
^Gunn, Steven J. Cardinal Wolsey church, state and art. Cambridge University Press. p. 231. ISBN0 521 37568 1. In spite of strong and repeated hints from Rome, he never sent a heretic to the stake.
My initial intent was to simply remove what appeared to be an erroneous statement "the same rate as under Wolsey". But that seemed too presumptuous without at least some commentary. But figuring out a reference was complicated for a negative, so I instead went with a footnote (which I removed and placed here in TALK). Subsequent discussion seems to support my observation that the statement about Wolsey was not factual and should be removed. But should it just be deleted (and the edit referred to this discussion), or remained in a qualified manner? After all, this topic is about Thomas More, not Wolsey. But Wolsey is referred to six times in this Thomas More Wikipedia entry. Relevant to this discussion, "note 8" says in part "from the Wolsey/John Fisher approach of persuasion, ...to More's brief approach of capital punishment" thus supporting that Wolsey did not burn heretics. I will go with Plan A and just delete "the same rate as under Wolsey" and put in the explanation line that this statement is unsupported and to see this discussion in TALK under "Did Wolsey have heretics burned at the stake like Thomas More?".
Tudor Times does appear to be a blog, created 2014
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