EP 106: Mission Driven Stories: Sir Thomas More

After years of admiring Sir Thomas More, I finally dug deeper into his life and story and I was blown away by what I discovered! Like so many other mission driven individuals, his final acts of moral courage were built solidly on a lifetime of deliberate actions in living the 7 Laws of Life Mission!

Join me this week as we deep dive into what made him the man who would DIE for his convictions!

If you don't already have it, grab your FREE 7 Laws of Life Mission Cheatsheet: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

You can also get TWO FREE CHAPTERS of my book The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution in the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript:

 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher author of The Mission Driven Life and Founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I'm so grateful to have you here today we get to do a mission-driven story about Sir Thomas More. Did a bunch of research, read some books, found some original sources that I'll share with you, and it's gonna be really inspiring, honestly, and enlightening all that we come to know about him.

I'm going to share some favorite anecdotes and stories from his life and demonstrate how he lived the 7 Laws of Life mission to become the man that he became one of the most famous martyrs in history.

I'm so glad that you're joining me here today for that. If this podcast has been benefiting your life, blessing you in some way, it would really help us if you pass it along and. Leave a review. That's also really helpful to those that stumble upon it and want to know what they ought to think about what we do here so that they can know that people are enjoying and appreciating these podcasts. Today. I've got a bunch of papers in front of me, so if you hear some paper shuffling, then I'm sorry.

I'm just trying to get to all the best stuff to share with you. So let's dive into the life of Sir Thomas More. He was born in London in 1478, and if you look at kind of a map of where he spent his life, aside from a few excursions outside of England, his life pretty much took place in London. It's really pretty crazy.

He had a pretty happy and comfortable childhood. His father was a lawyer. He belonged to some guilds, and so they were the upper middle class. Middle class, and his parents had several children. Four survived to adulthood, but his mother died when he was a child and his father went through three subsequent wives.

So these women kept dying before his dad did. In fact, his dad lived to be 79 years old, which was, even by today's standards is a pretty good run. And he was very close to his dad when his dad finally passed just a few years before his own death. It was very, very hard on him. So he would've had a typical tutor education in the tutor period of history.

The women at home would've begun his education. He would've learned some basic things at home. And then by the time he was seven years old, he was off to grammar school. He went to St. Anthony's, and it was one of the best of London's grammar schools. It was a really long day, was from six in the morning until six in the evening, only with a couple breaks.

And the curriculum of these grammar schools was the same for several hundred years. And basically how education worked at this time was that boys were traditionally the only ones who went to some kind of formal school. The girls were taught at home, and we'll talk in a minute about the way that More ran his home and how he educated his children, which is really pretty cool.

The boys were trained either for a career in the church or public office. Everything else that was learned by boys or girls was done in more of a trade school, an apprenticeship. There were many other ways of getting educated or having a skillset to do certain things in the community. He came from a father who'd had this formal education, and obviously was an attorney and influential person, and so he wanted his son to have the same, so he was there for a few years.

They would've gone through Latin. They would've argued and debated publicly. They would've learned writing and reading and languages. They also would've learned music, playing an instrument and singing, neither of which More was never very good at. So that's how he, but in the meantime, there was a huge emphasis on rhetoric and debate even in these younger years, and it was far more rigorous than our elementary school education is today.

So when he was about 12 years old, his father secured a place for him in the household of John Morton, Archbishop Bishop of Canterbury. Now this was basically him becoming a page, which when I first heard that was strange to my mind because I thought that was like the poor kids became pages to work their way up to knighthood.

But actually the culture of the time was quite hierarchical in the tutor society. But what's cool is that they believed that you couldn't know how to effectively. Lead others unless you knew how to serve. And so all of these boys became pages, and that meant that they lived in the home of the person that they worked for and they slept in common.

And they were, they had a handful of things that they did. They were waiting on the people. They would wait at the table, they would offer bowls for hand washing. They would clear tables and make up people's beds and run a lot of errands, run letters back and forth. Some of these kinds of things these boys were learning how to do.

And there was a huge emphasis on etiquette, personal deportment, and hygiene. There were books that the boys read about these social skills so that they could go out into the world and manage themselves properly according to societal mores. And he stood out. He was noticed by the people that he was working for as a page.

And what would normally happen is that you would be a page when you were younger, and then you would be squire in your, and from about 14 to 21, and then after 21 you could try to become a knight. While that wasn't his path, although plenty of young men followed that path, he at 14 was nominated for a scholarship to Oxford, to the Canterbury College at Oxford.

And this is partly probably due to his own conscientiousness and hard work and the ethics that he displayed the character that he had. And he went off to Oxford and spent two years there. One fascinating thing about Oxford at the time was that all the colleges, all of the classwork was given in Latin. That was the language of the educated. And it's actually pretty cool because it meant that everybody could talk to everybody else In the academic world, if you publish something, anybody anywhere could read it because everybody was learning their native tongue plus Latin.

Now at the college level, there was a system of education called Scholasticism that had been in place for a long time. In the past, in the previous couple hundred years, these older documents were resurfacing and coming more to the fore and taking more of a center stage in education. And what they would do is they would get into these original works and they would pick them apart and study them more and more in depth.

Now, we'll talk more about this in a minute, but interestingly, Thomas More became a good friend of a philosopher named Erasmus, and he's one of the most is really, really famous philosopher and thinker. And they were contemporaries became good friends, and Erasmus was largely responsible for the movement of humanism.

This was not what we think of as humanism today. That's antithetical to religion or faith or belief. It was very much a Christian humanism. It was a new movement that was more open-minded, that was letting more of these original works into the classroom. That was more open to. Your own interpretations about things, and a good way of putting it is it was an appreciation that God had granted man, the ability to think it was a very strong all his life.

So even though More became a huge fan of humanism and seeing the body as more beautiful, everything that came out of that over the next two or 300 years, opening up the educational model and seeking truth through reason and logic in a, in an even more aggressive way. He also retained a very strong belief in the Bible and the teaching and custom and traditions of the church, which we're gonna see more and more and more in his life.

But he left Oxford without taking his degree. Instead, he went to live in what was called the Inns of chancery. And this was basically where you went to study law. And his temperament was perfect for the law. It was one of the things that they like to talk about that made you a really good lawyer was ambiguity of mind. Being able to see a problem from every aspect and having a very.

Flexible ability to analyze something from every perspective and really pick it apart and see the problem and argue the case from a lot of different angles. He was top of his game at that kind of thing. One, one thing that people would say about him is sometimes it was really hard to know what he really thought about stuff.

Because of that ability to do that, this is where they taught the English common law, and this was a huge system of precedent and repeated interpretations. One of the things I thought was really fascinating about how the court system was at this time and place in England in the 14 hundreds and end of the 14 hundreds and the 15 hundreds, is that.

It was managed with a mixture of multiple languages. So the parliamentary statutes and legal papers, the documents and everything were in Latin. But in court, in the court itself, there was this strange kind of what they called bastardized Norman French. So they called it law French, and it was like French, but not, it was a different kind of French.

And then almost all the pleadings and witness statements were taken down in English. So, so, so fascinating. So he's in this world where he's, very versed at multiple languages, he's very brilliant. He is mastering the common law, and in the meantime, one of the. People that had a huge influence on him was a man named Sir John Fortescue, who died in 1479.

And he wrote a book that was later published as a book, but it was in print and it was a treatise that was passed around among these law students a lot, and it was called Commendation of the Laws of England. And his central arguments were that the law was supreme and that it was necessary for kings to obey the law.

And according to Fortescue, if the king did not obey the law, the people were entitled to disobey their sovereign. So we can see that thread of that thinking all the way to modern America. So really, really cool stuff and more is really credited with being one of the people that pushed that forward even more and champion that.

So he loved the law and he mastered the law, but in his day, and he adopted these ideals, it was just the mainstream belief that there was absolute truth and that that could be discovered by study and argument, and it didn't negate the fact of the law itself. Even if there was a bad legal document, the law itself was still pure.

That document wasn't the law. This goes back to what we talk about all the time here with natural law, objective truth, that we can reason that out and we can live according to it. That was definitely the worldview and the belief was that the church sacraments were valid even if they were administered at the hands of a bad priest.

And the law was valid, even if it was badly conducted. So this is where he's at. He's now, we went to Oxford for 14 to 16. He studied the law from 16 to 18, and now it's time for him to start practicing the law. Now we have actually a lot of evidence about Thomas Moore because he was so famous at the time and he wrote quite a bit, and the people around him wrote, and many of his letters have survived, and he knew famous people who talked about him and who he exchanged letters with.

One of the sources that I'm going to give you some quotes from in a minute, are from his son-in-law, William Roper, who wrote a biography of him just almost as soon as he died. And that has survived. And so we have firsthand evidence. Roper was his son-in-law for 16 years and lived in his house with him and his daughter was Meg or Margaret, who arguably more was closer to her than maybe anyone else, maybe even more than his wife.

And so he definitely knew more inside and out and wrote about his life, especially the last few years and justified the kind of man that he was and the decisions that he made. Now while he's studying law, and he is been at Oxford and his father is also moving up in the ranks in London in the government, he's gaining a circle of some of the most distinguished men of his time, and he was always a very meek and teachable person. So he was always willing to learn from anybody, people older than him, even younger than him. And so he progressed more quickly because he was so teachable.

Some of the things that we know about him because of who he became later on, was that this was a great time of character building for him. And near the end of this podcast, I'll go through the 7 laws for you after we know some facts about his life, and I'll point out to you how he was living each of those 7 laws.

We don't have a lot of details about, exactly what did he do every day, all day, when he was a child. But we know about the time period and we know how he lived and we know the kind of man he became and we know what kind of education he received. And so we know that he really was growing in those seven laws during these years.

So is now practicing law, meeting influential people, making friends. He's from the very beginning, a man of really strong ethic and integrity, who is just always keeps his promises, keeps his word, is very honest and upstanding. And by the time he's 21, his paths cross with Henry, the Duke of York, who later becomes Henry VIII.

And he's running in the same circles where this future king is. And so they're acquainted with each other. By the time he's about 21, 22, he starts getting asked to do what they called readings. And that was when he would go to the law schools and he would give lectures, often weekly lectures. And the first series of lectures that he did, which is very, very telling about the kind of man he was an in-depth lecture series on St. Augustine's, the City of God. Now the city of God is all about the difficulties of leading a virtuous life and at the same time being part of secular s society it's trying to answer the question, how could a good Christian best live a spiritual life while still contributing to the wider community?

And so we know from a young age that Moore is choosing to be in these kinds of works. He's thinking about these key ideas and he's studying them enough that he's mastering them and lecturing on them. And this is a central theme, a central question that dominated Moore's life. He wanted to know how to be the best man he could be.

He wanted to know how a Christian can behave in a secular world and be true to what's real and true and to himself. And of course, conscience is a key theme of his life and writings about him. And plays about him and so on. Now, about this time, and I don't actually know, he was living at Lincoln Inn or studying at Lincoln Inn and sometime around this time in his late teens, early twenties, he spends four years living at Charter House, and this is a Carthusian monastery.

Now, this is one of the most strict monastic orders that the way that these monks lived was really rigorous. It was very secluded. They lived in their own basically rooms In these cloisters. They only interacted at mealtimes and on communal walks, and they spent a lot of time doing like even extra prayers and extra things that other monks did.

And there's quite a bit of debate back and forth about what was going on in. More's life during this time, but his son-in-law Roper is gotta be the most trusted source for this kind of information. And what Roper says is that he thought really seriously about becoming a monk. That he felt like that would be a very righteous way to live his life.

That he was very seriously considering it. And he was watching these monks and interacting with them, a little bit and really contemplating the religious life. And it was difficult for him to decide what he should do. But eventually he finally felt that God was calling him to play a public role.

That he had been given the gifts and the education and the opportunity to do work in the world, in a leadership capacity with the law and eventually in government. And to have an impact that way and to have a family and to have the responsibility of a family. And he felt like that's the path that God wanted him to take.

But his religious commitment never waned and as we'll talk about it in a minute, the way he ran his home was in a very faithful way. So he did not choose the monastic life, but the fact that he interacted with these monks and knew them well, did play a role later on, which is really, really fascinating.

So he wanted to make sure that he was a man of great character and that in his public life, he was always acting as God would want him to. So he was really conscientious about that. As he goes on, by the time he's in his early twenties, I think about 23-ish. He qualifies as a barrister. So he levels up. So now he's got more authority in the courtroom, he's got more responsibility and he's asked to give a series of public lectures again as a reader.

And so he's studying, he's gaining more of an influence in the community this way, and by this time he decides by the time he's 26, he decides to marry. And that's a little bit late for a man to marry in this time period. But not unusual for his bride to be quite a bit younger than him. She was 17 and he was 26. That was pretty normal. Girls were very marriageable by the time they were 15, 16, 17, and men often had to pay a bigger price to be in a position to provide. So he felt like he was solid in his career.

He felt like he was solid in his career and ready to take on the responsibility of a family. His bride was Joanna Colt and some people called her Jane, and she came from a pretty important family and he took his role as husband and father like that of a teacher. He really was a very, very conscientious husband and father, and he wanted to mold Joanna into an intellectual companion.

She was known to have a very gentle and humble nature. She went along with his plans, was cooperative and very sweet. And what's amazing about her is that she had six children in seven years.

Four of them survived to adulthood which was a pretty good percentage survival rate for the time. Margaret, Elizabeth, Sicily and John were the four children that survived into adulthood. And he took on he had a home and he rented out part of it, and they were in part of it, as just as his income increased.

Eventually he took over the whole home as he had this family. And w by the time, I think Joanna was 24, just seven or eight years of marriage, she died of influenza. And More did not want to be alone. He knew a widow who was a little bit older than him. She had one surviving child, a daughter, and she had some property that she'd inherited from her first husband.

She had a little, some income of her own. She was of his class, so it was a very good match. And he married her again very quickly. He had a lot of very small children. You can imagine four out of six in seven years and they're all surviving. You know, he needs help and he marries her and it's a good marriage.

In fact, there was a point that one author made to attest to that, they said one of the reasons that we know it was probably a pretty happy relationship was because when he was planning out his burial plots, he wanted to be buried between his two wives because he loved them both dearly.

And Joanna chose to be buried next to him rather than next to her first husband. So that says something about their commitment to each other. And when they married, he adopted, her daughter, raised her as his own. They also had another kind of foster child. I don't know much about how that happened, but they were a pretty good house full, pretty quickly on.

He was a really conscientious husband and father, and he did something that was pretty revolutionary in his time. He educated every single one of his daughters equally as well as his sons. He just felt that women had the same intellectual capacity as men, and all of his girls had an equal education with the boys.

It was very practical. In fact, some people gave him grief and said, well, you're just spoiling them. They won't be obedient or whatever. And he said that the most important virtues in a woman are chastity and obedience to God and to their husbands. And education was more likely to mold women who could better resist the temptations of their nature, of their if if they had weaknesses.

If they had troubles, then this was just going to help them to be better women, more virtuous women. He really believed it. He acted it out. He hired really good tutors. He was very conscientious. He watched this with great interest. He told lots of people about it. And even when he was away, he would write home a lot and make sure that things were going well.

In his children's education, he called it his little school. He hired the very best teachers who were. Became famous later on and he shared what he was doing with other leaders. In fact, Erasmus, who was such an influential philosopher at the time, wrote to another friend and talked about this program of education he was doing with his daughters, and he said he was quite convinced that this was a great way to go.

He used to think that it wasn't a good idea, but he'd completely been converted to it. He realized that through education, they would be preserved from idle idleness. They would imbibe noble precepts and they would be trained in virtue to those who thought that learned wives might disobey their husbands.

He could see no reason to fear that because the husband should not try to command his wife in anything that wasn't honest and virtuous, and so she could better check her husband and only obey in terms of what was truly. Honest and virtuous because she would know. This goes back to something that I say often on this podcast, and in our programs that virtue becoming a virtuous person was the core reason for education.

And so they're helping women to be more virtuous. And in fact, according to Erasmus, there was now no nobleman in England who did not seek to have all his children well educated. So to me, there's a lot of legacies of Thomas Moore, but this is one of the coolest, he made a huge impact in the way that the public thought about law, about Catholicism, about revelation, about authority, about a lot of things.

But he also changed public opinion by changing the minds of the nobleman that he interacted with through actually living out this quote experiment. And then. Seeing how successful it was and converting everybody to it. In fact, his daughter Margaret, became a top scholar and she was the first English woman to publish a book in English.

They said that Catherine Parr has often claimed to be the first, but Margaret actually did it before her.

So in 1509, Moore was 30 years old. He was growing more and more successful as a lawyer. He was in a well-respected guild and he was potentially gonna be an alderman and maybe even lured mayor of London. And so his reputation is growing. His family is growing, he's really succeeding and.

So his reputation is growing and his family is growing, and then there starts to be this call for reformation in the spirituality, especially of church leaders. And they wanted a reformation of manners and morals, especially of the clergy. Now this leads us to another really interesting aspect of Moore's life, and that is that he's a contemporary of Martin Luther.

And Martin Luther puts his 95 theses up on the church door, and he writes all these tracks and he translates the Bible and he marries a woman that was previously a nun, and he does all these really radical things, and he's right about a lot of what he's saying, but. Moore and Henry VIII are really concerned about the fallout from what Luther is doing.

And one of, and it wasn't just that they were like, just traditionalists and they couldn't handle change. They had good reason to be concerned. For example, in German, in Germany, the peasants war had taken the lives of up to 300,000 people. And it was all about this, change in authority. This radical shift from who's really in charge is the church in charge, is the king in charge?

Is God in charge, is common law in charge, is natural law in charge? And so it's a turbulent time, it's a difficult time. And that kind of opens the door to what happens then over the next 20 years of Moore's life because he. Is vehemently against Luther. He's trying to shut Luther down.

And people that, that start teaching Luther's writings, he eventually, he's in a position of authority and they jail some of these people and they reprimand them publicly and they get them to retract and they burn Luther's writings and things like this. And, it seems maybe kind of backward looking or whatever.

We might think in our modern day about it. But it, they had real reason to be very concerned that this would literally create total chaos and cause the deaths of many hundreds of thousands, if not more, if they let this go on. And so More really believed in the absolute authority of the Pope.

He believed 100000% that the Catholic church was God's church, that Christ had instituted it, and that the Pope represented him on Earth. And even if Popes had become corrupt, the authority was still in the church. And that that couldn't be changed. And he never changed his mind about that. And that's why eventually he got into trouble and became a martyr.

So, one other thing I want to say, actually before we leave, all of this context and his family life, one of the things he was accused of later on when he was in this place where he was trying to help hunt down the heretics or participating in this, he was accused of battering people.

And he always denied it. And of course he died for what he said was true and right. So we have every reason to believe that. He just always told the truth besides which, we have no other contemporary evidence at all that he ever did that. And in fact, what we do know is that it was pretty common practice.

Now, not every man did it. Not every man did it all the time, obviously. But legally, if your children were really disobedient, you could beat them. Like you could hit them, whack them, whatever, even your wife, and they didn't really have a lot of legal recourse. Well, more was not like that. And it's always so important that when we look at history, that we look at who that person was in the context of their time.

When we look at someone and we judge their behavior based on our modern culture and morays and standards, and we think, oh, well they should have known this or that, they should have done this or that different, that's. Not actually fair or honest or helpful. What we have to do is in their time and place, how did the people around them think about them?

How did they compare to the people of their day? And on other future mission-driven stories we have coming up? This same principle will apply. We have to compare them to the people of their time. We have to look at them through the lens of what was accepted, what they could get away with more. Could have gotten away with a lot, but he, it was.

Commonly known, or at least Roper wrote about it, that he beat his children with a peacock feather. In other words, he didn't. And he just would talk with them and try to work things out using reason. And he was easier, even easier to do this because he was educating them properly and teaching them all of these things.

And so he was a very moderate man, very kind. There's some really sweet anecdotes about how much he missed his family. Every time he was away. He wrote home a lot and asked how everyone was doing and you can tell from his letters that he really missed his family and he loved his home life. So just such a good man to the core in so many of those ways.

So eventually he's made the undersheriff of London, and this is actually a really important role. He had several different government positions, but I think this one is a very important one because. What it meant was that he was dealing with the mass of everyday criminal cases in the city of London. So every Thursday and Friday morning, he would go and sit in judgment.

They called him an undersheriff and he would hear all the cases of the people so that they could get them through more quickly and they could have some kind of arbiter or judge to resolve their conflicts. And he came to be trusted and well known by just the normal, average, even poor people of London.

And this was really important later on, when all of this stuff was going down with Henry VIII because and in the final court case against him, he said “I've been silent.: And the law says that silence doesn't mean that you agree. And the person that was. Running the case, the attorney or whoever it was made the comment, no, actually your silence is reverberating across the realm basically that, because you won't take this oath, everyone feels like they know how you feel and they care because everybody knows who you are.

It wasn't like, some of these noblemen or higher level people in this society. They might just know famous people, or I shouldn't say famous people, important people. They would know important people and they would rise up in the ranks and they would maybe even work really closely with the king.

But the average person, wouldn't necessarily know. I mean, they would know they were important because of their dress, but they wouldn't know who they were. Most everybody knew who he was and his reputation for never taking bribes, for being completely fair and all of this was his reputation being formed.

Now another thing about his household was as he took over this whole house, as he grew inability and income, it was just busy. It was very large. Lots of people there. He was very, very generous. There was a guy close to his age that he let lived there for a long time, and when he remarried, his new wife kicked him out.

But Erasmus would come and stay there. People would stay there. They had gardens, they had an aviary. And actually one little fun fact about him was that he really loved animals. His second wife really loved them too, but he owned. Oh, in his lifetime at different periods, I don't know how many of these animals he had at the same time, but he had monkeys, a fox, a weasel, a beaver, rabbits, dogs and other animals.

And so he just, it was a busy he household with a lot going on all the time, and they presided over it in almost model Christian fashion. One author said the servants were well treated, but worked hard. Gambling, dicing and cards were forbidden. Prayers were read at morning and evening for the household and on holy days, which were frequent, and everyone was obliged to wake for night prayers.

One of the things his son-in-law Roper said about this was.

“If he were at home, besides his private prayers with his children to say the seven Psalms, litany and suffrages following was his guise nightly before he went to bed with his wife, children, and household to go to his chapel and there upon his knees ordinarily to say certain Psalms and collects with them.

And because he was desirous for Godly purposes, some time to be solitary and sequester himself from worldly company, a good distance from his mansion, he builded a place called it the New building, wherein was a chapel, a library, and a gallery in which as his use was upon other days to occupy himself in prayer and study together.

So on the Fridays there usually continued. He from morning till evening spending his time duly and devout prayers and spiritual exercises.”

That was kind of long, but basically what it means was he was super devout. He was, some people said he prayed for an hour and a half every morning. He read his, studied his scriptures every day.

They did scriptures in prayer multiple times in his home. They went to chapel all the time, and he built this special place of retreat for himself on his property where he would spend as many Fridays as he could, all alone nurturing his spiritual and mental self, finding time to be with God, time to be alone with himself, and really meeting his needs in that way and rejuvenating himself for all of the responsibilities he held in increasingly higher and higher positions.

And his household grew and grew, and he was just an incredible leader and his level of responsibility grew as well. He became increasingly involved in public life and was called upon for higher and higher positions. I. One interesting thing that he did was in 1512, he was responsible for ensuring that all the biscuit required for the army of King Henry, that he was gonna lead his force into France was available and of appropriate quality.

So he had basically take over the food required for the war that Henry wanted to rage on France. As time went on, he had more calls to be a reader. He had more responsibilities. He was asked to join Parliament and it took him quite a while to decide that he wanted to do that. Eventually he, I think it took him two or three years to say yes.

He was offered the formal royal appointment in 1516. I think he took it in 1518. And more and more he just worked closely with the king. There was a deep relationship, the form between them. In fact, they used to spend a lot of time together. He was actually, ironically, a really funny guy. People talked a lot about how humorous he was, and he says.

So he and the king formed this really close relationship. They used to talk about intellectual things. They wrote the seven sacraments book together to push back on Luther. They used to laugh a lot. Thomas More was actually a really funny guy. People talked often about how humorous he was, how engaging he was.

Easy to talk to, easy to get along with. And the king loved him and had him over to dinner with his wife and took him into his confidence. There was a really great relationship between them until things really started to fall apart. So he finally took this public position that put him working even closer with the king.

He finally took this royal appointment and one of the first things that he had to do was negotiate attacks that the king wanted to levy, 'cause he wanted to go back to war with France. And he wanted a huge amount and he had to present it to the House of Commons. And then he negotiated it down a little bit and just had.

He negotiated down and everyone was really impressed with his ability there. So now we're up to the 1520s and King Henry has been king for 20 years. His wife Catherine, can't have children anymore and she's only given him one surviving daughter, no sons. And of course he's been having affairs. He did really love her and I think they had a pretty decent marriage, but she had a lot of stillborns and babies died after they were born and all kinds of things like that.

And so here we are in the early 1520s and he doesn't have an air. He does have an illegitimate son from some other relationship and he makes him a Duke. And so someone somewhere plants the idea because as time goes on, king Henry becomes more and more dissatisfied with his situation. He becomes more and more paranoid that he doesn't have an error and he doesn't, he just thinks it's absolutely vital.

In fact, the people around them too, some of the, one of the reasons why some of the people around the king went ahead and went along with all his divorce stuff that we'll get into in just a minute, was specifically because there had been these kind of problems in other like kingdoms or whatever, and it would often erupt in bloodshed when there wasn't a legitimate error.

And so that was one of the things that they were trying to avoid. And what happened at first was that. He gets dissatisfied. He's, the king is like unhappy with Catherine. She can't have kids anymore. He becomes really enamored with this woman, Anne Boleyn, who is in the upper class circles.

And actually I didn't know much about her, but she was actually chased enough that he kept writing her letters and they got more and more kind of erotic. And she kept telling him, if you want me, you've gotta marry me. Because she was gonna, she wanted to be queen. So Moore is working with the king for the king.

He's writing against Luther and against heresies against the church because he is a stout Catholic. And by 1525 and 26, this idea gets planted in Henry's mind that. He can get out of this marriage with Catherine because it's not legitimate. There's this verse in Leviticus that talks about marrying your brother's wife, and she'd been married to his brother and so he, his wi his feelings for her were fading and he was obsessed with Amber Lynn, and he was paranoid that he wasn't gonna have an heir.

So he starts by 15, 27, he starts telling more, okay, my marriage isn't legitimate. I need to get it anul and more, divorce is against the law. It's against the law of God, and the Pope is in charge of these kinds of things. It's a religious sacrament to be married. It's a holy thing. In I, I think it still is, but in Moore's day for sure.

And it was something that the Pope had to oversee. It wasn't something that the law could manage because it was a holy union for life. And so what Moore needed to know was that the Pope was okay with it. The Pope was gonna grant him an annulment or a divorce. At first he wanted a divorce, then that wasn't gonna happen.

So then he thought, okay, well I'll use the Bible to prove that this isn't a real marriage, and then they'll grant me that. And so Moore never spoke against it, but he didn't go along with it. He didn't give his verbal consent. And so he just waits it out eventually by 1529, Charles V had been at war with France, and then there was gonna be this treaty signed, and Moore was sent off to France to manage this treaty.

And in the meantime, the Lord Chancellor's position came open. The current one was dismissed from office. And so Henry VIII asked Thomas Moore to be the Lord Chancellor.

He accepts the position, and everybody thinks it's a great idea because he has an impeccable reputation, and he's absolutely honest. And he never, ever, ever took a bribe. And in fact, there's one story that kind of came back to bite him. In fact, there was one story that people claimed that this woman had given him this silver cup.

And it was a bribe, and he had actually given it away because he knew she was trying to bribe him. And that's why many men around him, by the time they'd had the kind of positions that he'd held, had way more wealth than he did. And he had built himself a really beautiful home outside of town, but he'd never been really flagrant or he'd always been good with his money,

He just wouldn't take any bribes. And so he wasn't as rich as they were. In fact, there's a couple interesting incidents from when he was Lord Chancellor and in fact. Woolsey who had been the Lord Chancellor before him, had seen half as many cases as more Guess why? Because everybody knew more and they trusted him, so they would prefer to take their case before the Lord Chancellor.

So he saw over twice as many cases as Woolsey did in just the short time that he was Lord Chancellor. While he was in that position, he tried to be completely impartial in all his judgements all the time. In fact, at one point he ruled against his own son-in-law. And in another instance there was a stray dog that his wife had picked up and adopted and taken care of.

And then another woman claimed that it was hers. And so he had them bring the dog in with both of these women. And then he had them both call the dog and whoever the dog came to that was the rightful owner, and the dog came to the poor woman. So he gave it back to her earth.

In the meantime, things are accelerating with King Henry. He goes ahead and annuls the marriage. I don't know if he called it a divorce or an annulment originally. Puts away Catherine and marries ambient and more, does not go to the coronation, and they want him to sign a petition and more, won't sign it.

And then finally they get word from the Pope and the Pope says, this new marriage isn't legal. You're married to Catherine, so give up your Anne Boleyn and go back to Catherine. So it gets to this point. Now we're in 1531, 1532, 1533, and the king has married. In 1533, they get word back from the Pope right after that, and now it's time for everyone to go along with King Henry and what he wants at this point, this is how Church of England is formed.

He wants to break from the Pope. He wants to be the religious leader as well as the secular leader of England. And more just won't do it. He just won't go along with that. His conscience tells him that the Pope is the representative of God on the Earth, and that the Pope has the final say as to religious decisions and religious sacraments, which marriage is, and that he won't take an oath that this is his wife, that the divorce is legitimate, that Abilene's children should succeed on the throne.

And Henry isn't having it. And what's so fascinating is now here this, here's this really complicated situation where, Moore's not an idiot. He knows that Henry likes him and they've had this good relationship, but Henry is wants Henry's way and he's gonna bulldoze anybody in his way. He just knows that who's, that's who Henry is, even though he only ever talks very nicely about him, even when he sends him to his death.

And so they go arrest these car and monks and try them because they won't sign these oaths either. They won't take these oaths either, and they actually have a worse death than more. They're actually drawn and quartered, which is just awful. And so you can imagine there's this added layer of conviction with more, already his conscience tells him that what King Henry is doing is wrong.

He never speaks against the king, ever. And he never tells anybody his reasons for not signing petitions or taking oaths. But he just won't take them. And he just wants his silence to be good enough. And he thinks because he understands the law intimately, that his silence should be enough to keep him safe according to the law.

But of course, they're not gonna follow the law. They don't care about the law. They care about what they want. And he's already in this marriage with Annie Boleyn, and he's already pushing that her children are gonna be the rightful heirs. And of course we know there's four more wives to come.

So we know his track record now looking back, and people were just appalled that he would kill these monks over this. And then of course, it led to Thomas More's death.

So eventually More sees the writing on the wall. He goes home, he tells his family they're gonna expect me to take this oath. I'm not gonna take it. They're gonna arrest me. And they do. They send him to the tower. He's up in the most secure place, even though it's a normal room. He has a desk and books and writing utensils for a while.

He's there for about a year. Eventually they take away that stuff, but his health deteriorates while he's there. He only is able to have visitors a couple times and over and over again. These top leaders come in and try to convince him to take the oath. His family takes it. They're all safe. They don't understand why he won't take it.

They come to the prison, they try to talk him into taking the oath. He won't take it. Eventually he's charged with sedition. They take him into court and there's this little conversation between him and Sir Richard Rich and. Sir Richard Rich lies about what was said between them in order to try to get him found guilty, and sure enough, he is found guilty.

Sure enough he is found guilty and a few days later he is beheaded.

A few days later he is beheaded, which is just unbelievable. There are so many people around him who profess the same beliefs as him, who would not stay with their conscience in the way that he did. That would not stand up for what they knew to absolutely be right and true.

For the next few minutes, I just wanna give you some of my favorite quotes and anecdotes about him. I'm gonna first give you a few from Hi his son-in-law's biography. One of them was this really beautiful story about when his daughter Margaret got sick.

He talks about how it delighted him evermore not only in virtuous exercises to be occupied himself, but also to exhort his wife, children, and household to embrace and follow the same to whom for his notable virtue and godliness. God showed as he seemed a manifest miraculous token of his special favor towards him.

So his daughter Margaret, was sick and it was a sweating sickness. He says, who lying in so great extremity of that disease as by no invention or devices that physicians in such case commonly use, she could be kept from sleep. So that both physicians and all others despaired her health and recovery and gave her over.

So they've had paraded all these doctors through there. They've consulted everybody. They can find no answers. They're sure she's gonna die. And this is the situation. Her father as he that most entirely tendered her.

"Her father being in no small heaviness for her by prayer at God. His hands sought to get remedy where upon after his usual manner going up into his new lodging, that when I was telling you about earlier where he went to pray and spend his Fridays therein, his chapel, upon his knees with tears, most devoutly be sought Almighty God, that it would be like his goodness unto him.

Nothing was impossible if it were his blessed will at his mediation to vouchsafe gracefully, graciously to hear his petition where incontinent came into his mind that a glister should be the only way to help her.”

So he goes into his special space and he pours out his heart to God and he begs him to save his daughter.

And weeps over her and says, there's got to be something we can do for her. And God plants in his mind, this idea of doing a glister was the only way to help her, no idea what a glister is. So when he told the physicians, they by and by confessed that if there were any hope of help. That if there were any hope of health, that it was the very best help indeed, much marveling of themselves that they had not afore remembered it, so they couldn't believe.

They hadn't thought of it themselves, and they thought, yeah, if there's anything that's gonna help her, it's gonna be that.

“Then it was immediately ministered unto her sleeping, which she could by no means have brought unto waking. And albeit, after she was thereby thoroughly awakened, God's mark evident undoubted token of death plainly appeared upon her. Yet she contrary to all their expectations was as it was thought by her father's fervent prayer, miraculously recovered, and at length again to perfect health restored.”

So he really felt like that was God's hand answering him, performing a miracle on behalf of Thomas More, because he was such a great man.

Now, this particular quote is when. They are heading off. When he came home and told his family that they were gonna come get him and he was gonna have to go to jail to prison, his son-in-law, William Roper, came with him. And as soon as they got outside, he said he came and whispered in his ear, son Roper, I think our Lord, the field is one.

And he said, I realized afterwards that it was for that the love of God, the love he had to God rod in him so effectually that it conquered in him all his carnal affectations, utterly. So what he took that to mean was that he had prayed and done the spiritual work so that when he was taken to prison, he wasn't a mess and he was in control of himself and he was trusting the Lord.

Now when they went to court and Richard Rich told this lie about their conversation had been had when he was in prison. One of the things, one, the thing that Thomas More said immediately was, “In faith, Mr. Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than for my own peril.” And he really meant this because he knew that by straight up lying in court when a man's life was on the line, that kind of perjury that he was committing was gonna damn him to hell.

That's what it meant for Thomas More. And he was more sorry that Richard Rich was of that caliber of person and that he was condemning himself than he was that, that he was gonna die. That was kind of a foregone conclusion for Thomas Moore at this point. He just knew that's what was gonna happen.

This I think, is one of the most amazing things that I read about him. After they had pronounced judgment on him because he keeps saying, I don't understand. This is just my private conscience. I don't understand why you guys won't leave me alone. I don't understand why it matters so much to you.

They make their judgment anyway. They condemn him to death and here's what he says to them. And it's in this older English. So if you don't understand exactly what it means, I'll explain a little bit better. But I wanna read the exact words because they're beautiful.

“More have I, not to say my Lords, but as the blessed Apostle St. Paul, as we read in the acts of the apostles, was present and consented to the death of St. Stephen and kept their clothes that stoned him to death and yet be they now both twain, holy saints in heaven and shall continue their friends forever. So I verily trust and shall therefore write heartily. Pray that though your Lordships have now in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hear after in heaven merely all meet together to our everlasting salvation.”

So even in the moment when they are condemning him to death, he is placing no judgment on them. He has no enmity and no hard feelings. He's thinking about how Paul didn't understand what he was doing. And he condemned Steven to death, and then he was converted, and now they're both in heaven together. And he says, actually several times that he judges no other person for what their conscience tells them.

He doesn't know what another person's conscience is telling them. And if they don't feel that they have to stand up for their conscience in this case, then that's not for him. He tells one of his friends, he says I'll read you that quote in just a minute. It's really fascinating what he says to his friend about that.

One of his friends comes to him weeping after he's condemned to death and more ends up comforting the friend. He says, quiet yourself good, Mr. Pope, and be not discomforted for I trust that we shall once in heaven see each other full merrily, where we shall be sure to live and love together and joyful bliss eternally.

And then when he comes up to the block where they're going to chop off his head.

So Roper says that when he went to be executed. He actually made sure that he had one angel of gold and he gave that to the executioner and then he asked everyone to pray for him to bear witness with him. Then he should suffer death in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic church. And then he kneeled down and prayed and then turned to his executioner with a cheerful countenance and said, “Pluck up thy spirits man and be not afraid to do thine office you send me to God.”

The play A Man for All Seasons is one of many really awesome readings that are in the MDM Academy as an option for students to read. Largely because we spend some time in the academy is one of many key elements that we discuss is conscience and what conscience means and how we're true to our conscience and why that matters.

Many of these quotes are taken right from Thomas Moore himself. The author Robert Bolt really wanted to be very true to Thomas Moore. And in fact, you can read the play or watch, there's several movie versions of it that are really good. But just to wind down today, I want to read you a few of these quotes because they're really great.

He says “A man should go where he won't be tempted. He's talking to a young man that wants him to advance him and he says, you should go be a teacher. And he doesn't wanna be a teacher 'cause he wants to be famous. And he says, but Richard, in offer in office, they will offer you all sorts of things and basically you don't wanna be tempted.

So then he says to this young man, Richard, in office, they offer you all sorts of things. Basically they're gonna bribe him and he says, why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher, perhaps even a great one. And Rich says, and if I was, who would know it? And more says, you, your pupils, your friend, God, not a bad public. That, oh, and a quiet life.”

Because Rich sees the positions that more holds and he just sees glory and honor. But it's not like that for more, it's just a whole ton of responsibility that frankly, he's tired of having.

Here’s another great quote. “I believe when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”

Here's another great one. They're trying to get him to be ruled by the king and saying, why won't you be ruled? You need to let your king be your ruler. And he says, "I neither could nor would rule my king, but there's a little, little area where I must rule myself.” That's in his conscience. He's gotta be his own man.

Here's the quote I was mentioning earlier. His friend says to him, “You know I am. He says, I'm not a scholar as Master Cromwell never tires of pointing out. And frankly, I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not, but Thomas, look at those names. You know those men can't. You do what I did and come with us for fellowship.

And then more says, and when we stand before God and you are sent to paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I'm damned for do not doing according to mine, will you come with me for fellowship?”

Because again. He really honestly trusts that these people are doing what their conscience dictates.

He just thought the best of them. He just assumed the best in them. He wasn't gonna make a judgment about them. He was only gonna make a judgment about his own conscience and what he knew was right.

And here's one last beautiful quote for our own deaths, “My Lord, yours and mine, dare we for shame enter the kingdom with ease when our Lord himself entered with so much pain. So he didn't expect life to be easy. He didn't expect choices of conscience and choosing what was right to be easy.”

He knew it would be hard, and he was actually pleased to go home.

He had reconciled to himself to dying, and he believed he was going back to his God and that he had done what he had, fought the fight he had. Let his conscience rule. He had stayed true to those things he knew to be true and followed those. Those worthy monks to the death and stood for what he knew was right and true and just such an incredible, incredible man.

Lastly, let's really quickly go through these 7 laws of life Mission, as I'm sure you can see that he definitely lived them.

Love God: He really loved God. Daily prayer, multiple times, scripture reading, leading his family devotionals, worship, putting God's will first owes, obey his conscience to the death. He could not have shown his love for God and his commitment to God's, the things he believed to be his sacraments in his church

Love self: He definitely always made time to meet his needs. He worked hard to discipline his heart and mind. That's why he told Roper that he was grateful that. He had conquered himself that he had won. And the self-discovery, he spent time alone each week. He nurtured his self-image. He made healthy choices.

He took time with animals, with family, with friends. He just really did care that his conscience and who he was, he gave everything really to other people. But he always cared for himself. He renewed himself and he was true to himself. He was true to what He knew to be right. Loving truth. He was a lifelong student, very meek, very willing to adopt what he knew to be true and right.

Love truth: Always told the truth. He was going to the sources of truth. He lived by principle. I didn't cite them, but there's some really great quotes about, living by principle he was. He educated his daughters. He oversaw his health household. He let love reign. He didn't give way to either his passions or to doing things the way other people did them.

He thought for himself he embraced the truth and he lived differently than other people. He just lived differently than other people because he was a truth seeker and he was gonna live higher truth, the way that he managed his children and managed the people that came when he was the sheriff, and on, and on and on.

Love Humanity: Definitely always loved truth and loved humanity. He was such a great listener. He learned about all kinds of different people. He cared for them. He represented them in court equally and honestly. He saw them all as equal and treated his enemies with love and compassion and assumed the best and didn't make judgments and was empathic.

He wouldn't take bribes. He loved all sorts of people. And then of course, he heard the call. Probably the biggest call was away from a monastic life into public life. And eventually it ended up costing him his life as he tried to live. True to both. But he heard that call and he served in the law and he served his family.

He served his country and his king and his pope and his God as conscientiously as he possibly knew how he, there were many calls, many, new opportunities that he accepted different positions and different opportunities. He knew the kings of the world, the most powerful people of his day. He mingled with them.

They trusted him. In fact, king Charles, I'll read you this quote after he, after Charles found out because Moore had gone and helped with the peace treaty between Charles and the French and. Charles knew him and trusted him and liked him. This was what he said about him. It is very true. And this will, we say that if we had been master of such a servant of who's doings ourselves, we have the, had these many years, no small experience, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than have lost such a worthy counselor.

So he was just appalled that Henry VIII would have him killed. He knew the caliber of man he was, and he would rather have lost his best city than to have lost Thomas Moore. And so that's the way that, that the very, most powerful people in the world thought about him. He also, wrote these beautiful he did a lot of other things.

He translated things, he wrote the book Utopia, which I didn't even mention, which was really famous. Still read in colleges and. Even, maybe even high schools today. He was deeply involved as a parent. He heard the call to be a husband and to be a father, and to be a lawyer, and to be a negotiator and a judge.

All of those calls, he answered with complete integrity and did his best to show up the best that he knew how He wasn't a perfect man. He had many flaws, but his willingness to follow God and to find and embrace truth made him a force for good in the world. That reverberates still today, all these hundreds and hundreds of years later, and he continues to inspire so many people with the way he lived his life.

So that is Sir Thomas Moore, a truly mission-driven life, a man I greatly admire. And when I think of conscience, he's one of the first people that comes to my mind because he was truly a man of conscience. Who died for what he knew to be right and true. And I hope that all of us can learn something from him and strive to be a little bit more like him and to practice listening to and obeying our conscience in the small things so that when we are met with the bigger moment where it really matters, the character that we forged, we will be of the caliber of person that can continue to do what we know is right in the face of great adversity.

Thank you so much for joining me today for this incredible story of Sir John. Thank you for joining me today for this incredible story of Sir Thomas Moore, and I will see you next time.