Today, June 22, we celebrate the feast of St. Thomas More. He is the patron saint of lawyers, statesmen, and politicians—as well as our namesake at the Thomas More Society.

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Sir Thomas More was one of the most distinguished public servants in the realm and among the greatest Renaissance humanists of his time, writing widely on law and in defense of the faith. He served as the Lord High Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII until his resignation from the post in May 1532. He could not in good conscience recognize the king as the head of the Church in England or let him annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He refused to take the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII, was charged with high treason, and executed on July 6, 1535.

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At the scaffold just before his beheading, Thomas More reportedly said, “I die the king’s good servant, and God’s first.” There is crucial significance to how More may have intended that powerful clause, “and God’s first”—as he said his final words before execution. The legal scholar Brian Murray has remarked that More’s life represented the “tension between serving in a system of imperfect human law while trying to remain the loyal servant of an unearthly yet divine kingdom.” But for More, this phrase exemplified his moral integrity. The tension was not between being a good servant to his king and obedient to God. Instead, More knew that by putting God first, only then could he serve his king well—whether Henry VIII could accept that truth, was another question.

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More dedicated much of his life to public service and to the common good of the kingdom. A proficient defender of the faith, he nonetheless reconciled longtime public service with his rigorous piety. In his most read work, Utopia, he would instruct public servants facing moral difficulty, “Don't give up the ship in a storm because you cannot direct the winds.”

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Likewise, he was an accomplished legal mind in his day. Murray has described Thomas More as a model for jurists: “More’s life and legal career is an example of the prudent pursuit of traditional notions of virtue and justice within an era dominated by new ideas about the nature of law and justice in political systems.”

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In William Roper’s The Life of Sir Thomas More, published in the 16th century, his son-in-law related an anecdote of More instructing his children:

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"It is now no mastery for you children to go to heaven. For everybody giveth you good counsel, everybody giveth you good example. You see virtue rewarded, and vice punished, so that you are carried up to heaven even by the chins. But if you live in the time, that no man will give you good counsel, nor no man will give you good example, when you shall see virtue punished, and vice rewarded, if you will then stand fast, and firmly stick to God upon pain of life, if you be but half good, God will allow you for whole good.”

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St. Thomas More’s words and example, although removed from us by five centuries in time, still resonate clearly. Following his example, may we similarly thirst for truth, justice, and virtue.

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‍St. Thomas More, pray for us!

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Note: The quote “I die the king’s good servant, and God’s first," is sourced from an account of More’s execution published in the Paris Newsletter on August 4, 1535—where it read in the original French, “...qu’il mouroit sonbon serviteur et de Dieu premierement.” An alternative translation of the quote, substituting “but” for “and,” was mistakenly popularized by Robert Bolt’s play, A Man For All Seasons.