Saint Thomas More (1478-1535), also Sir Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman who in his lifetime earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar, and occupied many public offices, including Lord Chancellor (1529-1532). Despite his busy political career, he was a prolific scholar and literary man. Between 1513 and 1518, he worked on a History of King Richard III, an unfinished historiography, based on Sir Robert Honorr’s Tragic Deunfall of Richard II, Suvereign of Britain (1485). He coined the word “utopia”, a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in the eponymous book published in 1516. In 1535, More was tried and charged with high treason for denying the validity of the Act of Succession. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered (the usual punishment for traitors) but the king commuted this to execution by beheading. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, Pope Pius XI canonized St Thomas More in...