Juan de Oñate - Spanish Explorer

Juan de Oñate - Spanish Explorer

On April 20, 1598, Spanish captain-general Don Juan de Oñate approached the Rio Grande, then known as the Río del Norte, the River of the North. Oñate led an expedition that represented the first determined attempt by Spain to colonize the region explored by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado more than 50 years before, in 1540–42.

Oñate led a large expedition consisting of more than 100 families, almost 300 single men, numerous wagons, and 7,000 cattle. An advance detachment was led by Oñate’s nephew, Captain Vicente de Zaldívar. Unlike many other explorers who were peninsulares, those who were born in Spain, Oñate himself was a criollo, a Spaniard born in the New World.

Oñate was born to Cristóbal de Oñate and Catalina de Salazar in about 1550. He made an important marriage, which certainly aided his rise to power and influence. His wife was a descendant of both the conquistador Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. Oñate and his wife had a son and a daughter together.

On September 21, 1595, Oñate was awarded a contract by King Philip II of Spain to explore the region north to the Rio Grande and settle what became New Mexico, but numerous delays forced his departure to be held back until 1598. The cost of the expedition was entirely Oñate’s, with the king’s receiving a percentage of the wealth expected to be generated by the new colony.


So on April 30, 1598, Oñate in a formal ceremony took possession of the region in the name of King Philip II. The most important part of Oñate’s expedition was the military contingent, probably led by Capitan Zaldívar, since he held the position of sergeant-major of the Oñate forces.

The main weapon of the Spanish soldiers was the matchlock musket. Crossbows like the ones used by the Spanish in Cortés’s conquest of Mexico in 1519–21 were still in use by the Spanish but were apparently left behind in Mexico City when Oñate embarked on his march north.

However, in the heat of Mexico and the Southwest United States, many Spaniards wore cotton padded armor adopted from the Aztecs (Mexica), which gave good protection against the arrows the hostile Indians used against them. Curiously enough, Spanish troops carried heart-shaped shields called adargas well into the 18th century. Sidearms were long Spanish rapiers and for the cavalry, a pair of matchlock pistols.

Coronado had experienced some fierce fighting with the Pueblo Indian tribes of the Rio Grande valley, and Oñate was fully conscious that his entrance could be marked by combat with the native inhabitants.

Therefore, he followed strict military discipline throughout his expedition. After they reached the North Pass on the River (El Paso del Norte), they faced a trip of some 60 miles through a region so arid and hot that ever after the Spanish would call it El Jornado del Muerte (Route of Death).

Once among the Pueblo Indians Oñate used the feast of Saint John the Baptist on June 24 to stage a sham battle with the intention of intimidating them with his Spanish cavalry and infantry.

New Mexico Established

Apparently, Oñate’s show of force worked, because on July 28, without interference, he established New Mexico’s first capital at the pueblo of San Juan de los Caballeros of the Tewa tribe, which he named in honor of the men who had ridden north with Coronado years before.

Ultimately Oñate began the construction of San Gabriel as a more permanent capital, perhaps feeling uneasy about the dangers of a surprise attack at night if he remained in the Tewa village.

Although Christianization of the Indians was always noted as a reason for Spanish expeditions, the vast treasures that Cortés had found in Mexico and Francisco Pizarro in Peru guaranteed that the search for gold and silver would always be a paramount reason for any expedition, and Oñate’s was no different.

He was determined, however, to keep all exploration and mineral discovery under his own personal control and carried out severe punishments against those who disregarded his orders. With the nearest Spanish forces hundreds of miles to the south, such strict discipline would be the only thing that would keep such an expedition together and safe while surrounded by potentially hostile Indians.

Oñate’s grim emphasis on discipline soon proved to have been justified. In December, Juan de Zaldívar, Vicente’s brother, and some soldiers accepted the hospitality of Chief Zutucapan at the pueblo of Acoma. Once they were settled in their quarters, Zutucapan sprang a trap, and Zaldivar and some 10 Spanish were slaughtered.

In January 1599, Oñate sent Vicente on a punitive expedition against Acoma, his infantry and cavalry supported now by two pieces of Spanish artillery known as culverins. When the Acomans refused to submit, Zaldivar attacked. Although he was heavily outnumbered, his artillery slaughtered the Acomans. Captives were taken before Oñate, whose punishment was severe.

With the danger from hostile Indians behind him, Oñate spent more time in an illusory search for gold and silver mines. In December 1600, he embarked on a long expedition.

His search for riches took his attention from the settlement of the colony and many people who were disillusioned with his rule returned to Mexico, then called New Spain. Although his search for gold and silver proved fruitless, he became the first Spaniard since Coronado to explore as far north as Kansas to the settlement that Coronado knew as Quivera.

At some point, his love of exploration eclipsed his lust for gold. Even as disgruntled former colonists were spreading rumors of vice and brutality against him, Oñate undertook a tamat journey of exploration as far as the Gulf of California.

Although ordered back by the new king, Philip III, in 1607 to face charges, Oñate remained until Sante Fe was built. When in 1608 a new governor was sent to replace Oñate, he finally returned to Mexico City.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was born in 1642 at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, Lincolnshire, England, three months after his father, yeoman farmer Isaac, died. Newton’s mother, Hannah Ayscough, married the Reverend Barnabas Smith and left Newton with his grandparents at age three.

He grew up to hate his stepfather and never psychologically recovered from his mother’s abandonment. By the time Smith died in 1653, Newton’s personality had been forged; he became distrustful, hesitant in dealing with others, and emotionally unstable; these would be lifelong traits.

Newton attended day school in the nearby village and the Kings’s Grammar School at Grantham. He worked on his mother’s farm at age 14 but returned to school in 1660 to prepare for entrance to Trinity College at Cambridge University in 1661.

His mother refused to pay his tuition so Newton served as a subsizar, who performed a variety of jobs for fellow students. Newton did not distinguish himself at Cambridge, but he privately studied and mastered the esteemed works of René Descartes and Euclid.


Newton attended day school in the nearby village and the Kings’s Grammar School at Grantham. He worked on his mother’s farm at age 14 but returned to school in 1660 to prepare for entrance to Trinity College at Cambridge University in 1661. His mother refused to pay his tuition so Newton served as a subsizar, who performed a variety of jobs for fellow students.

Newton did not distinguish himself at Cambridge, but he privately studied and mastered the esteemed works of René Descartes and Euclid. Dr. Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, became his mentor and brought out Newton’s genius.

Avoiding the Plague

Newton returned to his mother’s farm to avoid the plague rampant in Cambridge from 1665 to 1666. Without access to his books, Newton discovered differential calculus, which he called “direct and inverse method of fluxions,” and expansions into infinite series.

He used common arithmetical elements to make them universals. Newton also queried the nature of gravity but realized his experiments required more work and left the persoalan until 1685.

Upon his return to Cambridge in 1667, Newton was shown the work of Nikolaus Mercator (1620–87), who had recently published Logarithmotechnia. This contained some of the methods Newton had used while experimenting on the farm. Newton showed Barrow his own ideas, and this work was published as De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum inifitas in 1711.

After painstaking experiments in 1668, Newton discovered the spectrum, which he deduced was white light made up of colored lights when exposed to a transparent medium. This idea led Newton to perfect a reflecting telescope in 1668; it was six inches long and could magnify 30 times. Prior to Newton’s telescope, only refracting telescopes were used.

Barrow resigned from Cambridge, and Newton obtained the Lucasian Chair in 1669 at age 27 after he earned a master’s degree. He presented lectures on optics that were not published until 1728. By this time, Newton’s work was noticed by such scientific luminaries as Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, James Gregory, and Sir Christoper Wren among others.

Newton became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1671. Controversy erupted over claims by Hooke, who was a powerhouse at the Royal Society, that he was first to invent the “pocket tube” (telescope) in 1664. Gregory the Scot claimed he had discovered calculus. Newton removed himself from the controversy and only published his work Opticks in 1704 after Hooke died.

Newton suffered a mental breakdown in 1675; it took him four years to recover. He then found mathematical proof of planetary ellipses around the Sun. Hooke had also realized these laws but failed to prove them. Edmund Halley (1656–1742), the astronomer and mathematician, met with Newton in 1684.

Halley urged him to publish his findings and financed the book entitled Philosphiae naturalis principia mathematica, better known as Principia, which included his three laws of motion. The third book of Principia appeared in 1687 and turned the natural sciences upside down.

Newton’s theories were taught at Edinburgh by his disciple David Gregory and Cartesian theory was dropped at Cambridge and Oxford; the French would not accede to Newton’s theories until 50 years later. Newton grew tired of life at Cambridge, so he embarked on a career of public service in 1687.

He became a member of Parliament for Cambridge University in 1689. He had another nervous breakdown in 1696. Upon recovering, Newton accepted the job of warden of the Mint in London. He was promoted to master in 1699 and revised Britain’s coinage.

Newton was reelected to Parliament in 1701 but soon lost interest in the position. He became president of the Royal Society in 1703, a position to which he was reelected for 25 years. He was a tyrannical and autocratic president who had favorites and made life torturous for those who dared to disagree with him. Queen Anne knighted him in 1705.

Controversies

Newton was engaged in two major scientific controversies. The first was from 1705 to 1712 with Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed (1646–1719), whose notes Newton conspired to publish against Flamsteed’s wishes. The second was from 1704 to 1724 with Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1726), a German mathematician.

Leibniz claimed he had discovered calculus before Newton. It has been proved that Newton discoverd calculus first but did not publish it, while Leibniz did. Leibniz and Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748), who mastered calculus, sent Newton problems they believed no one could solve in months, yet he solved them within hours.

As Newton aged, he spent time rewriting his notes. He had written over 1 million words on fourth- and fifth-century c.e. church history and on the Bible that were never published. His focus was to date biblical events using his mathematical calculations. Newton died in London on March 31, 1727, after suffering through numerous infirmities and various illnesses. He received a magnificent funeral and is buried in Westminster Abbey, London.

New Netherland

New Netherland

This Dutch colonial outpost existed along the Hudson River from 1609 to 1664. A relatively small and ineffectual colony, it was known for its trade and diversity. It was eventually captured by the English and became the colony of New York.

Following its independence from Spain in the 1570s, the Netherlands began constructing a worldwide empire due in large part to its powerful navy and savvy traders. In one of the country’s first colonial ventures, Dutch merchants in 1609 financed Henry Hudson to explore North America and Hudson discovered the river that bears his name.

In 1614, the Dutch established their first permanent settlement at Fort Nassau, later relocated and renamed Fort Orange (present-day Albany). This northerly settlement never grew very large and existed primarily to trade with Iroquois Indians for furs.


In 1625, the Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island to control access to the Hudson River. This southerly settlement soon attracted a variety of settlers to farm.

New Netherland was beset by a series of problems for most of its history. Relations with Native Americans were generally poor. Fort Orange was largely dependent on the Iroquois for its survival, while colonists in the south drove Algonquians from their lands and fought four wars in 20 years with them.

Of more pressing concern, however, were the colony’s mismanagement and ineffective leadership. The colony never produced a profit for its investors, while its most effective governor was the autocratic Peter Stuyvesant (1647–64), who barred the colonists from participating in their own governance.

Because of these problems, New Netherland had trouble attracting colonists. The Dutch West India Company did offer patroonships, large land grants with manorial rights, to anyone who took 50 settlers to the colony. However, Kiliaen Van Rensselaer was the only person to take up the company’s offer seriously.

Lacking Dutch settlers, New Netherland opened its borders to dissenters from New England including Anne Hutchinson as well as emigrants from Belgium, France, Scandinavia, and Germany and African slaves. As one visitor noted of New Amsterdam: “There were men of eighteen different languages.” Very quickly the Dutch became a minority in their own colony.

Ethnic diversity invited religious differences and although Stuyvesant attempted to privilege the Dutch Reformed Church, the company insisted upon a policy of religious toleration. Puritans, Quakers, and Lutherans were common in New Netherland, and Jews received greater religious freedom than anywhere else in America.

Ultimately, New Netherland suffered the most from foreign competition. A Swedish colony on the Delaware River proved a distraction to the Dutch and, in 1655, Stuyvesant engineered a military takeover of New Sweden. However, Dutch hegemony proved short-lived as in 1664 an English fleet under the command of Richard Nicolls arrived off New Amsterdam.

Although Stuyvesant attempted to mount a defense of his colony, “a general discontent and unwillingness to assist in defending the place became manifest among the people.” On August 27, Stuyvesant surrendered New Netherland to Nicolls, who granted the colonists generous terms, including the preservation of their property rights, inheritance laws, and religious liberty.

Revolt Against Spanish Rule in the Netherlands

Revolt Against Spanish Rule in the Netherlands

The revolt of the Netherlands, often known as the Dutch Revolt, or the Eighty Years’ War, started in 1568 and was only finally resolved by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It began with 17 provinces in the Netherlands rising up against the rule by the Spanish royal family, the Habsburgs.

The reasons for the revolt were three-fold. The transformation of Spain under the Habsburgs, from a European power to a major world empire with extensive colonies in the Americas led to involvement in numerous wars, and the taxes imposed on the Netherlands to help pay for these wars were greatly resented.

Many of the towns and cities in the Netherlands also resented Habsburg moves to centralize the administration of the region. By the 1560s, Protestantism had become popular in parts of the Netherlands, with the Habsburgs being keen to restore Roman Catholicism.


When friction started between Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the French statesman whom Philip II of Spain appointed to the Netherlands, and the many burghers in the Netherlands, it rapidly led to religious tensions. In August 1566, a small Catholic church was stormed and images of Catholic saints were destroyed.

It was quickly followed by similar moves elsewhere, and Philip II responded by sending in soldiers. When some of his opponents were executed, a rebellion broke out, with William of Orange, an influential Protestant politician, becoming its figurehead. The Battle of Rheindalen, on April 23, 1568, marked the start of the revolt.

Initially the Spanish were able to crush the rebellion, but when the rebels launched a naval assault in 1572 and captured the town of Brielle (Brill), the Protestants quickly rallied to support the rebels. Soon the northern provinces of the Netherlands were effectively independent of Spanish rule, and when Spanish soldiers tried to reimpose Imperial rule, the fighting escalated.

There were some who wanted the younger brother of the French king—Hercule François, duke of Anjou—to become the new king of the Netherlands, but this idea fell through after two years, as did one to make Elizabeth I of England the queen of the Netherlands.

The ruthless manner in which the Spanish commander, the duke of Alba, tried to retake the Netherlands led to an intense hatred of the Spanish. The action that earned the duke his reputation came after a sevenmonth siege of the city of Haarlem.

In July 1573, Alba’s victorious soldiers massacred the entire garrison. In October 1575, the Spanish slaughtered many people in Antwerp, the largest city in the region, and large numbers of its inhabitants fled.

In 1585, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, brought 6,000 English soldiers to fight alongside the Dutch rebels. Two years later, the English withdrew, but not before many important English, including Sir Walter Raleigh, had fought against the Spanish. As the stakes rose, the Spanish gathered together their armada for a naval attack on England in 1588, but this failed.

In the following year, Maurice of Orange, the son of William of Orange, took the offensive and captured Breda in 1590. By this time, the north of the Netherlands was enjoying effective independence, with fighting continuing until 1609.

It was during the mid-1590s that the Englishman Guy Fawkes fought on the Spanish side, gaining some experience in the use of explosives, which resulted in his recruitment for the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. From 1609 to 1621 there was a 12-year truce, with fighting starting again in 1622 and merging with the Thirty Years’ War, which ended in 1648.

Edict of Nantes

Edict of Nantes

The Edict of Nantes was the royal decree of Henry IV that ended the French Wars of Religion in 1598.

In 1562 the massacre of a Huguenot congregation in Vassy, carried out by Francis, duke of Guise, triggered the French Wars of Religion. The Catholic noble houses led by the duke, a religious fanatic, escalated the nationwide violence against the so-called Huguenot (Calvinist) heresy. In response, the Huguenots, with Henry of Navarre as their leader, retaliated by devastating Catholic communities under their control.

The ongoing religious conflict was complicated by political struggles within the royal court. After the death of Henry II in 1559, his three sons, Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III, would successively wear the crown.


Their mediocre political and military skills left a vacuum at the heart of royal authority, which enabled the House of Guise to make a move. Queen Catherine de Médicis, their mother and a Machiavellian stateswoman, was determined to defend the hereditary rights of her three sons and preserve the Crown for her family.

After three major military confrontations and two failures to sustain negotiated peace in the 1560s, the two sides reached the third peace at St. Germain in 1570, which offered more favorable deals to the Huguenots.

On August 23, 1572, the Huguenots from all over France gathered in Paris to celebrate the marriage of their leader Henry of Navarre, now a converted Catholic, to Margaret, the queen’s daughter. The reconciliatory event, however, turned into a massacre of the Huguenots by the Catholic faction of the court.

It remains murky whether or not Catherine de Médicis personally conspired in or ordered such a senseless bloodshed. The havoc of St. Bartholomew’s Day, however, killed an entire generation of Huguenot leaders, claimed more than 15,000 innocent lives, and, thereafter, prolonged the Wars of Religion for another two decades.

The turning point of the domestic crisis came with the Wars of Three Henries (1584–89), Henry of Guise versus Henry of Navarre versus Henry III, who had ascended to the Crown in 1574. During the war, Henry of Guise, whose ambition now was to succeed Henry III, conspired with Philip II of Spain, who needed the French support for checking England and suppressing the Netherlands’s Protestant rebellion.

In 1588, Henry of Guise and his Catholic League marched into Paris, besieged Henry III, and pressed him to abdicate the throne. While being still free, Henry III, a pious and militant Catholic, allied with Henry of Navarre, who converted back to the Huguenot faith after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

After the king made his own brother-in-law the heir to the throne, the two Henries marched against Henry of Guise and the Catholic League. Soon, the bodyguards of Henry III assassinated Henry of Guise. Shortly thereafter, the aged queen died and a Dominican monk murdered Henry III. Henry of Navarre, the only survivor, succeeded to the throne of France as Henry IV in 1589.

It took a full decade for the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, to end the religious wars and to reconstruct peace. He solemnly adjured his Huguenot faith again to become a Catholic in 1593. This compelled Pope Clement VIII to grant him absolution in the same year. The peace with Rome enabled him gradually to dissolve the Catholic League in France and pacify Spain overseas.

State Religion

On April 13, 1598, Henry IV promulgated an edict in Nantes, Brittany. It ordained that Catholicism would be restored and reestablished as the religion of the state, and the Catholic Church would preserve its privilege of collecting tithe, observing holidays, and enforcing restrictions regarding marriage. Meanwhile, it permitted Protestants to live in the kingdom without being questioned, annoyed, or compelled to change their faith against their conscience.

Moreover, the edict offered Protestants rights to property, to public offices, to education in a few designated Protestant colleges, to holding their own synod, and to having cases involving breaches of the edict to be adjudicated by special courts composed of half Catholic and half Protestant judges. It further bestowed on Protestants freedom of worship in about 100 fortified towns and cities outside the city of Paris, where they retained right to self-defense for eight years.

The Edict of Nantes appeared unpopular among both the Catholics and the Protestants at the time, but Henry IV had the personal charm and the political strength to implement and enforce it.

While Europe was engulfed by religious wars, the edict defied the existing ideal of universal faith: “one faith, one law, one king” (une f oi,un loi, un roi) and experimented with a policy that was more tolerant than the principle of “as the ruler, so the religion” (cuius regio, eius religio) embodied in the Peace of Augsburg of the Holy Roman Empire in 1555.

Münster Commune

city of Münster

The Münster commune is a bizarre chapter in the history of the Reformation. Lasting slightly over a year beginning in 1534, it involved some revolutionary Anabaptists who took over the city of Münster and instituted a new order while defending against besieging troops.

In 1533, a Lutheran named Bernard Rothmann, a former Roman Catholic priest, succeeded in bringing Lutheran control to the city of Münster, a good-sized city in northwest Germany. Rothmann, who had only been Lutheran since 1531, became more convinced of the Anabaptist beliefs and in May 1533 formally renounced infant baptism.

Later that year, he began preaching in favor of primitive Christianity, interpreted to mean sharing of all goods in common and living a simpler, morally upright life. This caused much controversy with those citizens continuing to hold Lutheran beliefs.

The success of Rothmann drew other Anabaptists flocking to the city, increasing the tension between the merchants and guildsmen in the town and those emigrating from other places in Germany and the Netherlands. In early 1534, Rothmann and nearly 1,400 others were rebaptized in Münster.

Around this same time, there was a heightened expectation by more radical Anabaptists of the end of the world described in the book of Revelation in the Bible. Associated with this were the rise of many so-called apostles and prophets ready to prepare the people for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

In February 1534, Jan Matthys (Matthijs) and Jan Bockelson, immigrants from the Netherlands, ran through the streets of Münster crying for all people to repent of their sins. This caused a mass hysteria, ending in an armed revolt against the town council (still predominately Lutheran).

The town council did not act aggressively, instead continuing to allow the Anabaptists their freedom. Many Lutheran citizens, concerned that the town would revolt, departed. This event, coupled with the continuing stream of immigrants, resulted in the town’s becoming Anabaptist.

On February 27, 1534, armed groups of men, led by Jan Matthys, went through the city, driving out all those not Anabaptist, calling, “Get out, you godless ones and never come back, you enemies of the Father.” By early March, the town was completely Anabaptist, with forcible rebaptizing of all those not already declaring themselves Anabaptist.

Matthys, Bockelson, and Rothmann, along with a leading merchant named Knipperdollinck, took over the control of the city. They declared that all possessions were to be held in common, threatening the wrath of God and public execution against those who withheld possessions from the community. After three days of prayer, Matthys appointed seven deacons to administer these goods.

All of this activity did not escape the notice of the Roman Catholic prince-bishop of Münster. While he did not live in the city and failed to get the support of those in the town in the early days of the conflict, the problems in Münster concerned the other princes enough to allow him to raise funds for troops to besiege the city.

By mid-March 1534, the city was somewhat ineffectively besieged. In early April, Matthys, believing God would give him power over the besiegers, went out with a band of troops, but he and all the troops were killed immediately.

Matthys’s death gave opportunity to Jan Bockelson to strengthen control over the town. Though the son of a tailor, Bockelson was an effective organizer and had, if anything, a more radical approach than Matthys.

In May 1534, Bockelson ran through the town naked and then sat silent for three days. He then prophesied that God had a new plan and organization for the town, with himself as chief apostle and 12 elders.

A morally strict code was at first enforced, but eventually the lack of men in the town (and probably Knipperdollinck’s very attractive daughter) led Bockelson, who was already married, to declare that God had ordained polygamy. Bockelson eventually married 15 wives, and many other men took multiple wives. This caused many problems in a few short months, resulting in an increasingly loose approach to sexual relations.

In August 1534, an attack by the bishop’s forces was effectively fought off by the town militia. Bockelson took the opportunity to declare himself the king of Münster, and the short-lived kingdom began. Bockelson appointed many immigrants as his councilors and had a gold-covered throne placed in the market square.

He thought of himself as a new King David and dressed in magnificent robes and held court with his equally well dressed counselors. At the same time, a reign of terror began for any of those who opposed the king and his counselors.

By January 1535, the blockade of the town was increasingly effective. A time of famine followed, though the king and his court managed to escape it for the most part by requisitioning supplies. In March, the king predicted that the town would be saved by Easter, but when this day passed, he quickly asserted it was a spiritual salvation and continued to proclaim the imminent return of Christ.

Finally in June of 1535, aided by some residents, the forces of the prince-bishop invaded the town, killing Rothmann during the battle. The deposed king and Knipperdollinck were put to death by torture after the king was hung in a cage and then led around the town on a chain.

While a few smaller Anabaptist uprisings occurred after this, most Anabaptists distanced themselves from these more radical uprisings and somewhat in reaction would disavow any kind of military role for their followers in future generations.

Sir Thomas More

Sir Thomas More

Sir Thomas More was a lawyer and judge in Renaissance England who rose to the highest appointed office of chancellor under Henry VIII, king of England. More was born in London on February 7, 1478, son of Sir John More, a prominent judge.

More studied at Oxford under Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn. He returned to London around 1494 to complete his studies in law and in 1496 was admitted to the law court of Lincoln’s Inn, located in central London. He became a lawyer in 1501.

At one point in his early legal career, More seriously considered becoming a monk. While he worked at Lincoln’s Inn, he lived at a nearby monastery run by the Carthusians, taking part in their monastic life of prayer, fasting, and religious studies. Although More quit the monastery, he continued to live out many of its religious practices throughout his life.

More decided to enter a lifetime political career when he joined Parliament in 1504. Shortly after, he married Jane Colt. She bore him four children. She died at a young age in childbirth and More quickly remarried a widow named Alice Middleton to care for his children.


When More urged Parliament to decrease its appropriation of funds to King Henry VII, Henry retaliated by imprisoning More’s father until a fine was paid and More had withdrawn from political service. After the king’s death, More became active again. He was appointed undersheriff of London in 1510.

He was noted for his impartiality and speed in seeing that cases were heard in a timely fashion. More attracted the attention of King Henry VIII, who appointed him to a number of high posts and missions on behalf of the government.

He was made Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523. As Speaker he helped establish the parliamentary privilege of free speech. Henry made him chancellor in 1529. He resigned in 1532, at the height of his career and reputation.

Throughout his life, More was recognized as a reformer and scholar. He wrote and published many works in Latin and English and was friends with a number of scholars and bishops.

In 1499, the scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam first visited England and formed a lifelong friendship and correspondence with More. On subsequent visits, Erasmus lived in More’s household at Chelsea. They produced a Latin translation of Lucian’s works, which was printed at Paris in 1506.

In 1509, Erasmus wrote the Encomium moriae, or Praise of Folly (1509), dedicating it to More. During one of his diplomatic missions to Flanders in 1515, More wrote his Latin classic, Utopia, a witty political satire on the role of government and society. It became an instant bestseller throughout Europe.

In the Reformation controversy of his time, More opposed Lutheranism and was a staunch supporter of the papacy and defender of the Roman Catholic Church. He enforced government suppression of the reformed movement in England until Parliament changed the laws at Henry VIII’s instigation.

More resigned his office and withdrew from public service when Henry, with Parliament’s approval, made himself supreme head of the Church of England and enforced the Oath of Supremacy and Act of Succession.

In 1534, More was imprisoned in the Tower of London on grounds of refusing to take the oath. More defended himself as a loyal subject, but he also declared that he was bound to follow his conscience on matters of principle.

Fifteen months later, he was tried and convicted of treason. Henry allowed him a few public words on the scaffold when he was beheaded on July 6, 1535. He declared himself “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Robert Whittinton, a contemporary of More, wrote of him in 1520, “More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”