Fall of Thomas More

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the second of our special episodes exploring the rise and fall of Sir Thomas More, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and Dr. Joanne Paul chart the great Tudor statesman's demise. Despite his silence about Henry VIII's self-proclamation as Supreme Head of the Church of England, More was executed for treason on 6 July 1535. What were the events leading up to his fall from grace? How did More's position impact the King? And what can we now make of this contradictory character and his contribution to Renaissance thought?

Presented by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Alice Smith, edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.

All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.

Not Just the Tudors is a History Hit podcast.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.
0:02.6	If you'd like not just the Tudors ad-free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit.
0:10.5	With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries,
0:16.0	including my own recent two-part series, A World Torn Apart, The Dissolution of the Monastries, and enjoy a new release every week.
0:25.2	Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.
0:31.2	Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and welcome to not just the Tudors from History Hit,
0:36.7	the podcast in which we explore everything from
0:39.1	Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenose, from Shakespeare to Samarise.
0:46.9	Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.
0:51.3	Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
1:08.9	By 1535, Sir Thomas Moore had become a man with a formidable reputation across Europe.
1:15.0	He was a friend of Erasmus, a lawyer and a scholar of renown, a citizen and previous undersheriff of the city of London,
1:22.4	a former Lord Chancellor and the author of many books, including his famous utopia.
1:29.4	But that year, 1535, on the 6th of July, the eve of the feast day of St. Thomas Beckett,
1:36.4	on Tower Hill, he was led out to die on a charge of treason.
1:42.1	Moore had always known that death stalked all men. Our whole life, he had written,
1:47.3	is but a sickness never curable. Now facing his own, he declared, I die the king's good servant
1:54.7	and God's first, before kneeling in front of the executioner to be beheaded.
2:03.1	The reason for his death?
2:08.6	When asked to swear an oath to Henry VIII's line of succession by Queen Anne,
2:14.2	which included a preamble affirming the king's title as supreme head of the Church of England,
2:17.2	Moore had chosen to remain silent. Under the new expanded treasons act of
	...

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