Thomas More
February 7, 1478 — July 6, 1535 · Feast day: June 22
Thomas More — lawyer, scholar, author of Utopia, and Lord Chancellor of England — was praised by Erasmus as a man of exceptional wit and learning, yet chose beheading over endorsing Henry VIII's break with Rome. He endured fourteen months in the Tower of London before his execution on July 6, 1535, declaring at the scaffold: 'I die the king's good servant, but God's first.' Canonized four hundred years after his death.