ct of Supremacy, by which English subjects were enjoined to recognize Henry VIII's authority over the pope, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London and beheaded for treason. His political essay Utopia (1516), speculates about life under an ideal government. More was canonized in 1935. Sir Thomas More, also called SAINT THOMAS MORE, humanist and statesman, chancellor of England (1529-32), who was beheaded for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. He is recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic church. In May 1515 More was appointed to a delegation to revise an Anglo-Flemish commercial treaty. The conference was held at Brugge, with long intervals that More used to visit other Belgian cities. He began in the Low Countries and completed after his return to London his Utopia, which was published at Louvain in December 1516. The book was an immediate success with the audience for which More wrote it: the Humanists and an elite group of public officials.?Charles V 1500-1558, Holy Roman emperor (1519-1558) and king of Spain as Charles I (1516-1556). He summoned the Diet of Worms (1521) and the Council of Trent (1545-1563). Holy Roman emperor (1519-56), king of Spain (as Charles I, 1516-56), and archduke of Austria (as Charles I, 1519-21), who inherited a Spanish and Habsburg empire extending across Europe from Spain and the Netherlands to Austria and the Kingdom of Naples and reaching overseas to Spanish America. He struggled to hold his empire together against the growing forces of Protestantism, increasing Turkish and French pressure, and even hostility from the Pope. At last he yielded, abdicating his claims to the Netherlands and Spain in favour of his son Philip II and the title of emperor to his brother Ferdinand I and retiring to a monastery.Martin Luther 1483-1546, German theologian and leader of the Reformation. His opposition to the wealth and corruption of the papacy and his belief that salvation w...
