Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) was a lawyer, scholar, statesman, and Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547) who was executed in July 1535 CE for his refusal to endorse Henry's break of the Church in England from the Catholic Church in Rome. The highly principled More disagreed with the king's divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536 CE) and especially Henry's promotion of himself as head of the Church of England instead of the Pope. Prior to his time in politics, Thomas More was a celebrated author and scholar, his most famous work today being Utopia which includes a philosophical description of an ideal society set on an island. Thomas More was made a saint in 1935 CE by the Catholic Church.

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”

― Sir Thomas More, Utopia