`Saint’ More burned his share of `reformist heretics’ while he was chancellor.
Execution was the punishment for the crime of heresy. As they were unrepentent heretics, they were in mortal sin. Not innocent. Heresy was also considered a crime against the state— high treason against the King.
He is a saint because he lived a holy life and died a martyr for Christ and his Church.
Typically a person burned at the stake was strangled first, although I’m sure some might not have been.Many were not, if the rope tied to their neck burnt before being used.
It is said that even without strangulation, one would perish by the smoke rising around their head before the flames reached their body.
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Burning at the stake was the penalty for treason as well as for certain other crimes. It was a common method. And, I’m sure being strangled and my body burned would be preferrable to being drawn and quartered, also a common method of execution, which was definitely done while the person was still alive.
No one saw anything wrong with either method in their day and age.
Maybe in 500 years people will have the same questions about the electric chair, gas chamber, firing squad, and hangman’s noose. And, lethal injection.
In the sixteenth century, burning heretics was morally right.
What, exactly, was the problem with that?
Are you decrying when Protestants burned Catholics at the stake (or beheaded them or hung them by the neck until dead?) Or only when Catholics burned Protestants (or beheaded them or hung them by the neck until dead).
News flash: that's what happened to heretics back in the day. That's regardless of whether it is people who you'd consider a heretic or people who I'd consider a heretic.
As Chancellor, More was obliged to apply the laws: he did not make them. And the laws were formulated with the suppression of sedition in mind: since everybody (church and state, orthodox and heretic, the prosecutors and the condemned) --- all of them --- understood that heresy involved treason: the repudiation of the oaths, covenants, and fealties which kept the kingdom united and at peace.
Six men were burned during Thomas More's chancellorship, which is indeed a very odious thing. More was directly involved in only three of these cases (maybe four? it's unclear), and in no case did he have any legal options: they were all relapsed convicts, whom he had no power to reprieve.
(Let me interject here that I remember when Karla Faye Tucker was executed in Texas during George Bush's term as governor. A lot of people, including myself at the time, blamed Bush for not pardoning her, since she was very much a converted person who had repented and repudiated her crime. It was only later that I learned that under the TX Constitution, the Governor had no power to pardon for capital crimes. Not exactly the same, but similar with More: he wouldn't have had the power to overturn their sentences.)
Yet More did believe in the death penalty for heresy/sedition. In his Apology and again in The Debellation of Salem and Bizance (both in 1533) he defended the principle of punishment of heresy by secular power on the ground that it threatened the peace and safety of the commonwealth. As Chancellor it was his duty to administer the civil laws of England, which prescribed the death penalty for obstinate heretics. During his service as Chancellor, he was personally involved in ~4 cases which resulted in executions. In three years.
You can get this in better perspective when you realize that in 1535, in early June alone, when Thomas More was in prison, Henry VIII’s regime with Thomas Cromwell at the helm burned at the stake 14 heretics. In two weeks.
Please don't think I am writing this as a total exoneration of Thomas More's Chancellorship, as if he were blameless. It's just a matter of seeing the men and the times with a just eye.