Thomas More (Protestant martyr)

Thomas More, birth date unknown, died 26 June 1556, was one of the Protestant martyrs of the English Reformation. Described by John Foxe as "a merchant's servant" and apparently just 24 years old when he died, he was tried for heresy by Dr John White the Bishop of Lincoln in the churches of St Martin and St Margaret in Leicester on April 21, 1556 and burned at the stake in the same town on June 26 later that year. He was the only Protestant martyr to die at Leicester as a result of Mary I's Revival of the Heresy Acts.

Trial record

The trial of the 21st of April was part of a general round of visitation undertaken by Bishop White at Cardinal Pole's instigation, part of restoring Roman Catholic worship in parishes of the Diocese of Lincoln and searching for heretics. The odd set up in Leicester where the suburbs fell into a prebend required two separate hearings, one in the Court of the Archdeacon in the south aisle of what is now Leicester Cathedral and in the Prebendal Court held in the Prebendal Church of St Margaret's. John Nichols preserves the Latin original of the trial record from the Registers of the Diocese of Lincoln of which the following is a rough translation:
He was sentenced for holding a Zwinglian memorialist view of the Eucharist denying transubstantiation. The delay between the date of More's sentence and that of his execution was due to the necessity of a royal signature to approve the death sentence.

John Foxe's account of the death

The Protestant martyrologist and hagiographer John Foxe preserved the following record in his enormously successful work Acts and Monuments:
Aside from the trial from the Diocesan Register this is the major near contemporary source. Neither the precise location of his burning or any details of it are mentioned by any historic source. He was apparently just 24 at the time he died.