But sanctity isn’t just for the mystic or those of the cloth. It also doesn’t spare one from having to navigate daily the complexities of this fallen world. Nowhere is this world more complex and more redolent of fallen humanity than in public life and even here, as I was reminded after reading Peter Ackroyd’s wonderfully vivid The Life of Thomas More, sanctity doesn't mean a Brahminic aloofness from politics.

This English martyr enjoyed a prominence in the collective memory of his countrymen even before his canonisation in 1935, four hundred years after his death. After a celebrated legal career, he became the first layman to assume the title of Lord Chancellor, one of England’s most powerful positions.

His fall from the king’s grace was as spectacular as his rise. His refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his opposition to the king’s claim to be the head of the Church in England eventually led him to the executioner’s scaffold, where he is famously quoted as saying: “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first”.

There has been no shortage of literary and filmic depictions of this saint and martyr—including a play by Robert Bolt and the 1966 Academy Award-winning film, A Man for All Seasons. As historical personages go, the twice married More is enormously attractive with his wit and a sparkling sense of humour. His story is a great personal drama of duty and loyalty unfolding against the backdrop of one of the most traumatic periods of English history.

Ackroyd, however, has not written a hagiography. Certainly, the More that emerges from this portrait is a familiar figure of integrity and piety; a man who wore a hairshirt beneath the rich garb of his stately rank, a daily Mass-goer who gave generously to the poor.

He is also a learned humanist who wrote substantially, one capable of composing a book on royal history, Latin verse and Utopia, an imaginative satire and his best-known work.

But this More is also one who prepared for the perils of courtly life practising his legal craft in a sheriff’s court amongst the lowlife of London. This saint is also the tough-minded diplomat and the relentless opposer of heresy that would pen the occasional bawdy verse. This is a saint that teased his wife about the size of her nose.

Drowned World

In many ways, the book is an elegy to the “good catholyke realme” of England and Ackroyd—who describes himself a non-practising but still believing Catholic—has said that he wanted to recover this “lost civilisation” through More.

Ackroyd has written extensively about London and other notable Londoners such as William Blake and Charles Dickens, and his passion for the city is palpable. His rendering of the city underlines just how severe a dislocation the English Reformation was.

Before much of it was expunged from the country by Henry VIII’s break from the Rome, England was steeped in Catholicism and at the heart of the Faith was the Eucharist as Ackroyd reminds us in fascinating detail:

In a letter home, one foreign observer describes, probably with some exaggeration, the piety of Londoners who “all attend Mass every day, and say many Paternosters in public (the women carrying long rosaries in their hands), and any who can read taking the Office of Our Lady.”