Before his execution by beheading, Thomas More (1478–1535) walked to the scaffold on Tower Hill in London and said to the lieutenant, “See me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” He told the onlookers to witness that he was dying “in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, the king’s good servant and God’s first.”
More was executed in 1535 for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England and for not acknowledging the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.