He was the wonderful English martyr, Chancellor of the Realm, who was beheaded on Tower Hill, just outside London, for not giving in to the heretical Henry VIII, who denied the supremacy of our Holy Father the Pope over the whole Catholic and Christian world. Henry VIII, the founder of the Episcopal Church, was an English king who married six wives, and murdered two of them. Saint Thomas More would not submit to him as head of the Church that Christ founded. Because Henry VIII set up bishops in place of the Pope (which accounts for the name Episcopalian, taken from episcopi, the Latin word for bishops), other groups were induced by various influences, to set up: ministers for the Presbyterians, congregations for the Congregationalists, liturgies for the Baptists, ideas for the Methodists, or ideas with some sort of hierarchical setup for the Methodist Episcopals. Saint Thomas More was only fifty-seven years old when the Anglicans (the Episcopalians) martyred him.
Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein, the Younger (source)
