The Man Who Kept His Oath When It Cost Him Everything

In 1534, Sir Thomas More stood in the Tower of London, stripped of his title as Lord Chancellor of England — once the most powerful office beneath the crown. King Henry VIII had demanded that More sign the Act of Supremacy, acknowledging the king as head of the Church in England. It would have been so easy. One signature, and More could have returned to his family, his library, his comfortable life in Chelsea.

His daughter Margaret visited him in the Tower, weeping, begging him to sign. More held her hands and said he could not swear an oath his conscience would not allow. He had given his word before God, and that word was not for sale — not even for his own life.

On July 6, 1535, Thomas More climbed the scaffold and told the crowd he died "the king's good servant, but God's first." The axe fell on a man who had refused to trade his integrity for survival.

The psalmist asks a piercing question: "Lord, who may dwell in Your sanctuary?" The answer is not the powerful or the clever, but the one "who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and does not change their mind." More understood what many of us resist — that dwelling in the presence of the Almighty requires a truthfulness that costs something. Integrity that bends under pressure was never integrity at all.