More put the case that ‘in thinges touching conscience, euery true and good subiect is more bounde to haue respect to his saide conscience and to his soule than to any other thing in all the world beside’. More was engaged in a particularly difficult and subtle testing of human, as opposed to divine, law, with all the resources of his legal experience being deployed to justify his beleaguered position. His contemporaries believed that he was acting obsessively or irrationally, but he believed himself to be acting legally—in the fullest possible meaning of that term. It has often been surmised that the trial of More represents the defeat of the individual conscience by the forces of the emerging nation-state, but that is profoundly to misunderstand his position. Conscience was not for More simply or necessarily an individual matter; as Lord Chancellor he had been charged with the application of conscience to law, but upon general and traditional principles. At his trial he was affirming the primacy of law itself, as it had always been understood. He asserted the laws of God and of reason, as they had been inherited, and he simply did not believe that the English parliament could repeal the ordinances of a thousand years. It is significant that he was found to be guilty because of that conversation with Rich in which he ‘put the case’. He was in that sense condemned for acting like a lawyer and, at the trial itself, he was also convicted for maintaining traditional law. He embodied law all his life, and he died for it.