Jack, in fact Tyndale was burnt at the stake not in England but in what is now Belgium, then part of the Holy Roman Empire in October 1536. He had been betrayed to the authorities by an English bounty hunter (who may well – this is controversial – have been originally paid by More) some eighteen months before. The English authorities seem to have made some sort of effort to win Tyndale’s release (by then More had been executed), but were unsuccessful. Interestingly, the first officially ‘authorized’ English-language version of the Bible was made available in churches only three years later, in 1539. Followers of Tyndale burned alive as a result of More’s efforts included Thomas Hutton (a priest), Thomas Bilney and Richard Bayfield. Other victims included John Tewkesbury and James Bainham, whose last words at the stake were for God “to forgive Sir Thomas More.”

You’re quite right that More’s dispute with Tyndale was about far more than an English-language Bible, but it’s a measure of the extent to which he did not want ordinary people to be able to examine religious questions for themselves (they should “meddle none higher than is meet for them,” he warned) that he even appears to have believed that some of his (Latin) works should not be translated lest, presumably, they be misunderstood by the plebs.

Finally, while I certainly believe that More was a brilliant and complex individual, and I understand that he was a creature of his time, we do have to deal with the fact that this was a man so taken up with his mission, and his obsessions, that he used his own house as a place of interrogation – and worse. In that respect (if only in that respect) the historical figure he most resembles is Beria.