Three years ago, when memories of the final series of HBO’s Game of Thrones were still fresh, Joanne Paul published The House of Dudley, a gripping account of three generations of the Dudley family, whose efforts to seize the crown from the Tudors, as I noted in these pages, made the machinations of the Lannisters and the Starks look tame. Now, hard on the heels of the final instalment of the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – and with a revival of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons opening in the West End in August – Paul has published another book equally attuned to the zeitgeist.
Thomas More is a biography of the man known to posterity as both St Thomas More and Sir Thomas More, an enigmatic figure variously worshipped as a saintly martyr and vilified as a dogmatic zealot. The author of Utopia (1516), arguably the most influential work of literature by an Englishman between Chaucer and Shakespeare, More was a friend to the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam and a patron of the German-born Hans Holbein the Younger, whose 1527 portrait of More wearing his golden chain of esses (a signifier of loyalty to the crown) is one of the most instantly recognisable images of the early 16th century.
More was one of the greatest legal minds of his generation in England. Appointed Cardinal Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor in 1529, he – unlike Wolsey, who had favoured a conciliatory approach to the widening confessional divide – used the powers of his office to root out Lutherans and others he deemed guilty of heresy.
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