Thomas More

Thomas More was a lawyer, humanist scholar and author of Utopia who became lord chancellor under Henry VIII. Although he supported the prosecution of religious dissent, he refused to accept the king’s supremacy over the English Church and would not endorse the annulment from Catherine of Aragon. Convicted of treason, he was executed in 1535 and later canonised by the Roman Catholic Church.

More is portrayed from sharply different perspectives in Tudor fiction. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall presents him through Thomas Cromwell’s hostile viewpoint, while C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels explore the legal and religious world shaped by men such as More; Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, although a play rather than a novel, remains one of the most influential fictional portrayals of his final conflict with Henry VIII.

In Margaret George’s The Autobiography of Henry VIII, the work covers Henry’s six wives, his rivalry and diplomacy with Francis I and Charles V, Cardinal Wolsey’s fall, the execution of Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell’s rise and destruction, and the long struggle to secure a male heir.