Thomas More by Joanne Paul

Thomas More: A Life

By Joanne Paul

Pegasus Books 2025

For her new book, Joanne Paul, author of 2024’s The House of Dudley, has chosen for her new book a narrower but much deeper subject, the life of King Henry VIII’s doomed chancellor, Thomas More. The result is the most entertaining, involving 600 pages on More ever written.

This is a subject more famously portrayed in fiction than in fact, obviously. Aided by the brilliance of Robert Bolt’s 1960 play A Man for All Seasons, the popularity of the 1966 movie adaptation, and the odd, almost ethereal skill of Paul Scofield when starring in both, Thomas More became a figure imprinted in the common mind as the living embodiment of decency, eloquence, and above all conscientiousness, a man who went to the execution block rather than swear to an oath in which he didn’t believe. Bolt knew perfectly well the corners he was cutting in order to leave out the less savory elements of the historical More, and he set about his bit of exquisite propaganda with a will that fixed the character for two generations.

Hilary Mantel, in her enormously popular novel Wolf Hall, did her best to offer a corrective. Her Thomas More is more wheedling than Bolt’s, more slyly hypocritical, and especially more bloodthirsty, personally torturing some poor screaming heretics, and she largely overlooks the fact that her version of More would have taken Henry’s Oath of Succession before breakfast. And since Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is the star of the show, the various cinematic adaptations of Wolf Hall haven’t featured any serious any More to rival Scofield’s.

Plenty of people watch movies; fewer people watch cable shows; virtually nobody reads books, so the textured, complicated More presented by Joanne Paul in these pages isn’t likely to trouble Scofield’s supremacy, but readers should nevertheless get to know this version. He’s more complicated and more interesting than anything in Bolt or Mantel.

This despite Paul’s own puzzling summation: “And yet, among all this debate and dispute over More’s legacy, one spectacular thing can truthfully be said,” she writes. “In the context of his own time and the years following his death, Thomas More did almost nothing to change the course of English history.” Admiration swells for an author so frankly willing to torpedo commercial interest in her own book.

But it doesn’t work, bless her. As in The House of Dudley, she adopts a quasi-novelistic approach here, changing reported dialogue into actual dialogue, carefully and convincingly inferring moods and tones of voice from dry records, and setting broader scenes with color and flourish. And as in that previous book, the method entirely works and is precisely balanced with the scholarly discussions Paul carries on in her generous End Notes.

Her Thomas More shares at least one major quality in common with Bolt’s: a thoroughly unbelievable lack of personal ambition. Even as early as 1517, More could sympathize with Erasmus about not becoming “immersed in the busy nothings of princes,” but he famously did become as immersed as it was possible for Bolt’s “a lawyer, and a lawyer’s son” to become. Henry liked his minions to be entirely dependent on him for all their honors and properties, and all he asked in return, aside from piles of money, ceaseless fawning, and bedroom access to wives and daughters, was the freedom to kangaroo-court you into decapitation on a random Wednesday. More thought he could walk the tightrope between peril and personal prosperity just long enough to collect his marbles and retire to his garden. They always thought that.

Joanne Paul understands this fundamentally and keeps her eye on the peril of befriending a tyrant. Just like in the Holbein portrait on the US dust jacket (universally known, thankfully, since it’s oddly uncredited), her Thomas More is a deeply worried man, increasingly so as the years and the honors pile on:

As More reached the age of fifty, he now found a third threat to the unity of belief and consensus in which he had grown up and vehemently believed. He would do his best to avoid getting caught up in it as well. But just as the other two problems had turned from sparks into raging fires, which he could not escape, More had reason to worry that he would soon find himself in a home ripped apart, and burning to the ground.

The inexorable dark climax of any telling of More’s story will of course be his famous trial, at which he did his best to defend himself against what he knew better than anybody was a foregone conclusion. Paul’s account is superbly readable:

Before the jury, More was challenged by the Attorney General, Christopher Hales, to answer the terms of indictment. On the first, his malicious silence, More was unequivocal. ‘I clearly respond to you,’ he declared, ‘that it is not lawful for me to be judged to death for such silence on my part, because neither your statute nor anything in the laws of the whole world can rightly afflict anyone with punishment, unless he has committed a crime in word or deed.’ They had chosen the wrong lawyer to prosecute on this count. ‘Laws,’ More argued, ‘have constituted no punishment for silence.’

The Thomas More in this book might have done almost nothing to change the course of English history, but in Joanne Paul’s hands, he makes for wonderful reading. This being 2025, the warning about getting immersed in the petty nothings of princes will fall on deaf ears. But this More is better company than either a pure saint or a pure sinner could ever be.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News