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nobility. Since the beginning of the Renaissance, their status had risen as rulers of states and principalities singled them out, granting them perquisites reserved for the favored, establishing them as a privileged class. Ulrich von Hutten, for example, held an imperial appointment in Maximilian’s court, enjoyed the patronage of the elector of Mainz, and dined frequently with Mainz’s archbishop. Pico della Mirandola was a protégé of both Lorenzo de’ Medici and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Huldrych Zwingli, rector of Zurich, was a formidable political and religious leader, and so great was Budé’s prestige that Francis I founded a college at his suggestion. Girolamo Aleandro, who taught Greek and held the office of rector at the University of Paris, served as Vatican librarian, papal nuncio to France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and, finally, became a cardinal. The Vatican brought Manutius’s son Paulus to Rome as the official Vatican printer; Henry VIII chose Polydore Vergil, an Italian humanist, as his official historiographer and summoned Juan Luis Vives from Spain to tutor his daughter. Erasmus, at Cambridge, and Philipp Melanchthon, at Wittenberg, held their chairs as professors of Greek with royal approval. John Colet’s position as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral also had royal sanction. And John Skelton, England’s poet laureate, had served as royal tutor to the future King Henry VIII, with the consequence that Henry, when he mounted the throne in 1509, was the product of a thorough humanist education.

No humanist rose higher in public life than Sir Thomas More, who, until his fall from royal grace, was as distinguished a statesman as he was a scholar. During Henry VIII’s early reign More had been appointed undersheriff of London, king’s councillor, and a judge of the courts of requests. In 1520, when the sovereigns of England and France conferred on the Field of the Cloth of Gold outside Calais, he served as Henry’s aide. Knighted, he then rose swiftly through a series of royal appointments — undertreasurer, speaker of the House of Commons, high steward of Oxford and then of Cambridge, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and, finally, when he succeeded Cardinal Wolsey, lord chancellor, the foremost living Englishman, after the king, of his time.

Erasmus, whose close friend he was, asked: “What did Nature ever create milder, sweeter, and happier than the genius of Thomas More?” But that says more about Erasmus’s generosity than More’s character. Unquestionably the Englishman was benevolent for his time, but it was not an age when men of mild and sweet disposition rose to power; a savage streak was almost a prerequisite for achievement. So it was with Sir Thomas More. He had first attracted royal notice—from Henry VII—for his skills as a Star Chamber prosecutor. In argument he was bitter, vituperative, given to streams of invective. And although as a writer he celebrated religious tolerance in his Utopia, in practice he was a rigid Catholic, capable of having a servant in his own home flogged for blasphemy. He believed that heretics, atheists, and disbelievers in a hereafter should be executed, and as chancellor he approved such

Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) as lord chancellor of England

sentences. At the same time, he was a loyal subject to Henry VIII. Presiding over the House of Commons, he cannot have imagined a time when he would be forced to choose between his king in Hampton Court and the pope in Rome. But that time was coming.

IN 1502, WHEN King Henry VII’s reign had seven years to run, his mother, Margaret Beaufort, had used her largess to found professorships of divinity at Oxford and Cambridge. Autocratic, wealthy, cultivated, and still vigorous in her late fifties, Margaret lay at the epicenter of England’s noble hierarchy. As viscountess of Richmond and Derby and a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, she was the paradigm of what a sovereign’s mother should be. Despite her conservatism, she welcomed change, particularly in the arts. Her country home had become a rendezvous for scholars, statesmen,