Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Historian Joanne Paul, biographer of Thomas More, talks with Tyler Cowen about More’s life and execution, the riddle of Utopia, the politics of Tudor counsel and power, and what the period explains about Shakespeare, social mobility, and England’s present.

Key ideas

1. More resists the hero/villain binary. Paul refuses to sort More into martyr (A Man for All Seasons) or persecutor (Wolf Hall): a humanist wit who also, as Lord Chancellor, imprisoned and burned heretics out of fear that Lutheran heresy would fracture Christian unity.
2. Utopia is a deliberate riddle, not a manifesto. Satire (gold used for chamber pots and prisoners’ chains) sits alongside a serious claim that Utopia’s rejection of money, property, and hierarchy is more real than the ‘falsities’ structuring More’s world — and ours.
3. Popular adaptation flattens complexity. Robert Bolt’s More, a champion of individual conscience, is nearly the opposite of the historical More, who distrusted individual conscience as a seedbed of heresy; screen versions need a hero and a villain, so More and Cromwell swap roles between A Man for All Seasons and Wolf Hall.
4. Tudor social mobility ran on education, not birth. Henry VII promoted capable low-born administrators — a strategy Henry VIII continued — because a Latin-educated bureaucrat class was both useful and politically disposable; the same educational expansion that produced Cromwell and Cranmer also produced the grammar-school grounding behind Shakespeare.
5. Paul reads present UK stagnation through Brexit and disinvestment. Economic and identity costs from Brexit, short-termist cuts to higher education, and persistent xenophobia are, in her account, what sits beneath a country with talent, language, and history but a stuck present.

Content

More, Erasmus, and the shape of a friendship

Paul opens on the surprisingly rocky start to More and Erasmus’s friendship — they met in 1499, alongside the young Prince Henry, and did not immediately get on. Correspondence flourished afterwards but stopped entirely during More’s years as Lord Chancellor, a gap Paul attributes not to religious disagreement (neither man aligned with Luther) but to the career choice itself: More’s near-total absorption into service to Henry VIII cost him his old identity as a full-time scholar, and the friendship went quiet with it. Erasmus dedicated In Praise of Folly to More partly because More himself embodied the wise-fool figure the book tries to articulate, and the two shared a taste for satire as a tool against pride and power.

Utopia as riddle

Asked whether Utopia is satire or sincere blueprint, Paul argues both — deliberately. The island’s use of gold for chamber pots and slave-chains mocks continental status display; the absence of private property rejects a world (More’s, and ours) built on ‘artificial’ constructs — money, property, hierarchy — in favour of things she says Utopians treat as genuinely real: virtue, food, useful clothing. The narration itself compounds the puzzle: Book 2’s description of the island comes from Raphael Hythloday, whose name can mean either ‘peddler of nonsense’ or gesture toward an angelic messenger, embedded inside a frame debate (between Hythloday and a character called ‘Thomas More’) over whether an educated person should give counsel to a prince at all. Paul resists reading the book’s surveillance and anti-individualism as an intended dystopian warning; she treats that reading as a post-Enlightenment, rights-based lens applied backward onto a text more concerned with the sin of pride than with lost privacy.

The persecutor question

Pressed on whether More was ‘just a bad guy’ — the persecution of heretics, alleged torture, misogyny in his writing — Paul states a working principle: not sorting historical figures into good or evil. She locates More’s turn against heresy in fear that Lutheranism would fracture Christian unity, a mechanism she thinks worth understanding rather than dismissing. She corrects an inflated popular claim (hundreds burned ‘personally’ by More) against the documentary record: three recorded burnings during his chancellorship, imprisonment and interrogation of heretics, and no confirmed evidence of torture, which More denied.

Portraits, plays, and the flattening of complexity

The Holbein portrait of More at the Frick reads, in Paul’s account, as unusually intimate — Holbein knew and respected More — in deliberate contrast with his comparatively ‘pallid’ portrait of Cromwell, a contrast the museum itself draws by hanging them together. Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons recruits More as an exemplar of freedom of conscience against an oppressive state, values Paul says the historical More would have rejected outright, given his deep suspicion of individual conscience as a source of religious fracture. She traces the same flattening instinct across adaptations generally: heroes need villains, so More is saintly in Bolt’s telling and villainous in Wolf Hall’s, when the historical men had known each other for decades and shared far more common ground than either production allows.

Reformation, execution, and public reaction

Paul stresses that religious identity in early Tudor England was not optional or a matter of popularity — ‘you are a Catholic’ — even though internal criticism of the Church, from both More and Erasmus, ran deep. What terrified More about the Reformation was the prospect of the Church’s unity fragmenting outright. His execution provoked genuine public unease; Henry VIII’s regime, aware it was being watched at home and abroad, scheduled the execution to avoid symbolic parallels with Thomas Becket and needed but failed to extract public acquiescence from More before his death.

Education, Shakespeare, and the roots of science

A 16th-century expansion in literacy and grammar-school education — driven partly by humanism’s push for wider access and partly by the Reformation’s need for scripture-literate believers — supplied the classical and rhetorical training (Cicero, Ovid, formal rhetoric) that surfaces later in Shakespeare’s soliloquies and poetry. On the scientific revolution’s roots, Paul is emphatic that the standard ‘science triumphing over mysticism’ story misleads: the scientific method itself grew out of alchemy and the search for the philosopher’s stone, with figures like John Dee and Francis Bacon holding occult and proto-scientific interests together rather than in tension.

Mobility, tolerance, and the limits of Paul’s expertise

Tudor social mobility was substantial and deliberately engineered: Henry VII (and later Henry VIII) promoted capable low-born administrators partly to check noble power and partly because such men, lacking independent standing, were politically disposable. A classical Latin education was the effective gatekeeper; not being a woman was close to a precondition, since women were formally excluded from governance as the period grew more institutionalised. Paul is candid about the edges of her own expertise here — she defers on Tudor visual art’s comparative weakness to another scholar’s book, and on the scale of 16th-century English antisemitism to broader European Inquisition-era trends she has not researched closely herself.

Canada, biography, and what comes next

Paul, from Ontario and trained under Quentin Skinner, situates her own interest in the 16th century’s liminal position between the recognisably medieval and the recognisably modern, and in the period’s visible ‘paths not taken’ — a source, she says, of both counterfactual interest and present agency. Closing on contemporary Britain, she attributes its stagnation to Brexit’s economic and identity costs, short-termist disinvestment in higher education, and persistent xenophobia crowding out other debate. Her next book, provisionally titled Tyrant, will use Henry VIII to examine tyranny’s character and the strategies contemporaries used to resist it.

See also

• Joanne Paul — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Thomas More — subject of the conversation
• Utopia — More’s book, discussed at length