Latest news with #ThomasMore
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Thomas More's courage is an inspiration for all time
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.
Telegraph
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The truth about Thomas More, Henry VIII's brutal enforcer
Over the last century, Thomas More has undergone three posthumous transmutations. In 1935 – exactly 400 years after he was executed for refusing to swear that Henry VIII was Supreme Head of the English Church – he was canonised by Pope Pius XI as a holy martyr. This declaration of his sanctity met a frosty reception in Anglican England, where the part More had played in putting Protestants to death for heresy before the break with Rome hadn't yet disappeared from historical memory. Then in 1967 came Paul Scofield's moving performance as More in the film of Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons. Rooted in hagiographical accounts written by members of More's family, it made him a hero, wise, erudite and humane, a man who chose to die rather than compromise his conscience in the face of tyranny. Yet a twist in the tale remained: the publication in 2009 of Hilary Mantel's world-conquering Wolf Hall. In Mantel's exquisite prose it's Thomas Cromwell, not Thomas More, whose brilliant mind wrestles with the relationship between faith, integrity and power, while More, Cromwell's opponent, becomes a callous, self-regarding zealot. In Thomas More: A Life, her absorbing and deeply researched new biography, Joanne Paul sets out to rescue More from these violent swings of the historical pendulum. Her goal is to tell his story 'forward', using sources from More's own lifetime, rather than 'backward', from texts indelibly coloured by the circumstances of his death. Born in 1478, More is a Londoner through and through, the son of a lawyer and grandson of a baker and a candle-maker. (A candle-lit procession on the streets of London is the first of many vividly realised scenes through which we experience the early decades of his life.) As this precociously bright boy goes to grammar school, then into service at Lambeth Palace, then to Oxford and on into training for the law, London itself becomes a character in a drama that unfolds tableau by tableau, much like the pageants Paul describes in vibrant detail. That drama, however, soon turns dark. When More is five, the Yorkist king Edward IV dies suddenly. The people of London find themselves co-opted participants in the dethroning of Edward's young son, Edward V, by the dead king's brother Richard. Two years later, Richard III loses his crown on the battlefield at Bosworth, and the capital reshapes itself for the coming of yet another new king, Henry VII. Paul tells this story in part through More's own unfinished work The History of Richard the Third (1513-18), a humanist text – or texts: More wrote his History in both English and Latin – drawing on classical models. But what emerges here is the extent to which More was also recording the memories of his upwardly mobile London family as they tried to survive terrifying political change. The possible psychological effects of these childhood experiences are fascinating. Can More's own earliest memories – growing up in a nurturing household under the corporate governance of a city violently shaken by the effects of individual self-assertion – be connected with his later insistence on the prime importance of unity and authority, and what he saw as the essential relationship between the two? In the early years of his career, More explored how best to accommodate his talents within what humanists called a 'mixed life', combining scholarship and religious devotion with marriage and public service. His best-known work, Utopia, was written in 1515-16, just as he was beginning to be employed as a diplomat by the young king Henry VIII. Its two parts consider the fundamental questions with which he was grappling: how far should a philosopher involve himself in the world, and what form should an ideal state take? But the conclusions of its enigmatically supple satire have never been easy to pin down. Where does the truth lie in a dialogue about an imaginary republic called 'Utopia' – 'no place' – described by Raphael Hythlodaeus, a character whose name means 'peddler of nonsense', to a fictionalised 'Thomas More', whose surname in Latin is a pun on the Greek for 'fool'? Initially, the world seemed to confirm that More could serve Church and state together. When Henry VIII embroiled himself in printed argument with Martin Luther, a German friar who was challenging the doctrines and hierarchy of the Church, More stepped forward in the king's defence as a theologian as well as a politician. His newly polemical style in his Response to Luther (1523) is a pointed reminder that the urbane figure in A Man For All Seasons is not the historical More. He was throwing back into Luther's 's----y mouth, truly the s--tpool of all s--t,' he wrote, 'all the muck and s--t which your damnable rottenness has vomited up'. By October 1529, when he replaced Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor at the head of Henry's royal administration, More's writing against the spread of Lutheran ideas had gathered scale and pace. Soon, he was taking a personal hand in the interrogation and burning of English heretics. But England's unity was already irreparably fractured. Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that the king could marry Anne Boleyn; in 1531, the king therefore rejected the power of the pope. More would have to choose between different kinds of unity, different forms of authority. On May 15 1532, the English clergy submitted to Henry's demand that they recognise him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. The next day, More resigned as Chancellor. In her account of these years and those that followed, Paul keeps admirably close to More's own words, thousands upon thousands of which poured from his pen. Ultimately, his conclusion on the king's 'great matter' would not be a defence of individual conscience, but the paradoxical reverse: More could not accept Henry's claim to be head of the English Church because it seemed to him inconsistent with the unity of Church tradition, a wider authority without which, he believed, individual opinion had no legitimate force. And yet More the lawyer, fearful and human, tried to save More the theologian. He did everything he could to avoid expressing his opposition to the royal Supremacy explicitly or publicly, until in the spring of 1534 Henry decided that his subjects must swear an oath to uphold his new status. More refused but wouldn't say why, hoping that silence might allow him to live out his days in a quiet retirement. It did not. Henry sent him to the Tower, and a year later – once a means had been found to convict More of treason – to the block. In 2000, Pope John Paul II named More the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. Yet Joanne Paul points out that, in his entire political career, 'Thomas More did almost nothing to change the course of English history'. Nor did he want to take a public stand on the issue for which he is venerated as a martyr. The man for all seasons was a man of intense contradictions: generous and self-aware, vituperative and self-righteous. Paul is excellent on the development of his ideas, though More himself – like his most famous book – remains difficult to 'see' as a coherent whole. Still, as this moving and resonant account makes clear, his refusal to abandon the conscientious line he eventually drew raises deep questions about the limits of legitimate authority and the threshold for resistance – questions which, as we face contemporary challenges to constitutional norms and the international order, have lost none of their troubling power.
Economist
01-05-2025
- Economist
Britain's social contract is fraying
Lodged incongruously on the metal cladding of an office block in the City of London, a blue plaque marks the birthplace of Thomas More. In 1516 he published 'Utopia', sketching out a vision of free hospitals, compulsory schooling and full employment—a forerunner of sorts to the welfare state. Nearby, blue plaques of a different kind are spray-painted on the flagstones of London's pavement. A cack-handed publicity stunt by the local police, each commemorates a spot where a Londoner's phone was recently stolen.
The Independent
15-02-2025
- Business
- The Independent
A four-day week? Soon, thanks to AI, we may not work at all
The world of work is in a state of flux. JP Morgan is ordering its staff back into the office five days a week, resulting in a hunt for extra space to accommodate the 14,000 desks needed at its London Canary Wharf headquarters. Amazon has taken the same line. Meta, Starbucks and Dell are also moving against remote working and WFH. But Citigroup has said most of its employees can work remotely two days a week, and is refitting its £1bn Canary Wharf building. Meanwhile, 12 Labour MPs (and one Green) are pressing for an amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, currently wending its way through parliament, for a four-day week to become law. At the same time, the universal basic income (UBI) movement is gaining traction; this is the idea of a no-strings-attached payment made regularly to everyone in society. Trials are taking place all over the globe, including in Ireland and Scotland. A pilot will soon be launched, in Jarrow and Finchley, that will see people receive £1600 a month for doing precisely nothing. The effect it has on their health and wellbeing, and whether they choose to do additional work, will be monitored. UBI is not new: the concept has been mooted since Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516. It's being given a modern dusting as a possible solution to the advance of AI. Among its leading proponents is Andy Burnham. The mayor of Greater Manchester argues it could serve as an antidote to technology's onslaught and, by improving people's lives, could save the government money by reducing social harm. Indeed, one trial showed that recipients were more likely to develop startup businesses and less likely to get divorced. This week, delegates at the Paris AI summit met against a backdrop of predictions that the technology will surpass human capabilities 'in almost everything' within two to three years. Already, it's estimated that, in the first year of ChatGPT, 14 per cent of Americans lost their jobs to robots. Elon Musk is saying the biggest threat to AI will come not from what it can do, but from governments reeling at the effects of wholesale unemployment. That does not stop him from also sharing that, in the future, a job will be for 'personal satisfaction'. Goldman Sachs reckons as many as 300 million posts will disappear. This is the same Goldman Sachs that has abandoned its own hybrid attendance policy implemented during the pandemic and issued a full return-to-office mandate. It's also in an area – banking – that is in the crosshairs of AI. Previously, it was supposed that dirty or physical jobs were at most risk from tech; now it's thought the target is the middle-class professions of law, medicine, and banking and finance. We're clearly stuck at a crossroads, uncertain of the route forward. How long we will be here remains to be seen. There are benefits and flaws with the different propositions. WFH is thought to be better for work-life balance; it improves mental health, removes the stress of commuting (as well as saving the time wasted in transit), and staff are said to work more efficiently. Employers are able to save money by not requiring such large premises. That's the view, although the evidence is apocryphal and not scientific. Against that, critics maintain that WFH encourages shirking, reduces spontaneity and creativity, and increases a sense of isolation, reducing opportunities for collegiality and mentoring. Similarly, all circumstantial. A four-day week has similar benefits and drawbacks. On the downside, it's enshrining in statute the notion of a slower fifth day that exists in many workplaces anyway, and what it will achieve is to make Thursday, not Friday, that more relaxed day. Quite how shorter hours will secure greater economic growth – a requisite of this government – those Labour supporters have yet to explain. They prefer to dwell on how it's needed because AI will reduce employment. But if true, it's hard to see how four days will be any more of a safeguard than five. That's where UBI comes in and says 'To hell with it, here's some cash to help compensate for the lot – you no longer need to work.' But what should be its value? What is enough in the northeast of England may not be anything like enough in north London. And who will pay for it? While some will enjoy UBI, there must still be sufficient numbers in paid employment, paying the taxes that will fund it. To say that governments, employers, do not know where to turn is an understatement. They sense change is coming; it's not here yet. But they're not sure what form it will take, or how extensive it will be. Some are focusing on the present, weighing which working patterns they believe to be right. Nothing is certain. The future of employment is occupying a similar space to climate change: something is happening, but we've got little idea of what the effects will be, or whether it will be slow and incremental or advance in a rush. That equates to frustration. All the folk who gather at events such as Emmanuel Macron's AI fest, with their smart software and algorithms, and like to forecast yesterday what will occur tomorrow, are nowhere near agreement. The result is fragmentation: practices adopted here and not there; policies enthusiastically supported and equally scorned. Utopia also advocated a ban on private property; goods being stored in warehouses, with people requesting what they need; no locks on the doors of houses; and citizens switching homes every 10 years. Every person on More's fictional island had to learn an essential trade, and they wore similar, simple clothes. They were each paid the same, but they were all expected to work. There were free hospitals, and meals were eaten in community dining halls. What he was satirising writ large was monastic life, in which everyone lived happily. Utopia or dystopia? If anyone has the answer, we're ready to hear it.
