Renaissance English History Podcast Episode 55: Tudor Times on Thomas More

Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I'm your host, Heather Teysko, and I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and our connection to our own humanity. This is episode 55. It's another joint episode with Melita Thomas of Tudor Times on Thomas More. Just a quick note that the Renaissance English History Podcast is a proud member of the Agora Podcast Network. And check out the Agora Podcast of the Month, which is Lands of Leviathan. It's a podcast that analyzes concepts and theories from political science and international relations using themes, trends, and trivia in popular culture. So you can listen to two nerds discuss state reformation during a zombie apocalypse, or how the Jedi Council would function in our international system. You can learn more and subscribe at landsofleviathan.com. And as always, you can get show notes and more information about the Renaissance English History Podcast at www.englandcast.com. And there you can also sign up for the mailing list, mailing list subscribers receive an extra mini cast every month, as well as an exclusive Spotify listening list, book giveaways, news, and other cool stuff. And for this particular episode, as well, you can get lots more information on Thomas More at www.tudortimes.co.uk. So moving on from all of those links, let's talk about Thomas More now. So Melita Thomas is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times, a website devoted to Tudor and Stuart history in the period from 1485 to 1625. You can find it at www.tudortimes.co.uk. Melita, who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970s series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson, also contributes articles to BBC History Extra and Britain Magazine. And we started the interview with me asking her what we needed to know about Thomas More. Thomas is definitely one of the most controversial figures of the 16th century, perhaps because he's been re-characterized, we say, by the enormous success of Wolf Hall. So, you know, it's been a lot of interest in him of late. He was a Londoner born and brought up in the city of London. His father was a lawyer and later a judge. And he belonged to what you might call the great and the good of the city. His grandfather was an alderman and so forth. He was educated in London at school, St. Anthony's School, which is in a later form still exists. He then went to Oxford where he studied for two years, but didn't take his degree, which was quite common in those days. Not everybody took a degree unless they intended to become a priest. He joined the legal profession like his father and he studied first of all at New Inn, which was one of the inns of chancery, and then at Lincoln's Inn where he became a barrister and qualified in about 1501. He was successful in his profession and he just started to move up the ranks of the lawyers in the early 1500s. It's possible he sat in parliament in 1504 though his biographers are a bit unsure about whether that's true or not. But whilst he was at Oxford and then in London practicing as a lawyer, he became involved in scholarly circles, I suppose you'd call it, with the humanist scholars of the period. He became friends with the most famous Renaissance scholar of them all, Erasmus, with Dr. Collett, who was the Dean of St. Paul's and founder of St. Paul's School, with Thomas Lineker, who was tutor to Prince Arthur, with William Grockin, another well-known scholar who introduced Greek as a study at Oxford. So he was part of this circle of humanists as they were called afterwards. And he started to move in sort of on the edges of what you might call royal circles as things were quite small in those days. I mean, a well-educated lawyer or a well-educated scholar was very likely to become involved in the king's household in some way. One of the first stories we have about him, it dates from 1499 when he was obviously already well acquainted with the royal family in some way. He went to visit his friend, Lord Mountjoy, together with Erasmus. And they decided to pay a call on the royal children who were Eltham Palace. And there he met Henry VIII as a little boy, the Duke of York and Henry's sisters. That was that sort of the first recorded meeting between Moore and Henry. So he continued in his legal profession. In 1512, he sat in parliament for the City of London. He was interested in some of the big London cases of the 1510s. There was the very notorious case of Richard Hunn, which was one of the first examples of the discord between the clergy and the commons. He became involved in a number of negotiations relating to city and commercial law. And he was retained by Cardinal Wolsey to translate for a papal envoy, Cardinal Caraffa, who was later Pope Paul IV. So he sort of gradually became more prominent in legal and administrative circles. He was invited to join the king's council in 1518. And he undertook a number of ambassadorial trips, I suppose you'd call them, to France and to Flanders, partly for trade missions, but also partly for negotiations over a number of treaties. There were numerous treaties in the 1510s and 20s between England, between the various parts of the empire ruled by Charles V, and between France. And Moore took part in a number of the negotiations and embassy visits. He signed a couple of treaties as one of the English representatives, in particular, the treaty that agreed that Francis I of France would marry Princess Mary, or possibly if he didn't marry her, that she would marry his younger son, the Duke of Orléans. So he became more and more important as a negotiator. But he was largely administrative in his role. He never vied with, say, Cardinal Wolsey for actually making policy for Henry. He was always a subordinate to Wolsey. In 1529, after Wolsey was dismissed from his post of Lord Chancellor, Moore was appointed as Lord Chancellor, so head of the legal profession. At the time, of course, things were very difficult because of Henry VIII's desire to have an annulment of his marriage. Moore would never talk about it, and he refused to get involved in it in any way. And Henry agreed that Moore would not be pressed to be involved in it, even though he was Lord Chancellor. However, that was not really a tenable position. And eventually, as Henry's demands to control the church became more and more difficult to resist, Moore resigned his position. But Henry was still very eager for him to confirm his agreement. He was very well thought of throughout Europe. He was known as a scholar. He was known as a man of influence and a man of great wit. And therefore, it was important to Henry that somebody who was very well thought of should approve of his actions, but Moore could not be persuaded to do so. Eventually, after a number of requests and demands to conform, Moore was eventually faced with the Act of Succession of 1534, which required everybody who was asked to swear an oath that the king was Supreme Head of the English Church, and that his children by his new queen, Anne, were his legal successors. Moore refused to sign the oath. He just said he wouldn't sign it. And he was imprisoned for about six months, during which time there were repeated requests for him to sign it. But he would neither take the oath, nor would he ever explain what he objected to in it on the basis that he didn't wish to incriminate himself. Eventually, he was tried and convicted of maliciously denying the role of Henry as Head of the Church. And he was executed on the 6th of July, 1535, St. Thomas's Eve. He was executed by beheading. And why did you choose him for the Person of the Month? There are a couple of reasons behind it. One of the reasons that brought him to the forefront of the list was a request from one of our listeners to look at him. She wrote to us, and she is apparently one of his descendants. He had four children, at least two of whom had children of their own. And obviously, over time, these descendants presumably just continue to expand. And anyway, this lady wrote to us and said, would we look at him? So we moved him up the list. But of course, he is an absolutely pivotal figure in the early to mid-16th century, in the whole history of the English Reformation, and a very worthy and very complex and interesting man to read about. It's very hard to actually form a real view of his character. He's quite elusive. So it's been interesting to read about him. Yeah. And on that note, I know, like you mentioned with Wolf Hall, there's been a renewed interest in him. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that we have about him? Well, it is very hard to know anything in the sense that because he is seen as a religious martyr by some, and as a religious persecutor by others, it's very hard to get anybody who doesn't have a preconceived view based on their own perceptions of whether the Reformation was a good or a bad thing. So although in his lifetime, all of the descriptions of him pretty much in his lifetime were positive in that he was obviously a very witty man. Everybody mentions his wit and occasionally you see the odd sentence that you can see that he did have a very dry sense of humour, but that's not always popular. So generally, he was very well spoken of as an honest man, a diligent man, a man who as Chancellor gave good justice and speedy and followed the law, but possibly also a very rigid man in his thinking, particularly as he got older. The chronicler, Edward Hall, who was a supporter of the Reformation accuses him of making a joke of everything or making a mockery of everything and just not taking anything seriously enough. After his lifetime, his first biographer was his son, William Roper, who wrote during the reign of Mary, in which time there was obviously a great desire to promote his defence of the Catholic Church. And his son-in-law was clearly a partial, he was very attached to his father-in-law. John Fox in his Book of Martyrs accuses him of being a vicious and sadistic persecutor of heretics. We've got to bear in mind that Fox didn't disagree with the principle of persecuting for religion in principle. He just didn't like persecuting Protestants. So we have to take that one with a modicum of what was happening on both sides. Throughout the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, what you might call the weak view of history that the Reformation was a good thing was largely seen through Fox's eyes, although even detractors tended to confirm his more positive aspects of being a good Chancellor, of being a good family man. So nobody was ever all bad about him. The Catholic Church in the late 19th century, sort of resurrected him and beatified him, possibly as that was a period in the Catholic Church when the authority of the Pope was being promoted even further. So that's when the doctrine of papal infallibility came back, actually, not till the 19th century. So more, although he wasn't quite as keen on papal supremacy as he's portrayed, he was a good one to be promoting from the church's point of view. And he was then made a saint in 1935. He was portrayed as a saint in the famous A Man for All Seasons, that marvelous film of the 1960s. And it's hard for anybody brought up as I was, seeing that film as a child, to not have that vision of him in your mind. But in Henry Mantel's The Wolf Hall, he's definitely portrayed as not quite the baddie. And actually, as you read through it, you become to realize in the two books, how much Moore and Cromwell are actually alike in many ways. They're sort of the two sides of the same coin. So it's interesting, but it's definitely a more negative picture. And some of the English historians of the 1960s and 70s were very, perhaps hung up on their perceptions of sadomasochism and rather worked up about what they saw as Moore's sexuality. Actually, looking at what I can see from the time is not necessarily borne out. It's all a bit post Freudian. They're very worked up about the fact that he used to apparently wear a hair shirt, or he did wear a hair shirt, and that he went for self-flagellation or self-mortification. But although we might see that as a rather strange and weird sexual practice, it was certainly not uncommon as a religious practice like fasting. So we shouldn't necessarily read sexual connotations into it. I mean, they might have been there. I mean, I don't know, of course, but it's not necessarily fair to sort of leap from that, even though you could say he was very concerned about chastity and he did seem to dwell on that to a degree. It doesn't necessarily mean he was a sadomasochist. It's a bit of a leap. But he is complicated. It's not straightforward. I probably started off with a more, perhaps a more positive view of him than I've ended up with. Yeah. And you talked about Hilary Mantel. How have the recent interpretations, is there anything else you can say about how he's changed in the past, say, 30, 40 years? Well, he's definitely gone from being a saint to a sinner without sort of passing go or stopping in between. Peter Ackroyd's biography of him is probably the current, what you might call the standard. There's a very interesting one, very nice style by Richard Marius. That's a bit older. That's dating from the 80s. I think it's probably time for him to be seen as neither saint nor sinner. But as like most of us, somewhere in between, he had his very good points and he had his not so good points. Although, of course, again, it's looking at the context of the times and how much do you think, how much do we put our own perceptions of what is good or bad or moral immoral on people of a different time? To a degree, you have to. But one of the questions I've asked myself is around, he was definitely a persecutor of what he considered to be heretics. I mean, there's no two ways about it. And for those of us who think that religious freedom is important, that's very hard to understand why he hated them with such virulence and why he was prepared to pursue them to the ends of the law. I'm absolutely certain that he didn't personally lock them up and beat them. He swore he didn't and he was a man definitely of his word that everything he did was legal. But then if you look in the wider context and you realize that his fundamental belief was that the church was a union or a communion of souls from the beginning of the Christian era, right up until the current day, that the whole church was a single union and that for individuals to try to break out of that was to risk the souls of other people. And he wasn't the only one. They saw heretics as carrying contagious disease in effect, but not of the body, but of the soul. And therefore, it was the duty of the church and the law to protect the rest of society from these people. And you might also ask, and this is one of the questions I have asked is, in a time ourselves when we're very concerned about war and terrorism, and in Moore's time, the Peasants' War that was seen as provoked by the Lucerans, although it was a lot more complicated than that. It was a terrible, between 100 and 300,000 Germans were slaughtered in a couple of years from that. So it was seen as unleashing all these terrible forces, the sack of Rome. They were worried. And if you take an analogy of our own day, there are many people who think it would be right to lock up people whom they see as peddling, quotes, violent extremism. And everybody's interpretation of that might be different, but the concept of there are people out there and what they say is dangerous to society hasn't changed. So, yeah, certainly lots to think about, I found. So, he was also a bit of a historian, wasn't he? His history on Richard III really kind of shaped our views of the Wars of the Roses and of Richard. Can you tell me about kind of his work as a historian? Well, that's really interesting, because again, until I started to investigate, I had assumed that yes, history was sort of an important part of his quite significant body of work. But actually, Richard III was never finished. It was actually written in two versions. There's a Latin one and an English one that he appeared to be writing more or less side by side. But it was never finished and it was never published. It's often been castigated as being propaganda written to please the Tudors. But actually, that's not necessarily the case. It was not a work that he published or promulgated in any way. It's possible that he wrote it as a sort of grammatical or rhetorical advice for his children. The huge interest in education and in a very modern way, he was a great believer in education for women. Yeah. So, Richard III, was it meant as serious history? There were obvious errors in it, regardless of your views on Richard III's character that more probably you weren't true, like the age of Edward IV when he died. On the other hand, some of the things that people have said weren't true, like Richard's spinal deformity, they actually were true. So, it's possible that it wasn't quite the runaway bestseller that everybody thinks he was. Right. I heard a little bit just separate about, he's like the main source of information about Edward's mistress, what was her name? Jane Shore. Yes. And he wrote a lot about her because she was still alive at the time that he was writing. And he was quite complimentary to her, I think, talking about how she was such a beautiful lady now, and she was older, of course, at the time, and how she's kept her beauty through the years and seemed to really, I don't know, seems to paint a really nice picture of her, I think. Yes. Yeah. I have to say, I haven't read his history of Richard III, but yes, that he spoke, I mean, Jane Shore, whether it was just more, but all that's ever been written about her suggests she was a nice woman, a very friendly, affectionate woman who used the influence she had with Edward IV for good. She was a Londoner and Sir Thomas More, throughout his life, was always a Londoner. And he was always keen to promote the city and to promote its virtues. So, he was likely to think that a goldsmith's wife from London was a good girl. Right, right. So, tell me about his work as Chancellor and what he did as the Reformation started to take hold and what he did to kind of fight that. And you kind of alluded to his persecution of heretics, but tell me more about that. Well, in his youth and as a humanist, More was not some sort of reactionary who thought that everything that the church did or said was right. He promoted Erasmus's new translation of the Bible, even though quite a lot of conservative churchmen objected to it. He was not a supporter of what you might call the superstitious element that had certainly crept into the church. Stories that if you said the rosary every day, it didn't matter how bad you weren't going to go to hell. So, he was quite dismissive of that sort of superstition. But his central view was that the church itself as a spiritual body was important, that it wasn't just what was written in the Bible, although that was clearly the most important source of the truth, but that custom and tradition and the views of church councils and the overall history of the church were also relevant to how people should believe and how the world should be conducted. He definitely believed that even if the priest himself were bad, that did not mean that the church was bad. So, he was perfectly well aware that there were very bad priests and monks, and also very good ones. But he held the traditional view that even if the priest himself were bad, it didn't mean the institution itself was flawed. Whereas the reformers, there were many of them who felt that the church, because some of the members themselves were so corrupt, that that necessarily meant that the church itself was severely or seriously flawed. So, in his younger days, he was certainly a promoter of reform within the church. And he supported Erasmus and others who were keen to improve morality within the church. I mean, by the early 1500s, many of the churchmen in England were certainly improving. Fisher of Rochester, of course, who was killed at the same time as Moore, Bishop Fox, Wareham, they were all good churchmen. Woolsey, not so much. And Woolsey was in many ways an archetype of the churchman who was too wealthy, too ambitious, too powerful. But once Luther came upon the scene, then Moore started writing in tracts against him. His first one actually is pretty revolting. Henry VIII had written a book against Luther. And he was very proud of his book, the assertion of the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther. And for this, the Pope gave Henry VIII the title Defender of the Faith. And Moore had worked with him on it. He hadn't written the book, but as with all books, Henry had discussed it with him and what have Luther responded to the King's book with a really shocking and abusive personal attack. Now, Luther's language was very, very scatological. And that was obviously the custom of the time. So Henry couldn't write back to Luther in those sorts of terms. So Moore was commissioned to write a refutation of Luther. And basically, all that Luther does is talk about shit and all that Moore does is talk about shit in return. I mean, endless in those words or worse. So that's all pretty revolting, but fairly standard for the time. So a number of his works against heresy are in those sorts of terms, which is somewhat distasteful. But he also wrote more considered works about religion himself later in his life, which were much more about his own sort of more religious and looking at the sacraments and looking at the passion of Christ, per se, rather than as reputations of heresy. As Lord Chancellor, it was his job to oversee the law, of course. And it was his job to support the church in its battle against heresy. So as the law stood at the time, the church would investigate allegations of heresy. And if they were found to be valid, and the heretic refused to recant, then the church would hand over the heretic to the state, to the secular arm for punishment. And punishments generally were public recantation or that the heretic would be sent off to look at a fire and books would be thrown into it, or they'd have to throw a faggot of wood into it as a symbol. People were burnt throughout the Middle Ages. It was in the range of, I'm not minimizing it, I think there were four or five burnt during Henry VII's reign, quite a few burnt under Henry IV. But those are the sorts of numbers. Generally, most heretics recanted. And depending on what the local bishop was like, people paid more or less attention to them. Wolsey was definitely not interested in persecuting people. He would call them before and give them a good scare and more or less tell them to be on their way. There were more burnt under Moore's chancellorship and nobody was burnt under Wolsey's chancellorship. And I think it's probably about 10. The figures seem a little muddled. About 10 were burnt whilst Moore was chancellor. But of course, against that, you have to put the fact that it was right at the forefront of public discussion by then. Whereas during the 15th and early 16th centuries, it had not been an issue. So Moore wasn't the only one who was worried about heretics. Lots and lots of people were and very many people were seeing it as almost the thin end of the wedge. I mean, Europe was very, very torn by war. I mentioned the German Peasants' War. The Turks were invading in the east of Europe and people felt under siege. His other role as chancellor was in the secular courts. And the chancellor's job is to be head of equity. So where the common law doesn't give a good remedy or gives a remedy that is manifestly unjust, then the courts of equity can intervene. And that was Moore's role. He heard a lot of cases. He was obviously a popular judge. People chose to be heard by his courts rather than by the king's bench, which was common law. Heather Teysko So what was his relationship with Henry? And how did that change throughout his life? I think Henry probably had a different view of it from that which Moore had. As I mentioned, his first meeting with Henry or his first published meeting with Henry, presumably he'd seen him before, was when Henry was about 10. And Moore would have been about in his early 20s, 23 or so. And he took Erasmus to see Henry because he thought he was a very impressive child, 10 years old. And when Henry became king, Moore wrote some very flattering verses about how everybody was happy that the miserly old Henry VII was dead and how delighted they were with the new prince who was clever and tall and handsome and all those sorts of things. And it would appear that although Moore often wrote with his tongue in his cheek, it would appear that he was genuinely impressed with the young Henry. When he first became one of Henry's counsellors, which he resisted for a while because he enjoyed his law practice and he liked being in city politics rather than necessarily getting involved in government. He went and swore the oath to Henry at Reading Abbey. And Henry told him he was to be God's servant first and then the king's, which obviously Moore took very much to heart. But he was on very good terms with Henry after that. They had a lot of intellectual interests in common. Astronomy in particular, they would go up onto the roof and look at the stars. Mathematics, Henry was quite a keen mathematician and Latin of course. And Henry would often call Moore to join him and Queen Catherine after supper for just conversation and private evenings together. So he was, insofar as you can be a friend of the king, he was friends with the king and queen. But he was always rather cherry of how much influence he really had. When people complimented him on how much the king relied on him, Moore was always quick to say that he didn't have any influence. And I think there's one quote where he said that if his head would win Henry a castle in France, he would not hesitate to have it. So perhaps he understood a bit more about what it's like to be a friend of the king. It was obviously extremely important to Henry that Moore agreed with him. He went to huge lengths to persuade Moore to accept Henry's supremacy. It clearly mattered to Henry on a personal level. It wasn't like Fisher, even though he'd known Fisher all his life. Fisher had been one of his grandmother's closest friends. There isn't the same personal feeling about it. He really wanted Moore to agree with him. Why do you think that Moore was so insistent on not accepting the supremacy? Because he saw it as the thin end of the wedge for breaking up the universality of the church. Unlike possible later interpretations, he wasn't ever that excited about the pope as supreme head of the church. He was much more inclined to the view that the church as a whole owned the truth, that councils were important, that the pope was only a source of authority within the church. Although he was the supreme source of authority, he wasn't the only one. So he wasn't quite as enamored of papal supremacy as a concept. And in fact, he objected or suggested to Henry that in Henry's own book, he ought to tone down his views of papal supremacy. Once the unity of the church was challenged, that is what he couldn't accept. It wasn't that he couldn't accept reform within the church, or that things didn't need to improve or change, but to break it up was what he feared. As far as the succession of Anne as queen and the succession of her children, he said that he was willing to accept that. He accepted that that was within the competence of the English parliament to agree. It was just that the act is drawn, the act of succession, you couldn't swear to one without the other. So it was not a political thought about Queen Anne. What was the view of him immediately after his death? And were there any repercussions in international circles for Henry or within his own parliament in his own country? Yes and no. Internationally, people seemed wildly surprised that Henry would have had a man who was so universally in Europe thought of as a great scholar and a statesman executed. Charles V and Francis I both sort of expressed surprise that such a man had been executed. The letter immediately written after by the French ambassador was that, quote, such was the miserable end of more who was formerly in great reputation and much loved by the king, his master, and regarded by all as a good man even to his death. So there was general surprise, but nobody did anything about it. I mean, there was nothing that they could do or should do. It was up to Henry what to do in his own realm from that perspective. At home, I think probably everybody who had had second thoughts about signing the Oath of Supremacy queued up to sign it. It was probably one of the elements that in 1536 led to the Pilgrimage of Grace. I mean, not specifically as a retaliation for the death of more, but it was one of the events that made Henry's attack on the church and tradition more unpalatable. There was no direct repercussion. And later on in his life, did Henry ever regret his death? I have come across suggestions that he did, although possibly in that he wanted to blame somebody else for it. So there is a story that he and Anne quarreled, and he and Anne frequently quarreled, it would seem, and that he accused her of being responsible for the death of the best men in his kingdom. But that was typical Henry. He always wanted to blame somebody else for his own actions as soon as he thought better of them. I would guess from some bit of pop psychology, which as you know, I'm very fond of, Henry was not a man who ever liked to take responsibility for unpalatable actions. He was always very quick to distance himself from things that turned out not to be quite what he'd hoped. And he was, I don't know whether this is narcissism, everything was always somebody else's fault. Henry was always a victim of somebody else's lies or deceits or betrayal or whatever. He was a man who did seem very, very upset at what he thought of as personal betrayals. And if you look at the people he punished, they were very often those who he thought were his friends or that he loved, whom he felt had betrayed him. So Moore and herself, perhaps Catherine to a lesser degree, and then later the Marquess of Exeter, Edward Neville, quite a lot of the people who were executed after the Pilgrimage of Grace and the alleged Exeter conspiracy are people who've been very close to him. And he seemed to really struggle with his friends not agreeing with him. So I guess if he regretted it, it would be more along the lines of regretting that Moore hadn't seen how right Henry was all along, and that Moore had probably brought it on himself, I would have thought would be his view. Heather Where can we go for more information to learn more about him? I know, we can't really cover him all in completely in this podcast. So where can people go to learn more? Melita Well, one of the books I've really liked is A Daughter's Love by John Guy. It's a joint biography of Thomas and his daughter, Margaret. And one of the things we haven't really mentioned is his very warm and affectionate family life, particularly his daughter, Margaret, he was deeply attached to. Education for women was important to him, not in the sense of going to university or whatever, but he believed, unlike many people of his time, that women were as intellectually capable as men, and that they could and should be educated. That's a really nice book, A Daughter's Love, Thomas and Margaret Moore by John Guy. There's the Peter Ackroyd biography, which is solid, shall we say. There's an awful lot of other information in there. There's the early biography by William Roper, which of course is of the time, but not always 100% accurate on facts from what can be gleaned from other sources. There's the Richard Marius one from the 80s, which is very good, although it's very long on theology, this one. And there's the Jasper Ridley, a statesman and a fanatic, but I think he's a bit too hung up on his sadomasochism bit. Yeah, just one of the thoughts on that with the whole education piece is that in those days, it was very common for children to be beaten. I mean, that was pretty much standard fare. But Sir Thomas Moore, he would beat his children with peacock feathers. So he was obviously not into physical chastisement nearly as much as some of his contemporaries were. Yeah, so it's a bit difficult to get away from some of the sort of hagiography of the saint stuff. But those three are good. Heather Teysko Excellent. And of course, your website. Melita Thomas Indeed, indeed. But obviously, we're confined with words. I mean, there's so much more one could say about him, and we're going to manage to squeeze into the website. Heather Teysko Sure, sure. Okay, perfect. Well, thank you so much. And is there anything else that you wanted to say about him? Melita Thomas I'm going to make one little quote, I don't know whether you can fit this one in or not. It's sort of to do with his sense of humor. When he was on a mission to Flanders, and the other ambassadors were boasting about how much more sophisticated their languages were, and Moore challenged them to say a sentence in any of their languages, which he would repeat. So, you know, they did the French and Latin and Spanish or whatever. So he repeated it. And then he said, Oh, wait, you can't repeat an English sentence. And he said, you know, repeat after me. Thwaites thwacked him with a thwittle. A thwittle is an old fashioned whittling knife. Heather Teysko Thank you again to Melita Thomas for taking the time to talk to us about Thomas Moore. For more information on him, go to tutortimes.co.uk or see the resources available on the Englandcast site at englandcast.com. In about two more weeks, we'll be back with a guest episode from James of the Queens of England podcast. And he's going to be talking about Bessie Blount, Henry VIII's mistress who bore him his only acknowledged illegitimate son. So stay tuned for that. That was Henry Fitzroy. So she was Henry Fitzroy's mother. So stay tuned for that in a couple of weeks. Thanks so much for listening.