Who was Thomas Moore? Night, Saint, Chancellor and Marta. His life seems paradoxical. His

son, Lord William Roper, who wrote the first biography of Moore, described him as a man

of singular virtue and of a clear unspotted conscience, more pure and white than the

whitest snow. And this is certainly one version that has come down to us. But he was also the

scholar who wrote utopia, among other works, and the Lord Chancellor for Henry VIII, who persecuted

Protestant heretics. So who was he really? To peel off the onion layers of myth around this

complex and controversial figure, I've invited Professor Tom Betridge onto the podcast.

Tom is dean of the College of Business Arts and Social Sciences at Brunel University London

and has written an implausibly large number of books and articles about the early tutor court.

Together we organised a big conference on Henry VIII, Hampton Court, back in 2009 and edited

a book called Henry VIII and the Court, and Tom has edited many others including Henry VIII in

history. His own books include literature and politics in the English Reformation, and writing

faith and telling tales, literature, politics and religion in the work of Thomas Moore.

And his is one of the most astute and brilliant minds working on the world of Henry VIII today,

as you'll soon hear.

Tom is always a pleasure to talk to you. I'm very much looking forward to this chat,

and we are talking about another Thomas Moore. It strikes me that the popular image we have of

Thomas Moore is really contradictory. We have an idea of the saintly martyr who won't compromise

his conscience, Robert Bolt's manful seasons, and of course that's actually drawing on mid-century

biography, someone like W.R. Chambers isn't there, who's picking up on the contemporary biography

by Moore's sign law, and then you have in Wolf Hall in Hilary Mantel's trilogy The Bigoted

Zellat, who is martyring others, and then many students will just know him as the author of Utopia,

...