Word: marius
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...private life as in public life, Marius suspects, More was a bit of an actor. Having succeeded at the main chance, he worked equally hard at humility. He played the family man to the hilt. His daughter Margaret was the love of his life. But he constantly harangued his first wife Jane, who bore him four children in seven years. His second wife Alice, whom he married within a month after Jane died at 23, was a testy widow he may have selected precisely because she did not attract him. Sex, Marius suggests, was the "ruling drama of his life...
More's writing expressed the agonized self-contradiction of an up-to-date careerist pursued by ancient demons. Marius rates him as "the greatest English storyteller between Chaucer and Shakespeare." The wit and irony that would soon mark the best Elizabethan playwrights already distinguished More. Like his friend Erasmus, More revered classical Greece. His masterpiece, Utopia (1516), a fantasy of the ideal commonwealth, imagined human beings so perfectly ruled by logic that they were happy to own no property and to labor modestly and endlessly for the common good...
...More was not always a man of reason. As he wrote on, he devoted himself, in Marius' phrase, to building "a wall of pages" to defend his faith in works like A Dialogue Concerning Heresies. He loathed the emerging Luther so profoundly that his theological arguments collapsed into scatological abuse. When his treatises failed to halt the Reformation, More took to burning the treatises of his enemies, and when book burning failed, he turned to body burning, exulting in the fires at the stake that carried Protestant heretics to hell "where the wretches burn forever...
...More was never really interested in upholding the power of the Pope as opposed to the power of the King. As Marius dramatizes it, the confrontation that...
Thomas' martyrdom was an irony More himself might have appreciated. Henry VIII, in Marius' view a frightened, defensive monarch, already tired of the mistress he was determined to marry, faced in his Lord Chancellor a holy man manque, with whip and hair shut, whose secret passion had always been to become a monk...