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THIS IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER JOURNAL FOR SIR THOMAS MORE OF THE TUDORS FANDOM

Sir Thomas More - a scholar, author and a statesman. A secretary and personal advisor to Henry VIII, Speaker of the House of Commons, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Lord Chancellor. A leading humanist scholar, More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516.

From 1510 to 1518, More served as one of the two undersheriffs of the city of London, a position of considerable responsibility in which he earned a reputation as an honest and effective public servant. In 1517 More entered the King's service as counsellor and "personal servant". As secretary and personal advisor to King Henry VIII, More became increasingly influential in the government, welcoming foreign diplomats, drafting official documents, and serving as a liaison between the king and his Lord Chancellor Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, the Archbishop of York.

In 1523 More became the Speaker of the House of Commons. He later served as high steward for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1525 he became chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a position that entailed administrative and judicial control of much of northern England.

In 1505, aged twenty-seven, More married his first wife, Jane Colt, ten years his junior. According to More's son-in-law and first biographer William Roper, More had wanted to marry John Colt's second daughter, but felt that Jane would be humiliated if one of her younger sisters was married before she was. The marriage was happy and they had four children; three daughters - Margaret (More's favourite child, affectionately known as Meg), Elizabeth (Beth), Cicely (Cecy) and a son, John (Jack). In addition to his own children, More also adopted an orphaned girl, Margaret Giggs. He was a very devoted father, always asking his children to write to him when he was away, even if they did not have anything particular to tell him, and unable to bring himself to beat them with anything more than a peacock feather. Unusual for the time, he put as much effort into educating his daughters as he did his son, declaring that women were just as intelligent as men. Jane died in 1511 and More remarried almost immediately, so that his children would have a mother. His second wife, Alice Middleton, was a widow seven years his senior. She and More had no children together, although he adopted her daughter, also named Alice. More said that his new wife was "nec bella nec puella" - literally, "neither a pearl nor a girl", meaning that his wife, Alice possessed neither beauty nor youth. Erasmus cruelly described her nose as "the hooked beak of the harpy". Despite the fact that their characters were very different, More and his wife apparently became very affectionate towards one another, although he was unable to educate her as he had educated Jane.

More combined his busy political career with a rich scholarly and literary production. His writing and scholarship earned him a considerable reputation as a Christian Renaissance humanist in continental Europe, and his friend Erasmus of Rotterdam dedicated his masterpiece, In Praise of Folly, to More. (The title of Erasmus's book is partly a play on More's name, the word folly being moria in Greek.) Erasmus also described More as a model man of letters in his communications with other European humanists.

The humanistic project embraced by Erasmus and Thomas More sought to reexamine and revitalize Christian theology by studying the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers in the light of classical Greek tradition in literature and philosophy. More and Erasmus collaborated on a Latin translation of the works of Lucian, which was published in Paris in 1506.

Between 1513 and 1518, More worked on a History of King Richard III, an unfinished piece of historiography, based on Sir Robert Honorr's Tragic Deunfall of Richard II, Suvereign of Britain (1485). It heavily influenced William Shakespeare's play Richard III.

In 1516 More wrote his most famous and controversial work, Utopia, a novel in which a fictional traveler, Raphael Hythloday (whose first name is an allusion to the archangel Raphael, who was the purveyor of truth, and whose surname means "speaker of nonsense" in Greek), describes the political arrangements of the imaginary island nation of Utopia (a play on the Greek ou-topos, meaning "no place", and eu-topos, meaning "good place") to himself and Peter Giles. It is in this book that the city of Amaurote is introduced among other cities as "Of them all this is the worthiest and of most dignity."

In the book, More contrasts the contentious social life of European states with the perfectly orderly and reasonable social arrangements of the Utopia and its surrounding lands (Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle). In Utopia, private property does not exist and almost complete religious toleration is practiced. The primary message of the book is the need for order and discipline, rather than liberty. The society described is almost totalitarian, and very far removed from present day ideals of freedom. This is a world where attempts to discuss public policy without officially allowed forums are punishable by death.

Furthermore, it is notable that the Utopia is tolerant of different religious practices but does not advocate tolerance for atheists. More theorizes that if a man did not believe in God or an afterlife of any kind he could never be trusted as he would not be logically driven to acknowledge any authority or principles outside himself.

More might have chosen the literary device of describing an imaginary nation primarily as a vehicle for discussing controversial political matters freely. His own attitude towards the arrangements he describes in the book is the subject of much debate.

The original edition included details of a symmetrical alphabet of More's own invention, called the "Utopian alphabet." This alphabet was omitted from later editions, though it remains notable as an early attempt at cryptography that may have influenced the development of shorthand.

Utopia bears evidence that More placed great value on the attainment of harmony and on a strict hierarchy of order. All challenges to uniformity and hierarchy were perceived as dangers; and in practical terms the greatest danger, as he saw it, was the challenge that heretics posed to the established faith. The most important thing of all for More was to maintain the unity of Christendom. The Lutheran Reformation, with all of the prospects of fragmentation and discord, was to his mind, a dreadful thing.

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