There is little need to justify a public discourse on Thomas Cromwell; there is a certain amount of need to justify yet another one on Thomas More. Most of us have by now recovered from the searing experiences of his 500-year anniversary – which had to run for two years because an error occurred in the entry of the man's birthdate, thereby proving right from the beginning of his life that he was ambiguous and mysterious and incomprehensible. To talk about these two men jointly, however, needs perhaps a word of justification. Why should one? What is it really that puts them side by side into a context? I think it is not unfair nowadays, after the work that has been done in the last fifty years or so, to regard them in a way as the two poles of the earlier Reformation era; two men whose experience, personalities and contributions mark out the range of possibilities and of the actions, as well as the sufferings, that the age included. And it is in those terms that I would like to discuss them today: first, as representers, if you like, of the two really different possible lines, and second, but more particularly, as individuals, to see whether they are in any way representative of anything except themselves.

The first problem that one faces in this discourse, therefore, is the question of how well we know either Thomas More or Thomas Cromwell. Both pose certain problems in very different ways in this respect. More appears to be the best documented individual of the sixteenth century, excepting just possibly Queen Elizabeth.