‘The king's good servant, but God's first.’ Few of Thomas More's words are more familiar than this valediction on the scaffold. It is therefore rather strange that the many historians who have concerned themselves with his life should have paid so little attention to the first part of this self-assessment, however justified they may have been, being moved by zeal, in writing glosses on the second. Even before he became lord chancellor, More had been a member of King Henry's government for some twelve years – a third of all his adult life. Yet in Chambers's biography, typical in this as in so much else, these years occupy seventy-nine out of four hundred pages, and even of these seventy-nine at least twenty-two are concerned with More's private life. Chambers was only following the pattern set by the early biographers, from Roper onwards, who all inserted their description of More's family and friends into those years. This imbalance, produced by the desire to get on to the dramatic last phase, has left us with some important and difficult questions – just why, for instance, did Henry choose More to succeed Wolsey? – and has obscured our view of some of Sir Thomas's most active years.

Between them, More and Erasmus have succeeded in creating a firm impression that More entered the king's service with the greatest reluctance and performed his distasteful duties in a constant spirit of nostalgic regret for the joys of uncommitted scholarship.