Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today, in our series Politics on Trial, I'm going to be talking about the trial of Thomas Moore, Sir Thomas More, Saint Thomas More, someone else who was ultimately canonised by the Catholic Church.

It's a trial that's probably best known for its representations on stage and on screen.

But the event itself, so far as we know, was a real drama in its own right. Maybe not

the result, the outcome, which was known, but the face-off in a courtroom between accusers

and accused. And it was also very revealing about how power worked in the time of Henry

the 8th and beyond.

There are two celebrated stage and screen versions of the trial of Thomas Moore.

One is in A Man for All Seasons.

Robert Bolt's play, it was originally a radio play, it was then put on on the West End stage in 1960. It became a very well-known film in 1966, starring Paul Schofield as Thomas Moore.

And the other is in Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel's great trilogy of novels, which also became a

play, a West End play, and is probably now best known for the BBC

dramatisation. In the Hilary Mantel version, Wolf Hall, the trial itself doesn't feature so much as

the interrogations leading up to it, because the leading character in Wolf Hall is Thomas Cromwell,

who was very present

in the interrogations of Thomas Moore, but not at the trial itself. In A Man for All Seasons,

The Trial, based, I think, quite closely on the transcript, features at the end of the play as

its climax, its set piece. But nonetheless, these two versions of the

downfall of Thomas Moore are like mirror images of each other. They're kind of through the

looking glass in that in a man for all seasons, Moore is the hero. And he comes across, he's written

by Robert Bolt as sensitive, wry, quite humorous, ironic, a man of conscience, a man of real

conscience, caught in a terrible position, caught between the demands of his master, his king,

...