The biggest movement working for change within the Catholic Church was Renaissance humanism. And one of its centres was at King Henry VIII’s court, where Thomas More — philosopher and Chancellor of England — was a leading figure. He may not have been the unblemished paragon of virtue portrayed in A Man for all Seasons, but he was undoubtedly a forward-looking Renaissance man. He taught his wife literature and music, and gave his daughters full Classical educations, a rarity in an age that did not value women’s learning. In his humanism, he is best known as a long-term and close correspondent of the greatest living sixteenth-century humanist, the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus, and their intellectual friendship is credited as one of the jewels of the age. Had King Henry VIII not executed More in his hurry to divorce, who knows what the ancient English Church might have become?