Reconsidering key issues in More's life, this new study not only allows us to see with clarity the different portrayals that have arisen to explain or condemn or exculpate, it also breaks fresh ground in its use of new evidence to reconstitute More's beliefs on Henry VIII and the royal supremacy, on the power of Parliament, on the power of the papacy and of the General Council of the Roman Catholic Church. To the question 'For what did More so silently die?' we now have a better informed, if no less controversial, answer." "But who was the historical More? Which of the many characterisations that have attached to his name, some plainly incompatible, are upheld by the sources? In this new study we are, taken behind the facade, to understand better the substructure of evidence on which biographers must construct their works. We see not only the different portrayals that have arisen to explain or condemn or exculpate, but are also given a sense of what we can and cannot know about Thomas More, laying bare those points of transition between the sustainable and the conjectural.