про мужскую дружбу:
Soon after his arrival at Calais he received from Erasmus a diptych, which displayed painted images of Peter Gillis and of Erasmus himself on two wooden panels. More was delighted by the gift, so timely a reminder of his ‘humanist’ world in a place and period where he was embroiled in legal and commercial matters, and at once wrote both to Erasmus and Gillis in praise of a work which would act as a perpetual token of their presence in his life; he was ‘coniunctus amore’, united in love with them. In the painting Erasmus wears a ring on the forefinger of his right hand; it had been presented to him by More. Indeed throughout his life More was notably generous, and his contemporaries seem delighted to have offered him gifts in return, even if they were not always so magnificent as the diptych. In this period, for example, Cuthbert Tunstall sent him a fly suspended in precious amber shaped as a heart. It was an age in which friendship between men could take elaborate forms.
про политику и идеологию:
His constant proximity to the king meant that he became a figure of much authority and power, but there were more significant reasons for royal service. He truly believed the king to be divinely ordained, the proper source of the harmony and blessings of the ‘commonwelth’. Henry represented spiritual, almost magical, power. In that sense it became More’s duty to serve him. Perhaps the element of sacrifice in the choice, made it all the more pleasing to him; once more he could subdue his own inclinations, just as he subdued his flesh, in the service of a higher order. Yet he knew himself well enough to know that he might serve as a counsellor to his monarch and, a few years later, declared it necessary that every man of ‘good mynde’ should give ‘good aduyce towarde his prynce and his countrey’. It is fair to take this as a measure of More’s own feelings on becoming a councillor attendant: he would be in the very best position to advise and persuade the king to follow his own highest instincts and better judgements. He could only have been heartened when, on his entering the king’s service, Henry himself told him that he should serve God first and his master second.
То есть не преминул на эшафоте напомнить Генриху что "I die the king's good servant, and God's first"