Wolf Hall is wrong: Thomas More was a funny, feminist Renaissance man 

The 1593 copy of Hans Holbein’s painting of Thomas More and his family attributed to Rowland Lockey. Photograph: Alamy

Why does Wolf Hall demonise one of the most brilliant and forward-looking of all Renaissance people? Its caricature of Thomas More as a charmless prig, a humourless alienating nasty piece of work, is incredibly unfair. You only have to consider one of Hans Holbein’s greatest works to see this.

Thomas More and his family were still settling into their new house near the river Thames when they all posed for Holbein. It was a new kind of portrait – an emotional revolution, even.

For this Tudor statesman did not just want Holbein to paint him, but to include all his nearest and dearest in what was clearly intended as a companionate image of family life, like nothing hitherto seen in Britain. Women and men all gather together sociably in a little community. On the compositional drawing that survives, More has annotated Holbein’s design. Next to Holbein’s depiction of his wife kneeling, More asks for a change – she should be sitting in a chair, not kneeling like a servant!

Tragically, Holbein’s painting is lost. The drawings and copy that survive, however, tell a story of a truly loving family and a politician with almost feminist ideas, by the standards of the time. A copy by a 16th-century artist in the National Portrait Gallery proves that More got his way with the kneeling. All the women depicted are seated, reflecting More’s written instruction to do away with that particular bit of gender hierarchy.

The drawings tell a story of a truly loving family and a politician with almost feminist ideas

Thomas More’s annotations on Hans Holbein’s sketch for his painting of the More family. Photograph: Martin B lher/Kunstmuseum Basel/PA

Holbein’s picture of More at home casts huge doubt on the fairness of the statesman’s portrayal in the novel and TV series Wolf Hall.

Why did Hilary Mantel choose to portray him in a way that flies in the face of all the evidence? The 16th century was another world, violent, extreme and cruel. More was no saint – although he is a Catholic saint. Both More and Thomas Cromwell – Hilary Mantel’s darling – had blood on their hands – and both got executed in their turn. “Around thrones it thunders,” as Thomas Wyatt, the English Renaissance poet warned.

Anton Lesser as More in the BBC’s Wolf Hall. Photograph: Ed Miller/BBC/Company Productions

The historian David Starkey is right to question the factual basis of Wolf Hall’s extremely negative caricature of More. But don’t take my word for it, let alone Starkey’s. Believe the great Renaissance humanist Erasmus, who idolised his friend More. The preface to Erasmus’s book Praise of Folly – a satire on human idiocy – is directly addressed to More. Its title in Greek is a joke on his name, explains Erasmus (“Moria” is Greek for folly). Erasmus is teasing his mate, calling him a fool. It’s a joke you can only make to someone with a sense of humour about himself. More liked a joke so much, in fact, that he had his own fool Henry Patenson included in Holbein’s family portrait.

The most compelling proof of Thomas More’s wit, warmth and original way of seeing things is his masterpiece, Utopia. Anyone who dreams of a better world should revere More, because in this 1516 book he created the very idea of utopianism – and named it. Yet his imaginary island somewhere in the Americas is not all it seems. Utopia is simultaneously a serious discussion of the ideal society (which, according to More, would be communist) and a text that mocks itself. More introduces jokes that undercut the book’s apparent message. The result is a complex intellectual balancing of ideas: we need ideals. We need to dream of a better society. We also need to beware of those dreams.

No one can read Utopia, or look at Holbein’s exquisite drawings of the More family, without wondering why Wolf Hall so distorts the image of one of Britain’s intellectual and political giants.

Perhaps it is poetic justice, though. More wrote a life of Richard III that inspired Shakespeare’s play about the Machiavellian king. Nowadays, his demonisation of Richard is widely seen as unjust. More has got the same treatment from Wolf Hall – but at least they didn’t give him a hunchback.

Portrait of Thomas More from a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527. Photograph: Getty Images

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