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"To Assyst The Ordynaryes": Why Thomas More Agreed To Become Chancellor, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Revisionists' explanations for Thomas More's willingness to serve as Chancellor have him scheming to support the Aragonese faction at Court-or conspiring with Hapsburg agents to revive papal influence in England in the wake of Campeggio's departure and Wolsey's "fall." In late 1529, More was obviously concerned with lay disaffection, troubled by the prospect that sectarian dissidents might capitalize on it to reform the church recklessly, and confident that the realm's bishops, assisted by the government, could outmaneuver the critics of Roman and English Catholicism, whose arguments for an alternative ecclesiology and soteriology he had opposed earlier that year. "To Assyst" …