ABSTRACT
Reginald Pole’s Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, abbreviated as De unitate (written 1535-6), William Roper’s The Life of Sir Thomas More, Knight (written 1556), and Nicholas Harpsfield’s The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, Knight (written 1556) take as their subject the events and people associated with the early Henrician Reformation.1 A similarity of subject matter is not the only connection between these three Catholic writers. During the Marian regime, both Roper and Harpsfield were part of Pole’s circle, involved in the programme to re-establish Catholicism and eradicate heresy.2 All three had links to Thomas More: Roper was his son-in-law, Pole had been a friend since sometime before 1518 and Harpsfield, who knew Roper from his time in Oxford (1529-50), widened his acquaintance with More’s circle during his exile in Louvain in the early 1550s.3 No one should be surprised, therefore, by the very strong intertextual relationship of the two More biographies. The Harpsfield manuscript was written at the request of Roper, whose own short Life of More served as the principal source for the longer Harpsfield text. In fact, significant passages from Roper are incorporated verbatim into the later work.
