A New Golden Age? More, Skelton and the accession verses of 1509

God’s City: ‘Civic Humanism’ and the Self-Construction of the Ecclesia in Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century England

“…While he did not foresee that Henry VIII could be a Rehoboam, his celebration of the new dawn (as I have argued elsewhere) is not as rose-tinted as an unsuspicious reading would suggest. 80 Some of More's writings from the following decade went further, and have him present himself as unenamoured with the practice of monarchy. One of his epigrams, printed in 1516, debates 'quis optimus reipublicae status', preferring the idea of being ruled by senatus rather than rexbut stops himself and asks whether he is in any position to decide who should rule.…”