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Sir Thomas More was born in 1478, in the city of London.  After his earlier education at St. Anthony’s School, he was placed, as a boy, in the household of Cardinal John Morton. Cardinal Morton had been in earlier days that Bishop of Ely whom Richard III sent to the Tower and was a chief adviser of Henry VII, who in 1486 made him Archbishop of Canterbury, and nine months afterwards Lord Chancellor. In his late teens, Thomas More was sent to Canterbury College, Oxford, where he learned Greek from the first men who brought Greek studies from Italy to England—William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. At the age of twenty-one he entered Parliament, and soon after he was made Under-Sheriff of London.  In 1503 he opposed Henry VII’s proposal for a subsidy on account of the marriage portion of his daughter Margaret. During the last years of Henry VII, More had drawn the ire of the king, and had begun to have thoughts of leaving the country. Henry VII died in 1509, when More was around the age of thirty.  In the first years of the reign of Henry VIII, he rose to large practice in the law courts, where it is said he refused to plead in cases which he thought unjust, and took no fees from widows, orphans, or the poor. In 1513 Thomas More, still Under-Sheriff of London, is said to have written his “History of the Life and Death of King Edward V, and of the Usurpation of Richard III”  The book, which seems to contain the knowledge and opinions of More’s mentor, Morton. In the year 1515 Wolsey, Archbishop of York, was made Cardinal by Leo X, Henry VIII made him Lord Chancellor, and from that year until 1523 the King and the Cardinal ruled England with absolute authority, calling no parliament.  In May of the year 1515, Thomas More was joined in a commission to the Low Countries with Cuthbert Tunstal and others to confer with the ambassadors of Charles V, then Archduke of Austria, upon a renewal of alliance.  On that embassy More was absent from England for six months, and while at Antwerp he established friendship with Peter Giles who was secretary to the municipality of Antwerp. While away from home, More was inspired by long and thought provoking conversations with friends and acquaintances. The product of these thoughts was possibly his best known work, <span style="text-decoration: underline">Utopia</span>. More’s <span style="text-decoration: underline">Utopia</span> was written in Latin, and is in two parts. The second, which describes the place Nusquama, as he called it sometimes in his letters—“Nowhere”, was probably written towards the end of 1515. The first part was most likely written in early in 1516.  The book was first printed at Louvain, in late 1516, under the editorship of Erasmus, Peter Giles, and other of More’s friends.