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HURCH ] and More took his role as Lord Chancellor, he used his new powers to further his campaign against heretics, including approving several executions.
    Despite the honour of his elevated position, More knew better than to trust the man who had deposed the ‘wise and honourable’ Wolsey. His remarks — that he couldn’t rely on Henry’s favour for ‘If my head could win him a castle in France … it should not fail to go’, and that ‘Politics be King’s games … and for the more part, played upon scaffolds’ — show a shrewd understanding of the corrupting nature of power and, in particular, Henry’s tendency to punish failure in those on whom he most relied.
    Yet More also had a conscience: one that proved to be his downfall. He felt unable to accept Henry’s repudiation of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, both resigning from his post as Lord Chancellor in May 1532 and refusing to attend Anne Boleyn’s coronation in June 1533. Like John Haughton and the monks of Charterhouse he then refused to consent to the King’s displacement of the Pope in the role of Supreme Head of the Church by swearing the Oath of Succession. As a result of this disloyalty, he was imprisoned in the Tower, and tried over a year later under an act passed in the interim that made it treason to deny the Ring’s supremacy. Silent in the face of his accusers, he was eventually convicted by the perjury of the villainously named Sir Richard Rich [also see T HE T OWER OF L ONDON ].
    On 6 July 1535, More was beheaded. His wit did not desert him at the last. He joked with an officer on the scaffold, ‘I pray you, master lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself’, and comforted the executioner, ‘Pluck upthy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short.’ Four hundred years later, Pope Pius XI canonised More as a Catholic saint and martyr.
    Lincoln’s Inn remembers its famous son. A copy of Hans Holbein’s portrait of More as Lord Chancellor, with his rich gown and chain of office, hangs in the Great Hall, but the greatest treasure is hidden in a nearby committee room. Here, a prized Holbein miniature of More ensures that in this place, where many great men and women have studied and worked, More’s profound determination to act according to his conscience will never be forgotten.

‘On 18 July, in the first year of our reign.’
Letter signed ‘Jane the Queen’, from July 1553
    G uildhall, which is situated at the centre of the City’s square mile on the site of an old Roman amphitheatre, is one of London’s great survivors. It was the only secular building to escape the Great Fire of London in 1666 and it survived the Blitz in 1940, though in both instances it lost its roof and windows. In the fifteenth century, it was the second largest edifice in London, after the Old St Paul’s Cathedral, and the formidable Great Hall and undercroft date from that period. It is now on its fifth roof, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott to recreate what the medieval roof may have looked like, but everything beneath window-height is to the design of the original master mason, John Croxton, who built the Great Hall between 1411 and 1430. It is Gothic perpendicular in style, and an impressive 151 feet long, 48 feet wide and 89 feet high. The five-foot-thick walls may partly explain its durability.
    In the Tudor century, it was the setting for important trials: notably the momentous trial of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop ofCanterbury [see B ROAD S TREET , O XFORD ]; Guildford Dudley and his wife, Lady Jane Grey.
    The traditional version of Jane’s story is littered with misapprehensions, not least of which is that she is known as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’. In fact, her reign extended for thirteen days, from the death of Edward VI on 6 July 1553 to the declaration of Mary as Queen on 19 July. She is also known to history as Lady Jane Grey, but after her marriage on 25 May 1553,