Building Opposition at the Early Tudor Tower of London: Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort

Medieval and early modern English monarchs constructed the Tower of London's iconography to symbolize royal power, creating a self-promoting royal ideology of the Tower. However, the Tower's cultural significance turned sharply when Thomas More wrote A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534) as a Tower prisoner, laying the foundation for an early modern tradition of literary and cultural representations of the Tower as oppositional to the Crown. In the Dialogue, through four progressive transgressions against Henry VIII, More defies the royal ideology of the Tower and refashions the Tower itself as a symbol of resistance to royal tyranny.