In an act of characteristic prescience and with lawyerly clarity, More composed his own epitaph, which he had cut in stone and which survives to this day in Chelsea Old Church. It was the month following his resignation as lord chancellor of England, some eight months before King Henry VIII sought his arrest and two years before his execution. He sent a copy with a letter of explanation (in Latin, like the epitaph) to his great Dutch friend Erasmus for publication and dissemination on the Continent, describing the epitaph as ‘a public declaration of the actual facts’, which anyone could refute if they were able (SL 178–83, at 179). In the epitaph More presents himself as a Londoner, alludes briefly to his literary interests and underscores his several years spent as a pleader in the law courts. He then lists his various public offices, duties and particular achievements in an admirably compressed form which conveys much about the period 1518–32, which primarily concerns this chapter: