Martyr's child: ‘John Guy: A DAUGHTER'S LOVE: THOMAS AND MARGARET MORE’ Review, TLS, 27 February 2009, p. 10.
Thomas More was beheaded on July 6, 1535. His story is well known. The role of his daughter Margaret Roper in that story, less so. John Guy, whose last subject was Mary Queen of Scots, has found a new tragic heroine in Margaret. She seems to be his ideal woman, so much so that his treatment of her husband William Roper seems written from the perspective of a jealous lover. Professor Guy reprimands Roper for failing to provide financial aid to his father in law after he resigned the Chancellorship, and generally deplores his prioritizing of property over principle: “If only William her husband could have given her the love and support she needed, she might have recovered a sense of inner peace[after More’s death], but his grasping, restless mind was fixed on worldly advantage. “
Guy makes a convincing case for Margaret as the great woman behind the great man. Margaret was her father’s main correspondent and confidante, and visited him regularly in the Tower while her mother, Lady Alice, only made the journey once. Her contemporaries extolled Margaret’s virtues as an example of the benefits of education for women. More had her schooled in Latin and Greek alongside her brothers and sisters, in his “school” at Chelsea. At 16, her writings so impressed the Bishop of Exeter that “his countenance showed that his words [of praise] were all too poor to express what he felt”, and whilst still a teenager she was able to correct Erasmus’s edition of the letters of St. Cyprian.
Margaret often remains in the shadows of the narrative however, as do many early modern women: the evidence simply does not exist to tell the full story of their lives. In many cases: “we can only imagine”. Nonetheless, educated imaginings are vital for recovering these untold stories, and it is testament to the maturation of feminist history that a mainstream author such as Guy recognises this. He perhaps goes too far when he suggests that Margaret might have been able to avert the Reformation: “The Church authorities were unable to see that the one person in England... who could match Tyndale as a translator and stylist, and could be relied upon to conform to Catholic teaching and doctrine, was Margaret Roper. But of course, she was a woman, so it never entered their heads”.
Guy’s book is based on a thorough examination of the sources. The depth of telling detail he is able to deploy is astounding. It is difficult for biographers of St. Thomas not to stray into hagiographical territory. But Guy does not shield us from the more unsavoury aspects of Thomas’ character, such as his scatological prose (he once accused Martin Dorp, a rival intellectual, of being in love with himself and his opinions, “just as every man thinks his own fart smells sweet”); and his glee in persecuting heretics (he called Thomas Hitton “the devil’s stinking martyr” as he condemned him to the stake). These details, however, are used to illustrate further the passion with which More acted on his principles.
Guy’s book is rich with tragic irony, as when More addresses the new King and Queen on their way to their coronation in 1509. He acclaimed Katharine of Aragon as the future “mother of kings...fecund in male offspring will she render your dynasty stable and enduring for all time.” The consequences of the failure to realize these platitudinous hopes set in train the decisions that led directly to Thomas’s own death. Meteorological history even provides Guy with pathetic fallacy: “even as Thomas had been speaking, the sky turned pitch black and it poured on Henry’s parade”. Guy’s powerful, dramatic telling of the climactic scene, where Margaret forces her way through the soldiers on Tower Wharf to embrace her father one last time before his death, is genuinely moving.
There is, fortunately, some comic relief. Guy notes that More described himself as a “of nature even half a giglot and more”. A giglot, is one “excessively prone to jesting and merriment, someone whose sense of humour could lead him into wantonness”. More once played a prank in his role as judge of the Court of Chancery: he sent a suitor who had tried to sell his neighbour’s wife a wardrobe of old clothes, pretending they were new, to go seek his remedy from More’s wife, Lady Alice, at Chelsea. The litigant received short shrift.
Ultimately, the tragedy of More brings into sharp relief the ever-relevant question of whether private principles can survive the inevitable compromises of public life, and whether the able citizen should quietly pursue his own ends, or attempt to ameliorate society by putting himself at the service of the state. Unlike most tragic heroes, the prescient More had long been aware of his fate. He had already explored this conflict, albeit indecisively, in Utopia. He attempted to safeguard his children’s inheritance (in vain), by placing all his property into trust on the day before the Act of Succession became law. He even staged a dress-rehearsal arrest at Chelsea, to help his family prepare mentally for the worst.
More’s end shows the dangers of public life for the man willing to stand against the tide. His friend Erasmus knew he did not have the strength for martyrdom himself, as he wrote to Richard Pace in 1521: “Mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth... I fear that were strife to break out, I shall behave like Peter. When popes and emperors make the right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly I tolerate them, which is safe”.
Guy’s tragic love story ends with father and daughter being reunited on Fifth Avenue, New York, where images of both of them are kept in nearby museums. This image is somewhat marred by a visit to the Frick Collection, where you will find the painted More gazing for eternity not into the eyes of his beloved daughter, but into those piggy ones belonging to Thomas Cromwell, his nemesis, whose portrait Holbein also painted.
Guy makes a convincing case for Margaret as the great woman behind the great man. Margaret was her father’s main correspondent and confidante, and visited him regularly in the Tower while her mother, Lady Alice, only made the journey once. Her contemporaries extolled Margaret’s virtues as an example of the benefits of education for women. More had her schooled in Latin and Greek alongside her brothers and sisters, in his “school” at Chelsea. At 16, her writings so impressed the Bishop of Exeter that “his countenance showed that his words [of praise] were all too poor to express what he felt”, and whilst still a teenager she was able to correct Erasmus’s edition of the letters of St. Cyprian.
Margaret often remains in the shadows of the narrative however, as do many early modern women: the evidence simply does not exist to tell the full story of their lives. In many cases: “we can only imagine”. Nonetheless, educated imaginings are vital for recovering these untold stories, and it is testament to the maturation of feminist history that a mainstream author such as Guy recognises this. He perhaps goes too far when he suggests that Margaret might have been able to avert the Reformation: “The Church authorities were unable to see that the one person in England... who could match Tyndale as a translator and stylist, and could be relied upon to conform to Catholic teaching and doctrine, was Margaret Roper. But of course, she was a woman, so it never entered their heads”.
Guy’s book is based on a thorough examination of the sources. The depth of telling detail he is able to deploy is astounding. It is difficult for biographers of St. Thomas not to stray into hagiographical territory. But Guy does not shield us from the more unsavoury aspects of Thomas’ character, such as his scatological prose (he once accused Martin Dorp, a rival intellectual, of being in love with himself and his opinions, “just as every man thinks his own fart smells sweet”); and his glee in persecuting heretics (he called Thomas Hitton “the devil’s stinking martyr” as he condemned him to the stake). These details, however, are used to illustrate further the passion with which More acted on his principles.
Guy’s book is rich with tragic irony, as when More addresses the new King and Queen on their way to their coronation in 1509. He acclaimed Katharine of Aragon as the future “mother of kings...fecund in male offspring will she render your dynasty stable and enduring for all time.” The consequences of the failure to realize these platitudinous hopes set in train the decisions that led directly to Thomas’s own death. Meteorological history even provides Guy with pathetic fallacy: “even as Thomas had been speaking, the sky turned pitch black and it poured on Henry’s parade”. Guy’s powerful, dramatic telling of the climactic scene, where Margaret forces her way through the soldiers on Tower Wharf to embrace her father one last time before his death, is genuinely moving.
There is, fortunately, some comic relief. Guy notes that More described himself as a “of nature even half a giglot and more”. A giglot, is one “excessively prone to jesting and merriment, someone whose sense of humour could lead him into wantonness”. More once played a prank in his role as judge of the Court of Chancery: he sent a suitor who had tried to sell his neighbour’s wife a wardrobe of old clothes, pretending they were new, to go seek his remedy from More’s wife, Lady Alice, at Chelsea. The litigant received short shrift.
Ultimately, the tragedy of More brings into sharp relief the ever-relevant question of whether private principles can survive the inevitable compromises of public life, and whether the able citizen should quietly pursue his own ends, or attempt to ameliorate society by putting himself at the service of the state. Unlike most tragic heroes, the prescient More had long been aware of his fate. He had already explored this conflict, albeit indecisively, in Utopia. He attempted to safeguard his children’s inheritance (in vain), by placing all his property into trust on the day before the Act of Succession became law. He even staged a dress-rehearsal arrest at Chelsea, to help his family prepare mentally for the worst.
More’s end shows the dangers of public life for the man willing to stand against the tide. His friend Erasmus knew he did not have the strength for martyrdom himself, as he wrote to Richard Pace in 1521: “Mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth... I fear that were strife to break out, I shall behave like Peter. When popes and emperors make the right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly I tolerate them, which is safe”.
Guy’s tragic love story ends with father and daughter being reunited on Fifth Avenue, New York, where images of both of them are kept in nearby museums. This image is somewhat marred by a visit to the Frick Collection, where you will find the painted More gazing for eternity not into the eyes of his beloved daughter, but into those piggy ones belonging to Thomas Cromwell, his nemesis, whose portrait Holbein also painted.
