Heroic Catholic Women...

Margaret More Roper:

St. Thomas More’s "Dearest Meg"

There are not many father/daughter bonds as powerful as that between Thomas and Margaret More. They were a pair of brilliant minds who understood and appreciated one another profoundly.

As one of the most learned women of the sixteenth century (by age eighteen her work earned praise from Erasmus), Margaret became her father’s favorite confidante. She remained devoted to him after her marriage, even went to great lengths to be near him during his imprisonment in the Tower of London.

Margaret collaborated with him on his most famous letters from prison, smuggled them out at great personal risk, even rescued his head after his execution. She also played a critical role in safeguarding the great saint’s legacy. Sir Thomas More’s life is well known: his opposition to Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, his arrest for treason, his execution and martyrdom.

Yet Margaret has been largely airbrushed out of the story in which she played an important role.

Margaret, or Meg, as her father affectionately called her, was born between August and October of 1505, the eldest child of Thomas and his first wife, Joanna Colt. Margaret was only six when her mother died and her father married a widow so that his children would still have a maternal influence in their lives and a woman to run the household. The widow was a loyal and true woman, and the grieving family grew to love her deeply.

In the early days before he went to work for King Henry VIII, More homeschooled his own children. He believed strongly in education for everyone, including women, and Margaret excelled. Her education consisted of languages, history, philosophy and rhetoric. She was fascinated by geography and astronomy and was a genius in Latin. More relied on her to keep him updated about family news when he was abroad on business for the King.

Eventually he became too busy in the King’s service to continue his children’s education himself, and hired William Gonnell as full-time tutor. Gonnell was a skilled teacher from Landbeach, near Cambridge, and a close friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam (a famous Dutch humanist and great friend of her father’s), who himself considered More’s daughters to have "outstanding talents". Gonnell arrived in the More household when Margaret was twelve years old.

A year after Gonnell became the family’s tutor, he wrote a letter to More which suggested that Margaret had progressed so rapidly that she might eventually publish a book. Although her father advocated education for his daughters, certain boundaries had to be maintained.

More replied sternly that Margaret’s "lofty and exalted character of mind [should not be] debased [by pandering to] what is vain and low." He prized moral virtue above literary fame, even though he had absolute admiration for his daughter’s devastating intelligence: "Since erudition in women is [viewed as] a reproach to the sloth of men," he continued, "Women should maintain appropriate modesty." If a woman strove to become a published author in her lifetime, it was subjected to the harshest scrutiny and could adversely affect the general advancement of women’s education. Because this was the prevailing attitude at the time, More was required to take care in highlighting his daughter’s achievements. When a friend expressed disbelief in her authorship after reading an example of Margaret’s work, More explained to his daughter the constant difficulty she would encounter:

Something I once said to you in a joke came back to my mind, and I realized how true it was. It was to the effect that you were to be pitied, because the incredulity of men would rob you of the praise you so richly deserved for your laborious vigils, as they would never believe, when they read what you had written, that you had not often availed yourself of another’s help: whereas of all the writers you least deserved to be thus suspected.

Despite his reluctance to make a spectacle of her achievements, Margaret had no greater champion of her education than her father, and by her twenties her mind had grown so self-sufficient and preoccupied with scholarly pursuits that she had little interest in marriage. However, by 1521, the senior members of the More and Roper families had decided that Margaret should wed the eldest Roper son.

Margaret was twenty-four when she married William Roper, more to please her father than herself. But the marriage was a happy one, fortified by love and respect, for Will was a good husband, studied hard, and helped Thomas More in much of his work. Their first child was born in 1523, and they went on to have four more children. In 1524, Thomas More moved his family from Bucklersbury to a new manor house in Chelsea. Margaret and Will moved with him. Margaret always lived in her father’s home or very nearby until his martyrdom in 1535.

Also in 1524, Margaret finished one of her greatest projects as a scholar and an intellectual. She translated the soliloquy on the Lord’s Prayer called Precatio dominica, by Erasmus. Her aim was to write vivid and readable English prose. The work isn’t a word-for-word translation, but an attempt to represent Erasmus’s "sense and meaning". Her book was published, despite earlier hesitations, in October 1524. Margaret became the first woman (not counting those of royal blood) to publish a work of translation in the English language.

In 1529, Henry VIII asked Thomas More to take the place of the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor of England.

He reluctantly accepted and Margaret supported her father in his decision. More was subsequently drawn into "The King’s Great Matter" of divorcing Katharine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn.

Thomas More knew that regarding this matter he had to be extremely careful.

In 1531, after attempting to use the influence of their mutual friendship to persuade Henry not divorce Katharine or break with the Catholic Church, More decided he needed to resign. Henry was demanding that everyone swear an oath to give succession to his children by Anne Boleyn and acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. Thomas More relented on the decree of succession, but simply could not accept the heretical ridiculousness of lecherous Henry VIII as Head of the Catholic Church.

In 1534, after years of cleverly evading the oath, Thomas More had tried the King’s patience for too long, and was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. It was a huge blow to the More family, but Margaret rose to the occasion, becoming his main channel of communication with the outside world. Her scholarship had always been extraordinary, but here she demonstrated remarkable street-smarts as well. She tricked Thomas Cromwell, the King’s new secretary, into thinking she would persuade her father to swear the oath and to this purpose was given unrestricted access to him. His cell door was unlocked except at night, Margaret could come and go as she pleased and More was allowed to walk in the precincts of the Tower and have books, paper and pens. This way Margaret was able to smuggle her father’s letters out of the Tower unmolested.

In November of 1534, Parliament was convened to pass a final break with the Catholic Church. Now More was put in solitary confinement and Margaret’s privilege of visiting her father was lost.

Though More and Margaret could no longer meet easily, she found a way to resume a clandestine correspondence. As death loomed for More, Margaret could sense his anxiety. She did her best to lift his spirits and reassure him. She wrote her father a prayer, which comforted him greatly, and was granted one last visit with him on May 4.

On July 1, 1535, Thomas More was tried for his refusal to take the oath. He argued valiantly and brilliantly, but to no avail.

He was sentenced to death for treason and escorted back to the Tower. As the somber procession reached Tower Wharf and turned right towards a small drawbridge, Thomas spotted Margaret. She slammed through the soldiers and threw herself into his arms, kissing him frantically.

Heartbreak silenced her voice, but her father held her for that brief moment and told her to have courage and patience, it was God’s will. The soldiers shoved her aside and More took a step toward the drawbridge, but Margaret lunged back through the guards and kissed him one last time. He released her and walked on, not looking back. Margaret, utterly broken, never saw him again.

More was executed on Tower Hill by decapitation on July 6, 1535. His head, by order of the king, was hoisted on a pike and displayed on Tower Bridge for a month, until it had to be taken down to make room for other heads. Thomas More’s head would have been thrown into the Thames had not Margaret Roper, who had been watching carefully and waiting for the opportunity, bribed the executioner and obtained possession of the sacred relic. After Margaret retrieved her father’s head, she was summoned before the King’s Council and charged with crimes against the state for keeping her father’s head as a relic, as well as retaining possession of his books and writings. Margaret was detained by Thomas Cromwell overnight, but released the next day, since no one could summon up sufficient corruption to punish a daughter for loving her father.

Margaret’s hope was to publish all her father’s works, but she ran into many obstacles. She died of unknown causes unexpectedly in 1544, at age thirty-nine, and left the task unfinished. She was buried in the Roper family tomb, with her father’s skull beside her. Margaret’s daughter, Mary, managed to have the collected works of Sir Thomas More printed in April of 1557, in order to honor the wishes of her mother. Margaret’s husband wrote a biography of his father-inlaw, which serves as the principle source of information we have on More’s life.

Thomas More was canonized on May 19, 1935. Catholics can hope and pray that his Dearest Meg, his pride and joy, his equal in wit and integrity, is with him forever in heaven. ■

Sources: mainlesson.com/display.php?author=synge& book=englishwom en& story=roper thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2012/07/19/margaret-roperdaughter- of-sir-thomas-more/

Margaret says goodbye to her father on the way to his execution