In August 1528, Sir Thomas More's eldest daughter, Margaret Roper, sent the
renowned humanist educator Erasmus of Rotterdam the gift of a preliminary
sketch by Holbein for the family group portrait by which she and her
siblings and half-siblings are largely remembered today. More sits
surrounded by his adult children and stepchildren. Margaret herself is
prominently placed in the foreground. She alone holds a book, and the text -
a section of the Chorus from a Latin play by Seneca - can be clearly read. A
version of this painting (although minus the Seneca) hangs prominently in
the Ondaatje wing of the National Portrait Gallery, as you emerge from the
escalator into the Tudor gallery.
Erasmus (a towering figure in the European Reformation, whose revised Latin
translation of the New Testament Luther claimed contributed to his break
with Rome) responded with genuine pleasure: “I'm scarcely able to express in
words, my dear Margaret Roper, ornament of Britain, the pleasure I felt in
my heart when the painter Holbein depicted for me your entire family like
this, so skilfully that even if I'd been present among you, I could hardly
have seen you all more clearly. How often I've found myself privately
wishing that, just once more before I die, I could have the pleasure of
seeing that little circle of friends that is so dear to me, and to whom I
owe a good part of my fame and reputation.”
In the Europe-wide circle of friends and collaborators around More (the
erudite scriptural commentator, polemicist and author of Utopia, and the
lord chancellor of England who went to his death rather than compromise his
faith by swearing allegiance to Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church
of England and to the legitimacy of his marriage to Anne Boleyn), Margaret
was acknowledged as an accomplished scholar. Since her death, she has tended
to be diminished or dismissed by historians, and the part she played in her
father's resistance to Henry VIII, leading up to his execution, underrated.
In his biography of Thomas and Margaret, John Guy brings Margaret conclusively
out of the shadows. On the basis of his meticulous scholarly examination of
the documentary record, she steps into the light as a heroine and a guide to
our understanding of the turbulent doctrinal and political times through
which she and her father lived, offering an arresting reassessment of More's
motivation in the months before his death.
From the start of the book, it is Margaret, the devoted daughter, who shapes
Guy's story, and gives bulk and weight to the emotionally elusive figure of
her father. She bursts on to the page, taking a wherry under cover of
darkness from Chelsea to London Bridge with her maid, against the rules of
decorum and at considerable personal risk, to bargain with the bridge-master
for the boiled and tarred head of her father, recently taken down from the
spike above the bridge on which it had been impaled for a month since his
execution on July 6, 1535. Active and assertive, with a sharp understanding
of More's innermost hopes and fears, Margaret takes charge of this
biography, as she does her father's relic.
Guy's brilliance as a biographer is that he allows her to do so. Instead of
maintaining that the crucial letters and treatises that bear witness to
More's attitudes and states of mind at the time of Henry's divorce from
Catherine of Aragon were contrived by More alone, or were ventriloquised by
Margaret's husband William Roper (who, Guy shows, was by no means in
sympathy or agreement with More's position on the Oath of Supremacy, unlike
his wife), he convincingly gives authority back to Margaret. By doing so, he
enables us to look at More from unfamiliar angles and to test our
interpretation of his actions against Margaret's highly intelligent
eyewitness account.
In a key chapter, entitled The Heart of the Matter, for instance, Guy argues
that the long “letter”from Margaret to her stepsister Alice, written in
August 1534, dramatising More's attitude during his imprisonment in the
Tower in the form of a dialogue between Margaret and her father, is a
collaborative piece. It was rigorously worked through by the two of them and
scripted by Margaret. This gives real force to the exchange. It captures two
like-minded, devout individuals, wrestling together with More's refusal to
compromise his beliefs. Finally, when Margaret has exhausted all efforts to
persuade her father that God will forgive him for taking the king's oath,
she capitulates to his ruthless logic, exclaiming, “In good faith, Father, I
can no farther go, but am... even at my wits' end.” Will he not reconsider
and change his mind before it is too late? “Too late, Daughter Margaret?”
retorts More, “I pray God that in this world I never have good of such
change.”
With the re-emergence of Margaret as an intellectual figure to be reckoned
with, her documented engagement with her father's ideas and position lose
their overtones of hagiography and become robust arguments. The resignation
and fatalism that marked Robert Bolt's portrayal of More in A Man for All
Seasons, his influential 1961 play, is replaced by the thrust and
counter-thrust of obstinate, yet principled engagement with his daughter's
attempts to dissuade him from martyrdom.
Guy's convincing page-turner of a double life has restored my faith in
biography as a genre. The fact is, if you are as capable a historian as Guy
is, with as thorough a command of all the archival and printed materials
associated with your subject and a scrupulous respect for the evidence, you
can still produce a wonderfully fresh account of even such a well-known
character as More.
That is, you can do so if you also have an outstanding talent for
stop-the-reader-dead-in-their-tracks gripping storytelling, and are as
silver-tongued on the page as is Guy. He has been justly celebrated for My
Heart is My Own, his biography of Mary Queen of Scots, which recovered
Elizabeth I's cousin and competitor from the vicissitudes of history. With A
Daughter's Love, he has gone one better and given back to us two great Tudor
figures in the round, and in such a way that we can at last understand and
appreciate Thomas and Margaret as the extraordinary people they both were.
A Daughter's Love by John Guy
Fourth Estate £25 pp320 Buy the book from
Books First £22.50 including free delivery
A woman's place
Why has it taken almost 500 years for the true importance of Margaret Roper to
be recognised? Highly educated, intelligent, loyal, enterprising and
courageous, Thomas More's favourite child discovered as a young girl that
women - especially learned ones - should shun the limelight. While still in
the schoolroom, her ambitions to publish a book were swiftly squashed by her
loving father. “Renown for learning, if you take away moral probity,” he
wrote to her tutor, “brings nothing else but notorious and noteworthy
infamy, especially in a woman.” For a woman “to lay herself out for renown”
is “the sign of someone who is not only arrogant, but ridiculous and
miserable”. A few years later, his tone had softened: while praising her
writing, he predicted that “the incredulity of men would rob you of the
praise you so richly deserved...as they would never believe, when they read
what you had written, that you had not often availed yourself of another's
help”. A backhanded compliment - and one which proved all too prophetic.
