A Daughter's Love: Thomas and Margaret More by John Guy

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.