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Friday 5 December 2008

A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More

Dearly beloved Meg

Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims.

Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Nearly 30 years ago, John Guy wrote what is still the best biography of this fascinating and contradictory man. Now he has turned his hand to More’s first and favourite daughter, Margaret Roper.

More stood out in many ways in his day. One of them was that he believed in educating his daughters. He attended personally to their studies. He hired competent scholars to teach them. Margaret was brought up on the same diet of Greek and Latin literature, philosophy and theology as her two sisters and her brother John. How the experience struck her siblings we cannot know, for More’s letters tell us very little about them. But they are full of admiration for Margaret. She became a formidable scholar, the ‘ornament of Britain’ according to Erasmus. She corresponded with the great man, even venturing to correct his Latin. She served as a foil, confidante and intellectual companion to her father. In Holbein’s famous family group, several of the women were shown holding books. Margaret’s is a Latin play by Seneca. More wanted people to know.

Yet, proud as he was of his daughter’s learning, More was never very clear about what it was for. He certainly did not believe in the equality of the sexes. He seems to have thought that although public reputation was a legitimate aspiration in a man, moral improvement was the sole purpose of scholarship in a woman. When Margaret thought of publishing a book of her own, he threw up his hands in horror. ‘Though I prefer learning joined with virtue to all the treasures of kings,’ he wrote to the young lady’s tutor, ‘yet renown for learning, if you take away moral probity, brings nothing else but notorious and noteworthy infamy, especially in a woman.’ Margaret did in fact publish, at the age of 20, a translation of Erasmus’s meditations on the Lord’s Prayer. But she had enough respect for her father’s sensitivities to do it anonymously. It is difficult to avoid seeing in this ambivalence the possessiveness of clever fathers in every age for their talented daughters. Margaret had to resign herself to cultivating her talents in private.

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