Margaret Roper on her father, St. Thomas More, in the Tower

CHELSEA, Middlesex, August 1534 AD — Margaret Roper, eldest daughter of Saint Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor of England, has leave to visit her father in the Tower of London, which she asked for herself a little more than a month after he was committed. This month her stepsister Alice Alington — Dame Alice More’s daughter by an earlier marriage — wrote to tell her that one of the greatest and most learned men in the realm, a friend of her father’s, called his conscience “a right simple scruple”, and that unless he changed his mind he would lose every friend able to help him. The letter does not name the lord; he is Sir Thomas Audley, who took the chancellorship her father laid down. She carried it in to him, and the answer she is writing now is mostly not her words but his.

What put him there is an oath. The Act of Succession, given the royal assent on 30 March 1534 AD, vests the crown in the children of King Henry VIII and Queen Anne, and men called before the commissioners must swear to it. The commissioners added a clause rejecting any foreign potentate, which the Act itself did not require, and told the clergy to renounce the Pope outright. St. Thomas More told them he would swear to the succession, but not the oath they offered him, which he said would put his soul in danger of perpetual damnation. What in it stops him he has not said, and in this letter he tells his daughter he will not: “But for what causes I refuse the oath… I will never shew you, neither you nor nobody else, except the King’s Highness should like to command me.” He refused at Lambeth on 13 April 1534 AD and was taken to the Tower four days later.

She writes at Chelsea, in the house her father built above the Thames, the letter half done in front of her.

John a Wood, the one servant allowed in with him, can neither write nor read, and is sworn to report to the lieutenant anything his master says against the King. What happens once the door shuts?

She asked about his health first — the old pain in his chest, the gravel and the stone, the cramp in his legs at night — and found it no worse and no better, “sometime very sore and sometime little grief”, she writes, and him out of pain that day. They say the seven psalms and the litany together before he will talk of anything worldly. Then the news from home: her mother bearing up, her brother John More doing well, the neighbours praying for him daily.

Your mother needed a licence of her own to see him. What did she say to him?

Dame Alice More asked him how a man everyone took for wise could lie in “this close filthy prison” among mice and rats when a good house and garden waited for him at home. He asked her one question back: “Is not this house as nigh heaven as mine own?” Dame Alice More answered, “Tylle valle, Tylle valle!.. Bone Deus, bone Deus, man, will this gear never be left?”

Then your sister’s letter came. Did you hand it straight to him?

Not at once. She put the argument to him herself first, and he answered before he had seen a word of it: “Daughter Margaret,… have you twice told me before, and I have twice answered you too.” Only then did she give it to him. He read it to the end, then read it again.

Parliament made this law and almost every man in the realm has sworn — you did, and so did Henry Patenson, your father’s fool, who is angry with him for holding out. Only your father and Saint John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, still refuse. On what ground does he stand, and does he blame the men who swore?

He keeps the law of the land, he told her, but “there is no man bounden to swear that every law is well made”. There is one authority he holds cannot err: “his whole catholic church lawfully gathered together in a general council”. He judges nobody else for swearing: “I meddle not (you wot well) with the conscience of any man that hath sworn, nor I take not upon me to be their judge.” At the end of her own arguments she put Henry Patenson’s to him, in the fool’s own words: “Why? What aileth him that he will not swear?.. I have sworn the oath myself.” Her father laughed. “That word was like Eve too, for she offered Adam no worse fruit than she had eaten herself.”

All this is other men’s law and counsel. At the end he came to his own soul and to God. What did he say?

Her father answered: “Mine own conscience in this matter (I damn none other man’s) is such as may well stand with mine own salvation, thereof am I, Meg, so sure, as that is, God is in heaven.” He trusts God will strengthen him to lose goods, lands and life rather than swear against it.

She sat very sad, she writes — “my heart was full heavy for the peril of his person, for in faith I fear not his soul.” He smiled at her: “How now daughter Marget? What how mother Eve?” The last words of that day are his: “we may meet together once in heaven, where we shall make merry for ever and never have trouble after.”