Margaret Roper

Portrait of Margaret Roper, from a 1593 reproduction of a now-lost Hans Holbein portrait of all of the women of Thomas More's family.

Margaret Roper (née More) (1505–1544) was an English writer and translator. She was the daughter of Thomas More and wife of William Roper. During More's imprisonment in the Tower of London, she was a frequent visitor to his cell, along with her husband.

Roper married William Roper in 1521 in Eltham, Kent. They had five children together: Thomas (1533-98), Margaret (1526-88), Mary (d. 1572), Elizabeth (1523-60) and Anthony (1544-1597).

After Thomas More was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to bless the Reformation of Henry VIII of England and swear to Henry as head of the English Church, his head, after being parboiled, was displayed on a pike at London Bridge for a month. At the end of that period, Roper bribed the man whose business it was to throw the head into the river, to give it to her instead. She preserved it by pickling it in spices until her own death at the age of 39 in 1544. After her death, her husband William Roper took charge of the head, and it is buried with him.

William Roper ("son Roper," as he is referred to by Thomas More) produced the first biography of the statesman/martyr, but his homage to his father-in-law is not remembered as well as his wife's efforts at comforting and honoring More. In Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women, he invokes Margaret Roper ("who clasped in her last trance/ Her murdered father's head") as a paragon of loyalty and familial love.

Roper was the first non-royal woman to publish a book she had translated into English. This was a translation of a Latin work Precatio Dominica by Erasmus, as A Devout Treatise upon the Paternoster. In a letter her father mentions her poems, but none is extant.

In Robert Bolt's famous play A Man for All Seasons, both Ropers were major characters. In the 1966 film, she was portrayed by Susannah York.

Ancestry

William More

Sir John More

Johanna Joye

Saint Thomas More

Thomas Granger (or Grainger)

Agnes Granger (or Grainger)

Margaret More

John Colt

Jane Colt

Elizabeth Elrington

External links

• "Margaret Roper and Erasmus: the Relationship of Translator and Source," WWR Magazine, Spring 2005.
• Works by or about Margaret Roper in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• "Letter to Margaret Roper written by Thomas More the day before his execution"