Margaret Roper

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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. After 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 afterwards. At the end of that period, Margaret 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 Margaret'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.

She published a translation of a work by Erasmus, 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, Margaret and Roper were major characters. In the 1966 film, she was portrayed by Susannah York.

[edit] Ancestry

[edit] 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)