In my visits to Canterbury, as I stroll down its delightful old street to St. Dunstan’s, I pause always in front of the ancient carved stone gateway—all that is left of the Roper mansion—fancying I see that devoted daughter hurrying home, secretly and by night, carrying her beloved burden in a silver casket: carrying it all the way in her own hands, fearful of entrusting it to those of any other. Most lovable as well as most learned among women—“her humility equal to her learning,” “no woman, that could speak so well, did speak so little,” says old Fuller in his “Worthies”—Margaret Roper holds her high place among the Fair Women of England, and her story is very near the first in the Legend of Good Women.
“Morn broadened on the borders of the dark,
Ere I saw her, who clasped in the last trance
Her murder’d father’s head.”
And, amid all the thronging shadows which people Chelsea’s shore, there walks no more vivid personality than his, as it moves before us through all his characteristic career; from the day he was taken from his school in Threadneedle Street, and made page-boy to Cardinal Morten, who said of him, seeing already his promise of wit and of worth: “This child here, waiting at table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man;” then to Oxford on his scanty allowance; thence to New Inn and to Lincoln’s Inn, studying law by his father’s desire, albeit longing himself for the pulpit; then law-reader of Furnivall’s Inn, whence he was called to the bar at the age of twenty-one, and so going to live “religiously yet without vow” in the Charter-House; lecturing in St. Lawrence, Old Jewry, on Augustine’s “City of God,” listened to by “all the chief learned of London”; patiently practising his profession, taking “no fee of Widow, Orphane, or poor person”; becoming famous, near and far, for his capacity, learning, integrity; and thus elected to the House of Commons when only twenty-three, and soon made Speaker; rapidly rising to the highest place in the realm, that of Lord High Chancellor; and then, as he passed daily to his seat on the woolsack, stopping always before his aged father, who sat, as judge of the court of the King’s Bench, in William Rufus’s Hall at Westminster, and “reverently kneeling down in the sight of all, ask his blessing.”
In the gallery of Old Masters at Brussels, I found lately, after long searching, a diminutive dark canvas set in a black frame, with a small gilt column on each side; its tiny tablet bears the inscription: “Holbein le jeune, 1497–1543. Thomas Morus.” This most attractive painting shows a table on which lies a small dog, peering at his master who sits behind; in More’s right hand, one finger between the leaves, he holds a book; his left hand grips his dark gown at the neck; a flat cap is on his head; a short curling beard, steadfast honest eyes, a plain, resolute, shrewd, strong face:—this is the man “in his habit as he lived” in the later years of his good life.
This portrait—as well as the more famous group of More and his family, now in Nostell Priory—was painted by Hans Holbein, [48] while he was living with More. He had grown tired of his dissipated life in Basle and of his wife, and had come to England with a letter of introduction to More, from Erasmus, whose portrait Holbein had just finished in Basle; and More was so pleased with the man that he gave him a home with himself. Here were passed three of the happiest years of the great painter’s life, during which he did much good work. Some of this was shown to the king on one of his visits, More having hung several of the portraits in a fine light for that purpose; and they so charmed the delicate-minded monarch that he asked, “if such an artist were still alive, and to be had for money?” So it came to pass that Holbein, on losing his good friend, entered the king’s service, and there remained until his own death.
After More’s execution, and the confiscation of his property—which is a tautological way of speaking of any of Henry’s murders—the house passed through many hands, noble and base, clean and dirty; and while everything is of interest concerning walls which, in Cicero’s words, “could give such good reason for their fame,” it would be but dry detail to follow their forlorn fortunes fully. Of the noblemen and courtiers who dwelt here, few are worthy our notice: but I may mention that as early as 1586 Lord and Lady Dacre had bought the house and estate; and here her brother, Thomas Sackville, often visited her, and from here many of his letters are dated. Here he may have written his “Gorbudic,” the first English Tragedy. It was Sackville who was sent to tell Queen Mary of Scots that her sentence was signed, and he it was who saw it executed. Lady Dacre, surviving her husband, willed the place to the great Lord Burleigh; and so it came to his son, Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards Earl of Salisbury. He rebuilt the house and improved the place in 1619, so that even then it was “the greatest house in Chelsey.” So great that, later, James I. found it just the place he wanted for his favourite “dear Steenie,” first Duke of Buckingham; giving its owner, then Craufield, Earl of Middlesex, snug lodgings in the Tower, in exchange. Charles I., as deeply infatuated with the Duke as his royal father had been, gave the estate out and out to him, in 1627; and his it remained until the Commonwealth seized on it.
His son, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham—a man worthy of, and worse even than his sire—regained the property by his shifty marriage with the daughter of Fairfax, and it was confirmed to him on the Restoration; but in 1664 it was sold, along with all the other estates of this poor and profligate scoundrel—the last and the lowest of the Villiers. He was the Zimri of Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”:
. . . “everything by starts and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was Chymist, Fidler, Statesman, and Buffoon.* * * *
Beggar’d by fools, when still he found too late
He had his jest and they had his estate.”
And Pope tells us, in his stinging verse, how “this lord of useless thousands ends” his ignoble life, deserted and despised:
“In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,
The floor of plaister and the walls of dung,
On once a flock bed, but repair’d with straw,
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw;
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red;
Great Villiers lies!”