In a well-known letter to a friend about the choice of a wife Sir Thomas says:
May she be learned, if possible, or at least capable of being made so! A woman thus accomplished will be always drawing sentences and maxims of virtue out of the best authors of antiquity. She will infuse knowledge into your children with their milk and train them up in wisdom.
Such wives did he prepare his own daughters to be; Margaret Roper, Elizabeth Dancy, and Cecilia Heron. Erasmus described their home at Chelsea as a “little academe combined with a university of Christian religion.” The favourite was the eldest, Margaret (1508-44), who was most like her father. He procured some of the best linguists of the age to teach her the learned languages, as Dr. Clement and Mr. William Gonell, and other great masters to instruct her in the liberal arts and sciences, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, music, mathematics, astronomy, and arithmetic. Her letters and orations delighted the most learned of her contemporaries, as the great Cardinal Pole, John Voysey, Bishop of Exeter, and Erasmus, who called her “the ornament of Britain.” The tutor of the Duke of Richmond wrote to Sir Thomas More to express his regret that he had not been present when his daughter “disputed of philosophy before the King.” The love and tenderness of her father were equal to his wisdom, and the story of their lives is ideally beautiful. When she married Mr. William Roper, of Eltham, Kent, he kept up communion in correspondence. In one letter he says:
Farewell, dearest daughter, and commend me kindly to your husband, my loving sonne, who maketh me rejoice that he studieth the same things as you do, and whereas I am wont to counsel you to give place to your husband, now on the other side I give you licence to maister him in the knowledge of the spheres. Commend me to all your schoolfellows and to your maister especially.
She wrote and translated many works, especially Eusebius’s “Ecclesiastical History” out of Greek into Latin, which her daughter, Mary Roper, another learned student, translated afterwards out of Latin into English.
Leland the antiquary writes of Sir Thomas More’s daughters, verses translated thus:
The purest Latin authors were their joy
They loved in Rome’s politest style to write
And with the choicest eloquence indite.
Nor were they conversant alone in these