What a picture lies here, even in these roughly translated lines, of the gentle relation which during years of early sorrow had grown up between the widowed father and the motherless children!
It is a companion-picture to that which Erasmus drew in colours so glowing, of More’s home at Chelsea many years after this, when his children were older and he himself Lord Chancellor. What a gleam of light too does it throw into the future, upon that last farewell embrace between Sir Thomas More and Margaret Roper upon the Tower-wharf, when even stern soldiers wept to behold their ‘fatherly and daughterly affection!’
More’s character.
This was the man whom Henry VIII. had at last succeeded in drawing into his court; who reluctantly, this summer of 1519,[780] in order that he might fulfil his duties to the King, had laid aside his post of under-sheriff in the city and his private practice at the bar; ‘who now,’ to quote the words of Roper, ‘was often sent for by the King into his traverse, where sometimes in matters of astronomy, geometry, divinity, and such other faculties, and sometimes of his worldly affairs, he would sit and confer with him. And otherwhiles in the night would he have him up into the leads there to consider with him the diversities, courses, motions, and operations of the stars and planets.
‘And because he was of a pleasant disposition, it pleased the King and Queen after the Council had supped for their pleasure commonly to call for him to be merry with them. Till he,’ continues Roper, ‘perceiving them so much in his talk to delight that he could not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and his children (whose company he most desired), and to be absent from court two days together but that he should be thither sent for again; much misliking this restraint of his liberty, began thereupon somewhat to dissemble his nature, and so by little and little from his former mirth to disuse himself.’[781]
This was the man who, after ‘trying as hard to keep out of court as most men try to get into it,’ had accepted office on the noble understanding that he was ‘first to look unto God, and after God to the King,’ and who under the most difficult circumstances, and in times most perilous, whatever may have been his faults and errors, still
Reverenced his conscience as his King,
and died at last upon the scaffold, a martyr to integrity!
IX. THE DEATH OF COLET (1519).