‘Were there then two John Mores of the rank of gentlemen, both apparently lawyers, living at the same time, in the same parish, and both having three children bearing the same names; or was John More, who married Agnes Graunger, the future Chief Justice and father of the future Chancellor? To these questions, in the absence of Cresacre More’s statement, the accumulation of coincidences would have made it easy to give a very positive answer. Is his authority to be weighed against them?
‘Stapylton’s assertion that Sir Thomas More had no brothers presents no difficulty, as they may have died in infancy. The entries which I have quoted would explain why he was called Thomas, after his maternal grandfather.
‘If any heraldic readers of “Notes and Queries” could find what are the arms quartered with those of More upon the Chancellor’s tomb at Chelsea, they would probably throw some light upon the question. Mr. Hunter describes them as “three bezants on a chevron between three unicorns’ heads.”
‘William Aldis Wright.
‘Trinity College, Cambridge.’
No. 2 (Oct. 31, 1868).
‘There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that Mr. Wright’s discovery has set at rest the perplexing question of the true date of Sir Thomas More’s birth. In the note in the Appendix to my “Oxford Reformers” I was obliged to leave the question undecided, whilst inclined to believe that the weight of evidence preponderated in favour of the received date—1480. What appeared almost incontrovertible evidence in favour of 1480 was the evidence of the pictures of Sir Thomas More’s family by Holbein. The most certainly authentic of these is the original pen-and-ink sketch in the Basle Museum. Upon Mechel’s engraving of this (dated 1787), Sir Thomas’s age is marked “50,” and at the bottom of the picture is the inscription, “Johannes Holbein ad Vivum delin.: Londini: 1530.” This seemed to be almost conclusive evidence that he was born in 1480. If Sir Thomas was born in Feb. 1478, according to the newly discovered entries, and was fifty when the picture was sketched by Holbein, the sketch obviously cannot have been made in 1530, but two or three years earlier.
‘Now if it may be supposed that the sketch was made during the summer or autumn of 1527, I think it will be found that all other chronological difficulties will vanish before the newly discovered date.
‘1. More himself would be in his fiftieth year in 1527.
‘2. Ann Cresacre, marked on the sketch as “15,” would have only recently completed her fifteenth year, as, according to her tombstone, she was in her sixty-sixth year in Dec. 1577; and according to the inscription on the Burford picture she was born in 3 Henry VIII.