‘3. Margaret Roper, marked on the sketch “22,” would be born in 1505 or 1506, and this would allow of More’s marriage having taken place in 20 Henry VII. 1505, as stated on the Burford picture.
‘4. Sir Thomas would be forty-one in July, 1519, and this accords with Erasmus’s statement in his letter to Hutten of that date (Epist. ccccxlvii.)—“ipse novi hominem, non majorem annis viginti tribus, nam nunc non multum excessit quadragesimum.” He would be only one year past forty. Erasmus first became acquainted with More probably in the course of 1498, when (being born in February) he was in his twentieth year. The “viginti tribus” must in any case be an error.
‘5. John More, jun., marked “19” in the sketch, would be “more or less than thirteen” as reported by Erasmus in 1521. (Epist. dcv.)
‘6. More’s epigram, which speaks of “quinque lustra” (i.e. twenty-five years), having passed since he was “quater quatuor” (sixteen), and thus makes him forty-one when he wrote it, would (if he was born in 1478) give 1519 as the date of the epigram; and this corresponds with the fact, that the Basle edition of 1518 (Mori Epigrammata, Froben) did not contain it, while it was inserted in the second edition of 1520.
‘7. There is a passage in More’s “History of Richard III.,” in which the writer speaks of having himself overheard a conversation which took place in 1483.
‘Mr. Gairdner, in his “Letters, &c. of Richard III. and Henry VII.” (vol. ii. preface, p. xxi), rightly points out that, if born in 1480, More, being then only three years old, could not have remembered overhearing a conversation. But if born in Feb. 1478, he would be in his sixth year, and could easily do so.
‘On the whole, therefore, the newly discovered date dispels all the apparent difficulties with which the received date is beset, if only it may be assumed that the true date of the Basle sketch was 1527, and not (as inscribed upon Mechel’s engraving and upon the English pictures of the family of Sir Thomas More) 1530.
‘Since I published my “Oxford Reformers” I have obtained a photograph of the Basle sketch itself, which dispels this difficulty also, as it bears upon it no date at all.
‘The date, 1530, on the pictures appears to rest upon no good authority. Holbein, in fact, had left England the year before. I therefore have little doubt that the remarkable document discovered by Mr. Wright is perfectly genuine.
‘Should the arms quartered with those of More upon the Chancellor’s tomb at Chelsea prove to be the arms of “Graunger,” the evidence would indeed be complete.