Little Arthur's history of England

by Lady Maria Callcott

But what you will like best to hear is, how good he was to his little son and his daughters: he used to laugh with them and talk with them, and as he had a pretty garden round his house at Chelsea, he used to walk and play with them there.

Besides this, he was so kind to them, that he had the best masters in England to teach them different languages, and music; and they used to have very pleasant concerts, when his wife and daughters used to play on different instruments, and sing to him. He was very fond of painting, and had the famous painter, Hans Holbein, in his house a long time.

Sometimes he and his children read pleasant books together, and he was particularly careful to instruct his little girls, and they read and wrote Latin very well, besides being very good workwomen with their needles, and understanding how to take care of a house.

You may think what a happy family this was, and how much all the children and the parents loved one another. All the best men that were then alive used to come now and then and see Sir Thomas More and family. There was the famous Erasmus, whom I mentioned before; and Bishop Tonstall, who often contrived to save people from the cruel Henry, when he had ordered them to be burnt; and Dean Colet, who began that good school at St. Paul’s in London, for boys whose parents were too poor to have them properly taught. You may think how happy Sir Thomas More was at Chelsea, loving his wife and children, who were all good, and most of them clever, and seeing his good and wise friends every day.

But you know that God gives men duties to do for the country they live in, as well as for themselves; and as Sir Thomas More was a lawyer, he was obliged to attend to his business, and when he became a judge, it took up so much of his time that he could not be so much at his house at Chelsea as he wished. It was still worse when Henry the Eighth made him Lord Chancellor of England, and required most of his spare time to talk with him, instead of letting him go home.

For some time King Henry liked him very much, and everybody was in hopes that he might make the king a better man.

But Henry was too bad and too cruel to take advice. The first dislike he showed to Sir Thomas More was because that honest man did not wish him to send away his good wife, Catherine of Arragon, and marry another woman while she was alive. Afterwards he was angry with him because he would not leave off thinking that the Pope was head of the Christian Church, and say what Henry pleased, though he tried every means to persuade him to do so.

At last the king sent him to prison on that account, and kept him there a whole year, and sent all sorts of people to him, to try and get him to say the king was in the right, whatever he might say or do, and particularly that it was right for him to be called the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

But More would not tell a lie. He knew his duty to God required him to speak the truth; and as he thought the king wrong, he said so boldly. This so enraged the cruel tyrant, that he determined to put him to death; but he made believe to be sorry, and said he should have a fair trial, and sent for him out of prison, and made a number of noblemen and gentlemen ask him the same things over again that he had been asked in prison before. And as he still gave the same answers, the king ordered his head to be cut off.

In all the whole year he had been in prison he had only been allowed to see his wife once; and his eldest daughter Margaret, who was married to a Mr. Roper, once also. The cruel king now ordered that he should be kept in prison, without seeing any of his family again before his death; but Margaret Roper waited in the street, and knelt down near where he must pass, that he might give her his blessing. Then she determined to try to kiss her own dear father before he died; so, without minding the soldiers who were carrying him to prison, or the crowd which were standing round, she ran past them all and caught her father in her arms, and kissed him over and over again, and cried so bitterly that even the soldiers could not help crying too.