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Margaret More Roper

Margaret More Roper as played by Gemma Reeves (Season 2),
& Kerry O'Sullivan (Season 1)
Humanist, translator, writer

born 1505 - died 25th December 1544
Character's backstory:She was a known translator and poet at her time. She was fluent in Greek and Latin, even studied medicine. She is one of the first translators of Erasmus of Rotterdam, she wrote her first well known translation of some of his works when she was just 19, and is believed to have written, together with her husband William Roper the first biography of Sir Thomas More ('The Life of Sir Thomas More'). During More's imprisonment she was a frequent visitor to his cell, along with her husband. After More was beheaded in 1535 his head was displayed on a pike. Margaret, shocked by this act of desacration of the dead, purchased his head. She had her father's head buried with her.

Gentility: daughter of Sir Thomas More

Position:

Personality type: Serious and highly intellectual, just as her father. Very loyal to her family and her beliefs.

Signature look:

Endearing trait(s):

Annoying trait(s):

Also seen in: In Alfred Lord Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women, he invokes Margaret Roper ("who clasped in her last trance/ Her murdered father's head") as a paragon of loyalty and familial love.

In Robert Bolt's famous play A Man for All Seasons, Margaret and Roper were major characters. In the 1966 film, she was portrayed by Susannah York.

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Kerry O'Sullivan - Season 1

Gemma Reeves

The More's coat of arms.

CHARACTER CONNECTIONS

Father: Sir Thomas More

Mother: Jane Colt (More's first wife)

Siblings: Elizabeth, Cecily, and John, Alice Middleton the younger (stepsister), Margaret (Mercy) Giggs (adopted sister)

Husband: William Roper
Alongside their brother, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Cecily More, foster sister Margaret Giggs, and stepsister Alice Middleton learned Latin, Greek, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. The two Margarets (Meg and Mercy) even had an inclination for studying medicine, and their father encouraged them to continue their studies in this and theology even after they were married.
This thorough and ongoing education produced impressive results. Though her work is no longer extant, Margaret Roper is known to have written Greek and Latin poetry, worked in the style of the late Roman author Quintillian, and matched her father’s treatise on “The Four Last Things” with her own discussion of death in a friendly competition More declared something of a tie. As she grew up, she joined the circle of Erasmus’s correspondents, who had nothing but praise for “More’s whole school. ” Her most prominent existing work is tangentially tied to the publication of Vives’s De Institutione. The English edition, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke calledthe Instruction of a Christen Woman, was translated by one of the More family tutors,Richard Hyrde, possibly at the initial instigation of the queen herself. This was the same Hyrde who provided a defense of female education as the introduction to Margaret’s translation of Erasmus’s Latin commentary on the Lord’s Prayer.Vives also mentions the More girls’ first-rate education and its chastity-reinforcing results early in De Institutione. (For further reading see)

*See also SIR THOMAS MORE'S Historical profile here* for more on the More family

UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER QUOTES

DEFINING EPISODES | MEMORABLE SCENES

PHOTOS

	Margaret Roper (neé More) on a painting by Hans Holbein. This painting, that showed Thomas More's whole family, was lost in a fire.

	Miniature of Margaret by Hans Holbein (c. 1535-36)

Woodcut from the first-known

edition of Erasmus' Precatio Dominica

translated by Margaret Roper (1525).

(British Library).

Romantic painting depicting Margaret attaining her father's head from Tower Bridge

for further details see: http://www.crcstudio.arts.ualberta.ca/wwr_magazine/online/spring_05/sp05_art1_roper.php

TRIAL OF SIR THOMAS MORE: Letter to Margaret Roper
(July 5, 1535)
This letter , written in coal at the Tower of London on the day before his execution, was the last writing of Thomas More.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our Lord bless you good daughter and your good husband and your little boy and all yours and all my children and all my godchildren and all our friends. Recommend me when you may to my good daughter Cecily whom I beseech our Lord to comfort, and I send her my blessing and to all her children and pray her to pray for me. I send her an handkercher and God comfort my good son her husband. My good daughter Daunce hath the picture in parchment that you delivered me from r my Lady Conyers, her name is on the back side. Shew her that I heartily pray her that you may send it in my name to her again for a token from me to pray for me.

I like special well Dorothy Colly, I pray you be good unto her. I would wit whether this be she that you wrote me of. If not, I pray you be good to the other as you may in her affliction, and to my good daughter Joan Aleyn to give her I pray you some kind answer, for she sued hither to me this day to pray you be good to her.

I cumber you, good Margaret, much, but I would be sorry, if it should be any longer than tomorrow, for it is Saint Thomas' Even and the Vtas of Saint Peter and therefore tomorrow long I to go to God, it were a day very meet and convenient for me. I never liked your manner toward me better than when you kissed me last for I love when daughterly love and dear charity hath not leisure to look to worldly courtesy.

Fare well my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven. I thank you for your great cost.

I send now unto my good daughter Clement her algorism stone and I send her and my good son and all hers God's blessing and mine.

I pray you at time convenient recommend me to my good son John More. I liked well his natural fashion. Our Lord bless him and his good wife my loving daughter, to whom I pray him be good, as he hath great cause, and that if the land of mine come to his hand, he break not my will concerning his sister Daunce.

And our Lord bless Thomas and Austin and all that they shall have.

(From The Last Letters of Thomas More, edited by Alvaro De Silva (Eerdmans Publishing, 2000), pp 127-128.)

Latest page update: made by MsSquirrly , Aug 29 2008, 9:04 AM EDT (about this update - complete history)

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	MistressPollyChoral	Was Margaret's husband William a member of...	0	Jul 19 2008, 12:59 AM EDT by MistressPollyChoral
		Thread started: Jul 19 2008, 12:59 AM EDT Watch ...the same staunchly Catholic Roper family who were important patrons of Thomas Tallis and, I believe, William Byrd? Do you find this valuable? Keyword tags: anne boleyn charles brandon gabrielle anwar henry viii jeremy northam jonathan rhys meyers margaret tudor natalie dormer sam neill showtime the tudors the tudors tudors characters Post reply

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