Margaret Roper and Her Father Thomas More's Head

She kept her father's head for nine years. She wanted to be buried with it in her arms. Henry VIII had impaled it on a spike.

Margaret Roper was Thomas More's eldest daughter, educated beside her brothers in Greek, Latin, logic, and philosophy, until she became one of the most learned women in sixteenth century England. Erasmus dedicated a commentary to her. She became the first non-royal woman to publish a translated book in English. Her father called her his dearest Meg, and he wrote to her the way he wrote to men he considered his intellectual equals.

More was arrested in 1534 and taken to the Tower. Margaret visited him there, smuggling letters in and pleading with him to take the oath that would save his life. He would not take it. She understood exactly what his refusal would cost him. On the first of July, as he was led back to the Tower after his trial at Westminster Hall, she broke through the ring of armed guards at Tower Wharf and threw her arms around him. He comforted her and she let go. Then she pushed through the guards a second time and embraced him again. William Roper recorded it.

After the first of July Thomas More was held under final confinement and Margaret could no longer reach him. On the fifth of July, the day before his execution, with his books and writing materials already confiscated by order of the King, he wrote to her using a piece of coal on cloth. Her maid Dorothy Colley smuggled it out to her. He sent his hair shirt with it, the one he had worn under his clothes for years, secret from everyone but her, so that no one else would see it once he was gone.

In that letter he told her he never liked her manner toward him better than when she kissed him last, for he loved when daughterly love and dear charity had no leisure to look to worldly courtesy. He asked her to pray for him. He signed it and sent it, and it was the last thing he ever wrote.

Thomas More was executed at Tower Hill on 6 July 1535. On the scaffold he moved his beard clear of the block, saying it had committed no treason. He told the executioner he had a short neck and asked him to strike well. Margaret was in the crowd. She watched the axe fall. She was the last of his family to see him alive. His head was boiled, as was standard practice, and set on a spike on London Bridge, in the place where John Fisher's head had rested two weeks earlier before it was thrown into the Thames to make room for his.

She had watched the bridge for days, waiting. Contemporary accounts preserve what she said as her boat passed beneath it. "That head has often lain in my lap. I would that it would now fall into it." Whether it fell to her from above or was brought down by a confederate on the bridge we cannot be certain, but she came away with it before it could be thrown into the river where Fisher's had gone.

Margaret was summoned before the King's Council and accused of stealing her father's head. Her defence survives in her own words. She told them she had saved it from being "devoured by the fishes" so that she could bury it . A decision was made and she was released. The head was preserved in a leaden box packed with spices, and she kept it beside her for the rest of her life.

The next nine years were spent working to save what the crown had tried to erase along with him. She hired John Harris, her father's former secretary, to gather and reconstruct his writings from what remained. She worked to show there was no treason in anything he had ever put on paper, against a verdict the crown had already made permanent.

Margaret Roper died on 25 December 1544, aged thirty-nine, before any of it reached print. Her daughter Mary translated his final writings and his nephew William Rastell carried the project the rest of the way. Her father's complete works were finally published in 1557, thirteen years after she was no longer alive to see it.

She had kept her father's head in a leaden box packed with spices for nine years, contemporary accounts say she had wished to be buried with it in her arms. Centuries later in 1824 the Roper vault at St Dunstan's was opened by accident and the lead box was dropped and broken, and the skull inside was seen for the first time since her death.

Thomas More's skull is believed to be sat there still, in the darkness, with his daughter alongside it.