Sir Thomas More's Connection with the Roper Family

Pearl Hogrefe

doi:10.2307/457892

Sir Thomas More's Connection with the Roper Family

PMLA ◽

10.2307/457892 ◽

1932 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 523-533

Author(s):

Pearl Hogrefe

Keyword(s):

Thomas More ◽

Sir Thomas More ◽

Lord Chancellor ◽

Business Relations

William Roper, son-in-law of Sir Thomas More, is one of those people who seem overshadowed by associates. He is usually mentioned as the son-in-law of the Lord Chancellor, or as the husband of More's brilliant daughter, Margaret. The origin of his connection with the More family is dismissed in the DNB by the statement: “His legal duties apparently brought him to the notice of Sir Thomas More, and about 1525 he married More's accomplished daughter, Margaret.” But in fact the Ropers were people of some financial and professional importance in their own right; and according to documents of the period, the Ropers and the Mores had legal and other business relations for many years before the intermarriage between the two families.

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Catholicism, Kinship and the Public Memory of Sir Thomas More

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History ◽

10.1017/s0022046901001488 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 53 (3) ◽

pp. 476-509 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

MICHAEL QUESTIER

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Thomas More ◽

Family Networks ◽

The Public ◽

Religious Issues ◽

Modern Period ◽

Sir Thomas More ◽

Group A ◽

Lord Chancellor

Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post-Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism's political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.

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Sir Thomas More, Utopia, and the Representation of Henry VIII, 1529-1533

Renaissance and Reformation ◽

10.33137/rr.v32i4.11591 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 32 (4) ◽

pp. 59-72

Author(s):

J. Christopher Warner

Keyword(s):

Henry Viii ◽

Thomas More ◽

Open Debate ◽

Sir Thomas More ◽

The Subject ◽

Lord Chancellor

This essay examines Sir Thomas More's Utopia in the context of Henry VIII's divorce crisis. During this period tracts from the royal press publicized an image of Henry VIII as a disinterested philosopher-king who welcomed open debate and advice at his court. Reading Morus and Hythlodaeus's dialogue on the subject of court counsel in light of this campaign helps us to perceive the manner in which More's appointment as lord chancellor served the purposes of the king's propaganda.

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William Warham and English heresy policy after the fall of Wolsey

Historical Research ◽

10.1111/j.1468-2281.2004.00213.x ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 77 (197) ◽

pp. 337-357 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Craig D'Alton

Keyword(s):

Driving Force ◽

Direct Action ◽

Thomas More ◽

Sir Thomas More ◽

Lord Chancellor

Abstract This article examines actions against heresy and heretics in England in the wake of the 1529 fall of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. It charts the brief re-emergence of William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, as the main driving force, arguing that the lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More, did not assert control over heresy policy until late 1531. Warham's policy combined anti-heresy activity with attempts at clerical reform. Moreover, he sought to publicize and publicly refute the errors of the heretics, eschewing show trials and burnings. This policy ultimately failed, and was replaced with more direct action which saw several key heretics handed over for burning.

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Thomas More: on the Margins of Modernity

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/385432 ◽

1961 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 20-37 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

J. H. Hexter

Keyword(s):

Red Light ◽

Thomas More ◽

Medieval Church ◽

Sir Thomas More ◽

Free Thought ◽

Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽

Lord Chancellor

Once upon a time men who read and wrote about Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, were convinced that he was a modern man, by which in some measure they seem to have meant their kind of man. This conviction became fully standardized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those, however, who saw him as a modern man — Lord Acton, Bishop Creighton, Principal Lindsay, Sir Sidney Lee — could not help but view More with impatience. For in their eyes he reneged on his modernity. He did not in the end stand firm for free thought, or for toleration, or for emancipation from the bondage of medieval bigotry and superstition. And although Karl Kautsky was sure that at the horizon Sir Thomas had seen the red light of the Marxist dawn, More did not even throw himself into the struggle for socialism. Instead he approved of the execution of men who were burnt at the stake because they rejected the spiritual control of the medieval church; and in the end he died a martyr for the unity which through the centuries that orthodox and persecuting Church had imposed on Europe.

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The Controversial Sir Thomas More

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History ◽

10.1017/s0022046900043992 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 36 (4) ◽

pp. 535-569 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Brendan Bradshaw

Keyword(s):

Thomas More ◽

Leading Role ◽

The Reformation ◽

Sir Thomas More ◽

Lord Chancellor ◽

The Church ◽

Public Career

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the so-called renaissance in Morean studies in recent years has been to provide the historiography with a new focus, namely the phase of More's career that begins in the aftermath of Utopia (1516) and concludes with his imprisonment in 1534. Hitherto, interest in that period was confined largely to the domestic scene celebrated in Holbein's famous portrait and drawings, the household at Chelsea as a centre of humanist culture, Christian piety and cosy family virtue. Yet this was the period of More's public career in which he served as a councillor to Henry vm and in a number of major administrative posts before his elevation to succeed Cardinal Wolsey as lord chancellor in 1529. It was also the period in which he assumed a leading role in the campaign against the Reformation in England, partly as a prosecutor of heresy on behalf of the Crown, but more spectacularly as a polemicist, specifically commissioned by the Church to defend orthodox doctrine against the challenge of the reformers – a task on which he expended some million words in the period between his tract against Luther in 1523 and the changed circumstances which induced a more devotional literary mode in the much acclaimed Tower Works.

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