Sir Thomas More, when twenty-one, married the eldest daughter of one "Maister Coult, a gentleman of Essex," a country girl, very ill-educated, but fair and well-formed. Erasmus says of the marriage--"He wedded a young girl of respectable family, but who had hitherto lived in the country with her parents and sisters; and was so uneducated, that he could mould her to his own tastes and manners. He caused her to be instructed in letters; and she became a very skillful musician, which peculiarly pleased him." The union was a happy one, but short, the wife dying, and leaving behind her a son and three daughters; shortly after which, however, More married again, this time a widow named Alice Middleton, seven years older than himself, and not by any means handsome. Indeed, More indulged himself in a jest on her want of youth and beauty--"_nec bella nec puella_." He had first wooed her, it seems, for a friend, but ended by marrying her himself. Erasmus, who was often an inmate of the family, speaks of her as "a keen and watchful manager." "No husband," continues Erasmus, "ever gained so much obedience from a wife by authority and severity, as More won by gentleness and pleasantry. Though verging on old age, and not of a yielding temper, he prevailed on her to take lessons on the lute, the viol, the monochord, and the flute, which she daily practiced to him." Her ordinary and rather vulgar apprehension could not fathom the conscientious scruples of her husband in his refusal to take the oath dictated to him by Henry VIII.; and when he was at length cast by that bad monarch into the Tower, then the grave of so many royal victims, his wife strongly expostulated with him on his squeamishness. "How can a man," she said to him on one occasion, "taken for wise, like you, play the fool in this close filthy prison, when you might be abroad at your liberty, if you would but do as the bishops have done?" She dilated upon his fine house at Chelsea, his library, gallery, garden, and orchard, together with the company of his wife and children. But to all he opposed the mild force of his conscience and religious feelings. "Is not this house," he asked, "as nigh heaven as my own?" to which her contemptuous ejaculation was--"_Tilly vally, tilly vally!_" He persisted in his course, and was executed, after which we hear no more of his wife.