Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.Various
History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
[2] The conduct of this great man's house was a model to all, and as
near an approach to his own Utopia as might well be. Erasmus says, "I
should rather call his house a school or university of Christian
religion, for though there is none therein but readeth and studyeth the
liberal sciences, their special care is piety and virtue; there is no
quarreling or intemperate words heard; none seen idle; which household
discipline that worthy gentleman doth not govern, but with all kind and
courteous benevolence." The servant-men abode on one side of the house,
the women on another, and met at prayer-time, or on church festivals,
when More would read and expound to them. He suffered no cards or dice,
but gave each one his garden-plot for relaxation, or set them to sing or
play music. He had an affection for all who truly served him, and his
daughters' nurse is as affectionately remembered in his letters when
from home as are they themselves. "Thomas More sendeth greeting to his
most dear daughters Margaret, Elizabeth, and Cecily; and to Margaret
Giggs, as dear to him as if she were his own," are his words in one
letter; and his valued and trustworthy domestics appear in the family
pictures of the family by Holbein. They requited his attachment by
truest fidelity and love; and his daughter Margaret, in her last
passionate interview with her father on his way to the Tower, was
succeeded by Margaret Giggs and a maid-servant, who embraced and kissed
their condemned master, "of whom, he said after, it was homely but very
lovingly done." Of these and other of his servants, Erasmus remarks,
"after Sir Thomas More's death, none ever was touched with the least
suspicion of any evil fame."
[3] Wood and Weaver both affirm that the body of More was first
deposited in the Tower Chapel, but was subsequently obtained by his
devoted and accomplished daughter, Margaret Roper, and re-interred in
Chelsea Church, in the tomb he had finished in 1532, the year in which
he had surrendered the chancellorship, and resolved to abide the issue
of his conscientious opposition to the king's wishes, as if he felt that
the tomb should then be prepared.
[4] Faulkner, in his history of Chelsea, adheres to this opinion, and
says that the tomb in that church is but "an empty cenotaph." His
grandson, in his Life, says, "his body was buried in the Chapel of St.
Peter, in the Tower, in the belfry, or, as some say, as one entereth
into the vestry;" and he does not notice the story of his daughter's
re-interment of it elsewhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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