In Sir Thomas More's chapel a certain Arthur Georges, who died in 1660,
lies under the feet of the person who happens to occupy the chair which
partly hides the inscription on his tomb:--
"Here lies interred the body of that generous and worthy Gent,
Arthur Georges, Esq. Here sleepes and feeles noe pressure of ye
stone. He that had all the Georges Soules in One. Here the
ingenious Arthur lies to be bewailed by marble and our eyes...."
"The ingenious Arthur!" One pictures him. A man who had "a way with
women". Apt to get into scrapes, irresponsible, but with a knack of
getting out of a tight corner. Kind-hearted, given to take what life
offers in the way of pleasure, and always ready to pass on good things,
and do a good turn to the under-dog. The inscription goes on to say,
"When all the Georges rise he'll rise again," which pious belief set me
speculating as to whether I might some day meet the "ingenious Arthur".
I'm sure I should like him.
Mrs. Darling was visibly impressed when I told her that the body of Sir
Thomas More (whose head had been thrown from London Bridge into his
daughter's arms below) was in all probability buried under the church.
His tomb in the chancel consists of a ledge and a tablet of black marble
surmounted by a flat Gothic arch. On the ledge was a bunch of tawny
chrysanthemums and a cross of scarlet immortelles, so the old man who
went to the scaffold rather than be a party to the chicanery and
concupiscence of Henry VIII is not yet forgotten. Sir Thomas More, it
has always seemed to me, carried his asceticism to extreme limits in the
matter of his marriage. "Having determined," so says the historian, "by
the advice of his ghostly father to be a married man, he was offered the
choice of the two daughters of a friend, and although his affection most
served him to the second, for that he thought her the fairest and best
favoured, yet when he thought within himself that it would be a grief
and some blemish to the eldest to have the youngest sister preferred
before her, he, out of a kind of compassion, settled his fancy on the
eldest, and soon afterwards married her."
More's first marriage, curiously arranged as it was, seemed to have
proved happier than his second, and one is driven to the conclusion that
the great man lacked discrimination in affairs of the heart. Hear his
second wife's tirade when visiting in the Tower. "I marvel," says she,
"that you, who have been hitherto always taken for a wise man, will now
so play the fool as to lie here in this close-fitting prison, and be
content to be shut up thus with mice, and rats, when you might be abroad
at your liberty, with the favour and goodwill of the King and his
council, if you would but do as the bishops and best learned of his
realm have done."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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