Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 38.djvu/454

Rh Thomas (1565-1625), took orders in the English College at Rome, was chaplain to Magdalene, lady Montacute (d. 1608), and laboured later at Rome and in Spain in behalf of the English catholic clergy (, Church History;, Athenæ). To his fourth brother, Cresacre, Thomas the priest resigned the property both at Barnborough and North Mimms.

(1572-1649) resided at More-Place or Gobions, in the parish of North Mimms, Hertfordshire. He remained a layman, although a fervent catholic, and at Gobions he wrote his ‘Life of Sir Thomas More,’ dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, without date or place, probably printed at Louvain in 1631, 4to; it was long erroneously assigned to his brother Thomas, who died in 1625. It was reprinted in 1726, and again in 1828, with preface and notes by the Rev. Joseph Hunter. More died on 26 March 1649. He married a daughter of Thomas Gage, and a descendant of Sir John Gage [q. v.] ; she died on 15 July 1618. Cresacre had a son Thomas (d. 1660), and two daughters, Helen and Bridget.

Helen, born at Lowe Luton, Essex, on 25 March 1606, resolving to take the veil, changed her name to (1606-1633), and with eight other ladies crossed in 1623 to Douay, proceeding thence to Cambray, where she spent the rest of her life as a nun ‘of the holy order of S. Bennet and English congregation of our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray.’ She died on 18 Aug. 1633. In 1658 appeared ‘The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Virtuous and Religious D. Gertrude More,’ Paris, collected and arranged from her manuscripts by her confessor, Father Baker; these were published in another form, London, 1873, 32mo, by Father Henry Collins. The latter also published a ‘Life of Dame Gertrude More,’ London, 1877, 12mo, professing to be from ancient manuscripts, concerning which, however, no information is vouchsafed. Gertrude's sister Bridget was prioress of the English Benedictine nuns at Paris, and died on 11 Oct. 1692, aged 83.

Cresacre's son Thomas, who married a daughter of Sir Basil Brooke, was a royalist, and lost much of his property. His son Basil sold Gobions, and lived at Barnborough till his death in 1702. Basil's son, Christopher Cresacre More, had a daughter, Mary, wife of Charles Waterton, esq., of Walton (grandmother of Charles Waterton [q. v.] the naturalist), and a son, Thomas (d. 1739), who married Catherine, daughter of Peter Giffard of White Ladies, and was father of the last descendant of the chancellor in the male line,

(1722-1795), a Jesuit from 1766, and a provincial of the order from 1769 till the suppression of the society in 1773. He died at Bath 20 May 1795, and was buried in St. Joseph's catholic chapel at Bristol, where there is a monument with a long Latin inscription in the entrance to the sacristy (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. xii. 109, 199). One of the Jesuit's sisters, Mary Augustina More (d. 1807), became in 1761 prioress of the English priory of canonesses of St.Augustine at Bruges, where she claimed to preserve as a sacred relic her martyred ancestor's hat; but in 1794 the French revolution compelled her and her nuns to retire to England. They found an asylum at Hengrave Hall, Suffolk, the seat of Sir Thomas Gage, till 1802, when they repurchased the convent at Bruges and returned to it. Bridget, another of the Jesuit's sisters, married, first, Peter Metcalfe (d. 1757?), and her son, Thomas Peter Metcalfe, was father of Thomas Peter Metcalfe (1794-1838), who assumed the surname of More and died unmarried, while his sister, Maria Teresa, married Charles Eyston, esq. (d. 1857), of East Hendred, and left issue (cf., for full pedigree of descendants of the chancellor's son John,, Records of Jesuits, xii. 702 sq.)

Of More's daughters, the eldest, Margaret Roper (1505-1544)—the ‘Meg’ of her father's correspondence—was remarkable for her learning, which her father proudly encouraged and Erasmus and Reginald Pole commended. She was of a charmingly sympathetic disposition, gentle and affectionate in all domestic relations. She is said to have ‘disputed of phylosophy’ before Henry VIII (, English Dramatic Poetry, i. 113), and was reckoned the equal in culture of Anne Cooke, Bacon's mother, and of her friend Mrs. Margaret Clements [q. v.] (, Debate, 1550;, Bibl. Cat. i. 447). She married William Roper of Eltham and Canterbury, prothonotary in the court of Canterbury, when about twenty. Her husband's accounts of her interviews with her father when in the Tower are among the most pathetic passages in biography, and she is commemorated in Tennyson's ‘Dream of Fair Women’ as the woman ‘who clasp'd in her last trance her murdered father's head.’ Dying in 1544, she was buried at Chelsea, leaving many children. Her last male descendant, Edward, died unmarried at Almanza in 1708, and his sister Elizabeth was wife of Charles Henshaw, of whose daughters Susanna married Sir Rowland Winn of Nostell; Elizabeth was wife of Sir Edward Dering; and Catherine was wife of Sir William Strickland.

More's second daughter, Elizabeth, 