Page:The Life of Sir Thomas More (William Roper, ed by Samuel Singer).djvu/228



I'll only add, that this Mr. More in relating Mrs. Roper's coming to her father when he was brought back to the Tower after his condemnation, tells us, that she was not able to say any word, but, oh my father, oh my father! but Mr. Roper, from whom he took his account, says not that she spake a word to him: and the Latin letter concerning Sir Thomas's death, expressly says, she could not speak a word to him. For which he gives the tragic poet's reason, Cura leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.

As for Sir Thomas's daughters, the eldest of them and his great favourite was married to William Roper, Esq. of Well-Hall, in the parish of Eltham in Kent, the author of this Life of Sir Thomas. By him she had issue Thomas Roper, who married Lucy, the daughter of Sir Anthony Brown, Master of the Horse and Privy-Councellour to K. Henry VIII. Anthony Roper, a second son, and three daughters, viz. Elizabeth, who married Stevenson, and was a second time married to Sir Edward Bray, Knt. Margaret, married to William Dawtery: and Mary, first married to Stephen Clarke, and a second time to James Basset.

Sir Thomas's second daughter Elisabeth was married to Dancy, and his third daughter Cecilia to Giles Herond, and that is all I know of them. These all lived together with Sir Thomas at Chelsea. Erasmus, who had been there and knew their way of living, calls the family a little house of the muses, and another acedemy of Plato: only, he says, he does it wrong by the comparison. Since in Plato's academy they disputed about numbers and geometrical figures, and but sometimes of moral virtues, wheras this house was more properly a school and exercise of the