JOHN GUY does his best to make the most of the daughter in this double life of Thomas and Margaret More. The title, the jacket image, the opening section and the last chapter all emphasise her role in her father's story. But there is no avoiding the fact that we know much more about him than we do about her.
Thomas More (1478-1535), Roman Catholic saint, hairshirt-wearer and self-flagellator, chose execution rather than concede papal authority to Henry VIII over the question of his divorce of Katherine of Aragon. Nonetheless, he was a man of the world. Educated for the law, he climbed up the judicial and political ladders of Tudor England until in 1529 the king appointed him Lord Chancellor: the statesman of Hans Holbein's portrait, inscrutably grave in red velvet sleeves, furred gown and gold chain.
Early chapters of the book try valiantly to tell at least some of this story from Margaret's point of view. Unfortunately her father is forever kissing his children goodbye, leaving to hear court cases in the city or to negotiate treaties on the continent. And when he comes home, it is always such a disappointment that he shuts his study door to read, write or chat with his Dutch friend, Desiderius Erasmus.
More belonged to a circle of Dutch and English humanists who studied, translated and published classical texts and promoted the learning of Greek. He was reputed a wit, an ironist, delighting in ambiguity, both pious and scatological, at home equally with the vernacular and the rhetorical, with the Greek philosophers and the early church fathers.
His political satire “Utopia” owed much to Plato's “Republic”, a work which also inspired his ideas on female education. He was perhaps the first Englishman to believe that girls were as capable of profiting from classical learning as boys. At his house in the village of Chelsea, he established a domestic academy where, alongside history, philosophy, logic and music, his three daughters, a son and various wards were taught to translate to and from Latin, Greek and English. English was important and More particularly encouraged letter-writing, an art requiring “simplicity, frankness, humour and wit”.
This is where Margaret comes into her own. Always an apt scholar, she developed into possibly the most learned Englishwoman of her day. She published an English translation of Erasmus's meditations on the Lord's prayer and she wrote a treatise on the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.
More himself wrote on those four last things, a devotional exercise which places him squarely within the medieval Catholic tradition. Mr Guy has scrupulously researched More's family, his career and the religious controversies he engaged in. And yet his knowledge never quite rises to an imaginative understanding of the enormous power, richness and exoticism of a religious tradition that More clung to even as Luther's idea of the individual conscience was presaging the modern world.
Peter Ackroyd's biography of More, published in 1998, better caught this pre-modern world: that Bosch-like antechamber to heaven or hell, where the dead are as present as the living and where miracles and demons have a physical reality even to the educated. For More, the church was almost unimaginably central and he believed Henry's challenge to the papacy signalled its destruction. His head in the circumstances was a small price to pay.
This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "A Catholic father"