William Roper

William Roper was the husband of Thomas More’s favourite daughter Margaret, a lawyer and member of Parliament who lived in More’s household for sixteen years and wrote, around 1556 and for the use of a fuller biographer, the Life of Sir Thomas More, the first English biography of any literary merit. It is short, affectionate and exact, told by a witness: More at Chelsea with his family, his refusal of the oath, Margaret embracing him on the way to the Tower, and his death. Roper had himself been a Lutheran for a time, and More converted him back. The Harvard Classics print it beside Utopia.