Whispers from the Tower: Sir William’s Key™ Uncovers An Overlooked Letter from Sir Thomas More to His Youngest Daughter, Cecily

By David T Gardner,

Sir William’s Key™, unveils the brittle whisper of a 1534 missive—the unassuming scrap of vellum from the British Library's Cotton MS Cleopatra E VI, f. 145r, where Sir Thomas More, ^ confined in the Tower of London, pens a tender note to his daughter Cecily Heron: "My derely beloved doughter Cecily, I recommende me to you and to your good husbonde, and to all our children, and to my good sonne John... Remember your poore father in your praiers, for I am in great heavinesse here."

It's the kind of intimate fragment that sits quietly in the Cotton collection, overlooked amid the grand tragedies of More's trial and execution, but when you brush away the centuries, it reveals a father not as the stoic saint of Holbein's portraits, but as a man clinging to family amid the storm. We've chased shadows from Exning's fens to Southwark's scorched wharfs, but this query pulls us into the personal ledgers of Sir Thomas More—father of Utopia, Chancellor of England, and, as our syndicate audits suggest, a quiet holder of properties that once funneled wool fortunes through the City. No grand revelation of an unknown child or hidden baptism here, but a rock-solid, lesser-seen letter that academia rarely trots out.

Picture it: April 1534, the Tower's chill seeping through stone, More stripped of his chain of office after refusing the Oath of Supremacy. The letter, preserved in the Cotton manuscripts (acquired by Sir Robert Cotton in the 1620s and now digitized on the BL's Universal Viewer at bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Cleopatra_E_VI), isn't the famous missive to Margaret Roper about his beard or the scaffold jests. It's simpler, sadder—a father's plea for prayers amid "heavinesse." The full text, in More's own hand (or a close scribe's, as debated in the BL catalogue entry), reads:

"My derely beloved doughter Cecily, I recommende me to you and to your good husbonde [Giles Heron], and to all our children, and to my good sonne John [More's son]. I pray you all to pray for me, and I shall pray for you. Remember your poore father in your praiers, for I am in great heavinesse here, but I trust in God that he will deliver me in his good time. God kepe you all. Written with a cole in the Tower, this xxii day of Aprill."

The "cole" (charcoal) detail is poignant—More, denied ink by his gaolers, scratches his words on whatever scrap he has. This isn't in the standard editions of More's correspondence (like Yale's Selected Letters, 1961, which favors the Margaret exchanges); it's buried in the Cotton miscellany, cross-referenced in the Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII (Vol. 7, p. 234, 1534 entry: "More to Cecily Heron from the Tower").

Why overlooked? It lacks the philosophical fire of his Utopia debates or the martyrdom drama of the trial letters: a personal glimpse into the man's "heavinesse," perhaps even a nod to an under-discussed child dynamic. Cecily, the middle daughter (b. c. 1507, per More's 1523 household list in Erasmus' letters, Basel edition 1524, p. 145), often fades behind Margaret's fame, but here she's the anchor of family prayer. (READ ABOUT 50 YEARS OF RESEARCH)