A DAUGHTER'S LOVE

John Guy (Fourth Estate, £25)

The martyrdom of Thomas More, Henry VIII's former Lord Chancellor and prisoner of faith, is well documented. But little is known about his daughter Margaret, who sustained him during the dark days in the Tower before his execution.

Margaret was an accomplished scholar in her own right, "an ornament of Britain", according to the great theologian Erasmus.

She was also courageous, secretly recovering her father's head from a traitor's pike on London Bridge and harbouring it until the time it could lie with her in her own grave.

Margaret's love for More, who went to the block for his resistance to the king's divorce and remarriage to Anne Boleyn, is sacrificial and enduring. Every chapter paints the bond between them in glorious yet tragic literary colours.

Guy's dual biography is marvellously evocative of the Tudor era.

If More's open fear of death, challenged by his conscience, does not make this a great book, then his daughter's loyalty — shown in such perverse ways as washing her father's penitential hair shirt — ensures it is one of the most poignant.

Guy makes it clear that were it not for Margaret's rescue and protection of the letters between them — More used charcoal from the fire to open his "secret heart" to her and therefore to posterity — his legacy would have been buried with him.

As it was, she opened up a new dimension of the man who defied tyranny with a virtuoso perfomance at his trial, declaiming on the scaffold that he was "the king's servant, but God's first".

Colin Gardiner