‘Worthy of their blood and their vocation’: The More/Cresacre Line

Abstract

While John Donne has become the most brilliantly well known of More’s descendants, More’s actual son, John, has faded into obscurity. The unfortunate combination of physiognomy (that receding chin so clearly depicted in Holbein’s sketches), his contemporary reputation as in Bacon’s acerbic suggestion of imbecility and his father’s overwhelming reputation seem to have driven John More into the shadowy recesses of familial memory.1 Yet, during More’s lifetime, John was encouraged to write and he participated in the same humanist and Catholic interchanges as his sister Margaret. In 1533 his translations of a sermon by Friedrich Nausea and of a treatise by the humanist Damião de Góis were published, and two books were dedicated to him, Erasmus’s edition of Aristotle’s works (1531) and Simon Grynaeus’s edition of Plato’s works (1534).2 Until the point of his father’s imprisonment, it is possible to perceive John More’s steady movement along the accepted path of a humanist scholar, indebted to his father and teachers alike. In this he parallels Margaret and, while he might not have been as close to his father, his gender would have opened up opportunities that were not accessible to his sister. Again, like Margaret, after More’s execution, John came under suspicion and he was imprisoned with William Daunce and John Heywood in 1543 for conspiring against Cranmer.