Alice More

Thomas More's wife

Alice More (née Harpur; 1474–), also known as Dame Alice Moore, is the second wife of Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England.

The story so far…

Week 6: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 1)

Alice is More’s wife and hostess of their dinners at Chelsea. But their dinners at Chelsea are conducted in Latin, and she doesn’t speak a word of it. More tells her she is ugly, and he married her to free him from desire. He castigates her from drinking wine. She has a little monkey on a chain that clings to her like a child. When Cromwell thanks her in English, she asks why he doesn’t marry again. She makes a lewd joke, betraying a spirit squashed beneath the tyranny of her husband.

Week 15: Supremacy

Thomas More’s family take the oath.

Alice: “Ask him what in the name of God he’s about. Ask him, is it clever, does he think it is, to leave his wife without company, his son without advice, his daughters without protection, and all of us at the mercy of a man like Thomas Cromwell.”

Week 16: The Map of Christendom (Part 1)

Alice comes to Cromwell to beg mercy for her husband. She does not understand her husband, or why Cromwell has been good to them. She feels spurned by Thomas More, who thinks only of Meg Roper his daughter, who is not her daughter. She tells Cromwell that More wears a hairshirt and sleeps alone. She feels to him as one might a child.