16 - Competing Lives and Contested Objects

Summary

This chapter explores the competing memories about the transmission of Sir Thomas More’s hair-shirt – the penitential garment he wore beneath his clothing for most of his adult life – the object’s significance to More’s descendants, and its devotional and memorial function within the religious communities they founded or patronised between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the hair-shirt story are two Margarets: his blood daughter, Margaret Roper (1505–44), and his adopted ward, Margaret Giggs (1508–70). Different historical accounts claim each Margaret as uniquely aware of More’s asceticism, and that they each received the hair-shirt from him when he died. These claims suggest each woman had a superlative connection to More’s spirituality and beliefs. The hair-shirt symbolises More’s deep commitment to God throughout his political career and service to Henry VIII, a commitment that would cost him his life. More’s state execution both literally and figuratively exposed the hair-shirt and his largely private devotional practices. The hair-shirt became a new surface on which memories of the Reformation, and the construction of English Catholic identity have been formed from the sixteenth century to the present day.