Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
The grisly tale of skull locked away in city
How Sir Thomas More’s head, chopped off on the orders of Henry VIII, ended up in a vault in Canterbury...
Moreisat the block, he can see him now. He is wrapped in a rough grey cape [...]. He is speaking to the headsman, apparently making some quip to him, wiping the drizzle from his face and beard. He is shedding the cape, the hem of which is sodden with rainwater. He kneels at the block, his lips moving in his final prayer...”
These are the last moments in the life of Sir Thomas More, as witnessed by his nemesis Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall.
But what were the events that led to his execution at Tower Hill in London - and how did his severed head end up in Canterbury?
Born the son of a successful London lawyer in 1478, he rose to become Lord Chancellor and was a key adviser to Henry VIII.
He definitely travelled through Canterbury at least twice during his lifetime.
The first was with the King’s party who met Emperor Charles V in the city on the way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold festival in France in 1520. The second was in 1527 with Cardinal Wolsey’s party on the way to Rome to seek agreement from the Pope for Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
And it was the latter which sparked More’s downfall, as he opposed the divorce and refused to recognise the King as head of the Church of England, as required in the 1534 Act of Supremacy. He also refused to acknowledge the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn as legal.
More met his grisly fate on July 6, 1535, and his head was taken from the scaffold and parboiled, before being stuck on a pole on London Bridge.
His daughter Margaret - who was married to William Roper of Canterbury - reportedly bribed the bridge-keeper to knock it down and she smuggled it home.
More’s skull was eventually buried with her in the Roper vault at St Dunstan’s Church in 1577. The vault was later enlarged and the skull transferred to a niche behind a grille where it remains, last seen during an investigation in 1978.
His links to the city can still be seen today. In the Roper chapel in St Dunstan’s Church there is a stained glass window depicting events in More’s life. There is also a picture of his skull in the niche of the vault below.
Across St Dunstan’s Street from the church a plaque commemorating the family’s association with More is mounted on the Roper Gate.
He was canonized in 1935, 400 years after his death. In September 1955 about 12,000 Roman Catholics came to Canterbury for a pilgrimage in honour of St Thomas More and the English Martyrs.
■ Pictures and information used with kind permission of Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society.