Privacy is a subject I’ve traced a history of, bits and pieces of which had found their way to K. before I got censored. When we lived in groups, the group in a cave, privacy would have been mental: avert your eyes as Lilith is birthing, while Og is sick, while Adam is coupled with Eve … Privacy began to become what with think it is with the Roman hearth secreted in a small central room. I’ll gather those reference here if I live. But right now I have to add a wonderful story about Thomas More I hadn’t known! from Bill Bryson, At Home:
| In one of his works, John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century historian, relates an anecdote concerning the marriage of Thomas More’s daughter Margaret to a man named William Roper. In the story Roper calls one morning and tells More that he wishes to marry one of More’s daughters — either one will do — upon which More takes Roper to his bedroom, where the daughters are asleep in a truckle bed wheeled out from beneath the parental bed. Leaning over, More deftly takes “the sheet by the corner and suddenly whippes it off,” Aubrey relates with words that all but glisten lustily, revealing the girls to be fundamentally naked. Groggily protesting at the disturbance, they roll onto their stomachs, and after a moment’s admiring reflection Sir William announces that he has seen both sides now and with his stick lightly taps the bottom of sixteen-year-old Margaret. “Here was all the trouble of the wooeing,” writes Aubrey with clear admiration. |
Not many months back Jan and I watched A Man for All Seasons. Paul Scholfield played More, Susannah York played Margeret. I wish Fred Zinnemann and company had written that scene into the movie. I would have loved to have seen the delicious Susannah’s buff fore and aft, imagining her sixteen. More’s actual Margaret, sleeping naked with her sister in a bed under the bed might have ben considerably less fetching. But of course I would have wanted the chamber pots emptied, the straw burned, and the air freshened before I set foot in the room; even for a brace of naked teen girls.
I found a picture online of Susannah York and Paul Scofield together, in character, in costume. I also found a pic of Susannah on her belly in bed with the top of her backside showing. But I’ll insert this close up of her perfect face.
Henry VIII made Thomas Sir before he murdered him. The Roman Church made Sir Thomas Saint Thomas much later: largely because Henry murdered him.
One of history’s great men, clearly.
