BooksBarbecue
Back Lamentation Save as PDF

Lamentation

CJ Sansom
Chapters (56)
  1. Chapter One
  2. Chapter Two
  3. Chapter Three
  4. Chapter Four
  5. Chapter Five
  6. Chapter Six
  7. Chapter Seven
  8. Chapter Eight
  9. Chapter Nine
  10. Chapter Ten
  11. Chapter Eleven
  12. Chapter Twelve
  13. Chapter Thirteen
  14. Chapter Fourteen
  15. Chapter Fifteen
  16. Chapter Sixteen
  17. Chapter Seventeen
  18. Chapter Eighteen
  19. Chapter Nineteen
  20. Chapter Twenty
  21. Chapter Twenty-one
  22. Chapter Twenty-two
  23. Chapter Twenty-three
  24. Chapter Twenty-four
  25. Chapter Twenty-five
  26. Chapter Twenty-six
  27. Chapter Twenty-seven
  28. Chapter Twenty-eight
  29. Chapter Twenty-nine
  30. Chapter Thirty
  31. Chapter Thirty-one
  32. Chapter Thirty-two
  33. Chapter Thirty-three
  34. Chapter Thirty-four
  35. Chapter Thirty-five
  36. Chapter Thirty-six
  37. Chapter Thirty-seven
  38. Chapter Thirty-eight
  39. Chapter Thirty-nine
  40. Chapter Forty
  41. Chapter Forty-one
  42. Chapter Forty-two
  43. Chapter Forty-three
  44. Chapter Forty-four
  45. Chapter Forty-five
  46. Chapter Forty-six
  47. Chapter Forty-seven
  48. Chapter Forty-eight
  49. Chapter Forty-nine
  50. Chapter Fifty
  51. Chapter Fifty-one
  52. Chapter Fifty-two
  53. Chapter Fifty-three
  54. Epilogue
  55. A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  56. H ISTORICAL N OTE

To Roz Brody, Mike Holmes, Jan King and William Shaw, the stalwart writers’ group, for all their comments and suggestions for Lamentation as for the last seven books.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The details of religious differences in sixteenth-century England may seem unimportant today, but in the 1540s they were, literally, matters of life and death. Henry VIII had rejected the Pope’s supremacy over the English Church in 1532–33, but for the rest of his reign he oscillated between keeping traditional Catholic practices and moving towards Protestant ones. Those who wanted to keep traditional ways – some of whom would have liked to return to Roman allegiance – were variously called conservatives, traditionalists, and even papists. Those who wanted to move to a Lutheran, and later Calvinist practice, were called radicals or Protestants. The terms conservative and radical did not then have their later connotations of social reform. There were many who shifted from one side to the other during the years 1532–58, either from genuine non-alignment or opportunism. Some, though not all, religious radicals thought the state should do more to alleviate poverty; but radicals and conservatives alike were horrified by the ideas of the Anabaptists. Very few in number but a bogey to the political elite, the Anabaptists believed that true Christianity meant sharing all goods in common.

The touchstone of acceptable belief in 1546 was adherence to the traditional Catholic doctrine of ‘transubstantiation’ – the belief that when the priest consecrated the bread and wine during Mass, they were transformed into the physical body and blood of Christ. That was a traditionalist belief from which Henry never deviated; under his ‘Act of Six Articles’ of 1539, to deny this was treason, punishable by burning at the stake. His other core belief was in the Royal Supremacy; that God intended monarchs to be the supreme arbiters of doctrine in their territories, rather than the Pope.

The political events in England in the summer of 1546 were dramatic and extraordinary. Anne Askew really was convicted of heresy, tortured, and burned at the stake, and she did leave an account of her sufferings. The celebrations to welcome Admiral d’Annebault to London did take place, and on the scale described. The story of Bertano is true. There was a plot by traditionalists to unseat Catherine Parr; and she did write Lamentation of a Sinner. It was not, though, so far as we know, stolen.

Whitehall Palace, taken by Henry from Cardinal Wolsey and greatly expanded by him, occupied an area bounded roughly today by Scotland Yard, Downing Street, the Thames and the modern thoroughfare of Whitehall, with recreational buildings on the western side of the road. The whole palace was burned to the ground in two disastrous accidental fires in the 1690s; the only building to survive was the Banqueting House, which had not yet been built in Tudor times.