Most of those in the reforming camp were not social radicals, except for one group, which became a bogey for the traditionalists: the Anabaptists. In Holland and Germany various sects had grown out of Luther’s Reformation, and the Anabaptists (or adult Baptists) believed in returning to the practices of early Christianity. These beliefs included holding goods in common, which meant overthrowing the feudal ruling classes – although they seem to have been more ambivalent about the rising merchant classes. When they took over the German city of Münster in 1534, the local Protestant rulers joined with Catholics to exterminate them, but the Anabaptists continued as a persecuted minority in north-western Europe. A very small number fled to England, where they may have made contact with the survivors of the fifteenth-century Lollards, but were quickly caught and burned. In England they were very few; but a Dutch Anabaptist coming to London in 1546 and forming a small group there would have been possible.

Of course, like the group in Lamentation, these men would have been vulnerable to infiltration by official spies, of which there were plenty. The slowly emerging world of London printing (at this period most books were imported from the Continent) was watched by the authorities, with printers often being reformers, and some having contacts with exiled English polemicists in Germany and the Netherlands, of whom John Bale (a religious, though not a social, radical) was the most feared. And Anne Askew, hiding in London in 1546, was captured by informers – and later tortured in the Tower by Wriothesley and Rich. She was one of many brought before the Privy Council for questioning during the 1546 heresy hunt; although, as Shardlake observes in my novel, it would have been very unusual for an accusation as weak as Isabel Slanning’s in the story to go that high.

LONDON IN 154 6 was a tumultuous, violent, sectarian and impoverished place. It was only a year since the country had faced a serious threat of invasion. The King’s French war had, literally, bankrupted England – Continental bankers were refusing to lend Henry any more money – and the debasement of the coinage continued apace, to the impoverishment of the lower classes especially. The harvest of 1546 seems to have been a good one, which was probably just as well for the elite; bad harvests later in the decade contributed to large-scale rebellions.