AT THE SAME TIME a young man named William Cecil was beginning to make his career on the fringes of politics. I have invented his position on Queen Catherine’s Learned Council, although he was certainly a friend of the Queen, and moreover wrote the preface to Lamentation of a Sinner when it was published in 1547. During that year he first appears on the record as Edward Seymour’s secretary, beginning the meteoric rise which was to culminate, in 1558, when he became chief adviser to Elizabeth I. Edmund Walsingham, meanwhile, was the uncle of Elizabeth’s famous future spymaster, Thomas Walsingham.

THE FACT THAT all these people knew each other is indicative of just how tiny the Tudor elite was – essentially a group of titled country landowners, though increasingly open to men from the gentry and merchant classes, who sought positions at court to amass wealth and, like Rich and Paget, went on to create their own great estates. Paget and Rich were both lawyers of undistinguished lineage but great ability, who were first chosen for service by Thomas Cromwell – as Shardlake observes, six years after his death much of the political elite still consisted of men whom Cromwell had advanced. ‘Gentleman’ status, meanwhile, was everything for young men like Nicholas Overton, who guarded it jealously; allowed to wear swords and colourful clothes of rich material forbidden to the common populace, they were brought up to see themselves as quite different from the common run.

FOR THE VISIT of Admiral d’Annebault in August 1546 I have followed closely the short account in Charles Wriothesley’s Chronicle. As one traces the ceremonies, one realizes their huge scale. Henry played a prominent role, but this was to be his last hurrah. Five months later he was dead. Greeting the admiral near Hampton Court was also Prince Edward’s first public appearance.

Catherine Parr and the Politics of Henry VIII’s Last Months – An Interpretative Essay

Historians have long puzzled over the huge upheavals in English politics during the last months of Henry VIII’s life. The source material is fragmentary, mainly scattered correspondence and ambassadors’ reports, and the reliability of one major source regarding Catherine Parr, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, has been called into question. Historians are divided over Foxe; he was a radical Protestant who wrote, highly polemically, about the sufferings of Protestant martyrs in the years before Elizabeth I ascended the throne. Some have said that Foxe is too biased to be credible, adding that where Catherine Parr is concerned he was writing seventeen years after the event he described. Others respond that Foxe was meticulous about trying to get his facts right, whatever gloss he put on them. I tend to agree with those who say that Foxe was an honest and assiduous gatherer of witness testimony, while also agreeing with pretty much everyone that his chronology was notoriously unreliable – of which more below.