C Sansom: Sovereign

More thanks – once again – to Roz Brody, Jan King, Mike Holmes and William Shaw for reading the book in draft, and to my indefatigable agent Antony Topping for his help and comments – and for the title. Thanks again to my editor Maria Rejt and to Mari Roberts for her copyediting; and to Frankie Lawrence for a mammoth bout of typing.

The only study of the 1541 conspiracy I have found is an article written by Geoffrey Dickens as long ago as 1938: A.G. Dickens, ‘Sedition and Conspiracy in Yorkshire’ (Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, vol. xxxiv, 1938-39). Michael K. Jones’s book, cited above, was fascinating and thought-provoking on the Blaybourne legend. For the Catherine Howard story, Lacey Baldwin Smith’s A Tudor Tragedy (Alden Press, 1961) remains the fullest account, with David Starkey’s Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (Vintage, 2004) giving an interesting modern perspective.

R.W. Hoyle and J.B. Ramsdale’s article ‘The Royal Progress of 1541, the North of England, and Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1534-42’, in Northern History, XLI:2 (September 2004) is useful on the politics of the Progress, though I think it seriously underestimates the centrality of the conspiracy in Henry’s journey north. For details of what the Tudor court on Progress might have been like I am indebted to Simon Thurley’s The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (Yale University Press, 1993) and David Loades’s The Tudor Court (Barnes & Noble, 1987). Dairmaid Mac-Culloch’s Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale University Press, 1996) helped in my attempts to get the measure of that most complex of men. For both the conspiracy and the Progress the ambassadorial reports in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. XVI provide material that is fascinating but frustratingly limited.

R.W. Hoyle’s The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (OUP, 2001) and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Pilgrimage of Grace (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002) were both very useful. Moorhouse tells the story of the Mouldwarp legend.

D.M. Palliser’s Tudor York (OUP, 2002) was a mine of information on the city. Christopher Wilson & Janet Burton’s well-illustrated St Mary’s Abbey (Yorkshire Museum, 1988) was very helpful on the layout of the monastic precinct. There is still debate in York about whether Henry stayed at King’s Manor when he was there. I think he did; it makes obvious logistic sense. The idea that the hundreds of workmen known to be present and building tents and pavilions were building a scaled-down version of those used at the Field of the Cloth of Gold is mine, but it fits with the limited evidence in the Letters and Papers. And there was no time to build anything more substantial; they had less than two months to get there and complete everything.

The song welcoming the King to York in Chapter 16 will not be found in any book on Tudor music; I made it up. I hope it has an authentic ring.