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Acknowledgments
    This book would not have been possible had I not been offered the post of Associate in the Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Historic Royal Palaces and Kingston University, which is part-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am very grateful for the wonderful opportunities this role has opened up to me, this book included.
    I would like to express my gratitude to Historic Royal Palaces for kindly agreeing to release copyright on the research I had carried out as part of my duties as the Research Curator on the Henry VIII project, and especially would like to thank Lucy Worsley, Polly Schomberg, Erica Longfellow and Kent Rawlinson for their support and friendship. My thanks also go to Benedetta Tiana for being the first person to be enthused by the 1536 idea!
    I am grateful to the many scholarly giants on whose shoulders I have stood. I would particularly like to acknowledge my debt to the work of George Bernard, Susan Brigden, Xanthe Brooke and David Crombie, Michael Bush and David Bownes, C. S. L. Davies, G. R. Elton, Christopher Haigh, R. W. Hoyle, Eric Ives, Stanford E. Lehmberg, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Peter Marshall, Alec Ryrie, David Starkey, Tania String and Greg Walker. I thank Tania String for giving me a copy of a forthcoming article in draft. I am very grateful to my peer-reviewer, Eric Ives, for his thoughtful comments on the text. As always, the errors that remain are mine alone.
    On a personal note, I would like to thank Tom Betteridge, my wonderful DPhil supervisor Robin Briggs, Lyndal Roper and the Balliol history workshop, and Susan Brigden, my undergraduate tutor, inspiration and friend – the person who first introduced me to the words ‘you loke for ded men’s showys’. I’d also like to thank John Cairns for taking a great author’s photo and Miranda Powell for improving the book immeasurably with her thoughtful copy-editing. Thank you to the friends and family who have encouraged and supported me as I wrote this book. I am enormously grateful to Kate Kirkpatrick, my excellent editor, and to my mother, Marguerite Lipscomb, who’s been my splendid and untiring first reader and critic, and the source of much encouragement. Thank you.



C HAPTER 4
    1536 and All That
    H istorians have noted that that 1536 was a particularly awful year for Henry. Derek Wilson calls it Henry’s ‘ annus horribilis’ . R. W. Hoyle refers to it as ‘the year of three queens’, and Sir Arthur Salisbury MacNulty concludes that, in reaching forty-five, ‘it is justifiable to regard the year 1536 as marking the approach of Henry’s old age’. Few, though, have connected this turbulent and important year with Henry VIII’s changing character. Only Derek Wilson has noted that ‘most of the reign’s acts of sanguinary statecraft’ occurred after this point, and that ‘it was in 1536 that bloodletting of those close to the Crown became frequent’. 1
    A brief chronological overview, however, of the many tumultuous events in the life of Henry VIII in 1536 begins to suggest the significance of this one year.
    The year began, from Henry’s perspective, well. On 7 January, Katherine of Aragon, Henry’s estranged (and denied) first wife, died. Yet, only a couple of weeks later, a series of less propitious acts occurred. Henry fell from his horse while jousting. He was unconscious for two hours and observers feared the worst. Despite the official pronouncements of his rude health, the fall appears to have burst open an old injury which would never properly heal and meant that this great athlete of the tiltyard would never joust again.
    Anne Boleyn attributed her shock at the king’s fall to the next major event of 1536. She miscarried on the day of Katherine of Aragon’s funeral – and it had been a boy. This was a huge disappointment to the king, and threatened the stability of the realm at a time when English security was already in jeopardy. In early 1536, an edict issued by the