This novel is based upon the amazing true life events of a uniquely courageous woman born in the reign of  King Henry VIII of England.

Her name was Rose Locke. 

Introduction

            We Lockes were rich. Very rich. We were also an age-old family that could trace its noble lineage back beyond pre-Norman times. And yet we were also by now that most modern and dangerous of families. We were Protestant English at a time when it was still dangerously illegal to be so. But we held firmly to hope.

In the long and dark English night, John Wycliffe[1] came forth as streaming light to our hard pressed world. He demanded that the Truth, the written word of God, for so long shaded by the servants of Rome, be set free amongst the shadows to then reach, touch and free the souls of good English Christians, too long chained like starved prisoners in the half-light. Every person, he demanded, should have the right to read the Bible in English!

But in 1526, after more than one-hundred-and-forty years, we English were still waiting… 

Prologue

Gainsborough Hall, 1610. 

I am growing tired; not of life but of living. As I write, I am in my eighty-fifth year and living within a failing body that was never meant to live as long as it has. And yet though it now constantly ails me, I cannot but marvel that both it and I have survived for so long and through so much together. Even so, I look forward to that hour when my gracious Lord and Saviour shall call me forth. Often, especially in the restless hours of this twilight, I look back with gratitude, and as someone who has been humbled, upon all the Lord’s most merciful deliverances that He hath given me and my loved ones.

Recently, I read something of my father’s life – set down in Holmshed’s Chronicles[2]. Having done so, I realise that I have locked within my head so much more of what others have long since forgotten or taken with them to their graves.

So, I believe that it will serve well for my descendants and other readers for me to now set down in writing an account of my life. This includes the exploits of the family Locke, my family, and of the struggles that we true Protestants have weathered under the unrighteous dominion of others – of all that has been brought to rage and war against our faith and conscience. I write that this account might then ever endure to bear true witness to those trials, so that my children and children’s children shall know of the hard-won victories that have preceded them into this life, and so be better equipped themselves to then defend and maintain these for following generations.
 

Chapter One 

London, 1526.

Through the shroud of smoke from ten thousand Christmastide fires, the weak moon let forth light from on high. It glimmered upon the pure white feathers of snow drifting silently to earth as if in a vain effort to redeem this defiled and filthy city. As it did so, by the equally subdued light of four-and-twenty flickering candles, I quietly slipped out from my exhausted mother’s body and into the safe hands of her equally weary midwife.

The date was the twenty-seventh day of December, in the year of our Lord, fifteen-hundred-and-twenty-six; the seventeenth year of the reign of our most dread and Catholic sovereign, King Henry VIII.

‘It’s a little girl, my lady,’ the midwife sighed with some deep note of disappointment.

Then, as she held me aloft by my tiny ankles and slapped me firmly across my buttocks, to get me breathing, my mother said that I let out such a rush of lusty yell that it all but drowned out the cry of the watchman in the street below as he called out the hour and that all was well.

Once pinked up, my ever faithful nurse-maid, Maggie, then took charge of me. Gently she washed and bathed me in a shimmering hammered-copper bowl of soothing warm water set before the still glowing embers of the fire. After that, she swaddled me in fine white linen. And then, as she had me nestled lovingly in her arms, hurried me outside the bed chamber to present me to my waiting father.

‘’Tis a daughter, sir!’ she exclaimed, smiling triumphantly. ‘Such a pretty little thing too, with a mouth like a rosebud.’

I am certain he met me with genuine welcome and joy. For I was not the tortuously awaited son and heir to his fortune, because he had already come and been followed by spares. Instead, I was but one of nineteen children that this man beyond his time would eventually seed into this life. Those who survived, he would cherish and lavish boundless time and love upon. And he would see all his offspring educated with equal measure at a time when education for a woman was viewed equally as being either commendable or damnable, depending upon the disposition of the woman’s future husband.

I was born by far luckier than the numberless others that who entered into the world that day, and who by fate were condemned to a limited lifetime of hunger and poverty. Instead, mine was destined to be a life of privilege, for which I remain ever mindful.

My father, William Locke, was outwardly the very essence of a loyal Tudor subject. He was an unimaginably wealthy London merchant and a notable member of The Worshipful Mercer’s Company of London[3]. We lived at Cheapside; close to the Mercers Hall and Chapel, in a fine mansion amply befitting our high station in life. After all, not only were we Lockes rich, but we were an age-old family who could trace its noble lineage back beyond such pre-Norman worthies as the Earl Leofric of Mercia and his famous lady, Godiva. And yet we were also, by now, that most modern and dangerous of families – we were Protestant English at a time when it was still dangerously illegal to be so. More than this, we were Bible smugglers[4].

Mercers, like my father, became the conduit for our particular style of evangelical Protestantism to enter England. In my time, many another young mercer apprenticed into the Low Countries trade became converted to it whilst staying at the English house in Antwerp. There, they could be baptized into a new way of thinking with the latest ideas upon religion.

Before I was born, even Thomas Cromwell[5] had likewise been well versed in this ‘heresy’ when he was still a very young man working for merchant adventurers, though I scarce say he was never brave enough to admit so to the King.

Thus, through brave mercer families, like us Lockes, Master Tyndale’s latest books could be had fresh from his press, having been smuggled into England by being hidden amongst the bales of fine cloths and silks we brought into London by the shipload.

I can clearly recall my mother from those days. She had come to the truth of the Gospels by way of some English translations smuggled into the country for her by my father’s factor on the continent. Mother often called my two sisters and me into her chamber to read aloud to us from out of those very books. Yet this she did in the strictest of privacy, for fear of ‘outsiders’ finding out. For then such translations were condemned as ‘heretical’ by both the Pope and our King.

For more than ten years, a Mercer named Mister Packington had been involved in smuggling Protestant writings into the land from abroad. My mother and father knew him well.

Early one November morning[6], at about four of the clock, Mister Packington left his lodgings at the sign of ‘The Leg’ in Soaper’s Lane. As usual, he was going to mass, but on a day when dawn was breaking upon one of the mistiest and foggiest that any alive in London could remember.

A gang of labourers, already at their work, witnessed Packington turn the corner and walk on into Cheapside. The Mercer was not heading towards the nearest parish church of Saint Pancras. Instead, he was making his way to the Mercer’s own chapel, close to the Great Conduit. Packington paused momentarily as he reached just opposite Ironmonger’s Lane, before he began to walk across the eerily empty thoroughfare. He never made it to the other side.

The labourers in Soaper’s Lane heard the gun shot echoing down the empty street. Throwing down their tools, they immediately ran to see what had happened. They found Mister Packington lying dead upon the bloody cobbles with his chest blown apart. There was no assailant in sight. And none was ever brought to justice for this cold blooded murder.

Very few in the city laboured under the illusion that this had been some random crime of violence. My father, for one, was certain that his friend had been assassinated on orders of the clergy, because of his reformist views.

‘You must listen to me, children,’ Mother urged. I can still recall the look of terror etched upon her face and the tremble in her voice as she drew my sister, Alice, and me close to her. ‘You must promise to me never to tell anyone that I have a copy of the Gospels or that I have read them to you. Do you understand? You must tell no one. Someone may even try to trick you, or ask you to make an oath upon the Bible. But you must never tell them anything. For if you do, the Bishop will have me taken away and burned to death!’

We swore that we never would breathe a word about her secret.

I was not told who had killed this man, or indeed if anyone knew. The hatred for those like us ran deep, especially amongst the Papists .To them we Protestants were the same as the Jews, or the Mohammedans or atheists. For they considered every living person outside the fold of their Holy Roman Father as a heretic, and therefore someone who could justly be consigned to hell.

Thus, throughout my lifetime, the Company of Mercers has been a channel for this tide of movement towards the reformation of our Church. This was carried out covertly at first. But then, in later times, we stood in defiant openness – to be loathed by both Anglicans and die-hard Catholics alike. Yet we did so willingly, knowing that God had called upon us to be new disciples and to guide the faithful back to the true ways of His early Church, as Christ had intended it to be.

As far as the rest of Europe might suppose, at the time of my birth I was entering into the very ‘model’ of a Christian kingdom, where our most sovereign and Catholic King Henry was held up by the Pope to be a shining example of all that a Christian prince should be. Henry was intelligent and, in his youth, considered quite athletic. He spoke French, Latin and Spanish, and was so religious that he heard mass three times a day, even whilst hunting – a pastime of which he was passionately fond. Henry Tudor was also an accomplished musician and composer, as well as being a good and faithful husband to our beloved Queen, Katherine of Aragon, and being a loving father to their only surviving child – the young Princess Mary.

            Yet it was for the writing of a book, attacking Martin Luther and defending the Roman Catholic Church, that lavished upon Henry the greatest praise of all, and for which the Pope bestowed upon him the accolade of ‘Defender of the Faith’. This was a title that he would prize highly and hand down to all four successive monarchs under whom I have tried to serve God faithfully through my long life.

But in executing his new position of ‘Defender of The Faith’, Henry saw fit to blacken England’s fair earth – with the burning of a number of early Protestant ‘heretics’ who had been raised in this country.

            No sooner had I reached my first birthday than this pretty English illusion began to be exposed to the world for that which it was; an ugly and deceitful sham set as cover for the far darker truth beneath. Even as I was being born, this once blessed realm of England was about to be rent apart for two simple reasons.

            Firstly, King Henry’s wife had failed to provide a son to continue the only recently created Tudor dynasty. And as Katherine was already nearing forty years of age, it seemed increasingly unlikely that she ever would produce an heir. Coupled with this iniquity, the much younger King was by now certain that this failure was by no means down to his personal prowess. For to disprove any blot upon his masculinity, he had already embarked upon a string of adulterous affairs that resulted in the birth of several boy bastards. Even though Henry could legitimise any of these at the stroke of a quill, such action would not end all of the problems at hand, because the situation had become too complicated.

            As the last blush of Katherine’s youthful good looks faded into middle age, the ever lustful King Henry was hopelessly smitten by love for one of Katherine’s young ladies in waiting. Her name was Anne Boleyn. Seeing her sister defiled, used and abused by the King, before then being cast off completely, she steadfastly refused to submit to Henry’s increasingly carnal desire of her. Anne would not do so until she lay legally upon the royal marriage bed. To achieve that end, Henry would need to have Queen Katherine ousted. So lust – impure and simple – ultimately set Henry upon a path that would change the course of England’s history and faith.

            In order to free himself of his first wife so that he might marry his new love, Anne Boleyn, Henry set upon the only real option open to him – to have his marriage to Katherine annulled. As he appealed to the Pope, Henry claimed that the marriage was cursed because, according to the book of Leviticus in the Bible, the union was ‘unclean’ on the grounds of Katherine previously being the wife of the King’s late elder brother, Prince Arthur.

            However, for the marriage between Henry and Katherine to have gone ahead in the first place, the Pope had issued a special dispensation, and so it was logical that this could not later be deemed to have been effected against the Church’s laws. Therefore the Pope refused to grant either annulment or divorce.

So Henry was left in the unenviable position of seeking another seemingly legal way around the problem. It was then that, quite suddenly and astonishingly, Henry’s stance towards certain Protestant attitudes seeping in from the continent softened. He realised that these new ideas might hold the answer to his problem!

I remember well my father later telling me about this time, as he whiled away the slow days and weeks leading to his death, and as I waited for the birth of my first son, William.

While still young enough to do so, Father used to go beyond the sea for Anne Boleyn. The Queen-in-waiting had engaged him to bring her parchments of the Gospels, Epistles and Psalms, all written in English and French instead of Papist Latin. And all of this so soon after the time when such an open request for them from one so highly placed in Henry’s court would have been unthinkable.

Amongst many of the Lutheran papers that came into my father’s possession, was one that proved beyond all dispute that the ‘Donation of Constantine’ – the single document under which the Pope claimed sovereignty over all emperors, kings, and princes – was nothing more than a much later forgery. The implications of this deception were not wasted on Anne Boleyn, King Henry, or his advisers. Armed with this knowledge, Henry felt it was within his rights to reject Roman control altogether and to instead place himself at the head of the Church of England.

By that time, Henry had already met a then little known cleric named Thomas Cranmer, temporarily decamped from Cambridge in the wake of a visitation of the plague. He was a man in whom my father set as high hopes for the furtherance of our own Protestant cause as he did our zealous Boleyn.

Cranmer was a man more than willing to advocate on Henry’s behalf in his Great Matter[7] and so the King had sent him to the Protestant princes of Germany to learn more about Lutheran doctrine. When the Calvinists and Lutherans were officially approached upon the subject, their opinion that ‘the marriage was sinful but repentance must blot out past sins and that the King’s marriage must not be dissolved. Henry was so angered by this response that the relationship between them and the King immediately soured.

However, Cranmer became so immersed in the new religion that by the time he had to return to England, he too did as the Lutheran clergy had done – in taking a wife! However, when Henry then raised him up to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer was forced to keep his marriage a closely guarded secret in the still firmly celibate Protestant Church of England. They say that he was then forced for a very long time afterwards to smuggle his wife from place to place as she accompanied him when he moved. She lay concealed in a large oak chest that he claimed necessary for his great quantity of vestments and books.

Naturally, when the King’s Great Matter was then again set before his own bishops in England to judge, Henry was eventually granted the much sought after legal annulment from his first wife.

            Nevertheless, Queen Katherine steadfastly refused to bow to unrelenting pressure piled upon her by the King to publicly acknowledge the same, even when Henry forcibly removed the Princess Mary from the care of her mother and forbade the two to be allowed to meet again. And when Henry ordered her to hand back certain royal jewels, so that he might give them to Anne Boleyn, Katherine bravely retorted, ‘I will not give them up to a person who is the scandal of both Christendom and a disgrace to you.’

            In Katherine’s eyes and those of the wider Catholic Church, she was still, had always been, and ever would be, King Henry’s lawfully wedded wife in the sight of God. And since no mere men could put the marriage asunder, Anne Boleyn was therefore naught but a whore.
 

Chapter Two

As a girl just turned ten, I was coming of an age when I was fully beginning to take in all that was going on about me. Until then I had been fit only to take lessons from my tutors or to be found about the nooks and crannies of our house, where I would be playing with my doll or be in the company of our loyal nurse maid. Never had I questioned the comings or going of members of my family, or the arrival of my many and ever growing number of siblings, or even sometimes their sudden absence forever, or of my own mother’s seemingly constant condition of pregnancy, or to question it.

As for matters pertaining to our sovereign, they too were becoming more and more curious to me; especially those relating to our situation of being a land with ‘two queens’.

I have found recently, whilst reading a printed copy of Holmshed’s Chronicle with my protégé, Dorothy, a story about my late father. And so being his daughter, I have thought to enlighten my children and descendants a little more upon that and other related matters as I remember them.

In the twenty-fifth year of our sovereign King Henry’s reign, fifteen-thirty-four, on hearing of the fate of the Lady Katherine Dowager, Pope Clement VII issued a Bull proclaiming a curse upon our King Henry and this entire realm. It was set up at Dunkirk in Flanders – the nearest point that his agents dare post it to England.

Upon witnessing the King’s rightful rage, one London mercer, Mister William Locke, took it upon himself to immediately go to Dunkirk and to tear the wretched thing down and to then bring the offending article home and cast it low at His Majesty’s feet. For this act of great daring, King Henry gave my father one-hundred pounds a year and made him a gentleman of his Privy Chamber. He was also made the King’s Mercer, and His Majesty vouchsafed to dine at our house. Moreover, my father was knighted and so became Sir William Locke.

However, despite this display of unquestioning love and loyalty on my father’s part for his sovereign lord, not always would there be sweetness and light from the King to my father. For Henry proved a most difficult man to whom one could be bound, and those who are bound together are oftimes destined to suffer together. Those two men, for a while made close by fate and friendship, would soon share in such bitterness and darkness that would slowly turn my father’s love for his King into loathing.

*          *          *

Henry's appearance at our country lodge one day was most unexpected. So much so that I had no time to withdraw from my father’s side as the King suddenly burst in upon us. So I quickly hid behind him.

As His Majesty stood before me – he was dressed in the finest pale blue suit of clothes with intricate feather detailing all picked out in silver threads – to mine eyes the King looked like a giant, standing well above my father’s goodly stature. I remember well His Majesty’s complexion being most fair, and thinking how well it set off his bright auburn hair – which he had combed straight and cut short beneath his great plumed cap.

Once suitably greeted by my father, His Majesty slipped off his riding gauntlets to pass a few moments with trivial pleasantries. These were exchanged easily enough until, as I perceived in the King’s sudden change of tone, the most vexing of questions arose.

            ‘Still no sign of a child, Sire?’ said my father, as he enquired after the Queen.

            ‘No!’ The King snapped. ‘Yet I have oftimes reminded the Queen that it has now been over a year since the death of our infant son, and of her duty to conceive for me another! It is alright for you Will!’ The king’s smile hinted of a sneer. ‘You cannot step about your household for tripping over sons!

            ‘To tell you the truth,’ Henry continued, as he leaned in towards my father and confided in little above a whisper, ‘I am glad to be away from her and Hampton Court just now. For the Queen goes about hissing and snarling at me like some she-cat straight from the alley. I swear she shall drive me away altogether before much longer!’

            It was only then that the King espied me in the fold of my father’s clothes.

            ‘God’s teeth!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘What do we have here? A spy?’

Although terrified, I immediately stepped forward and threw myself into a low curtsey, as I had so often practised with my mother. I was too afraid to look up into his eyes. My older brother, Matthew, had teased me once – saying that if the King came to our house, little girls like me should never meet his eyes with mine, for the King’s glare could turn such a small person straight to ashes.

            ‘May I present my daughter, Your Majesty? This is Rose.’

The King reached down with his great hand and lifted up my chin. To my relief, as I did so, my brother’s warnings were proved false. Instead, I found the King to be smiling broadly at me, and with such twinkling eyes that I could not look away from them.

            ‘Good morning my Lady Rose,’ he said, bowing graciously. ‘I am honoured to meet such a fine young gentlewoman.’

I stifled a would-be giggle and politely dipped in slight curtsey again, while still trapped fast in his gaze.’

            ‘Such delightful manners!’ The King beamed. ‘But tell me child, can you answer me a riddle?’

I did not know if I could do so, and smiled nervously at this unexpected proposition.

Without further ado, the King launched into his question.

‘Tell me, my Lady Rose,’ he continued, ‘what is it that a child owes to both her father and her sovereign King?’

As quick as a heartbeat I replied.

            ‘Obedience, Your Majesty!’

With that the King’s eyes widened and, holding fast his belly, he threw his head back in an almighty roar of laughter.

Although startled, I nonetheless managed to keep my poise.

            ‘Well answered, my young lady!’ he exclaimed. ‘God’s teeth, William, but you have schooled the child well!’

Then the King leaned down once more towards me and, gently caressing my pale cheek and looking me in the eyes, made a comment with what I perceived in my innocence to be with all sincerity. ‘Had I not already a wife I would marry you in an instance. One day, Lady Rose, you shall be a fine asset to any future husband.’ Then he glanced at my father before warning, ‘But be certain, Will, to choose one for her who has a wit about him. For this daughter of yours would be wasted upon a dullard!’

With that, His Majesty quickly produced a small leather pouch. Then he loosened the drawstring, carefully tipping something delicate out into the palm of his hand. It was a small string of something milky and glistening.

‘Here, my lady,’ he said, proffering me the jewels. ‘Pearls for a perfect young lady of great wisdom beyond her mere years.’

            ‘Your Majesty…’ instead of grasping at the lure as a young girl might, I instead hesitated and looked towards my father’s face for guidance.

            ‘It’s alright, Rose,’ he said. You may accept the King’s most generous gift.’

Then Henry smiled a most pleasing smile when, again, I politely curtsied as he handed me the string.

            ‘Again, Will, I praise you for your young daughter’s fine upbringing… but then I should expect no less from a child of yours.’

            After that, the King slated his thirst with a large goblet of wine before quickly making his farewell once more.

            ‘Was that the King’s voice I could hear, Will?’ asked my mother, as she came down from her chamber where she had been attending to the baby.

‘Yes it was, Kate,’ Father replied, ‘but he is gone now and on his way back to Cheam.’

‘Was the Queen out riding with him?’

‘No, she was not,’ Father replied cryptically, for I was still present and he would not dare for me to understand his true meaning. ‘And I very much fear that our sovereign might have his foot already in the stirrup of a certain Winchester brood mare and riding her hard…’ To which my mother seemed somewhat alarmed.

            It was impossible, at that time, for me to understand that the ‘Winchester brood mare’ of which he was speaking was a certain young woman who had already in the recent past been ‘boarded’ upon us, on occasion, at the personal request of the King himself. Neither could I have fully comprehended, as a child, how much of a risk my father and certain friends of his had already taken in backing the King over his split with Rome. They had only done so with ardent hope for radical reform of the now Protestant English Church. To consider that Henry might now be casting aside Anne Boleyn in favour of a Papist sympathiser must surely have made my parents blood feel as thought it were freezing in their veins. This, after all the risks and sacrifice taken on my father’s part for ‘the cause’! In the run-up to and execution of the King’s ‘Great Matter,’ and his divorce from Queen Katherine, it must have struck him cold to learn that Henry had since engaged upon an affair with this other woman. And what a dangerous woman she might turn out to be!

            As for the pearls? I have oft wondered why the King had them about his person that day. Were they perhaps a love token for a yet unseen mistress? Or perhaps a trinket for a princess? For one thing I know with certainty, they were never intended for me. Then, my being naught but an innocent child, at first I proudly wore the gift that King Henry had given me that day. But my pride eventually waned as I grew towards my womanhood and began to appreciate the circumstances under which the gift was given. And although I could not bring myself to part with them, neither could I bring myself to wear them any longer. For to me they were to become naught but a pretty string of beads handed down to me by a monster.