Untitled

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General
Ralph Sadler
Spymaster-General
A short biography of a long-forgotten English Tudor hero
[1]
Dedication. For my mother and father both of my sisters, and both of my brothers, for my children, Louis James, Joseph Daniel, Ishtar Talitha, this book is now written, with all my love.
My thanks go also to Juelles, Leo, Cassian, David, Professeur William E. Pobjoy, Professor Norman Russell, Professor Alan Plent, Professor Dai Freke, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, and to all of the historians and their historiographies down the ages, without which this book would just not have been historiographically possible, or been near-so curious.

Chapter Listing
Chapter pp 4-5
Listing
Introduction pp 7-10 Ch 1 pp 12-32 Ch 2 pp 34-38 Ch 3 pp 40-46 Ch 4 pp 48-56 Ch 5 pp 58-68 Ch 6 pp 70-77 Ch 7 pp 79-87 Ch 8 pp 89-98 4 Ralph Sadler : Sutton House Ralph Sadler : the play-within-the-play Ralph Sadler : at the Court of King Henry VIII Ralph Sadler : engaging Ralph Sadler : ascending Henry VIII : Henrician era : part (ii) 1509-1547 The Tudor dynasty : Henry VII : Henrician era : part (i) 1485-1509 Ralph Sadler : Context

Ch 9 pp 100-118 Ch 10 pp 120-128 Ch 11 pp 130-152 Ch 12 pp 154-167 Ch 13 pp 169-176 Ralph Sadler : Scottish Reformation Elizabeth I : Elizabethan era : 1558-1587 Ralph Sadler : Storm-Bringer Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General Ralph Sadler : Principal Secretary
Ch 14 pp 178-187 Ch 15 pp 189-198 Ch 16 pp 200-205 Ch 17 pp 207-218 Ch 18 pp 216-224
Ralph Sadler :
The Moth
Ralph Sadler :
Secrets & Beer
Ralph Sadler :
Hamlet Autolycus
Ralph Sadler :
Circumventing God & the Law
Ralph Sadler :
Secrets & Questions

Ch 19 pp 226-234 Citation & References pp 236-237 n.b. Bibliography etc. Pending 20.07.2011 will be after pp 238 (listed) Ralph Sadler : Lies & Silences
Introduction
Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General : a short-biography of a long-forgotten English Tudor hero.
I love books. Time spent in a library for me is the clock stopped.
What I really enjoy to do is pick my subject : then find the most erudite and up-to-date author on-or-about the topic : then dig-out the most obscure and ancient author on-or-about the topic(s) : and then, of course, read their books, one-after-the-other, in no particular order or preference of author.
Obscurum per obscurum, as the Latin phrase has it, to make the obscure clear from the study of the even more obscure, and that is my motto and my aim in this book, too.
My reading method is to, at first, read in the back just the bibliography-section, say, in one book of my choices, and then do the same thing with the other book; or a stern perusing of the chapter listing by title-and-page number with footnotes bit (when supplied) is sometimes a laugh to me. The Index. I put one book down randomly, and then pick up the other, and choose a random chapter from it to read for no particular reason.
To put both books down, and go out for a short walk in the fresh air instead.

Always to attempt at some point to read each book from cover-to-cover, as designed.
No battery to charge, or any waiting time to kindle, I can just go back at random, anytime. Anyplace. And for me, to own the book as the real cultural-artefact, not merely my having online partshares with potentially billions of others in an occasionally-materialising prostituted and abridged download-ghost from cyberspace, is of major importance to my overall reading requirements. By adopting my humanist-adapted technique, youll find you read all books at least twice; a sensible way to go on. And good for ya! Specially if you hate those books! Or love em! Henry VIII liked books. He was being prepared and trained as a priest when his elder brother died, and that meant Henry would now become king, and he did do, in 1509, aged seventeen.

Henry VIII had discovered the discursive methods of argument in the philosophy of humanism, so he loved getting two copies of the same book, and chucking them at the back of unsuspecting courtiers heads when they werent looking his way. He was an ignorant and violently psychopathic bibliophile chucker of books our Henry VIII, then. Wishing to hear both sides in any debate raised by the books, hed choose two people with already-known differing opinions on the subject, and largely save himself the trouble of reading the books themselves, I suppose, by having both people make a verbal book report to him in person. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey used to warn that once Henry VIII got an idea into the royal head, Henry VIII was like a dog with a bone, and so you should be circumspect in all you said to him, Henry VIII didnt let sleeping dogs lie. Maybe the book-chucking was just Henry VIIIs way of trying to knock some sense into you. Henry VIII often amused himself with his courtiers. His favourite swearword was said to be cunt, and if it really was, he was once noted screaming this, at various people, eighteen separate times before hed even taken his first food of the day. A bad start to the day for any bon vivant, I imagine. The Victorians censored all kinds of swearwords from books. People have always used books and writing to influence readers. Pure propaganda is what an awful lot of it is.
10
Every word I say in this history book I can straightforwardly back up with a reference to the historical record, and those records themselves are almost entirely from the original sixteenth-century manuscripts. Just because I dont put a footnote next to every word doesnt make the words I use and what they say untrue. Ive actually gone totally easy on the footnotes here (for me, anyway) as Im saving most of them for the long-biography of Ralph Sadler that Ive already started writing.
Heres the potted-version, Ill start it on the next page, as Ive had my own two pennorth worth now, and itll give you the idea that this is a history book, its gonna be seriously good reading, not like this whiffly whimsy.
In order to build up the perspective for our picture, to be able to establish the context, let us now investigate some of the history which led up to the Tudor dynasty.
Ralph Sadler worked fifty years helping form the Tudor dynasty, dedicatedly propagating and propagandising its aims and goals.
11
Chapter 1
Ralph Sadler : Context
12
Back just before Henry VIII came to the throne, in 1507, when his father still ruled the English Tudor dynasty which father, Henry VII, had founded on the success of his own 1485 military coup, a man called Ralph Sadler was born. 1
pp. 144 C. T. Onions Oxford Dictionary (in two volumes, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) volume one A-Me (1933). Definition of the word banneret gives at 1b: Sir Ralph Sadleir...last Knyht-Banneret of England (1635) as the earliest recorded use of the term banneret. Sadleyr, whether spelt eyr, eir or ier, would be pronounced in the spoken-English of the day most likely with what today wed consider a Cornish burr, phonetically, then, Sad-le-yurr, rather than as in the French pronunciation of the words hotelier or hier, giving us Sad-lee-yeeerrr, say. Theres probably an endless argument to be had around the vowel-stress and dipthongal use of interchangeable e and a and i and r' in pronunciation, or not, depending whether you wish to sound English or French, all very Hyacinth Bouquet to be picking the bones out of that. I make the case for my choosing to go with the er-spelling throughout the main body of my text based on the findings and advice of our leading British historian, Professor Diarmaid N. J. MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the church at the University of Oxford, St. Cross College, and also the President of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology(2011), from our arranged-meeting at the British Library, and after his close-viewing and analysis of a selection of Ralph Sadler original manuscripts with me, nearer to Christmas, 2010. Fundamentally, there was a transposition of i for y in the spelling of English during the course of the sixteenth-century. Sadleyr (which is how Ralph Sadler spelt it when signing his own signature throughout his life, 1507-87, his open-faced e or his y being mistaken for i, variously), leading eventually in this case to Sadleir. And two of his own sons choose to spell it as Sadlier instead. Sadler with no i or y is a special spelling, apparently more reserved for use only on written public documents by Ralph Sadler himself within his lifetime. Possibly he wished to have an English-sounding surname when dealing with Englishmen, to be French-sounding to Frenchmen, and a choice for (depending on which particular one!) the Scottish person he was dealing with! I deal more with this matter within my main text. Sadleir was probably chosen by Ralphs oldest son, Thomas, (or even by grandson, also a Ralph) as the spelling used for their own surname spelling, and for that on Sir Ralph Sadlers tomb in St. Marys Church at Standon, Hertfordshire. As Professor MacCulloch advised me, spellings of names from the Tudor period, such as that of Sir Thomas Cornwaleys, are adjusted in our own day to spelling without the y as a usual convention, so it is Sir Thomas Cornwallis (Cornwaleys), Ralph Sadler (Sadleyr), Cromwell (Crumwell), Boleyn (Bullen, a y added!), which tend to become over time the commonly-accepted, consensus adjusted-spellings. See also, Diarmaid MacCulloch Suffolk and the Tudors: politics and religion in an English county 1500-1600 (1986) and Diarmaid MacCulloch A Reformation in the balance: power struggles in the diocese of Norwich, 1533-1553 pp 97-114 in Counties and Communities: essays on East Anglian History Eds. C. Rawcliffe et al (1996). There may well be French, German or even Flemish roots to the Sadler family name, and there are connected family branches throughout Europe and the U.S.A. in existence today. Sieur de Liyr (Sieur, Seigneur, Lord of Liyr, to mean Mr. Liyr) would have been a legal form of address in France, and then later, Sadleyr, inherited etymologically as an entire family surname.
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Ralph Sadler is someone curious in history ; he either attempted to self-censor himself from the historical record for at least a part of his life ; or he slipped through the cracks, as history and its books of historiography have come down the ages to us with a real paucity of fully-organised, or even any, Ralph Sadler information. Or maybe both these things happened to him. Most likely : both.
I cant honestly recommend a decent book on Ralph Sadler to you, theres next to nothing accurate written about him in existence, so I studied him for over twenty-odd years, then I wrote this one, which I do recommend to you. These opening comments have merely set the scene to provide the context, and to indicate the vibrant English Renaissance stage upon which Ralph Sadler was about to come even further into his own. From the sheer wealth of material required to be called on, it has proved a nigh-on never-ending, ongoing and intractable-impossibility to maintain a fluent-line of narrative, one strong enough to carry along the mass of detail, in this vastly-complex subject. This short introductory biography you are engaged with was in fact itself a gargantuan task (hence, the long-biography has naturally emerged from it) involving my sifting through millions of particles, smidgins, over-heard brief-snatches, and arcane, mainly obscure and utterly obscurantist pieces of information, spanning roughly the years 1485-1635.
2
I call on many sources from history and literature, and we have to range among differing perspectives, in order to draw down on the final-focus. As such, anything apparently random will explain itself as we go on. I give as many references as I think appropriate, and whenever I use quotation, it is from an original and authentic primary-trace source or
2
* Authors comment: Invaluable in that regard, with wonderful illustrations to doubly-recommend it, Susan Dorans The Tudor Chronicles: 1485-1603 (2008) Quercus Books is a belter.
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secondary-historiography sources, and always in full acknowledgement of these our postmodern times and sensibilities. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft said Winston Churchill. Statecraft was an art, and Ralph Sadler was its English Tudor master.
The Spymaster-General, as I term him, did not appear overnight; his statecraft was learned, and had its own history. Ralph Sadler was an innovator, an original inventor and profound practitioner of his beliefs.
It has taken the past three-years alone, collating the minimum-number of facts, just to make the thesis of Ralph Sadlers having been an English Tudor hero comprehensible for the general reader, as English Tudor history itself had to be re-cast and re-written so as to now include Ralph Sadler. It has been a gaffe of Credit-Crunch, 2008! -type proportions, for history, for historians, for all of us, to have accidently overlooked Ralph Sadler with regard to his importance to both the Tudor era and to our own times. Ralph Sadler was an awesome figure, and if we blend some characters of our own day, we can get an idea of the man.
15

Imagine then, Earl Grosvenor, current Duke of Westminster, and our countrys richest individual landowner; mixed with Lord Peter Mandelson, in his former roles of First Lord and President of the Privy Council and First Secretary of State and Business Secretary; augmented further by the character traits of Ian Flemings creations of M and that of James Bond; then all that amalgamated with the bulldog-spirit of Winston Churchill; the brains of both Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton; include in, too, the prolific writing skills to match the output of both Charles Dickens and P.G. Woodhouse combined, all harnessed to the spirit of the poet found in the intellectually-gargantuan Shakespearian works, probably looking somewhat-like a cross between the actors James Mason and John Hurt, and you will have an innate grasp of who Ralph Sadler quintessentially was : and understand that, above all of these, he was a consummate English Tudor gentleman.
That you have most probably never even heard of the man, is what must be simply be considered as an unfortunate historical-oversight, an oversight now hopefully being put to rights by this short biography. If my own investigations these past two-decades are anything to go by, it is unsurprising that you know little or nothing of the Ralph Sadler, as he largely preferred things that way. I did not dub him Spymaster-General too lightly, and it is an appellation I think you will come to find both well-deserved and highly-appropriate. You can only hope to be ready for his story, and many-beliefs will be confounded along the way. The readiness is all as it says in the Shakespearian play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. 16
When I was first-married, in 1979, I was employed as a private-detective in a Liverpool private-detective agency. One of my specialities was skip-tracing, tracking down people who didnt want to be found. I couldnt tell you how instinctual and purely-lucky you have to be to get anywhere with those particular-lines of inquiry. You have to remain unseen yourself in the process, and establish, by fair means or foul, what the person you are skip-tracing has been doing whilst theyve been missing, where theyve been living, what their disposable assets are, what their modus operandi is, who and what theyre involved with. Then, you face The Boss with what youve discovered; and your secret report had better be completely accurate and confirmable in every detail, no opinions, no lucky-dip, or youll get sacked from being a private-detective.
As the famous-historian Geoffrey R. Elton, warns us : The lucky-dip principle of historical investigation produces only a succession of discarded theories. But sometimes it is necessary to proceed in that way, and no harm is done provided no-one is led to believe that the truth is yet known.
3
Id suppose I am an English Tudor specialist historian, in that I claim to know all the details of the English Tudor era, as far as is humanly-possible for me, and thats it.
3
pp. 253 G. R. Elton England under the Tudors (1955) Methuen & Co.
17

A sort-of a near-simulacrum of what being an historian is really like, I like to suppose. History is a matter of context; the evidence should be presented in order to establish the motive of actions arising and ascribed to any one individual, no opinions, deal with the facts from within the facts. A long study of Ralph Sadler and the details of the English Tudor era led me to the inevitable conclusions I have attempted to demonstrate in these pages. There are so few facts! as the Tudor historian Anthony Salusbury-Brereton laments aloud. I have stumbled upon something that, once you know it, allows you to easily connect to, and discover Ralph Sadler in a Zelig-like but real connection with every major person and event over the course of virtually the entire sixteenth-century. 4 Ralph Sadler fits in with all those stories perfectly : a new discovery in amongst the old ones, found quite unexpectedly.
I hope I have written a fitting epitaph and a certainly long-overdue and highly-deserved encomium to a nearly-forgotten English Tudor hero. I will expound and include some of my own ideas as I adopt the method of short biography to explore our subject.
Zelig is of course the 1983 Woody Allen bogus documentary film of that name, whose charmingly enigmatic title character, Leonard Zelig, fictionally and funnily pops-up internationally everywhere with anyone-whos-anyone, in fact, apparently. The film received nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design in that years Oscars Awards.
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I will, hopefully subtly, insinuate references within my text to some of the Shakespearian works poetry along the way, not just for the great atmosphere they bring to my writings on Tudor times, but for their complete accuracy in regards what I have to say, too. Ralph Sadler was probably born in 1507, and he lived till he was eightyyears old. His father was called Henry Sadler, and probably of Warwickshire yeoman-stock. Henry Sadler was consecutively employed as a well-placed factotum for two different marquis, Sir Edward Belnap (Belknap) and Sir Thomas Grey, who were important members of the English nobility to both Henry VII and to Henry VIII; a marquis being an English nobleman in degree of place between a duke and earl, of course. Ralph Sadler lived for eight decades of a confused and bewildering sixteenth-century, a century filled with ground-breaking historical words and deeds, and throughout these events, unnoticed and invisible, for at least fifty of his adult years he was at centre-stage, usually just out of the direct glare of the spotlight, Zelig-like. Ralph Sadler was a man who during his lifetime knew intimately both kings and queens, in fact, name anybody who was anybody and he seems to have known them, personally. Ralph Sadlers whole raison detre was the distorting of history in the service of power. Natal beliefs of English history in the medieval period were based somewhat in the mythology that Brutus, (grandson of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who had established Rome) was the founder of Great Britain. Brutus later divided the kingdom between his three sons, Kamber being given Wales, Locrinus granted England (Loegria)
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and Albanactus having Scotland (Albany). Troia Nova, or New Troy was the capital, in London. The royal treasury was in Winchester and Merlin was a legendary Welsh-magician, whose red-dragon had overcome the white-dragon of the Saxons, and helped King Arthur rule in peace from mythical Camelot.
The Tudor legacy would be the-effective and permanent union of both Ireland and Scotland with England and Wales, and the Tudor dynasty purpose in seeking such a union, was for the prevention of invasion and threat of war, from foreign influences abroad. Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1541, so Ireland was de facto in the union with England and Wales, but it was to be a hundred and eighteen years from 1485 until Scotland became integrated in 1603, and our country declare itself to be Great Britain, and still there would be no political union until 1707. By the year 1040, a certain Macbeth, the Mormaer of Moray, was busy in Scotland, slaying Duncan, and being killed in his turn by Malcom III of Canmore, in 1057. In his book (based on an ancient-Welsh tome) History of the Kings of Britain, 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth gives us ...the idea of Britain...
5
and the first mention ever of King Leir, with
its cautionary tale of anarchy following division of the kingdom, and the earliest-known spelling form of Leir. The stories of Macbeth and of King Leir were both in some form of commonknowledge by the 1150s. By the time Henry II, the new King Arthur, came as part of the Angevin dynastic-succession to the English throne (reigned 1154-89) medieval French had become the common language
pp. 114. S. Schama A history of Britain (three volumes) (part one) (2000) BBC Worldwide.
20

of the English court, and the Count of Anjous chivalric badge of the Plantagenets, the yellow broom or planta genesta, was firmly established in the heraldic royal coat of arms.
Henry II was known as The Castle-breaker, and was ...a true imperialist, pushing English power,...reducing the king of Scotland into a humiliated vassal... 6. Thomas Becket was Henry IIs ...secretary-general, keeper of the archives and guardian of official knowledge... 7, and in 1158 acting as a sort of ...royal impresario ...organised...an immense, calculated display of Englishness...
8
in Paris, to persuade Louis VII of France to
marry-off his daughter, Margret, to Henrys son. This entertainment and education in Englishness entailed ...250 footmen singing English anthems, followed by English-bred mastiffs and greyhounds, followed by eight carts...bearing Real English Ale, each pulled by teams of five horses, each of the horses had a groom and a monkey...twenty-eight packhorses, the gold and silver plate, the squires and the falconers....
9
After he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket ...surrounded himself with...scholars of the Church- the eruditi...
10
and by 1164 fell out with Henry II, and made for
refuge at the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, a hundred miles south-east of Paris. Here he ...established...what was in effect, a government-in-exile, complete with its own pan-European spy-network, his own letter-smugglers,...and his own tireless department of propaganda... 11.
6 7 8 9 10 11
pp. 125 S. Schama A history of Britain (three volumes) (part one) (2000) BBC Worldwide. ib.id. pp. 127. ib.id. pp. 129. ib.id. pp. 129. ib.id. pp. 132. ib.id. pp. 134.
21

After confiscating his lands, Ranulf de Broc organised and participated in Beckets assassination, at Canterbury Cathedral on 29th December, 1170, and Henry II was finally rid of his turbulent priest. Louis VII sent a legendarily-large ruby ring, the Regale of France, a particular gem-stone that was famous already throughout Europe and reputedly filled with powerful and mysticalforces, as a personally-gifted dedicatory veneration to the tomb of Becket in 1179.
In 1174, William I of Scotland was humiliated at the Treaty of Alnwick, and ...from it derived the perennial claims of the Plantagenets that they were...the feudal suzerains of the Scots, an assertion that would be made with much blood and misery for all concerned...
12
Yet, ...by granting towns charters of liberties.., the Angevins established the idea of such charters as contracts made between the king and his subjects... Carta, ...the law..was an independent power in its own right...
13
and gave rise to Magna The Provisions of the
14
Council of Oxford in 1258 caused ...the transfer of sovereign powers from the Crown to a standing committee elected by the Barons and the Church.
15
Between 1200 and 1300, a new, nationally-based economy was being forged by the sheepranching Cistercians, with their super-flocks at places such as Melrose Abbey in Scotland, Valle Crucis Abbey in Wales, and Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire. Henry III reigned from 1216-1272, and stabilised the economy with a properly-assayed sovereign-type new high-percentage of purity gold coinage.
12 13 14 15
pp. 148. S. Schama A history of Britain (three volumes) (part one) (2000) BBC Worldwide. ib.id. pp. 162. ib.id. pp. 162. ib.id. pp. 177.
22

Henry III also had a secret-service, the so-called Black Angevins, and dubbed the assassins of the same his hawks.
Scotlands southernmost port, Berwick-upon-Tweed, exported hides and wool and was populated by local artisans, foreign merchants and bankers, ...especially the Hansa Germans and the ubiquitous Flemish...
16
Edward I, Hammer of the Scots, brought supply ships up the Tweed and the Clyde to make war, then massacred 11,000 men at Berwick, and after 1295 the border between Scotland and England was always north of the town. Hugh Cressingham and William de Warenne were then appointed Scottish colonial administrators, and although ...Warenne (who disliked the Scottish weather enough to stay, for the most part, south of the border on his estates in Yorkshire)...
17
showed sound vision, it
was not enough to save him from the Scottish-wrath of William Wallace, who defeated them subsequently in battle at Stirling Bridge in August, 1297, killing both, and having Cressinghams skin flayed and turned into a carriage-belt for his own broadsword.
In 1347, men and women sporting wings and dressed as swans and dragons for the Christmas revels at Guilford, and the Robin Hood stories began to become well-known and enter the traditions of English storytelling.
16 17
ib.id. pp. 188. ib.id. pp. 205.
23

The stories of Macbeth, King Leir and Robin Hood were all common knowledge in the time of the proto-Renaissance king, Richard II. John Wycliff and his Lollards had begun on translating the Latin bible into English. In 1390, a three-day tournament held at Smithfield... (with viewing-stands built by the royal Clerk of Works, Geoffrey Chaucer) was designed as an Allegory-of-Harmony...
18
Ranulf was usually anglicised as Ranulph or as Ralph, as well as sometimes being interchanged with its variant Rafe, as we will see later in the 1090 case of Sir Rafe de Brer, the first of the Breretons, and of his descendants there was produced a Sir Ralph Rafe Brereton, who died in 1299.
19
The Breretons have a most unusual family-tree and from Sir Rafe de Brer in 1090, to the present-day, they trace at least thirty-one generations unbroken, and appear most commonly in their connections to royalty and the government of this country. 20 A more-famous relative was to die alongside Anne Boleyn. Based in the Teutonic tradition, Ranulf (Ranulph, Ralph, Rafe) is taken as meaning the warrior who falls on his enemy with the onrush of a wolf, unstoppably unstoppable, like a cascading-waterfall. Ralph is taken as meaning the powerful wolf-counsellor. In the Latin root, it is Autolycus.
18 19 20
ib.id. pp. 257. x/cff Anthony Salusbury-Brereton Anciente Whispers (1999) Brereton Press. ib. id. x/cff
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How apt it would also prove to be for Ralph Sadlers most-unprecedented and mostremarkable case. An unusual name. When you understand Ralph Sadlers central involvement in the propagandistic development of Tudor dynastic-policies, policies which were designed in order to create an absolute
monarch totalitarian-regime, but one that appeared to be roughly-sketched in the guise of perhaps developing into and offering some prospect of a comparative, potentially liberal democracy sometime soon, Ralph Sadler, at first-appearance, may seem like a lifelong, highpowered, career-minded civil servant; but it is his magisterial-grip over the court of publicopinion, Parliamentary opinion, and his control of the actual royal court and its various occupants, which are what stand out clearly on a closer-examination. Richard II was very much an early Renaissance prince in the European mode : someone who prized civility and the patronage of the arts as much as feats of arms and the hunt 1385, he failed to decisively defeat Scotland.
21
but in
Richard II is shown in the Shakespearian works as ...feckless, wilful and petulant...
22
and
the play Richard II is considered as a ...haunting portrait of a man whose inner-resolve crumbled...strikingly close to the mark...
23
21
pp. 256 S. Schama A history of Britain (three volumes) (part one) (2000) BBC Worldwide. pp. 255 S. Schama A history of Britain (three volumes) (part one) (2000) BBC Worldwide. ib.id. pp. 262.
22
23
25

In the famous patriotic demi-paradise speech in Richard II made by a dying John O Gaunt, [act (ii), scene (i)] this paean to England is notable as ...a hymn to insularity...it was the land that was sceptred and blessed, not the person of the monarch... 24. The Shakespearian play goes on to depict Richard, paralysed by fatalism...as he sees (the future Henry IV) Bolingbrokes army approach Flint Castle: Now I can see my end. But this resignation was, in fact, a convenient piece of Lancastrian-Tudor propaganda, neatly disposing of the embarrassment of a deposition by claiming that Richard had resigned the throne rather than having it snatched from his grip. Only when the throne was vacant...did he (Henry IV)...volunteer his services.
25
Richard II in fact was violently deposed, and forced to abdicate in 1399, and then to become Sir Richard of Bordeaux, only to then die a year later. Parliament heard of his Renunciation of the throne, and then they approved Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford and Duke of Lancaster, to be the new king, as their King Henry IV, by loudly-cheering him to the rafters. Henry IV was ...an insomniac, deeply troubled by a bad conscience... Shakespearian depiction, and had a disturbed and unstable reign.
27 26
very like the
Accordingly, many
Shakespearian characters find the chaos and anarchy of the War of the Roses...was...the poisoned fruit of Bolingbrokes coup detat 28
24 25 26 27 28
ib.id. pp. ib.id. pp. ib.id. pp. ib.id. pp. ib.id. pp.
258. 264. (my brackets) 264. 265. 266.
26

In Wales, the common laws of Hywel Dada had been codified and used since the tenth century.
By 1400, Owain Glyndwr of Glendyyffvrddywyy was supported by the Tudors, in a bid for an independent-Wales. He would become the Owen Glendower of the Shakespearian plays. The Tudors were supporters of the princes of Gwynedd, acting as councillors, servants, diplomats and soldiers for them. By 1403, Henry IV had defeated Glyndwr, and then killed Henry Harry Hotspur, the Earl of Northumberlands son, at the Battle of Shrewsbury. In the Shakespearian plays of Henry IV, guns and armaments feature, and as 1403 was considered too early a date for the use of such weapons, the plays are considered to have been a commentary relating to the Rising of the Northern Earls of 1569. Recent archaeological finds of munitions on early English battlefields seem to put the whole matter open to question, as we shall soon see.
Henry V has his streak of native pugilism
29
caught in his Shakespearian portrait as Prince
Hal, and with his defeat of France enabling a heavy tax-levy, ...evidently made the political community confident that the kings business was also the countrys business.
30
Henry V died of dysentery, aged thirty-five. His widow, Catherine de Valois, then married Owen ap Maredudd ap Tudur, a man of solid Welsh stock. Tudur would become anglicised as Tudor.
29 30
ib.id. pp. 266. ib.id. pp. 265.
27

Their union ...exemplifies the love story of the queen and the pauper...a central theme of European romantic literature.
31
Catherine and Owen had three sons, Edmund, Jasper
(Jaspur) and Owen, reflecting in their choice of names their offsprings English, French and Welsh heritage. Sir John Falstof, a war veteran from the times of Henry V, presided-over his own personal East Anglian empire from his base at Caistor Castle.
Henry VI, the saintly fool felt the force of the Peasants Rebellion in 1450. During the fifteenth-century, the throne of England was in turmoil; the War of the Roses raged between the White Roses of the Yorkists and the Red Roses of the Lancastrians. Henry VII (Tudor Lancastrian) emerged as the eventual victor, and so did the opportunity to secure national peace. To make certain people couldnt rally behind a flag, flags would be banned; the usage of heraldry and of liveries suppressed. Civil war had to be stopped; the Tudor dynasty would be overtly-seen to lead society in English traditions , and their propagandamachine would guarantee it. By 1452, Henry VI was so without supporters to his throne that he ennobled his halfbrothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, raising them from ordinary citizens to be above all existing-nobility, as the Earl of Richmond and the Earl of Pembroke, which began the multifarious troubles over flags, heraldry and the use of liveried men. Entertainments were typical by the fifteenth-century, and during Henry VII the Kings Progress was invented, so that by staying every year at the houses of different leading nobles, the monarchy could be seen in public and simultaneously deprive nobles of a great deal of money, as they would have to pay for and organise the entertainments, and provide
31
pp.1. R.A. Griffith, R.S.Thomas The making of the Tudor dynasty (1985) Sutton Publishing.
28

for the house to entertain in. Households would be sumptuously arrayed and accommodation readied for the royal retinue.
The play as performed before a ruler, to broach matters hard to approach directly, reached a peak under the medieval Medici-period courts. As theatre and theatrical-type productions (pageants, coronations, processions and the like) grew and were part of court life, the courtier and gentleman became one and the same; a patron of the arts. This mirrored the Greek and Roman cultures that had gone before, and, as education in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries grew, the learning all about, the remembrance of, and commemoration in these ancient cultures was to the fore throughout Europe. Not that it was an unknown-thing : When Harold I (c.1012/1016-1040) visited Rome for a year, he brought back the imperialpurple to the succession of the English throne. From our own day: The ancient Greeks and Romans have given us many of the tools with which we still understand the world, from democracy to dictatorship, philosophy to pornography.
33 32
Playwriting, poetry, art and music, public propaganda, are all on that list, but to the Greeks, the concept of freedom was the quintessential thing that guaranteed an individuals humanity. The Greek culture that preceded them was adored by the Romans.
32 33
Simon Schama. In his BBC 4 television series, 2009. (my brackets) Cambridge historian Mary Beard. Interviewed in The Guardian newspaper, 21.3.2009. Review section, Lives and letters, article titled Exit Strategies.
29

In 14 c.e. the first Roman emperor, Augustus, is said to have called his family and friends to him as he was dying, and asked them if he had ...played his part well in the comedy of life ? . He then used a quotation from the Greek-playwright, Menander: Since the play has been so good,
Clap your hands and all of you dismiss us with applause! Joking with friends, never once losing control, or his distinctive, individual character; Augustus then clasped his wife, Livia, to him, and died. Dying is the easy part; its the comedy thats hard he might well have added. Or, at least his propagandists and propaganda machine might have, for the rumour and outright invention
34
of this story are Socratic, philosophical, convenient and the most royal
of propaganda, and the Greek and Roman traditions provide an obvious kind-of archetype for the Tudor propagandists.
In the 1452-53 hospicium, or household accounts of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham and Lord Chief Constable of England, we see provision made for actors who provided the entertainment during the Christmas festivities. 35 The Duke had a main abode at Maxstoke Castle, Warwickshire, and a country house retreat at Writtle Manor, Essex. This would be a sophisticated gentleman, as we would understand it. Highly-thought of in the community, the Dukes household spoke a variety of languages
34 35
ib.id. The Buckingham-Roll household account book, Michaelmas, 1452-53, compiled by William Wistowe, treasurer to the household of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. From the extant, original twelve-foot long manuscript parchment roll, written on both sides, in Latin. Staffordshire Record Office D/641/1/3/4. * Authors comment: For further details, and to save overly-heavy wear on the original, see Camden Miscellany XXVIII, Camden Fourth Series, volume 29, (1984) Royal Historical Society ; The Account of the Great Household of Humphrey, First Duke of Buckingham, for the year 1452-53, pp.8 ; chapter I; Edited by Mary Harris, with an introduction by J.M. Thurgood.
30

amongst them, such as French, Italian and German. There were jesters, mummers, masquers, and plays were performed. In a very interesting entry of those very same household accounts, listed under Solicito Creditoribus, we see: Johanni Sadeler de Whitacr pro avenna (xs).,..Henricio Shakespere pro facture farine avene (viiijd).,..
36
Payments to a John Sadler of Over Whiteacre , Warwickshire, and to a Henry Shakespeare, whos right next to him! Their lord, the Duke, eventually rebelled against the Plantagenet king, de facto in support of the Tudors. A more recent discovery to my research, it is a current line-of-inquiry that these two men could appear to be the proper paternal grandfather of Ralph Sadler and the paternal greatgreat grandfather of William Shakespeare, respectively, and that could mean that both the Sadler and the Shakespeare families were of traditional Warwickshire-yeomanry stock from since before the time of Henry VII. Such a potentially huge discussion will not have needs to detain us here right now. This would be my very own lucky-dip moment then, so I bear in mind what G.R. Elton warned of. The truth is yet to be known.
36
pp.29. ib.id. (my brackets)
31
By 1456, Jasper Tudor was Henry VIs closest advisor. Jaspers brother, Edmund Tudor married a descendant of an illegitimate-line of the Lancastrians, Margret Beaufort, in 1455, and their only son was Henry Tudor, born in January, 1457, and, with his Plantagenet-bloodline from his mother, later to be crowned as Henry VII, after his victory on Bosworth Field. Unfortunately, Edmund never met his son Henry. Edmund Tudor had died in November, 1456, shortly after being released from imprisonment by William Herbert, in Carmarthen Castles damp-dungeons, where he had become ill. Edward IV deposed Henry VI in battle at Mortimers Cross, and was acclaimed king on 4th March, 1461.
These struggles were a lot later on to be called as the War of the Roses, coined as such by author Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth-century, in fact, but they in sum were the fight over how the divine-right of kings would match itself against any one individuals personal willto-power, and strove to define through this most-divisive civil-war if the throne belonged to either the white rose of Plantagenet Yorkshire, or to the red rose of the Lancastrian Tudors. The Lancastrians would eventually win, but then Henry Tudor anyway married Elizabeth of York, and the roses were as one-rose, the civil-war of the War of the Roses abated, and with the accession of their son as Henry VIII, subsided beneath the waves. On 29th March, 1461, a heavy defeat was inflicted by Edward IV on the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton, near Leeds, in Britains bloodiest-ever mainland battle. 32

Two bullets have been found on the site by archaeologists, after years of digging. Yet it is this that provides the conundrum, setting back the use of small arms in English battles, and making it much more likely that the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 did employ guns; which would then mean that the account in the Shakespearian plays of Henry IV would be factual. And totally beg the question as to how the author knew such a thing, as it would have been a state secret. Not a secret, of course, to those who were present at the battle, or shot. Jasper Tudor fled with Henry VI to Scotland, then the West Country, Brittany, having endured the spectacle of the execution of his then aged father, Owen ap Maredudd ap Tudur, grandfather to Henry VII. Sir William Herbert took Jasper Tudors lands in 1462, then also his title, of Earl of Pembroke, in 1468. The young Henry Tudor was brought up for the next decade by William Herberts wife, Anne Devereux, at Raglan Castle. He was provided with Edward Hasley and Andrew Scot, both Oxford graduates, as his personal tutors. Sir Hugh Johns of Gower instructed him in military matters, and his commemorative brass can still be seen in St. Marys Church, Swansea.
At the Battle of Edgecote, 1469, Warwick defeated Edward IV, and William Herbert paid a heavy price for his earlier involvement in the death of Edmund Tudor, when he and his brother, Richard, were both captured and executed. Henry Tudor was taken to safety at Weobley, Herefordshire, and then by Sir Richard Corbet to Hereford Castle, and soon-enough reunited with his uncle Jasper. The 6 th of October, 1470 saw Henry VI restored to his throne, by Warwick.
33

The Battle of Barnet on 14 th of April, 1471, was the end of Warwick, The King-maker. On the 4th of May, the Battle of Tewksbury saw Henry VI captured, and he died in the Tower of London on the 21st of May, 1471. After his fathers execution at the Battle of Edgecote, William Herbert II was only granted the title of Earl of Huntingdon, not of Pembroke, by Edward IV. Robin Hood was now in the common-knowledge, and in the story of the by-now traditional folk-tale, Robin Hood was also the Earl of Huntingdon, and the insult to William Herbert II should be reckoned to be intended. His brother, Walter Herbert would be a force to reckon with in the coming embroilments. Richard III was a puritan martinet
37
, who deposed Edward V in June 1483, after Edward IVs
death that April, and ensured continuation of the policy that kept Jasper and his nephew, Henry Tudor, in the exile of Brittany and France, from 1471 until 1485. Richard III was ...the first king to use character assassination as a means...of moulding popular opinion.
38
The work of a propagandist is to make things powerful with meaning, using the quick and the dead as they see fit. For every work of propaganda there may be one of anti-propaganda.
These propagandistic and cultural-features were to culminate in the pursuit of profit and the wielding of war, as the totality of political-efforts from king and government, in foreign and domestic policy, a state of affairs largely unchanged to this day.
37 38
pp. 266. S. Schama A history of Britain (three volumes) (part one) (2000) BBC Worldwide. Charles Ross Richard III (1981).
34

In a royal proclamation of 23rd October, 1483, Richard III ...stressed the personal immorality (adultery) of the Marquess of Dorset (Thomas Grey) ...
39
Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham and Lord Chief Constable of England, lord to John Sadlier of Over Whiteacre and to Henry Shakespeare, then rebelled. He was betrayed by a supposedfriend, Ralph Bannaster
40
and taken to Salisbury by Sir James Tyrell, where he was executed
in the public market-square by Richard III, on 2nd November, 1483. (Tyrell, at a later-date, admitted to personal responsibility for the murders of the Princes in the Tower). Its an unusual name, Ralph, even to our own day. Ralph Bannaster was rewarded with the Dukes house of Writtle Manor, in Kent. Henry Staffords widow, Katherine Wydeville, ended up married to Jasper Tudor after Bosworth Field. Henry VII needed to demonize Richard III to sanctify his own claim to the throne, and first port of call in the Lancastrian-Tudor propaganda war were the supposed-murders of Edward V and his brother, the Princes in the Tower, with emphasis on an imagined deformity in Richard of a hunch-back and allegations of interest in witchcraft, to complete the character assassination; powerful propaganda images that persist in the popular imagination to this day.
39
pp.100. R.A. Griffiths, R.S. Thomas The making of the Tudor Dynasty (1985) Sutton Publishing. (my brackets) 40 ib. id. pp.99. The authors make a note for us to not mistakenly think Ralph Bannaster was called Humphrey!
35

On 6th December, 1484, Henry Tudor, via the extensive spy-network he commanded with his uncle Jasper, issued from exile in Brittany a propaganda-letter, distributed in Wales, calling for military support and assistance in overthrowing Richard III. Richard responded on the 7th of December with his own royal proclamation against Henry Tudor and the rebels, continuing his own ...skilful propaganda for domestic and overseas consumption .
41
Chapter 2
41
ib. id. pp. 121.
36
The Tudor dynasty
Henry VII : 1485-1509 Henrician era : part (i)
37

On 7th August, 1485, Henry Tudor, with his uncle Jasper and his English supporters from exile, gathered a force of between 4,000-4,500 men, including among them a thousand Scottish troops commanded by Sir Alexander Bruce of Earlshall and John of Haddington, with the rest of the men being largely French and Welsh mercenaries, and sailed for England, landing at Mill Bay, near St. Annes Head in Milford Haven, South Pembrokeshire, Wales. The Ballad of Lady Bessye (c.1495) and ...the world of spies which it recreates...
42
was
popular soon after Henry VIIs Battle of Bosworth Field 1485 victory, and it tells the tale of how Lady Bessye, Elizabeth of York, Henry Tudors future wife (in actual fact, it should have been more about her mother, Margret Beaufort) conspired with Lord Thomas Stanley, to place Henry Tudor on the throne, and hed become Henry VII, and she his queen. Marching towards North Wales and Cheshire, another Stanley-family ballad, Bosworth Field, says when Sir William Stanley met up with Henry and Jasper Tudor on 20th August at Lichfield, in the joyful exuberance some of the men fired-off guns to cheer the country. The Bosworth Field song also says that Richard III, with his 10,000 men, was on Ambion Hill, above Redmoor Plain (Market Bosworth is the nearest town) in Leicestershire, when battle against Henry and Jasper Tudors 5,000-strong force was joined on 22nd August. Richard had with him ...chained together 140 cannons called serpentines to form a phalanx of artillery in support of his vanguard; a similar number of great bombards were trundled to the battlefield; and his troops had handguns or arquebuses. On Henrys side, the artillery provided by the French king had presumably been carried through Wales and the West Midlands and it may have been supplemented by the guns fired at Lichfield.
43
Following recent archaeological finds announced in 2009, of ammunition in the form of various styles for various types of rifle (harquebuse) and pistol-type bullets, along with cannonballs, the actual site of the Battle of
42 43
pp. 115 R.A. Griffiths, R.S. Thomas The making of the Tudor Dynasty (1985) Sutton Publishing. ib. id. pp. 160.
38
Bosworth Field looks set to somewhat re-write the early-history of munitions usage in medieval combat. The site of the finds, announced in 2010, centre on a location between the villages of Dadlington, Shenton, Upton and Stoke Golding, and has remained unknown since it was fought over five hundred years ago.
44
What this find also does is allow us to give ever-
more credence to the facts as they are listed in the two Stanley-family ballads, even though the oldest version of them we have is in a manuscript from c.1600. The previous, internationally-recognised holder of the title for first combat usage of munitions on a large-scale was a place called Pinkie Cleugh, and a battle ahead of us, one in which Ralph Sadler was the leading participant. That took place some sixty-odd years after Bosworth Field, and is (currently) considered the worlds first modern swords-versus-guns encounter, so it gives us a clear indication that, even today, our understanding of the whole period of the Tudor dynasty is nebulous and uncertain, in that potentially epoch-changing firearms are already in use (maybe as early as 1403), yet we know little or nothing about them. With the Lancastrians already joined with some of Lord Thomas Stanleys men, Sir John Savage of Cheshire among them, the crucial turning point of the battle famously comes with the recounting in the ballad Bosworth Field of how, as Richard III rode out from his troops and met Henry and Jasper Tudor head-on, and as the balance of the fight could have gone either way, Sir William Stanley rode in with 3,000 men, and slaughtered the fourteenthPlantagenet king, Richard III, the last English-born king to die in battle. As Richard was hacked down, his standard-bearer, Sir Philip Thriball ...still clung to the standard when his legs were hewn-off...
45
44 45
pp. 3 Guardian newspaper 29.10.2009. pp. 163 R.A. Griffiths, R.S. Thomas The making of the Tudor Dynasty (1985) Sutton Publishing.
39

The bearing of flags in battle would also be something Ralph Sadlier would come to know first-hand, in his job as a knight-banneret, and being hacked and hewn-at as being the kind of fate he might expect to encounter, as its being part of the job, an occupational-hazard.
In just two hours, the Battle of Bosworth Field was all over. With only perhaps somewhere between four hundred and a thousand killed between both sides, possibly Henry VII had better guns from Europe with him, and it may have been efficient guns and not the propaganda of heroic chivalry that made the final-difference, and led to a quick-defeat of Richard III. The Tudor dynasty had begun. A noble, Arthurian-knights-style chivalric victory was finer-propaganda than having to admit to the use of new-fangled technology ; guns would be seen as the wrong kind of witchcraft, and so be kept top-secret. Nearby Garbrodys Hill was the place where, after the battle, supporters of Henry Tudor are supposed to have found Richards 120,000
46
crown of state, hidden in a thorn-bush; the site
was then renamed, Crown Hill in commemoration, and the crown-in-a-thorn-bush image soon began to appear on the Tudor heraldic escutcheons. Richards hacked-about body was unceremoniously treated, humiliatingly slung over the back of a horse after having being stripped naked and seriously physically-abused, even after death. Facts largely kept back from most of the contemporaneous accounts.
46
Incredibly, the crown was worth around 120 million in an equivalent amount of todays money. Henry VIIs accountants would be cock-a-hoop!
40

Jasper Tudor bore the crown at Henrys coronation, and was made Duke of Bedford and Earl of Pembroke once again, a wolf and a dragon being the supporters to the ducal shield coatof-arms of his Great Seal, as Lord of Abergavenny, which survives. 47 He had striven against the odds for thirty years, and was finally vindicated as his nephew became Henry VII, and simultaneously brought Wales into its final and permanent peaceful unification with England.
Jasper Tudor died peacefully ten years later, in 1495. The word football had entered the English language in 1486. The ballads of Bosworth Field and the Ballad of Lady Bessye are sometimes claimed as sources in the history plays of the Shakespearian works. They mix words of High or Court French in with the vernacular. After the birth of Henry VIIs first son, Arthur, there were a company of actors, the Princes Players, who were required to contribute to the amusements of the court. In the kings household accounts for 1492-1509, numerous items are found relating to theatrical amusements. Henry VII made a royal progress to Sir John Montgomerys home, Faulkborne Hall, in 1489; but as households began vying between each other to put the best shows on, Henry saw it as divisive and potentially faction-making. In 1498, Henry VII made a royal progress to see John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, at Castle Headingham, Essex. After being escorted through a be-liveried guard-of-honour, Henry politely reminded him that the use of uniformed-livery was forbidden, and made him pay a fine of 10,000.
47
pp. 180. R.A. Griffiths, R.S. Thomas The making of the Tudor Dynasty (1985) Sutton Publishing. x/cf Great Seal illustration no.74, courtesy Badminton Estate Office and National Library of Wales.
41

Henry VII was preoccupied with the details of his ancestry
48
and had a deep interest in his

49
family and ...spared no opportunity to laud its royal ancestry and ancient qualities' historian Bernard Andre emphasised the red dragon of
Court
legendary Welsh warrior-king
Cadwaladar in his Memoir, and provided an initial platform for Lancastrian-Tudor written propaganda which followed. As early as 1501, plans for colonisation of new-found lands were being advanced. Thomas Mores Utopia later to be the first literary work to reflect the impact of the New World discoveries on the English Tudor mindset.
In 1502, Polydore Vergil came to the court of Henry VII as the deputy for the Papal Collectorship of Revenue. By 1506, he had the kings backing, as the new court historian, in beginning a large-scale English History, and adding a more up-to-date academic styling to the Lancastrian-Tudor propaganda machine. Polydores book is full and accurate
50
and was to start with the
traditional myth of Brutus founding England, and end at the reign of Henry VII. Ralph Sadler was born the next year, in 1507, five hundred and four years ago. He was of potentially of good Warwickshire-yeoman stock from of his father, Henry Sadler, who had worked for the unfortunate rebel, Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset.
48 49 50
ib. id. pp. 167. ib. id. pp. 183. ib. id. pp. 114.
42

Henry VII had controlled domestic unrest and waged foreign wars as a warrior-king, and he was commemorated as just-such, with a knight, dressed in Henry VIIs personal armour, riding through the middle of Westminster Abbey at the height of his 1509 funeral rites; to formally-divest the armour in pieces, one-by-one, onto the High Altar. Such theatricality was to be the watch-word in the reign of his second son and only surviving-heir, Henry VIII. With Henry VIIs death in 1509, Polydore Vergil would finish his first draft only after Flodden Field in 1513; just as Sir Thomas More was beginning the writing of his own History of Richard III, and they were meeting together at the Doctors Commons, a sort of pseudoprivate gentlemans dining-club in that era, meant for serious discussion and formulations concerning the Church in England and the laws applicable to Church business in the state. In Polydore Vergil we can see a mentor to Sir Thomas Mores becoming known as the Father of English History. Before Henry VIIs death in 1509, the pageantry and sophistry at court had become muted. Chapter 3
Henry VIII : 1509-1547 Henrician era : part (ii)
43
At Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragons joint coronation in 1509, they ate a feast more honourable than that of the Great Caesar(and we note here the direct propagandistic comparison to the Roman emperors) and his new wife Catherine, his deceased elder brother Arthurs widow, performed an exhibition of her homelands Spanish dancing. The mythical Court of King Arthur at Camelot, with its chivalry and pageantry, was how Henry VIII envisaged his own royal court to be. Only seventeen years old when he came to power, at that years Christmas celebrations in 1509, Henry VIII appeared, garbed as a strange knight and tilted with vigour and grace. Henry VIII was also keen on history, and the gourmandising lifestyle of his blood-relative, Edward IV, as well as being smitten with 44

Henry III, whose earlier mediaeval court was truly-Arthurian; more importantly, Henry III had minted his own gold coins, just as Henry VII had also done during his reign. The sovereign gold-coinage, originally begun by Henry III, but fallen into disuse, had been resurrected and copied by Henry VII, and his newly-assayed pure gold nobles and angels coinage was stabilising the English economy by the time Henry VIII succeeded to the throne. In 1512, Ralph Sadler was aged five years-old, Henry VII had been dead three-years, and the new monarch, King Henry VIII, cavorted : ...on the day of the Epiphany at night the King, with eleven others, were disguised after the manner of Italy called a mask,
51
a thing not seen before in England.
52
This was the first of
many masques that Henry VIII would personally perform in. A vital component to the masque was the ...anti-masque, a humorous parody of the more solemn main show.
53
The
formal masque itself is presented in parody during the action in the Shakespearian play, Hamlet, as the play-within-the-play which entertains the fictional Elsinorian court,
consequently functioning itself as an anti-masque to, and of, Hamlet, but with the usuallyexpected anti-masque humour removed. The parody (as referential to old-style playing of masques), the comedy, the satire, the tragedy, all of these are in full-bloom and exemplified in Hamlet,. Henry VIII adored all things Italian. His fencing-school was based on Italian stylings ; as is the fencing-match in the Shakespearian play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which takes place between Hamlet and Laertes.
51 52 53
* Authors comment: Modern spelling masque, and referred to as such by me from now on. pp. 213. A. L. Rowse The Elizabethan Renaissance: the life of society (1971) Sphere Books. pp.161. T. F. Thiselton-Dyer Royalty in all Ages (1903) John C. Nimmo Ltd.
45

As he grew up, Ralph Sadler would have trained at Henry VIIIs Italian fencing-school. There had been a darker side to Henry III; his deployment of a so-called Black Angevin spying-network. It involved anonymity, ciphers, secret letters, double-agents, assassins and assassinations, for domestic and foreign, religious and political purposes. These secret-service assassins were known to Henry III as his hawks. Copying this secret-service of Henry III featured prominently in Henry VIIIs worldview. As the king, Henry VIII now had privileged access to the bokes de secretis, comprising of the White Books, governmental top-secrets, for theirs and the monarchs eyes only; and also the Red Books and Blue Books, the secret account-books of state-business, each kept in their individual security lock-fitted bagge de secretis. Red, white and blue: the colours of the eventual Union-Jack flag.
The gentlemanization of Great Britain was to be the methodology of the Tudor propaganda on which everything would hinge.
We have grown used to the image of the ruthless, powerful, cultured Renaissance Man.
46

In the English Tudor era of the true warrior-poet, when all was still fresh, new and unknown, the unsung and unseen-hero was Ralph Sadler ; he fought for his country simultaneously with his sword and with his pen-and-paper, using his wits as a shield, and he would prove to be the very-first, and the very-last, of his kind. Henry VIIs Henrician era lasted from 1485-1509. Henry VIIs son Henry VIIIs Henrician era lasted from 1509-47. Henry VIIIs son Edward VIs Edwardian era lasted from 1547-53. Henry VIIIs great-niece, Jane Grey, was the Nine-day Queen from 10th to 19th July, 1553. Henry VIIIs daughter Mary Is Marian era lasted from 1553-58. Henry VIIIs daughter Elizabeth Is Elizabethan era lasted from 1558-1603. Ralph Sadler was alive under all of these reigns, living for eight decades out of the total one hundred and eighteen-year Tudor dynasty. Ralph Sadler was hugely influential for over fifty of those years within the political and economic structure of the Tudor dynasty; for around the final fifteen years of the Henry VIII Henrician era, the other thirty-five years are then spread out over the Edwardian, Marian and Elizabethan eras. For over fifty-years, between 1532-1587, Ralph Sadler ruled the Tudor dynastys roost, as their key ambassador to Scotland, the foremost diplomat and elder-statesman of the realm, and was, always, a strictly low-key, discreet behind the scenes-type of operator.
47
The Tudor dynasty ends with Henry VIIs grand-daughter, Elizabeth I, in 1603. Ralph Sadler was her mentor.
The Scottish-king James VI took the throne next, crowned also as James I of England. He began the Stuart dynasty, and reigned from 1603 to 1625. His was the Jacobean era. Ralph Sadler was his mentor. How-exactly the up until that point mortal enemies of England and Scotland were to be reconciled in James VI, and the hearts and minds of those in Albion and Hibernia won over, to become the one-people of Great Britain, is central to Ralph Sadlers story. Thomas Cromwells household was where Ralph Sadler was probably educated; possibly from as early as the age of six, in 1513, or beginning when he was fourteen, in 1521. The former date could make sense if father Henry Sadler went off to fight in France that year at the Battle of the Spurs and left his son(s) with Thomas Cromwell, which living-arrangement then stuck, and Ralph would have had decades living as part of Cromwells household; the latter date would fit to all concerned and to everyone else in the upper-echelons of society as having been involved the year just prior in The Field of the Cloth-of-Gold celebration in France, and would still give Ralph Sadler five years training time with Cromwell before his first known individual-appearance in the record, working as an attorney on property cases.
48
In 1520, at the age of thirteen, Ralph Sadler would have been cognizant of the Landsknechts mercenary force, who were armed with some of the worlds first accurateshooting rifles, when they accompanied on an informal state visit to England the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, whose purpose really was to attempt to collude with Henry VIII behind French backs. The Landsknechts were back again in Charles Vs second informal state visit of 1522, and their mere presence in London terrified the parochial Cockney folk, who stood amazed that such men existed who could drink so much beer whilst carrying seriously loaded guns. The London City Aldermen were only terrified the city would be burnt to the ground if the beer ran out! The Landsknechts mercenary forces were to become an integral part of Ralph Sadlers life, it would be him who would contract with them again and again throughout the Tudor period ;for and on behalf of England. The pivotal role his own father was playing at Cardinal Wolseys amazing 1520 foreign fiesta, The Field of the Cloth-of-Gold, must also have been in focus for Ralph Sadler. This Field of the Cloth-of-Gold celebration was in fact just a huge sop to the idiocy and egos of Henry VIII and of Francis I of France, all accommodated by Wolseys delusions of grandeur in imagining himself as an individual major European power-broker. (Wolsey would in later years unsuccessfully try to bribe his way into being elected as Pope.) The Field of the Cloth-of-Gold was held in a barren and remote valley situated between Ardre (Camp, to the English) and Guisnes in June of that year, a wild, truly-epic and fauxArthurian shindig that very nearly bankrupted Henry VIII, costing over a third of the countrys annual income just to stage.
49

Henry Sadler had helped supply buckram coverings and artificing skills to the literally minicity that was built on a shallow swamp, and if Ralph accompanied him there, he may, like Henry VIII, have seen a young girl his own age, Anne Boleyn, acting as a handmaid to Queen Claude, wife of Francis I.
Divine, divisive and exquisite propaganda was all-resplendent and very much in the ascendant during the Tudor age : from the Italian painter Volpe and Mr. Ellys Carmyan, who both supplied propaganda-imagery and decorated the temporarily-erected buckram and canvas wooden-framed temporary edifices at the Field of the Cloth-of-Gold for Henry VIII; to later Court Painter, Hans Holbein ; to the painters and engravers such as Nicholas Hilliard and the Gheerharts of Elizabeth I and James VIs day. As regards his personal power, Henry VIII could issue grants or proclamations as he pleased, but until the progress through the bureaucratic protocol of the Course of the Seals had ratified them, Henry VIIIs decisions were invalid. After Henry VIIIs personal grant, prepared by his private personal attendant-secretary (who was Ralph Sadler, uniquely, in this position for the last fifteen-years of the reign) was readied, the Kings Seal was the first to be appended to his grant or proclamation. From there, it was handed to the Office of the Privy Seal (where it was copied and sealed a second time) thence to the Office of the Lord Chancellor, holder of the Great Seal, where a third copy was made, and the third and final seal applied, making it all now official, the law. This was how the progress through the Course of the Seals protocol was completed. 50

John Colet, Dean of St. Pauls and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, wanted to Reform the church in England. They were friends of Sir Thomas More, and through him knew Desiderius Erasmus. Archbishop Warham and Bishop Dr. Edward Fox led an effective Regency Council overruling any of Henry VIIIs desired excesses. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey would show Henry VIII that the kings signature and seal alone were legitimate enough to validate any kingly decision, and show him that it was also legal for Henry VIII to entirely ignore the whole
Course of the Seals protocol; Ralph Sadler was later to personally-administer the whole process, unfettered, and have his own, personal-copy of the Kings Seal to use at will, and which was supplemented by a wooden inkstamper device engraved with a facsimile of Henry VIIIs personal signature. The art of Wolseys management was his mastery of both matters and men. He had inherited an increasingly sophisticated administration from the Yorkist kings and Henry VII, but added to it a shrewd understanding of the meaning of power....an awesome manipulator of patronage, honours, bribes, threats...a political psychologist in a cardinals hat...he knew what made people tick-their vanities and fears- and he also understood the critical relationship between display and authority. 54 Ralph Sadler knew Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Sir Thomas More well, and in the young Ralphs life, More might have been aware of him and his brother, John, being placed into the household of Thomas Cromwell, with the boys aged only six and four years-old respectively,
54
pp. 289. Simon Schama A history of Britain (three volumes) part one (2000) B.B.C. Worldwide.
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if their father Henry Sadler went off to wage war in France, fighting at the Touranne and the Battle of the Spurs in 1513 with Henry VIII and the other loyal Englishmen. For the next decade or so, Ralph Sadler would be surrounded by the royal court and its courtiers, becoming educated and immersed in the English Renaissance.
Chapter 4
Ralph Sadler : ascending
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It was not just for sheer-entertainment that pageants and commemorations took place at Court, but for highly-political purposes too. Consider this poem, from John Skelton, royal-court poet and dramaturgist to Henry VIII. Read-out aloud, in a continuous monologue, the skill in writing and rhyming is apparent :
ware the Hawk. by John Skelton. (Prologue) This work devised is, For such as do amiss;
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And specifically to control Such as have cure of soul, That be so far abused They cannot be excused By reason nor by law; But that they play the daw, (verse 1) To hawk, to hunt From the altar to the font,
Why cry unreverent Before the sacrament, Within the holy churchs boundes, That of our faith the ground is. To hawk in my church of Diss This fond frantic falconer, With his polluted pawtener, As priest unreverent 54

Straight to the sacrament He made his hawk to fly. With hugeous shout and cry. The High-Altar he stripped naked: (verse 2) Thereon he stood and craked; He shook down all the clothes And sware horrible oaths
Before the face of God, By Moses and Aarons rod, Ere that he hence yede His hawk should play and feed Upon a pigeons maw . Upon the altar-stone; The hawk tired on a bone; And in the holy place She dunged there a chase 55

Upon my corporals face. Such sacrificium laudis (verse 3) He made with such gambades On Saint John decollation He hawked in this fashion, Tempore vespararum Sed non secundam sarum But like a March harum
His brains were so parum. He said he would not let His hounds for to fet To hunt there by liberty In the despite of me, And Hall-oo-oo ! there of the fox. Down went my offering box, Book, bell and candle, (Epilogue:) All that he might handle Cross, staff, lectern and banner, 56

Fell down in this manner. 55 *
If Henry VIII needed some ideas for creative ways on exactly how to mindlessly destroy ecclesiastical properties, here they were, writ large! A licence to be a mad March Harum! As if Henry VIII would need that! Imagine, too, the effect on Cardinal Wolsey, the daw mentioned in the Prologue being most certainly referential to the heraldic-depiction of rooks associate with one of his personal coats-of-arms, and his home at Cawood , coupled with his being John Skeltons arch-enemy, when this poem was performed by Skelton in front of him! With its call for control over those who had charge over cure of soul! With its mad March harum, dog-pack and the ravaging, dunging hawk, the desecration of the altar, the destruction of church decoration and ritual elements, all felled-down with the most vigorous colloquialism and declaimed outloud before the whole Court, by the author! The Sale of Indulgences, sanctified by the Pope in Rome, whereby time in Purgatory, (a kind of ante-room waiting-area, imagined as being after death and before entry to Heaven
55
Op. cit. Greg Walker John Skelton and the politics of the 1520s. More for the ease of the eye on the page than anything, I have designated that there be a prologue, as an eight-line octet, then, three fourteen-line verses after the Italian-style sonnet, followed by a three-line epilogue that ends in a rhyming-couplet, English-style. This gives structure with classical references that is more appropriate to the period, instead of the unwieldy look of the continuous scripting more normally found in regards this poem. I do not believe the poet means the church at the mundane geographic location in Diss, Norfolk, but that he meant to make reference to the underworld of the god Neptune from classical literature, and its nomenclature, Dis. I dont know that Skelton ever even visited Norfolk, but he knew the classics! I took poetic-licence and made the halloo-oo-ing of the fox as a visual, otherwise the punctuation and spellings are as in the original, very good, poem. I came to my conclusions on this by reading the poem out-loud to myself, utilising phonetic soundings, as I heartily recommend, in order to fully-appreciate the versification in the poem, which is rendered more alive by so-doing. * Authors note : attention again. My thanks go to a Mr. William Corbett for drawing this Skelton poem to my
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(or Hell) was achieved ) might have an indulgence issued for cash against it, and time in purgation be consequently shortened, had caused such resentment in society as a whole, that John Skelton would have been seen as someone who was telling it like it is. Dr. Edward Fox, Henry VIIIs nemesis with Archbishop Warham in the Regency Council, would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of being halloo-ed like his feral namesake, and then having dogs set on him, most certainly.
A symbol on one royal Tudor coat-of-arms is the greyhound; Henry VIII loved hunting with a pack.
Soon enough, Henry VIIIs hawking pawtener, Ralph Sadler, would fly free to do his masters bidding in the hunt. We recall that Henry III termed his secret-assassins his hawks. Ralph Sadler, the loyal and honourable hawk of Henry VIII was to prove deadly and unfailing. We note also that the personal emblem of Anne Boleyn was a falcon : which is a hawk. Henry VIII had been mooting his divorce from Catherine of Aragon since 1526. With his Master of the Hawks by his side, Henry VIII combined his personal divorce with one from the Catholic Church itself. 58

The John Skelton poem, ware the Hawk, is, literally, immediately just-before the Reformation of the Church in England and Dissolution of the Monasteries begin, and its influence over Henry VIII cannot be underestimated; and yet, it has been, and hugelyunderestimated at that. It is crude in the pejorative sense, but it is packed with sophisticated images and use of language. I cannot for the life of me see why it is not an officially-designated developmental influence also over the poetic renderings of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, yet this never seems to have been suggested by anyone. I insist on it! English poetry has roots which are almost criminally traduced, misunderstood and ignored. John Skelton, it was, then, who was the ultimate inspiration, and with his powerful political plays and poems, would have persuaded (if he needed any persuasion) a youthful Ralph Sadler that here, in performance, was the way to crush your enemies and to win the conscience of kings and influence people, with humour to play a key-part in the swallowing of the propaganda-pill.
John Skelton wrote a book on princely manners for Henry VIII, during Skeltons primaryschooling of the-then young Prince Henry, after the fashion of those of Castiglione and Machiavelli. To Ralph Sadler, Master of the Kings Hawks, our brash young-courtier, hawks were a reality and a metaphor for the new ideas. By adopting, adapting and deploying all he that he learnt with a deft aplomb, he would make himself something seriously to be wary of.
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ware the Hawk was a poem he would have had by rote, and he put the theory into devastating practice.
As well as seeing the masque developing into the verse-form of the poems of John Skelton, his morality play, Everyman (1529), Magnificence, and others by him provide the model for all the aspiring propagandists and playwrights of the day, from that date on. The masques of Italy which Henry VIII had become enamoured of in 1512 were not so much theatrical plays, but they were expected to be more than a mere ballet or a court ball. The chief aim of the participant in the court-masque was to surprise the spectators, by the wearing of odd-shaped, often visored headpieces to go with fantastical costumes. Elaborate and intricate mechanised-automata were frequently displayed. The scientist and astronomer Nicholas Kratzner was also an inventor and master mechanical-technician at the Henrician royal court, and we could picture the masque as being a kind of noisy, colourful fancy-dress ball, crossed with all the cacophonous fun of the funfair. Henry VIII was certainly most taken with masque entertainments, and held a life-long fascination for all-new things. The masques at the Henrician court were reportedly proverbial, and much expense and time went into their staging and performing. Henry VIII and some friends once turned up at a Westminster banquet dressed as Russian Muscovites:
...with furred hats of grey, each of them having a hatchet in his hand, wearing boots with peaks turned-up...
56
Henry VIII definitely invented, experimented and extemporised, personally, with the masque-form.
56
Passim Henry VIII Letters&Papers.
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The young Princess Mary, who would grow up to be crowned as Mary I, danced a masqueballet for her father and mother, hiding her face under a black-crepe gauze headpiece as she had assumed the character of an Ethiop (African) queen. In 1527, for the French ambassadors, she was a chaste Icelandic princess, and in May of that year she burst forth from a stage-set cave dressed as a Roman noblewoman, draped in cloth-of-gold and crimson tinsel (both very rare and difficult to get hold of then) to dance a ballet. This was the happiest Mary would get to be in the whole of her life, though she didnt know it just then, of course. Ralph Sadler was almost-certainly working out of the household of Thomas Cromwell at around the same time, employed in maybe in the capacity of Cromwells personal-secretary, attorney and accountant, and busy at his propagandist learning. In 1514, Henry VIII added the Kings Players theatrical troupe alongside the Old Kings Players troupe to his household accounts. He would go on to attempt to be a holy-warrior king, achieving a foreign presence and policy in Europe. Only ever a minor prince on that international stage, he would, however, live up to his small part in every way. In 1520, when Ralph Sadler was thirteen, Henry VIII had the Great Chamber at Greenwich fitted with a stage, and a play, Menachmi, the goodly comedy of Plautus, was performed for an international audience, as part of the proceedings over the Treaty of Tournai with France.
Considered to be ...one of the earliest indicators of anything like classical taste in matters connected with the stage...,
57
57
it must have made a tremendous impression on a young
T. F. Thiselton-Dyer Royalty in all Ages (1903) John C. Nimmo Ltd.
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Ralph Sadler, more than seventy years before the Shakespearian Comedy of Errors play, whose plot draws on the ancient classic, was published. In The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, a traditional play of the Robin Hood myth, now turned into a Skelton-written
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satirical comedic original , Skelton participated as an
actor, and took the part of Friar Tuck. We find this at the start of the Prologue opening the play : [ Enter: Ralph, Jailer at Nottingham, Sheriff and Messenger.] Ralph: Ye protract Master Friar, I obsecrate ye with all courtesy, omitting compliment,
you would vouch, or deign to proceed. Friar Tuck: Deign, vouch, protract, compliment, obsecrate! Why, Good-man Tricks, who
taught you thus to prate? Your name, your name ? Were you not christened ? Ralph: Rafe .
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My nomination Radulf is, or Ralph : vulgars corruptly use to call me
Ralph Sadler sometimes signed himself Rafe, being addressed as such by his own father in letters written to him. Latterly, he himself uses Raff , Raphe, Rafe, variously, in private correspondence, but eventually settles on plain-Ralph in more common-usage. Skelton appears to give an instantaneous oratorical opinion on pretentiousness here, to both Rafe, and to the audience, the right note for a young courtier to be aware of in Henry VIIIs court.
58
* Authors comment: Other, later-authorship has been subscribed to, Anthony Munday, say, but this is almost certainly a repetition in plagiarism, the original Skelton manuscript being discarded somewhere along the way. The play, and its subject-matter of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, was the original English traditional drama of patriotic propaganda, played in pantomime among the populace from time immemorial, from at least since the 1350s. Skelton had merely been doing a written-version of the common-knowledge folktale, but it was to become a primary source for the playwriting-generation that came next, and became the standard-model worked on by dozens of aspiring playwrights, up to and including the time of Anthony Munday. I do not deal any further here with matters of authority, date or authorship in this play. 59 J. Payne Collier Five plays forming a supplement to Dosley and others (1833).
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Chapter 5
Ralph Sadler : engaging
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I believe that John Skelton was the person who had the biggest artistic impact on Ralph Sadlers writing-skills and development. I like to believe the part in Skeltons The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington would have been performed originally by Ralph Sadler himself. Ralph Sadler was to have some individual experiences of plays, touring with Cromwellian propaganda throughout the country, in charge of the Cromwells Men theatrical troupe. The apocryphal Shakespearian play, Thomas, Lord Cromwell (1602) has in the last beat of its final scene, Ralph Sadler, as a properly-named character, Ralph Sadler, who is given the last line to speak. He arrives too late with a warrant of full-pardon; Thomas, Lord Cromwell has been executed moments earlier. Not the kind of tragi-comedy that would have gone down too well in the Tudor period, you might think, what with the real power-brokers of government being portrayed in it as themselves, and as fools and hypocrites. It is strange this play was apocryphized and excluded from the first collected works of the Shakespearian plays, known as the First Folio(1623). Stranger still, because Richard Burbage makes the point in the prefatory comments of that work that the plays were being collected before they got lost. There are several apocryphal Shakespearian plays, and you might have thought Burbage would know the real from the fake, having been an actor in some of them : but the play Sir Thomas More is also among the Shakespearian apocrypha, and is so alike in style and form to Thomas, Lord Cromwell, that it almost seems uncanny that the apocryphal plays could be so similarly written, and it could be they were simply the earliest of the plays in the writers ouvre, and/or somehow foxed from him. Scholars say all the Shakespearian apocrypha plays seem earlier (cruder) in style compared to the majority of the First Folio plays ; is it possible the play Thomas, Lord Cromwell was written by Ralph Sadler? The play, Henry VIII from the Shakespearian First Folio(1623) was once considered an erroneous entry from apocrypha to that work, and physically and spiritually excised for a period as such. Could this play, along with Sir Thomas More (compared by scholars to be 64

stylistically allied to both Thomas, Lord Cromwell as also to Henry VIII) and Thomas, Lord Cromwell have all been originally-written by Ralph Sadler? (Henry VIII is back in
all of the published Complete Shakespearian Works-style editions nowadays.) For all of the original manuscripts and documents we have of Ralph Sadler, no recreational writings have been identified, and it would be strange, almost uniquely-odd, for such a longlived and erudite Renaissance man not to have crafted any such writings. 60 As a messenger, Ralph Sadler, the Orator to Henry VIII, and then later, appointed as sheriff and jailer for the Crown, it is possible (as was tradition in early court entertainments) that Ralph Sadler played himself in the original performance of a play he wrote himself, (although, I dont imagine Thomas Cromwell played himself in this!) which play may have ended-up being passed around from pillar-to-post in the English Tudor theatrical world over the course of the sixteenth-century, like many others, and eventually ends up through a series of repetitions and revisions in plagiarism as part of the Shakespearian apocrypha; in much the same vein as John Skelton ended-up re-writing the traditional play, The
Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, as I mentioned already in my page footnote #8, above. As Henry VIII grew more ill, he probably learnt entertainments could keep his mind off the pain, and an in-house solution may have been the cheap and available to hand, Ralph Sadler. The earliest version of the play Thomas, Lord Cromwell, with the character Ralph Sadler delivering the final line in the play, and getting a laugh for it, may be amongst the very first of these diversions for Henry VIII.
60
N.B. But see also the final paragraph of this book for x/cf Professor Diarmaid MacCullochs comments and quotation.
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And who better to play the part of Ralph Sadler , than Ralph Sadleyr, also known as Sadler, himself, in person? He was right there, at Nonsuche Palace, pushing Henry VIII and his gammy-leg around in a trolley wheelchair, for the best-part of a decade.
Intriguingly, the British Library has a manuscript fragment called Hand D which consists of some pages from the play Sir Thomas More : and these pages are thought possibly to be in the handwriting of the plays original author. Urgent graphology and more paleographic research needs doing in a direct comparison of Ralph Sadlers handwriting and the British Library Hand D manuscript pages of Sir Thomas More. In simple experimentation, examples from Sadler letters of 1535 and 1543 matched precisely the handwriting of Hand D when overlaid by my own traced-out copies. Sir Thomas More appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company 2009 edition as a four-page chapter, entitled A Scene for Sir Thomas More, where they attribute the rejected 1590 script of Anthony Munday (possibly in collaboration with Henry Chettle) as having been re-written by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood and possibly William Shakespeare some years later, 1604 is suggested. The Hand D fragment comprises the individual identifiable handwriting of three of these men as overwritten comments, bar the that of the main text, which is deemed the still-yet unknown and anonymous calligraphy of Hand D. The Hand D fragment comprises the scene where Sir Thomas Mores named character as the Sheriff of London gives the speech to the mob, to try to quench their revolutionary ardour to smash London to pieces : the Evil May-Day speech he actually made in London, 1517, when a young Ralph Sadler may possibly have witnessed it. Ralph Sadler was appealed for the king to spare the life of the real Thomas Cromwell; Ralph Sadler was working closely with 66

Henry VIII in 1533, the same year as when the Shakespearian play Henry VIII concludes its plot. Thomas More is well-dubbed the Father of English History, as his books on the subject were seminal and contemporary with Ralph Sadlers education; and More was personally wellknown to Ralph Sadler, probably more so after Ralph attended in person the eventual interrogation of More in the Tower, but Ralph was only ten years old when More made his famous Evil May-Day speech in London, 1517, so may, as I have just suggested, have even witnessed that happen in real-life.
The details of Evil May-Day and the speech of Sir Thomas More were published in 1587 in Hollinsheds Chronicles. If we could but remove the repetitions in plagiarism and revision from the three plays, Sir Thomas More, Thomas, Lord Cromwell and Henry VIII, if we closely-examine the Shakespearian apocrypha, would we possibly find them all originally to have been originally in the hand of Ralph Sadler? The hand stained by that with which it worked in?
Sir Ralph Sadler died in 1587.
Thomas Cromwell, at first working as chief factotum for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, before he eventually became Henry VIIIs stooge, then victim, always promoted the Henrician Reformation of the church, and he gathered divers quick and fresh wits around him to 67

deliver the message, especially in the print medium. He retained educators and propagandists to work for and on behalf of Henry VIII; men such as the religious reformer and playwright, Thomas Gibson; William Marshall; Richard Morrison; author Thomas Starkey; Richard Tavener; John Uvedale; William Gray, comedic rhymester and propagandist. Also there were John Heywood, playwright and John Foul-mouthed Bale, religious reformer, author, playwright; who, with his seminal King Johan (King John) of 1548, wrote the transition work bridging the old-fashioned chronicle-history play and the morality plays. John Skelton, playwright and seminal figure in the emerging English literary tradition whom we just met, similarly, Thomas Churchyard, errant warrior-poet, Henry Dowes, musician, composer, coiner and tutor in Latin and Greek, and Thomas Wyatt, the warrior-poet dubbed a Father of the English Sonnet alongside Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Hans Holbein, artist, were some others associate and co-opted to being Cromwells men, those positively propagating Henry VIIIs propagandistic image and views. National identity and nationalism strove to become nationhood. Professional interrogators, as Ralph Sadler was, learn not to say what they do know or dont know to their captives ; hence, Ralph Sadler seems to equivocate in all he does, vacillating so much he scintillated until he positively stribulated, and the ululating penetrating propagandist sound he spread around was...England!. Elizabeth Is legendary reputation for hesitancy and prevarication in her decisionmaking is explained by this, too, as are all her policies : let your enemy come to you, dont waste time and expense searching out trouble, subvert their organisation from the inside with double-agents, get them attacking each other : Sadlers usual modus operandi was 68

secretly opening and copying then resealing every document he wished to do so, as he so chose. What you didnt know he knew, he could use to harm you with later, as he also so chose. All the frugal ways both events and people are dealt with in (very-specifically) Elizabeth Is reign can be explained by the principles Ralph Sadler learnt and relied on being disseminated and utilised by him and then others. The cultural elite of the early English Renaissance literature in the Tudor period, the Fathers of history, comedy, sonnets, poets and actors, and some fiercer men who were warriors, these were the transitional, seminal, ground-breaking political writers, artists and propagandists that Ralph Sadler was educated and grew up with. Thomas Cromwell was said to have recommended Niccolo Machiavellis book The Prince (1513) (with its anti-papal approbations, and influences from Petrarch) as a practical experience, as opposed to the theory of other books. We recall some of the more Machiavellian traits of the book reflected in the times, but Cromwell had
another book
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to which he himself might have paid greater attention. It was il Cortegiano

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(1528) (The Courtier) by Baldasar Castiglione
and it was the most popular prose work of
the Italian Renaissance, influential and distributed widely throughout Europe. According to Castiglione, the successful courtier and gentleman ought to:
61
* Authors comment: Bishop Bonner wrote to Cromwell in 1528 asking to borrow his copy of il Cortegiano. 62 Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier Everyman Press. * Authors comment: Thomas Hobys translation of Castiglione into English was 1561.
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...always humble himself somewhat under his degree, and not receive promotions so easily as they offered him, but refuse them modestly...to purchase favour at great mens hands, there is no better way than to deserve it. These two instructions were to be the leitmotif of Ralph Sadler ; not that he ignored Machiavelli, as Cromwell was to discover; Thomas Cromwell should have paid more attention to Ralph Sadler, too. The courtier should cultivate such a close-relationship with his monarch, says Castiglione : ...that he may break his mind to him and always inform him frankly of the truth of every matter meet for him to understand, without fear or peril to displease him... Ralph Sadler acting as Henry VIIIs personal private attendant-secretary was ideally placed to practice all of what Castiglione preached, and, furthermore, to utilise all that Thomas Cromwell and Machiavelli could teach, too. The honour accorded to a gentleman was conferred for some notable action performed beneficial to the general commonwealth. That honour would continue in the line of primogeniture, just as succession to the land also generally did in England. Any title and land held together helped to knit a firm social framework. By developing social flexibility, incentive, movement and initiative, some kept up, others went down, but on the
whole the system was extremely beneficial to Tudor society then. The envious court, as the Shakespearian works has it, and following Castigliones advice: One should recommend oneself by talking oneself down, ...
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Historian A.L. Rowse describes this as being William Cecils technique. Ralph Sadler was eventually William Cecils mentor, and pupil followed teacher in turning down earldoms and suchlike, always taking the profit, always humble, never touching the fame. Not so Thomas Cromwell, though by the end of his days, he may have been more sinned against than sinning. The low-born Cromwell has a largely-unknown childhood background, he was self-confessed as ...a ruffian...in his younger days..., and had served as a condottiere, a mercenary soldier-of-fortune in the war with the French at Garigliano in Italy. He was next a merchant, then an accountant to a Venetian, where he cultivated his own business contacts, and became intimate with the Frescobaldi banking family and with the double-entry system of account-book keeping. The markets of Antwerp were familiar to him, as were the means and values of political propaganda and spin. On a visit to Rome, to jump the queue at the Vatican, Thomas Cromwell waylaid the dissolute Pope Julius II (out for his early morning stroll) with bribes not of money (though that almost certainly came into it) but of sweetmeats, jellies and on-the-spot entertainment from a three-part singing troupe, so as to obtain the Popes personally blessed written indulgences for Lent, on behalf of some friends back home in Lincolnshire. Ralph Sadler was with him, and gained a personal papal written dispensation, valid for the next three generations of his own family, and from the gaining an extreme close-up of the living-personification of the then Catholic church in action, no doubt then had something to break his mind to Henry VIII over during the course of their close-relationship .
Also connected to the household of Thomas Cromwell was Ralph Radcliffe, headmaster at Hitchin Grammar School. He converted a former Carmelite monastery into a theatre. As well
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as having his students act out Radcliffes self-penned evangelical plays, he put on theological polemics (some featuring comic turns, sometimes involving comedy nuns, such as Thomas Wylleys Against the Popes Counsellors(1536) ) which were patronised and supported financially by Cromwell for performance. Cromwell had seen how others, like schoolmaster William Hunnis (formerly of John Colets, Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral, school) and Thomas Ashton in his Shrewsbury school, had used theatrical comedy to get the Reformist propaganda message across, and Cromwell chose who he would support carefully : ...the purpose of playing...was and is, to hold as twere the-mirror-up-to-Nature, to show...the very age and body of the time.
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No mention there as to the verity that may, or may not, be contained therein, however. Ralph Sadlers fellow student, Nicholas Udall (Woodhall), would go on to be dubbed the Father of English Comedy for his plays Thersites (1537) and Ralph Roister-Doister (I would wonder where he gained inspiration for the latter title, Ralph being as relatively uncommon a name then as it is now?) and he would also go on to publish the bible in Englysshe.
Another pupil was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, direct-inheritor of Thomas Wyatts mantle as Englands leading sonnet writer. Howard was a developer of the English sonnet, advancing the fourteen-line original Italian Petrarchian-form. Buxton illustrates this best, noting that Petrarchs :
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Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act III, scene (ii) between lines 20-24.
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Amor, che nel penser mid vive regna... is translated by Wyatt as:
The long love, that in my thoughts doth harbour And in my heart doth keep his residence, Into my face presses with bold pretence And therein campeth, spreading his banner... Looks like this in Howards hand: Love that doth reign and live within my thought And build his seat within my captive breast, Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought, Oft in my face doth his banner rest... Of which Buxton says the difference is not one of a good poet and a bad one, but between a poet who has understood Petrarchs art and one who has merely understood the meaning of his words. A. L. Rowse comments ...we can see that ... [Howard]...is already a modern poet.
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We note that Love is personified as clad in armour, waving a flag about, like a Knight-Banneret .
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pp. 25-26. A. L. Rowse The Elizabethan Renaissance : the life of society (1971) Sphere Books. * Authors comment: From his quotation, referring to pp.26-27. J. Buxton A tradition of poetry .
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Henry Howard left his translation of Virgil incomplete. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was a tragic and personal friend of Ralph Sadler. We have seen the first glimmerings of how Ralph Sadler was prepared by his surroundings, tutors and fellow-students through his direct-education in propaganda and speechwriting, poetry and the creative arts to take up the place he did in Tudor society. The type of household Sir Humphrey Wingfield of Ipswich ran was unusual, but not altogether unique. An Ipswich councillor in 1507, an M.P. in 1523, Sir Humphrey was a specialist legal-interests member of Henry VIIIs Council by 1526, and Speaker in the 1534 Reformation Parliament. His two sons Richard and Robert became prominent during Henry VIIIs reign. At his country retreat of Brantham Hall, one of the models of progressive education in its day,
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Wingfield educated other children besides his own.
William Cecil and John Cheke were among them, along with Roger Ascham and John Christopherson. All later attended the Catholic St. Johns College, Cambridge. William Cecil was later to be mentored by Ralph Sadler, and then become ennobled as the first Lord Burghley under Elizabeth I, Cecil and Cheke also at one point being
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ib.id. pp.183-5 in Chapter III (pp.181-301); The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham; edited and translated by Diarmaid MacCulloch Camden Miscellany XXVIII. Camden Fourth Series. Volume 29 (1984) Royal Historical Society. This is an earlier-piece of great historiographical writing by the great Professor Diarmaid N.J. MacCulloch. His highly-accessible Reformation: Europes house divided 1490-1700(2004) Penguin is recognised as the best modern account, and his Thomas Cramner: a life(1997) Yale University Press so also is his A History of Christianity: the first three thousand years(2009) Penguin (and the BBC television-series version of this available on dvd is very good, too) are all seminal historiographies, and like all he writes, all wellwritten and all well-worth reading.
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Northumberland Men, who in the 1550s were linked to the nefarious Northumberland Plot, alongside Nicholas Bacon, father to the more famous son, Francis.
Sadler was keenly-aware of the potential in youth, in his own children and in others; for five years beginning in early 1580, the young George Chapman (d.1634) was installed, ostensibly as a gentleman-usher, living in Ralph Sadlers household of Standon Lordships (Lordship Manor, as it is today) at Standon in Hertfordshire, Ralphs favourite country-mansion manor house. George Chapman was to go on during Elizabeth I, James VI and Charles Is reigns to become the most contemporaneously well-known person of English literary life and culture, and he was widely-considered as the leading playwright of the day bar nearly-none, right up to his death in 1634. His first play would be slightly semi-autobiographical, and called The Gentleman-Usher, and it is loosely-based on his time at Standon Lordships; in fact he may have written it there. You write about what you know, I suppose. John Christopherson, however, became a trialled-murderer, let-off in 1535, before he became appointed as a Bishop and as a propagandist for Mary I. You could take him as you found him, I guess. Roger Ascham, a Protestant sympathiser, was tutor and confidante to Elizabeth I, and in his book, Toxophilus(1545) ( Lover of the Bow ), a treatise on archery, he praised the way academic study and physical training were combined at the Brantham school. The chivalrous
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knight is merging with the romantic, noble poet, as an ideal way to become The English Gentleman.
Chapter 6
Ralph Sadler : in the Court of King Henry VIII
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Roger Ascham, from his Brantham Hall based schooling and Cambridge matriculation, was known as the Grecian humanist, and became tutor to Elizabeth I. He also instructed on the qualities and chivalric exercises which made for the all-round gentleman and courtier : ...to ride comely, to run fair at the tilt or ring, to play at all weapons, to shoot fair in bow, or surely with gun, to vault lustily , to run, to leap, to wrestle, to swim; to dance comely, to sing, and to play instruments cunningly, to hawk, to hunt, to play at tennis, and all the pastimes generally which be joined with labour, used in open place, and on the day light, containing either some fit exercise for war, or some pleasant pastime for peace. 66 This humanist-chivalry was already exemplified in the person of Henry VIII, who we find described as: ...exercisyng him selfe daily in shooting, singing, daunsing, wrastlelyng, casting of the barre, playing at the recorders, flute, virginals and in the setting of songes, making of ballettes,...
67
66
pp.223. A.L. Rowse The Expansion of Elizabethan England (1955) Sphere Books; from his own reference to pp.457 of A.F. Sievekings Shakespeares England ; chapter 2, Games. 67 L. F. Salzman England in Tudor Times (1926) Batsford.
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In Henry VIIIs case, the energetic-pursuit of all-forms of entertainments, distractions, sports and hunting, both human and animal, verged-on, or very-near to, in fact, a childish obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In 1526, at the age of only nineteen, Ralph was fledged from Cromwells nest, and is seen acting as an attorney-at-law in property cases, maybe in the very first dissolutions (Wolsey) regarding ecclesiastical property, Sadler being able to speak, write and read in French,...Latin...had some Greek and a working knowledge of the law.
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The Italian language, culture and style may be added to that list, as early in the 1530s Ralph Sadler employed the highly-discreet and efficient mercenary Italian Captain Malatesta and his half-dozen Italian compatriots as a personal bodyguard force. The wearing of livery to denote who you worked for was banned by law ; Sadlers Men seem to have elided this serious sumptuary restriction, by each man sporting a discreet sewn-on royal blue armband embroidered with the motto I serve only the king in gold letters around it, written in Greek. Only Sadlers Men wore this emblem. Ralph Sadler also worked intimately for many years with those famous Italian migrs, Giovanni Portinari and Jacopo Concio, in the destruction and building of fortifications, palaces, castles, monasteries, nunneries, abbeys, churches and houses, for and on behalf of Henry VIII and for his children.
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pp. 249. S. T. Bindoff The House of Commons, 1509-1558 volume three (1982) (three volumes) HMSO.
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Berwick Castle in Scotland stands fast, the twelve-feet thick stone walls unaltered to this day as example and as a stupendous-monument to their architectural collaborations. Henry VIII had a very early modern near-accurate map of the whole 1537 Italian coastline hanging on his wall, and introduced the Italian methods in the art of training and managing horses to his own stables ; his Nonsuche Palace ( the beyond all-compare palace; modern-spelling, Nonsuch 69 ) was to be an Italianate architectural-concoction and confection, externally decorated in a wedding-cake-like, highly-curlicued piped-icing style in the then highly-expensive terracotta, and the grounds filled with ornate-reproductions of classicalGreek and Roman statuary, novel fountains, hidden caves and grottoes, clipped topiary shapes and the like everywhere, an ongoing work-in-progress when Henry VIII died.
Ralph Sadler was possibly a contributory designer (along with Giovanni Portinari, Jacopo Concio, Niccolo da Modena and Toto Del Nunziata, all influenced by Pietro Torrigiani) but most certainly Sadler was the main man in charge at Nonsuch Palace; Ralph Sadler was appointed on the 25th March, 1538, as the Steward of the Palace,
Keeper of the Wardrobe, Keeper of the Gardens and Keeper of the Parks; unique and highly prestigious, these well-paid positions were only given in the direct gift of Henry VIII.
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Nonsuche is certainly the earliest spelling documented on Nonsuch Palace, in a 1541 ms reference associated to Ralph Sadler. Probably a double meaning of anonymous(no-such-place) is meant as well as beyond-compare, and Nonsuche was a kind of punning-joke and codeword, maybe fitting in to the strategy of hiding the kings infirmity from the public, by hiding him away somewhere secret, that took shape from 1536 on. A similar nomenclature based in the dont ask, dont tell notion is found at the home of the original forerunners to modern computers, Bletchley Park, aka Station X during WW2; but strangely and coincidentally, the X stood for the Roman numeral ten, not no-such or top-secret.
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Ralph Sadler rode, sailed and walked up, down, and across this country, and on the continent abroad, constantly, his whole life, hearing and using folk-speech words and proverbs, adages and homilies. With the restraint he would have learned from his education, his writing was tempered by classical languages, proverbs, homilies, adages and folk-speech usage. The language and imagery we find used throughout the Shakespearian works would have been second-nature to him as he strode around, just a normal part of his day-to-day life. As Wolsey fell and Cromwell rose, Henry VIII had won the battle for control over his English people, body and soul. Now he would win the battle for their hearts and minds, with propagandistic printing a mainstay. Where that didnt work, there was always brute force to rely on. In 1528, we again see Ralph Sadler engaged in his attorney work on property cases, and of his helping of Thomas Cromwell to become a Member of Parliament.
By 1529, Ralph Sadler, aged twenty-two, is a named executor and beneficiary to Thomas Cromwells last-will-and-testament. Thomas Cromwell owned the fourth-largest library in Europe. In his last-will-and-testament, he left a large-part of it in a personal bequest to Ralph Sadler, along with cash award of 200 (worth around 20,000 today).
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Ralph Sadler had his eldest son christened as Thomas, named for the childs godfather, Thomas Cromwell.
In 1530, around seventy-percent of the nobles in the House of Lords signed a letter sent to Pope Clement VII in Rome, demanding a divorce for Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon. Weighing in at over 5lbs (2.5kgs.) this letter had eighty-one wax-seals attached to it. It is hailed by historians as being vital to understanding why England is a Protestant country. Historian David Starkey has said : To understand England we need to have this document in mind; this document was the start of what would turn into an avalanche of propaganda against Rome and wicked foreignways.
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When the Pope refused the written-demand for Henry VIIIs divorce, the English king brokeoff all relations with the Church of Rome.
Henry VIII was also having a little local-difficulty on the borders with his Scottish neighbours in 1530-31 ; Ralph Sadler may well have entered the direct service of Henry VIII and begun operating undercover on the ground in Scotland around this time, to locally observe, if not to intervene directly in the developing situation. A peace treaty with Scotland was not negotiated with Henrys nephew King James V over these border matters until 1534.
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pp.12. The Guardian newspaper 24.06.09 news item quotation. The news item was about the letter. A damaged original copy of the heavy-duty letter to the Pope is kept at the National Archives at Kew. The original letter itself was rediscovered in the 1920s, after languishing lost in a drawer of the Vaticans secret archive. The newspaper article concerned a modern Italian-made, fully-authentic reproduction of the undamaged document, in a limited-edition print-run of 200 copies, to include even all the wax-seals, priced at 43,000 (around +50,000euros, at 2009s world-still-in-financial-crisis rates) and was currently-then in production, sales to be aimed at libraries and collectors.
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The period under discussion here, Ralph aged twenty-four in 1531, and his being thirty-one by 1538, is the most crucial; the transition from boy to man in political terms. As one of only sixteen-appointed Gentleman of the Kings Inner-Chamber and also made a member of the Privy Council in 1536, Ralph Sadlers elevation to the knighthood two-years later, with the power and responsibility that accrued to him thereafter, forged him into becoming the linchpin in all forms of the central and regional government of Great Britain, for the next four decades, right-up to until his eventual death in 1587. The book The Glasse of Truth(1531) initiated a sustained propaganda-campaign
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against the Pope, and for the right of Henry VIII to now proclaim himself as the Supreme Head of the Church in England ; in 1534, he autonomously acclaimed himself with that title publicly, by Act of Parliament. This, then, was the Wolsey, Cromwell and Ralph Sadler-style of advice to Henry VIII : to get an ideological notion, and put it into practice by enshrining it in an Act of Parliament, thus making it watertight, it now being a legal-requirement on people. No vote would ever need to be taken, nor the gradual erosion of autonomy in the Divine Right of Kings by reliance on Acts of Parliament, be mentioned. By the mid-1530s, Thomas Cromwell solely controlled the state-machinery of propaganda-playwriting.
In 1532, Bales Troupe of actors performed an anti-Beckettian diatribe, well received; especially likely that it would be well-received by Henry VIII, as he later had the tomb of
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David Starkey Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant. David Starkeys latest television series, part 3, broadcast 19.04.09, on Channel 4. * Authors comment: The letter to the Pope precipitated The Glasse of Truth as surely as night follows day.
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Thomas Becket desecrated specifically to recover The Regale of France, the ruby ring of legendary-power, originally given of personal-gift by Louis VII in 1179, as a veneration. The rumour arose that Henry had used the whole of the Dissolution of church properties as a smoke-screen, in order only to obtain this mythological and mystical jewel; which he then wore, contemptuously, on his thumb, where mistress rings were traditionally worn then. All rumours circulating around Henry VIII are powerful, propagandistic by default: all part of the image-building.
In 1532, Henry VIII probably more publicly plucked Ralph Sadler, aged twenty-five, out of the household of Thomas Cromwell, if he indeed was still in it by then, and made a new title in the royal household for him : Master of the Kings Hawks. 72 So many new ideas came to Henry VIII in the 1530s; it was an English tradition around then to have the youngest man in the room speak first in any debate. If that most remarkable man Ralph Sadler was chosen each time in such a manner, indeed, if that is fundamentally how he himself came to power, a lot of the newness and innovation of Henry VIIIs policies from then might be better-explained than is currently the case. Maybe Ralph Sadler said this revolutionary idea to Henry VIII : The greatest prince in the world, if he have all the riches in the world, and lack the hearts and minds of his people, he hathe nothing, nor can stand in any suretie... That is Ralph Sadler, aged fifty-four, the quotation taken from during a speech to the House of Commons, 1561.
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Professor Michael Gray, the Sutton House specialist in biographical matters concerning Ralph Sadler, made this statement to me in person, variously, during the 1990s ; but I have never seen the ms concerned, nor do I know the reference from the ms, as Professor Gray has never published on this, and I have been unable to locate it for myself.
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The general and currently-accepted view at present is accurately summed up here neatly and succinctly : Between 1529 and 1531 he [Henry VIII] conceived the revolutionary idea of breaking with the Pope and declaring that England had always been an empire in which the king had no superior other than God himself. Then he could get his divorce in England. Scholars have long argued whether it was Henry himself who had the courage to take this drastic step, but it is clear he was saying this sort of thing many years before the divorce crisis gave it a particular usefulness. Probably Henry was encouraged to give shape to his new ideas by the new chief minister who emerged out of the confusion at the end of the 1520s : Thomas Cromwell.
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That Henry VIII now suddenly declares himself to be Rex Imperator, King-Emperor, and tells the Pope England is an Empire! That Henry VIII invented the new-title for himself, Supreme Head of the Church in England. That the new ideas Henry VIII suddenly got in the early 1530s, were in fact not from Thomas Cromwell, but were the direct-influence from the youthful verve of a rubicund and vibrant Ralph Sadler, whose status by 1536 as a Gentleman of the Kings Inner-Chamber and the Master of the Kings Hawks, his job as personal private attendant-secretary to Henry VIII, all of which had developed and blossomed during the previous decade as Ralph grew-up within Henry VIIIs royal court, all combined to put him in a position to be a permanent veritable conscience of the king and conspired together enough for him to be able to advise Henry VIII precisely on all the finer points on the winning of the hearts and on the winning of the minds of all of the people, by-hook or by-crook, all of the time : and for
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pp.177 Diarmaid MacCulloch Groundwork of Christian History (1987) Epworth Press. (my brackets)
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Ralph Sadler to be heard and be taken seriously by Henry VIII all of the time they knew each other. An appropriate time and place perhaps to recall :
Theory is error, overtaken and displaced by facts.
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Like so much else of Ralphs life currently, his appointment as Master of the Kings Hawks is shrouded in mystery. Henry VIII also had a Master of the Falcons, Sir Robert Cheseman,75 about whom much is known, and, as everybody knows, a falcon is a hawk, hence a mystery remains to be solved over the seemingly-apparent double-appointment involving Sadler and Cheseman.
There is also a lack, at present, of information right across Ralph Sadlers more-than five decades in office; so, following now then, the yet-shorter short-biography, more-or-less potted and somewhat abridged, is condensed in the following chapter similarly to an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, I have (crudely) put together a series of clauses, predications and prepositions which I hope point-up what I consider to be the important points and the issues and topics arising. Now that were part-way through this book, youll have a better idea of what the issues are, so well have a little recap, and then the forwardslooking views : this abridged short biography is basically sort-of the-play-within-the-play of Ralph Sadlers lifetime : if you dont want to partly-spoil the end of my book for yourself, you could maybe skip this next chapter for now, and come back to it later? (If you dont wish to know the result, please skip the next chapter. You could always read it when youve read the rest, in fact, if you ever find yourself in need of a quick brush-up on matters Sadlerian, the
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pp.91 A. D. Nuttall Shakespeare the thinker (2007) Yale University Press. * Authors comment: Famously depicted in Hans Holbeins full-length portrait of him, as Master of the Kings Falcons(1533).
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next chapter is it, the very nine pages with which to do such revising. Please, dont tell your friends that they need only to read the following chapter in order to-then be able to passthemselves off as it appearing as if to their being as well-informed as if theyd actually read the whole book! Never tell a secret to two as Ralph Sadler quipped.)
Chapter 7
Ralph Sadler : the play-within-the-play
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The play-within-the-play : an abridged short biography of Ralph Sadler.
Ralph Sadler, probably born 1507, spelt his surname 'Sadleyr'; the eldest-known surviving son of Henry Sadler. Ralph Sadler was more often known when in the public eye or discussions of his day by 'Sadler in the spelling. Little information is available on his early childhood; then, questions, intrigues and plots begin to proliferate and abound over the transitions between nineteenyear old Ralph Sadlers 1526-onwards attorney-work, dissolving ecclesiastical properties and with his later appointment in 1532 as the personal private attendant-secretary to Henry VIII for the next fifteen years. Created Master of the Kings Hawks, 1532; to Ralph Sadler then gaining the reversion to the post of Prothonotary in Chancery
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in May, 1534, age twenty-
seven, and his working alongside the younger John Gostwick at accountancy under Thomas Cromwell; aged twenty-nine, in 1536 he is created as a Gentleman of the Inner-Chamber and Privy Council to Henry VIII; from then on, having his own personal cadre of specialist Italian mercenaries as his personal accompanying bodyguard, Sadlers Men; and his own troupe of actors, Sadlers Players; to Sadlers then being made in joint-charge with Thomas Cromwell as the Master of the Crown Jewels, and Sadler separately made also Clerk to the
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pp.20. V. Belcher, R. Bond, M. Gray, A. Wittrick Sutton House: a Tudor house in Hackney (2004) English Heritage/National Trust. * Authors comment: The definitive, bench-mark book in matters of archaeology and history in the physical-construction on the site.
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Court of the Hanaper and Clerk to the Court of Augmentations; to his highest-level personal involvement in the Dissolution of the Monasteries; all in 1536, all sometimes life-long tenures, more-or-less : as was his becoming an M.P. many differing times for many differing places from here on in; and also participating in the suppression of the popular uprising The Pilgrimage of Grace(1536), which probably was the first of his domestic war experiences. Ralph Sadler organises the building and construction of the Sutton House manor house, Hackney, 1534-6 for the reuniting meeting of 7th July, 1536 of Henry VIII with Princess Mary, after which he sells the Sutton House; aged thirty, was made His Excellency, the English Special Ambassador to Scotland, Orator to Henry VIII, in 1537,
and makes the first of several embassies (1537-43) for Henry VIII to Scotland : to at aged thirty-one, his Steward and Keeperships of Nonsuch Palace and his 18th April, 1538 knighthood by Henry VIII : was he made a Knight of the Garter? : possibly at this point becoming a designated Knight Banneret, at least by the light of Henry VIIIs personal penchants for early-medieval chivalry and its trappings, but if so it was as an un-blooded in the field, a rubicund, a beardless, an un-married bachelor, a virgin soldier KnightBanneret, as that is how the actual designation stayed until you were dubbed on the actual field of battle by the king in person (see also, below), and no less would do. At the age of thirty-three Ralph Sadlers being made by Act of Parliament the first-ever legal Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament, when he becomes what I term as The Spymaster, in 1540; maintaining that elder-statesman status for the final forty years of his life; Ralph Sadler received personal bequests from the last-will-and-testament of Thomas Cromwell in 1540, including a part of his library of valuable books; also, the so-far hazydesignation of a first coat-of-arms was finally awarded to him in 1542; the same year as his first foreign war experiences, in Scotland : it was also the same year Ralph Sadler was
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personally-tasked by Henry VIII with the Dissolution of the Knights Templars & Hospitallers (1542), his mission-goal here being to now eradicate and utterly-dissolve the Knights Hospitallers organisation in England, which was by-now administering all the former properties and holdings that had previously-belonged to the outlawed and so largely completely-defunct Knights Templars organisation in England, at fifty-nine different sites throughout the country. By 1543, they and their organisation(s) disappear entirely from the English known-record. Ralph Sadler then refurbishes the original Knights Templars headquarters at Temple Dinsley, which is situated nearby to Standon, and then lives there peripatetically; next gifting it whilst he was still alive to two of his sons. Master of the Great Wardrobe for Henry VIII in 1543, more-usually a lifelong tenure, Ralph Sadler keeps the nomenclature or is re-appointed under Edward VI; it is somewhat obliquely referred to in Elizabeth Is reign when Catholic plotters determine him codenamed as 'The Moth' (sic.).
Ralph Sadler more-definitely starts living in 1543 at the Standon Lordships manor house in the Hertfordshire countryside, which Sadler probably designed and had custom built between 1536/7-43, the manor of Standon itself being originally gifted of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn; then to Jane Seymour; Sadler was Steward for each of them in turn. Ralph Sadler is also in possession of the Knights Templars-built local St. Mary the Virgins church in Standon Village, and is appointed as Sheriff of Hertfordshire, variously, over the following years. The questions continue to abound over the transitions, with intrigues and plots coming to a head for Ralph Sadler when he was requested to have the Scottish Cardinal David Beaton assassinated, and Sadlers then sole-planning and eventual execution of the assassination, 1543-46; having the deed actually-done in 1546 during the rough wooing period in Scotland, 1542/3-47; Sadlers highly-significant sole-creation and negotiating of the Treaty of
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Greenwich (1543) with Scotland; made Treasurer to the Army in Scotland in 1544; whilst also undertaking multiple cross-Channel undercover trips during the Siege of Boulogne, also in 1544; his first European mainland war experiences. 1545, and Ralph Sadlers discovery of his having been unknowingly bigamously married since 1533, and then his responding with a personal Act of Parliament to then legitimise his children, but not divorcing; to 1547, and his Knight-Banneret designation at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh being confirmed as blooded in the field now, with-a-beard, a married man in the field of battle sense, but only dubbed-so by the technically legally unlicensed-to-do-so Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and not by King Edward VI : so the Knight Banneret designation probably wasnt ever legal : though being Knight Banneret may always have been a certainty for him, given the right circumstances (battle) if Henry VIII had dubbed him thus originally, in 1538 : but Henry VIII was with Ralph Sadler in 1544 at the Siege of Boulogne, so may-well have dubbed him in the field : though recognition of the whole situation is maybe to be found, and/or Knight Banneret may have become an affectionate unofficial title, as he is addressed as Sir Ralph Sadleyr, Knight Banneret occasionally by Elizabeth I in some of her letters to him. (see also, above)
Now, in 1547, he was become what I term as The General: at which point he was complete to my eyes : the Spymaster-General. This unofficial-title of mine for him, Spymaster-General, is how I would conveniently define Ralph Sadler to understand in a shorthand description his role in the intrigues and plots of the Tudor dynasty over the course of the next four-decades; via the terms of Henry VIIIs last-will-and-testament, Ralph Sadler had received personal bequests and was also made Privy Councillor and a personal Ward of Edward VI during the Boy Kings minority; Sadler was Master of the Great Wardrobe, ?again; Sadlers organising and participation in
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Ketts Rebellion and the associated domestic uprisings, 1549; then being made first the Steward and then the Constable of Hertford Castle in the 1550s; Ralph Sadler purchases Haselor Manor, near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1550, where a John and Mary Shakespeare may well have lived in a tied-cottage at Haselor Manor itself at one time. One of their sons, William Shakespeare, would later become notable to history and have a close friend and personal-mentor, called Hamnet Sadler : a grand-nephew to his great-uncle (if they are actually related) : if Sir Ralph Sadler, Knight-Banneret and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I, the richest-commoner in the country, the most important man in the government, was Hamnet Sadlers great-uncle, that fact would have most-certainly filled a young William Shakespeare with awe. Ralph Sadler, anyway, sells Haselor Manor in 1553. In that same year, Sadler curiously sells Sutton House, Hackney, for a second time, 1553 : in despite of any records saying that he had ever repurchased it, indeed, of any records saying that he had ever even owned it in the very first instance. Ralph Sadlers direct supporting of Lady Jane Grey as the The Nine-Day Queen in 1553; possibly arranging to buy out his own very-brief house-arrest for supporting of Jane Grey; then, Sadlers active role in and arranging of royal wardships, and also in the keeping of hundred-strong armed militias personally-maintained and readied at Standon, Hertfordshire, for use in any trouble arising in London; all of this for Queen Mary I, personally-requested and warranted by her; and some of all of that during Elizabeth Is confinement in the Tower.
In 1558 at the accession of Elizabeth I, Ralph Sadler was created First Lord and President of the Privy Council and made the English Warden of the East and West Marches in Scotland; in 1559, Sadler begins the serious active undercover-phase of a black ops infiltration insurgency mission to oust the French and finally make the border with Scotland safe, as
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these troubles with the Border Reevers had been ongoing since the time of Henry VII : the religious reformations of the era playing a key part in this balance : and Elizabeth I is mainly kept entirely out of the loop; Ralph Sadler negotiates behind the scenes in regards of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis both I&II, April, 1559; next, Sadlers solely-conceived, constructed, planned and performed masterstroke, the Treaty of Berwick on 26th of February, 1560 in Scotland : the point at which the Scottish Reformation technically begins, although the full-blown revolution would not emerge until 1567 : Ralph Sadler is next present during the height of the continuing unrest of the putative War of the Insignias(1558-67, say) against France in Scotland, appearing at the Siege of Leith in 1560 : peace with France for the next twenty-years comes about with Ralph Sadlers sole-conception, construction, planning, negotiation and performance of the Treaty of Edinburgh 6th July, 1560 (see also, below), with Elizabeth I still being kept out of the loop as much as possible : Ralph Sadler passing his lawyers degree from Grays Inn, 1561, at the age of fifty-four, the same year as his making his famous hearts and minds speech to the House of Commons : The greatest prince in the world, if he have all the riches in the world, and lack the hearts and minds of his people, he hathe nothing, nor can stand in any suretie... By 1568, the luring, entrapment, apprehension and detention of Mary, Queen of Scots, with his own then immediate-creation as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as a direct-result, at the age of sixty-one and holding that same office for the final nineteen years of his life. A second even more hazily-designated coat-of-arms, maybe not issued, 1568; organising and participation in the suppression of the Rising of the Northern Earls 1569; his still being known as Ralph Sadler, Orator to Henry VIII in 1571; in 1572, receiving the personal gift from Elizabeth I by her handwritten warrant, of his being able to
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display the untressured (borderless, qv, see below) Lion of Scotland emblem, quartered of Mary, Queen of Scots personal coat-of-arms, which French royal coat of quarter-arms Elizabeth I herself was individually-entitled to display, so, all-relevant to Sadlers closeinvolvement of the preceding years with both women and their War of the Insignias international disputes over coats-of-arms issues, which had led to Mary, Queen of Scots never ratifying the Treaty of Edinburgh [1560] ) (see also, above) : which treaty was the singlemost and greatest of the English peace-settlement treaty negotiations achieved in the sixteenth-century, and Ralph Sadler solely created it and negotiated it : but William Cecil usually always gets the credit, until, that is, some more recent history books of our day, where Sadler is finally being accredited and acknowledged more properly (one very recent historiography says precisely this, and the original manuscript records I have studied support the same conclusions : in the process virtually destroying what is written and said then, in entirely 99.9999% of existing historiographies from over during the past five hundred years to the present-date, about William Cecils reputation for having had an individual omnicompetence during the Elizabethan era, and assigning it automatically to the truly omnicompotent Ralph Sadler : thereby, automatically, then, causing no end of soulsearching, involving some total revisions, re-writings, controversy and fuss among the current-batch of our Tudor historians, I would hope). The possibly- as many as the third different personal coat-of-arms for Ralph Sadler, issued on 4th February, 1575 by the College of Arms, was later displayed, in a qualified way, at his tomb in St. Marys church at Standon Village (but well deal more with that in just a moment) along with his day armour,77 his helmets, breast-pieces, cuirasses, spurs, basically, all of the apparel he is wearing as he is depicted in the from life life-size sculptured model of him in effigy atop his tomb, where the face looks as though it may well have been sculpted taken of a death mask impression, so, if you ever wished to actually meet Ralph Sadler in the flesh,
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As was invariably worn among the Knights Templars, qv : and I am tempted here to demand, that, Q.E.D., Ralph Sadler himself was a Knight Templar : maybe he started his own version of that ancient order, once that he owned all that they had once owned? Ralph Sadler owned properties in twentyeight English counties at his eventual demise.
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this is probably just about as close as you are going to get! There were some of his battle trophies displayed around his tomb, too, but
his coat-of-arms display was in form of the actual Lion of Scotland flag (tressured, then, with a border, which qualifies it, qv, see above) which particular flag used was reputedly taken at the height of the fighting at the infamous Battle at Pinkie Cleugh (1547) by Ralph Sadler in person. Ralph Sadler is said to have led the cavalry-charge into the seething-fray of men and churning bodies to rescue the English Standard main battle-flag and its bearing party, as they were beginning to be overwhelmingly inundated by some of the Scottish horde, (the ones who hadnt already been shot dead at point-blank range, then, we suppose) and then Ralph Sadler and the troops hed rallied pushed back the hordes to then successfully rescue the English Standard battle-flag and its bearers, and, whilst, in the confusion of battle, Ralph Sadler then-simultaneously captured the Scottish Lion of Scotland main battle-flag by himself : which battle-flag was also the personal arms pennant-flag of Mary, Queen of Scots : when the confusion had reigned, hed kept his head, it sounds like, when all about were, some literally, in fact, very busily in process of losing theirs from their shoulders.
Hence, Ralph Sadlers automatic right by a previous feat-of-arms on the battlefield in 1547 to his requesting of Elizabeth I in 1572 that he be able to both claim the Lion of Scotland, and to display it as being his own personal coat-of-arms, by that automatic right : though, it must be said, the capturing of Mary, Queen of Scots herself in 1568, wholly-due to Ralph Sadlers previous-dissembling with the Scottish monarchs during the preceding thirty-odd years for and on behalf of the English monarchs, may have had more than just a little-bit to do with Elizabeth I then specifically going to the trouble of hand-writing and then
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hand-sealing the award for him, in person : really, all-in-all, it is an astonishingly heroic sequence of events, in total, and ones which alone create Ralph Sadler in his own right as an English Tudor hero, The Hero of Pinkie Cleugh, an appellation he was actually known-by in his own day. The captured Scottish Lion of Scotland flag, then, was that which was later hung above Ralph Sadlers tomb, on its enormous wooden flagpole, and which flagpole is fashioned of Scottish Pine, the wirework-traced and
engraved metalwork shielding on the handle being unique to Scottish artisanship of the period confirms its authenticity. Ralph Sadlers authentically real battleaxe, along with the authentic and original flagpole itself, remain perched high on the wall above his tomb to this day; the original battle-flag from The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh being lost, a facsimile one now replaces it. How sad all the day armour and other pieces lasted right till 1909, when the then-lord of the Standon manor sold most of them at auction, for cash. At least Ralph Sadlers battleaxe and the captured flagpole remain, and that is a minor-miracle in and of its self to be grateful for. There is no-doubt, that, whatever went-on at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, Ralph Sadler had a publicly-known and admired reputation in his own lifetime for his having been a hero to the English that day, which honoured reputation attached itself and followed him around for the latter-half of his life. The old wooden high-security treasure chest Henry Romayne manufactured for Ralph Sadler around 1543, and used for the carrying of specie bullion to and from Scotland 1543-? 1580s, is also still preserved in St. Marys (formerly, St. Mary the Virgins) church in Standon
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Village. Sutton House in Hackney still stands, too, as does the core of the Standon Lordships manor house, which is today known as Lordship Manor, and was remodelled in the nineteenth-century by the Duke of Wellington (1852). George Chapman (d.1634), the individually single-most famous of all of the playwrights who were well-known of his day, was living in the Sadler household at the Standon Lordships manor house, c. 1580-85. Chapmans first published play, The Gentleman-Usher, is loosely-based on his time at Standon. Aged seventy-seven, Ralph Sadler was made Grandmaster of the Queens Hawks in 1584 (?or before) and was organising the sworn band of avengers into the Oath and Bond of Association Act(1584/5) in Parliament; and simultaneously was negotiating a secret peace treaty/non-aggression pact with James VI behind his
mothers, Mary, Queen of Scots back during those same years, all actions geared towards smoothing and perfecting the stage for her eventual execution; Sadlers personal setting of Francis Drake to more direct work against Spain in 1585, 1586 and 1587; acting as Chief Judge and Prosecutor (No.29) of the forty-two commissioners at Mary, Queen of Scots fatal trial, having personally-known and dealt with her for virtually all the years of her life; to his own death nearly two months after her demise, on the 30th of March, 1587. Ralph Sadler was aged eighty years old in 1587, and was dying reputedly both as the richest commoner
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and as the leading arch-Protestant in all-England, owning properties in
some twenty-eight English counties by the time he died, and he had personally seen to it that
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Edmund Withipoll would probably be among some others who might give Ralph Sadler a good run for his money to his being named as the richest commoner in the England of 1587. With modern knowledge, it is probably possible now to define by research whether this is in fact true or not, or was always just spin around Sadlers reputation. It was said of him, not by him. No contest as to Ralph Sadler having being the leading English arch-Protestant, 1537-87, I should have said.
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the biggest potential-threat to the ongoing success of the Protestant Reformation in England, figurehead and activist Mary, Queen of Scots, had by-now been permanently-removed, as such, and the Scottish Protestant Reformation automatically guarantee Scotlands being a peaceful and militarily safe border now to the English.
All of the topics compounded here in this chapter of abridged short-biography are just some of the main issues regarding Ralph Sadlers life which still-need further information gathering on them.
Here endeth the abridged short-biography of Ralph Sadler, according to the manuscript record. Abridged thus far, and no further.
Chapter 8
Ralph Sadler : Sutton House
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It is undoubted that Ralph Sadler was an active hunter and sportsman all his life; that there was a more sinister-side to his appointment, as the Master of the Kings Hawks in 1532, there should also be no-doubt. The spy-systems of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Wolsey, then Cromwell, were inherited by Ralph Sadler for and on behalf of Henry VIII, and he knew exactly how to utilise them, having grown up with them since he was a child. Henry VIII, then, had yet more new ideas and had his own Domesday-style national inventory, called the Valour Ecclesiasticus, drawn up in 1535, to value all ecclesiastical property in England and Wales, and then dissolve their ownership to the Crown by legal means of grant or bargain ; hence, The Dissolution of the Monasteries as the policy became known, thereby came to be inclusive of Ralphs original attorney-work experiences in the mid-1520s. 98

New legislation would now make the Church liable to taxation for a tenth-part of its annual-income. Having married his dead brother Arthurs young widow, Catherine of Aragon in 1509, Henry VIII divorced her twenty-four years later, on the 5th of April, 1533, annulling their married time together as if it had never happened. Catherine of Aragon died a natural death (or she was possibly assassinated with poison) three years later, on 7th January, 1536. Peterborough Cathedral was Catherine of Aragons last resting-place.
There was an attempt at a popular uprising against Henry VIIIs radical restructuring of English society, it took place in 1536, and may be categorised most easily as a response to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, something itself that Sadler and Cromwell were doing for and on behalf of Henry VIII, by Act(s) Of Parliament, to cash-in all the property of the Church, keep the money for the Crown, including re-selling the land amongst Henry
VIIIs favourites at court. The rising would become known as The Pilgrimage of Grace; there were suddenly a lot of destitute monks and nuns wandering about with nowhere to go, and the commonfolk wondered at this : the uprising was inevitable, and inevitably and ruthlessly put down by Henry VIIIs forces, ably assisted by Ralph Sadler : When the royal decree for putting down monastic houses reached Yorkshire, mobs rose upon the Kings Commissioners; hooting them from the towns, tearing up their proclamations, and in more than one town clubbing them to death. In place of standing by the law, the gentry looked on in silence. Show of authority was gone. The Magistrates fled;
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the citizens snatched up pike and bill; and the Barons, whose foolish chatter had roused this storm, retired to their fortified houses, on pretence of guarding those strongholds for the King. Northumberland lay at Wressil, Darcy at Pomfret. All the Border was in uproar, and no man knew what he ought to do. Then, the monks came out and made their game. Fathers sallied forth from the abbeys of Fountains, Jervaulx, Hexham and Lannercost, most calling on the people to rise up in defence of the King and the Holy Church. They laid the blame of all the evil on Cromwells door. Cromwell, they said, was putting down convent and abbey in order that he might levy a tax for the King on marriages, births and deaths. Cromwell was a Devil, and the first demand of the Saints must be Cromwells head. The rising must be a Pilgrimage of Grace. The stout Yorkshire lads must march on London; deliver their King, from his evil councillors; restore Queen Catherine to his bed and board; hang Cromwell like a dog; revive the religious houses; and see that their Father the Pope got his own again...The Friars prepared an Oath, which they put to every man they met; a pledge to stand by the King and the Holy Church. Vast crowds were taking up the cross and sticking on their breasts the Pilgrims Sign ; a scroll depicting The Five Wounds of Christ.
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Thomas Cromwell did indeed enact legislation to create the first national Births-and-Deaths Register requirements, which tabulation totally re-shaped governments attitudes towards the citizenry from then on : statistics cant lie. On the 24th of January, 1536, only seventeen days after Catherine of Aragon, his wife of nearly a quarter of a century had passed-on, Henrys active life was to be compounded and curtailed, at age forty-four, by mobility and health problems, which would last for the whole
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William Hepworth Dixon pp. 120-122 Her Majestys Tower (1869) Hurst and Blackett, London.
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of the final-decade of his life. After a heavy fall from his mount whilst riding at the tilt, hed probably burst an already-ulcerated artery in his thigh. It did not, though, prevent him exploring his more aphetic-tendencies towards those who upset him. In one, if not two, marriage-ceremonies, Henry VIII wed his second wife, Anne Boleyn, the next day (pressure on, might be his last chance at anything, she was pregnant... I think Im dying! Im Henery the Eighfth, I yam, I yam! I yam!, we imagine) on the 25th of January, 1533. Anne Boleyn was beheaded by the especially brought-over Swordsman of Calais, on 24th May, 1536. The Swordsman of Calais, obviously a follower of Henry VIIIs type of aphetic-leanings, is said to have spurned-off her head like a football, sending it with a single sweep some thirtyfeet through the air (the executioner himself claimed a personal record) via the use of his nine-feet (3m) long customised-scimitar sword (which was kept hidden under a hay pile until the moment it was needed so as not to put a scare into the intended victim) and a patented one-swipe-and-off run-up technique from behind on his client. Observing the Swordsman of Calais work at close-hand was the reason Henry VIII brought him over to England. Sir Thomas More had predicted just-such events, even using a word only coined back in 1496, football, in his analogy, the moment he himself had become imprisoned in the Tower, saying that Henry would spurn-off our heads like footballs.
Henry VIII was either present at the Tower and hidden inside a room with a direct-view of the execution-place : or out in the countryside, hunting; his propagandists, Ralph Sadler chief
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among-them, let us have both versions, in order, I would guess, that we would be unable ever to tell truth from fiction. Some things have always been rotten in the state of England, but deceiving the public over the doings of royalty has always had a priority; the publics image of the monarch must remain dignified, propaganda-led, at all times.
Anne Boleyn was buried in the Vinicula Chapel, within the confines of the Tower of London, the pieces of her body slung into an old wooden chest that used to hold Beefeater arrows, and which now became her makeshift coffin.
Five months later, on the 30th May, 1536, Henry VIII married his third wife, Jane Seymour, and on the 7th July, Henry VIII was reunited, after around five-years of enforced (by him) estrangement, with his twenty-year old daughter, Princess Mary. King Henry VIII with Queen Jane Seymour and Princess Elizabeth met up with Princess Mary at Sutton House, Hackney, then newly-appointed and furbished as a minor palace, somewhere for privacy, away from the very public-gaze of Hampton Court Palace. The discovery of an en suite Garderobe Room in Sutton House, in 1994, shows the level of the architectural work and designinnovation that went into the construction of this still-extant and still recognisably Tudor minor royal palace; and Sutton House is itself one more thing that is over-looked and undervalued, in our countrys history. Sutton House was constructed by Ralph Sadler for Henry VIII sometime between 1534-36, after Cromwells nearby more pretentiously-grandiose building-attempt, Kings Place (later, Brooke House) had proved largely abortive. Cromwell had commissioned the royallocksmith, old-retainer Henry Romayne, to create a customised
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bright-iron
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lock for the new house, and in January, 1536, Sadler, as Henry VIIIs personal
private attendant-secretary, took it to the king, writing to Cromwell that he had: ...delivered unto His Grace (Henry VIII) your lock and opened unto him all the gins of the same, which His Grace liketh marvellously well and heartily thanked you for the same...
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An ornate, Henry Romayne-wrought, bright-iron lock, made for Henry VIIs treasure-hoard at Sheen, is in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, and another beauty is in the Victoria and Albert museum, cast for the great hall at Beddington Place, between 1539-52, and they give between them a sound-idea of how the locks for Sutton House would have looked, and ...one grieves that such ingenuity should have been employed for the simple operation of unlocking a door... .82
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* Authors comment: Annealed in the forging-process, this type of metal used would prevent any binding to the locks internal-mechanisms, the gins, or tumblers. Atmospheric-conditions at altitude can cause such binding, high-up on a mountain, for example, when you might least want the lock to jam, on, say, a huge treasure-chest carrying gold over-stamped with French-markings! Such a treasure-chest exists, to this day ; it belonged to Ralph Sadler and it was the oaken treasure-chest used throughout the rough-wooing campaign in Scotland,1542-47, and again in the 1560s campaign ; on the front it has, in a line, SIX locks made by Henry Romayne fitted to it, and a few secretdocument compartments, I shouldnt doubt. It was used again and again by Sadler, from the 1540s to 60s, for the officially sanctioned bribery of those who would sell-out to the English in Scotland. That this royal artisans work of skill, with a full-history of its history, sits lamentably unknown, uninvestigated, abandoned and neglected, on the floor of St. Mary the Virgin church, Standon, filled with the local old births-and-deaths registers, is a national disgrace. Why isnt this treasure-chest, as a priceless historical-artefact, exquisitely made by Henry Romayne for the monarch (Romayne had worked for Henry VII, Henry VIII and Edward VI) and owned by Ralph Sadler on permanent display at Sutton House, thus saving it for the nation? 81 Ralph Sadler, January, 1536, in a letter to Thomas Cromwell. (my brackets). Here we see the primeexample of how and why Ralph Sadler is considered to be acting as Henry VIIIs private personal attendant-secretary by this date at the latest. 82 pp. 493. Article: The Most Superb of all Royal Locks by Claude Blair in Apollo magazine (Christmas edition) 1966. * Authors comment: The National Trust should give some serious thought to having replicas manufactured of these two locks, and fitting them at Sutton House. The V&A Beddington Place lock would suit the front door, the Walters , which is more-ornate and connected directly to the kings personal security, could be fitted on the door of the Kings Bedroom, where the en-suite Garderobe Room was uncovered in 1994. This is Room F1 on the official floor-plan; which doesnt show the Garderobe Room as even being in the house, really, as it is not marked! It is more usual that the finding of a garderobe automatically designates the building it is in archaeologically as being a royal palace; garderobes being such a complete rarity, and purely indicative of the presence of royalty at that period; but it doesnt appear to be the case yet at the lost palace of Sutton House. Come on, National Trust, it would be well-worth the effort, and would be authentic, as would redesignating to lost minor-royal palace-status be. I broached some of this matter with Professor
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That the twenty-nine year old Ralph Sadler was so closely-involved in Henry VIIIs life and personal-security that he had the keys to unlock the Kings private-doors, both literally and metaphorically, and that he had been positioned or positioned himself as the go-between for the king and his Vice-Gerent-in-Spirituals and Vicar-General in Matters Ecclesiastical, Thomas Cromwell, is confirmable by at least 1536. As Vice-Gerent-in-Spirituals and Vicar-General in Matters Ecclesiastical, Thomas Cromwell was able to act in loco-parentis, with the effective-power of habeaus corpus, for and on behalf of Henry VIII, so that, in the absence of the king, Cromwell was the king - at the very least, in matters spiritual-and-ecclesiastical. Ralph Sadlers positioning within this relationship between Henry VIII and Cromwell enabled him to know-precisely what to do and say at all times, most especially in regards of his ownfuture. Ralph Sadler, long-serving, omnicompetent Tudor statesman, diplomat, ambassador, Parliamentarian and soldier, would employ his own ingenuity to create a mechanism of titular monarchical authority, and he would eventually say, do, and write, things more intricate than anything in heaven-and-earth that Henry Romayne, long-serving royal-locksmith and artificer in metal-work, 83 could even philosophise in his dreams of, and : ...transformed England into a unitary state in the abstract sense that the King-inParliament could make laws that bound Church and State equally...no pre-Tudor Parliament
Michael Gray of Sutton House, before family tragedy precipitated his sudden early-retirement to Spain in 2008. 83 * Authors comment: Henry Romaynes still-extant great fire-place hearth-furniture andirons, each bearing their individual bright-iron statutary and carvings of the initials and heraldic-shield devices of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, each enormous andiron topped with a huge reproduction of the actual imperial royal-crown, looking like miniature metal tea-cosies, from Knole House, Sevenoaks, Kent, spring to mind. Superb!
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enjoyed the jurisdictional competence that underpinned the Acts of Appeals and Six Articles or the Uniformity Acts of 1549, 1552, 1559. The Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity even went beyond Henrician practice.... 84
The only man with an actual individual in loco-parentis, legal jurisdictional-competence, the original Principal Secretary for the King-in-Parliament, a stand-in, habeas corpus representative for the King-in-Parliament, mouthpiece and political-instigator, the supremehead and governor of propaganda in England, throughout the Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan eras, the brains behind the all-important Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan decisions and laws, was that most-remarkable man, Ralph Sadler. A most unprecedentedly remarkable man. King Henry VIII, his new wife Queen Jane Seymour, Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth were to all spend the night together as a family-unit for the first time ever in the Hackney Sutton House minor royal palace. The twenty-nine year old Ralph Sadler literally watched over it all on the 7th July, 1536, from the front-doorway of Sutton House. Princess Mary was brought to the Hackney manor house that day, and was presented with a diamond-ring by the new Queen Jane. This served an international diplomatic-purpose, in that the diamond-ring had already been a gift to Catherine of Aragon from her uncle, Charles V, which Henry VIII inherited on her demise. Returning her mothers diamond-ring to Princess Mary was the way to avoid confrontation with Charles V over the matter and to cement a
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pp.369.
John Guy Tudor England 1485-1603 (1988).
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good start to Jane and Marys relationship. The ever-practical and ever-pragmatic Tudorway, shows-through again. The happy-families situation did not last long. Queen Jane presented Henry VIII with a living male-heir the following year, but died herself fifteen-days later of pupereal fever, brought on by her giving birth to Edward VI, on 24th October, 1537. (Or, she may have been assassinated with poison.) St. Georges Chapel, Windsor Castle, was Jane Seymours last restingplace. Ralph Sadler sold the Sutton House in 1537, the still-extant lost royal palace in Hackney of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, never really having settled-there for himself, and moved to the countryside, building during the course
of the next decade his own, custom-designed Standon Lordships, a little-mansion country manor-house, in Hertfordshire, on the Standon lands originally given by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, then subsequently to Jane Seymour, when Ralph had acted as Steward to them both, and which were now become his. It is unclear, from the evidence at-present available, whether Sutton House remained in the purview of the State Comptrollers Office, and it was then successively leased-out as time went by, or was disposed of entirely to the private-sector early-on. Sir John Heron, as Comptroller of the Kings Household and Treasurer of the Chamber from 1492-1521, may-have owned and managed, for the Crown, an earlier-building on or near the site of Sutton House, in 1511, certainly, and slightly-before, possibly, and created a palace which was begun for Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragons only living-son, only for it to be subsequently abandoned when that child died prematurely. 106

Sutton House manor house abuts the Hackney Brook, a feeder to the main River Lea, which runs south to the Thames at the Isle of Dogs, and north up to Ware, where another River Lea feeder, the River Rib, abuts Standon Lordships manor house, so it would be a perfectly straightforward-matter to row by boat between Hackney and Standon, in a few hours ; something certainly not beyond the strength of Henry VIIIs teams of professional rowers, who ferried him all over the Thames Basin rivers. It is likely that Henry VIII did some of one of his favourite pastimes, stargazing, with royal astronomer and artificer of mechanical automatons, Nicholas Kratzner, on the flat roof at the rear of Sutton House, which overlooked the Hackney Marshes, as the site would give good night-sky perspectives, ones different from those at Greenwich, another Henrician stargazing site. There is a Hertfordshire local-legend from Standon village, that there exists an undergroundpassageway between the St. Mary the Virgin church, and present-day Lordship Manor, Ralph Sadlers former Standon Lordships country-mansion manor-house, over half-a-mile away, whose East wing chapel definitely had an ingenious trapdoor letting-on to an underground room, as it was noted extant in the eighteenth-century, although this may have simply been some-sort of a refuge or priest-hole.
There are rumours, too, of a large, subterranean-vault underneath the St. Marys church, which have never been investigated. Ralph Sadlers tomb is a large feature inside the church. All sorts of untold-numbers of unknown hidden manuscripts may await discovery. The notion of preserving-documents in lead-lined boxes that had had the air extracted from them was known in Tudor times. A later seventeenth-century occupant at Standon Lordships hid possessions in one of the River Leas feeders, the River Rib, which runs through the property, when avoiding pursuers. 107

Identical types-of rumours surround Sutton House in Hackney. In the 1950s, remains of a brick-arched tunnel were discovered near the River Lea associate to Sutton House : no trace remains of any of the evidence of a Knight-Templar in a full-suit of armour that was said to have been found guarding the entrance to the recently-uncovered tunnel! The personal-physician to Elizabeth I, the Venetian, Dr. Julius Caesar, had a son, Sir Julius Caesar, who lived at Sutton House in the early 1600s , and who was the Master of the Rolls and Chancellor of the Exchequer to James VI of Scotland when also hed become James I of England. Sir Julius Caesar reported in 1618 a servant at Sutton House finding ...documents... hidden-upon a ledge, which ledge was in a niche half-way down the deep kitchen-well, at the rear of the house, which documents were fished-out when the well was drained during maintenance work, presumably in an airtight, lead-lined box, and Sir Julius took possession of them. Sir Julius Caesar was, in many-ways, similar to Ralph Sadler; long-forgotten now, an amazing man all in his own-right, highly-intelligent and influential, six-foot four, with ginger hair and a long ginger beard, he had his own Sumptuary Act of Parliament passed, entitling only him to wear an all-black suit of armour; and his father knew Ralph Sadler, as, indeed, did Sir Julius himself, as he was in one of Ralphs old-jobs, living in one of Ralphs old houses.
Ralph Sadlers personal seal signet ring was said to be engraved with the classic Romanbust depiction of the Emperor Julius Caesar. In 1619, there was a Privy Council meeting which discussed land and other matters concerning Ralph Sadler, who was deceased some thirty-two years by then, and one attendee present was Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls.
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We understand then, that the turbulent, epoch-changing events of 1532-37, happened when Ralph Sadler was aged between twenty-five and thirty years-old. Not that it is possible to single-out any particular year in Ralph Sadlers whole life that wasnt completely full of turbulent, epoch-changing events, usually with him as the bringer of the hurricane, yet we always find him, standing coolly, in the dead-calm eye of the storm!
Chapter 9
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Ralph Sadler : Principal Secretary
Ralph Sadler soon enough controlled everything that Cromwell had; and more besides, including his own troupe of actors, the Sadlers Players. We note the variant in the spelling of Sadleyr to Sadler here, as Ralph Sadler appears to have colluded in having his surname spelt Sadler in all his public-arena communiqus and communications, throughout his life, despite his spelling Sadleyr in his personal signature for the whole of his life. On Sadlers
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tomb, we see the original y in his surname transposed now to an i in spelling Sadleir; a great individual example of how such then-current practices were modernizing the English language. Sir Ralph Sadlers tomb is of nearly the same quality in its carving as that of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Yet it stands neglected, almost ruinous, to this day in the church of St. Mary the Virgin in Standon, Hertfordshire, in the village he helped to create and to perpetuate. The matter of a picture by Hans Holbein, which most-probably depicts Ralph Sadler, is used as the frontispiece in this book; the death-mask depiction that was carved of Ralph Sadlers face on his full-length, life-size depiction in effigy atop his tomb, is most like that painted portrait, identical, in fact; its just forty years on in time from it. The Holbein portrait is from in and around the time the War of the Rough-Wooing of the English technically-began in Scotland, 1542. At the age of thirty, Ralph Sadler was made special ambassador-without-portfolio and sent in 1537 on an embassy mission as His Excellency the English Special Ambassador to Scotland, Orator to Henry VIII up to Scotland by Henry VIII personally, ostensibly to speak with Henrys disgruntled sister, Margret, and she instructed to answer Ralph as if she were speaking to Henry himself. Ralph Sadler then had his own Shakespearian The Winters Tale to tell, riding his favourite Barbary horse through snowstorms in the deepest part of the January midwinter-time: this was the first time that we know of he ever rode on his own between London and Edinburgh, and he did his first Scottish embassy trip there and back in a month, in the middle of a severe-winter, grabbing the attention of the whole Henrician royal court by so doing. Ralph Sadler must have been a canny-lad, who loved his horses.
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But then again, Ralph Sadler definitely loved horses, worshipped them, you might say. His favourite Barbary horses (the same type of horse often found favoured in the Shakespearian works) often get a mention in Ralph Sadlers own correspondences. Henry VIIIs reign had seen the beginning in selection of land nearby to his main London metropolis, in order to provide fodder and space for the rapidly increasing horse-traffic into London, and instead of a congestion-charge, anyone with thirty or more men and horses was required to corral them beyond city limits. The laws covering this have resulted today in Hampstead Heath being preserved for the nation, as its land-footprint is the sole-surviving remnant of those measures, and Ralph Sadler held a great deal of responsibility to that. Good old Sir Ralph Sadler, eh? Remember him fondly when your feet walk upon those particular English pastures-green! Ralph Sadler capped his Scottish trip by going straight on to visit James V of Scotland in France, where James was on a state visit, to drop off Margrets gift of the Scotulorum Rotulorum (a history of Scotland, that interestingly contains those historical details found in the Shakespearian play Macbeth which are not found in Camden or anywhere else but the play and some earlier sources unknown until more recent days) and which Margret also gave copy of to Ralph Sadler as a gift for Henry VIIIs archives. Ralph Sadler would discuss matters further with Henry VIIIs nephew James, including the continuing infringements of the 1534 peace treaty regarding the Anglo-Scottish borders, in place of the king. Since 1531, the Border Reevers, some of James Vs more recalcitrant subjects, had been accepting bribes in gold and silver off Henry VIII to stay out of England : but they welshed on the bet, as it were, by continuously making a nuisance of themselves in the area and sporadically but persistently raiding back-and-forth over the Scottish-English border around Berwick.
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On the 25th of March, 1538, construction began (as did payments to Ralph Sadler) on Nonsuch Palace, near Cuddington, Surrey. This Italianate Renaissance design-marvel was to be modelled (with Henrys worsening mobility from his 1536 perforated leg-ulcer foremost in mind) to have uniquely innovatory dumb-waiter style lift-shafts fitted at each end of the ground-floor corridor, allowing Henry his own independent disabled-access to the single upstairs-floor, whilst still seated in his wheeled trolley-chair. Level-access would have been an over-arching requirement inside and outside the palace, and the approaches look gentlyramped and fairly level-looking in the oldest-known Elizabethan picture of the place. Nonsuch Palace was soon habitable, and though lived in from 1540 onwards, it was still being ornately added-to, in its trademark faux-Italian-ate style, at Henry VIIIs death in 1547. On the 18 th of April, 1538, aged thirty-one, Sir Ralph Sadler was knighted, for services rendered. In 1539, Sir Ralph Sadler had obtained Selby Abbey, Yorkshire, by ...a grant and bargin...on behalf of Henry VIII...
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(most intriguing for us to note the for and on behalf of Henry VIII
has altered to now just being on behalf of here) and by 1541 he is sole-owner of the vicarage and the four large water-mills at Selby, plus the ferry over the Ouse and its charges ; he also had a little mansion manor-house, a rectory, and Hoke Chapel, all in
nearby Snathe parish.
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A grant or bargin for...the Monastery of Selby and Staynor...before the Dissolution, 20th December, 1539 . BL Mss: add.ch. 45875. * Authors comment: A fascinating document; an original single piece of calfskin parchment roll, unfortunately, missing its seal. One of many manuscript documents of the historical record I have personally examined at the British Library, where I have a Registered Academic Reader designated-status, and am privileged-enough to be allowed near some of such precious artifacts. History truly comes alive in your hands, before your very eyes, when you handle these items. The British Library is one of the worlds truly great, worthwhile institutions, and we must support and back their work, now more than ever.
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Historian A. J. Slavin, estimates 370 acres in Yorkshire as being the total of Ralph Sadlers other, separate Yorkshire land-holdings.86
Ralph Sadler had to have a strong presence in Yorkshire; this was the county linking-towards the bordering territory with that reluctant, truculent and recalcitrant neighbour nation, Scotland. Like de Warenne and Cressingham for Edward I back in 1295, on behalf of Henry VIII, Ralph Sadler was the effectively-appointed colonial administrator for Scotland, and in the de Warenne tradition, Yorkshire was adjudged the best-place to be to counter any troubles (and bad-weather) from further north of the English border. By 1539, Ralph Sadler controlled and owned Selby Abbey, other nearby properties, and had a large chunk of land in the rest of Yorkshire on behalf of the King, if not for, but as with all of Ralph Sadlers voluminous land-owning,
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the holdings were, more often than not, of a
strategic, political-nature, and it was all just to be able to have control towards the Scottish border, in the case of the Yorkshire lands. By 1544, over 3,000 ecclesiastical-properties had been destroyed in Yorkshire alone. Ralph Sadler was very much a master of war, at home and abroad, the linchpin in Englands defensive structure; what we would describe best as Head of Homeland Security. For all of his over fifty-year long career, non-stop, he never failed in this role. That Ralph Sadler, in 1540, aged only thirty-three, was at the same time running the country as Principal Secretary, and caring intimately for Henry VIII throughout the latter portion of
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Op. cit. x/cff A. J. Slavin Politics and profit in the sixteenth-century: a study of Sir Ralph Sadler and the office of the Hanaper, 1507-1547 (1966). (Reprinted 2009.) 87 Sadler owned land in twenty-eight separate English counties at his death.
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that reign, and would then go on to become such a vital political asset in the reigns of the next-three monarchs, most especially as a leading-light and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to Elizabeth I; we must now see from this short-biography of Ralph Sadler, that these are the major and massively-important facts that every historian, in every history book and historiography ever written, never seems to have been aware of as to their having being both contiguous and pertinent to the other known-matters of historical fact, and so historians have consequentially been unable to elucidate or enlighten us thus-far upon these Sadlerian matters, in any truly useful or informative way : all of
which matters I hope may soon have considered debates from peer-approval forwarded to them, now that a more fully-comprehensive short-biography is finally available on Ralph Sadler by these pages. Just after marrying his fourth-wife, Anne of Cleves, on the 6th of January, 1540, Henry VIII either incarcerated or planted (at whose suggestion?) Ralph Sadler in the Tower of London briefly, maybe, but anyway placed him alongside Thomas Wyatt, that Father of the English Sonnet, with whom Ralph Sadler supposedly shared a cell. Ralph Sadler, no doubt after long discussion of the transition, merits and demerits of the Italian verse-form sonnet into its becoming the emerging Early English Sonnet verse-form of poetry with his knowledgeable fellow-inmate, was released in enough time to become Principal Secretary to the-King-inParliament, just before the moment when Thomas Cromwell was elevated as the Earl of Essex, in April, 1540; and to then bear witness to Archbishop Thomas Cramners 9th of July, 1540 declared nullification of Henry VIIIs fourth marriage; pertaining to grounds of a
previously-undisclosed pre-nuptial betrothal-agreement between Anne of Cleves and the Marquis of Lorraine, and also to the non-consummation of her marriage with Henry. Henry VIII was divorced from her on the 12th of July, 1540. Anne of Cleves took a pension of 3,000
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per annum (worth around 1.5m today) and died peacefully aged forty-four as a naturalised citizen, really, in England, 1557. Westminster Abbey, adjacent to the High Altar, was Anne of Cleves last resting-place. Thomas Cromwell, however, was now officially cast-down and out and into the Tower of London; only one person dared to represent for him to Henry VIIIs face: but even Ralph Sadler couldnt persuade his royal master to issue a royal pardon, unlike in the play, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and the real Thomas Cromwell was not hung by the neck, but executed by beheading, as its now being his right by both the prerogative of his enoblement and by the particular mercy of Henry VIII, on 28th of July, 1540, only having occupied his highest honour given him from Henry VIII, as Lord Cromwell, the Earl of Essex, for barely three months. But whether Ralph Sadler was really true to Thomas Cromwell, or more of a Shakespearian Iago-like figure towards him, or just always totally more-or-less independent of him, is difficult if not impossible for us to truly discern from the record at present.
Regulating history, via lists of kings and queens, compartmentalising great men or great women and events of history, is a Victorian legacy still being shaken off by modern historians. The integration and seamlessness of people and events is what is sought today, a contiguous-narrative; but that neednt entirely exclude our being able to come to grips with the great movements of history and at the same time hold in our heads the fact that some personalities outstandingly dominate their time or their metier, and so they could and should be considered as at least exceptional individuals worthy of special note, if not as great men, heroes, and as great women, heroines. By pointless homogenisation in attempts to understand the process, we lose all colour in the telling of our history, and thats no good for a story!
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By April, 1540, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, had ... resigned his duties to his protgs...
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The protgs, one Ralph Sadler and one Thomas Wriothesley, by Act of Parliament, were also granted direct individual-access to the House of Commons and/or the House of Lords by Henry VIII at their own frequency, discretion and will, and now became joint-holders of the new position of Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament, the first time in English history that foreign and domestic policy is in an officially-recognised form of legally-designated jurisdictional competence, and also formally-separate from the Crown. This formalisation of Thomas Cromwell/Ralph Sadlers time as Principal Secretary to then legally become Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament during the 1530s-40s formally carries the power away from the monarchy and fundamentally places it in the hands of the executive administration, Parliament, forever. The position of Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament was ostensibly shared at first with Thomas Wriothesley; but it was Ralph Sadler who played all to his own advantage, and Wriothesley quickly got completely sidelined by events as they fell out.
We would guess-kindly that, true to humanist form, Henry VIII in choosing new top advisers would have picked his leading Protestant reformer (sharpest man of the new-ideas) as Ralph Sadler, and then chosen as his leading Catholic (sharpest man of the old-ways-asthey-are-now) in Thomas Wriothesley, most likely for them to be the representatives of their two religions, in effort to hear both sides, and for Henry VIII to be seen publicly as at least ostensibly as having both sides actually heard by him.
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pp. 181. Susan Doran The Tudor Chronicles: 1485-1603 (2008) Quercus.
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But Henry VIII never seemed to be able to please all of the people all of the time, never even-attempted it, and was blithely-unbothered by failing so to do, it appears. You cant please all of the people all of the time, and some people you just cant please at all, so pass me more of the eel pie and stuffed-swan starter, now! is what he may likely have said, if anyone had ever dared ask him. Henry VIII liked the eel pies of an old lady that he bumped into selling them when he was out boating on the Thames one day so much, he whimsically dubbed her spit of waterbound land as Eel Pie Island, a name which stuck. Maybe it was the same kind of whimsy that persuaded Henry VIII that Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament would be just the name of the shop, just his usual butler-service, and not an appointment that would fatally undermine the legacy of their being able to be a pure absolute monarch for his children. Ralph Sadler would have comfortingly assured him, that with two mere commoner people appointed in a purely administrative-based rubber-stamp post for confirming Henry VIIIs every whim now legally, in Parliament, a post from which they could either or both of them be sacked at any time, how could the joint or even single Principal Secretary to the King in Parliament ever threaten even the least jot of Henry VIIIs absolute power? Henry VIII does seem like quite the all-round dissolute prince, not a virtuous, good or kindly virtue about him, ever, just a great-big rich and spoilt-child his whole life, didnt know or care where the money came from, dressing-up as an ancient and imagined chivalric knight, demanding his real-wars to play with his real-soldiers at,
scrapping wives and religion in piggish acts of selfish petulance, having people killed in the manner of a Great Khan from some ancient even to his day Arabic-tale, all on a whim, from 118

his eel-pie whimsy. All the while, his people starved and were exploited, ground down under the heel of this brutal, psychopathic dictator, always doing stuff just to quench his visceral appetites, no intellect or intelligence in the man worth talking of; as a direct comparison, I think of Colonel Mumar Gadaffi in our time : Same man in Henry VIII, a jumped-up, tin-pot dictator, not rich enough to be taken too-seriously by the nations that matter, heedless of all others, including members of his own family : in sum, Henry VIII was a brutal brutish brute of a man, his selfish hands steeped and stained with the blood of that he worked in. Very Shakespearian character. I think it most likely that young Ralph Sadler got so close to all that Henry VIII demanded of the world, that it revolted him; and that as a result, he grew up and vowed to change things forever, to change history, to stop one person ruling over everyone, to create and share the wealth and to change the religion in English society, to achieve a more humanist outcome and to forge, anneal and braze it all to a sense of all of that embodying what it was to be English for the citizens of this country. And with a great-deal more than the usual amount of commonsense granted to a human being, and with a real sword in one hand and his pen and paper in the other, Ralph Sadler gradually achieved all of his aims, and he did it for and on behalf of all of us, Englands future, basically, and for that he should have all of our undying thanks, always. If we consider Henry VIIIs court as the Shogunate was organised at that same historical period over in Japan, then Ralph Sadler was the Chief Samurai and Prime Minister ; when the Shogun died, other apparent-leaders and their regimes came and went, but the old Shoguns regime as a model never really faded entirely-away, and no-one ever took down the old Chief Samurai and Prime Minister, Ralph Sadler, the Spymaster-General, and he infiltrated and created an effective Parliament, whilst the warring-clans and factions, domestic and foreign, more or less fought among themselves!
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At this point, between 1539 and 1540, Ralph Sadler became, de facto, the unassailable and wholly-unaccountable, Head of Homeland Security, as we would understand it today. Most importantly, he was secretly the Spymaster-General of all spies in the State, and was a master-spy in his own right.
The Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament position was the equivalent to our own times as if the post of Head of Homeland Security was to be wholly-amalgamated with that of being both the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary, whilst also being the Prime Minister, so as to then individually be in sole-charge of overall policy decision-making, both foreign and domestic; and acting as First Lord of the Treasury and Chief Minister for the Civil Service, as well as in the offices of First Secretary of State, First Lord and President of the Privy Council, Secretary of Defence, and Chief Minister and Treasurer for the Armed Forces; including too, via the administration of the State Paper Office, the overall responsibility for all official Tudor publications, state-censorship and all of any matters pertaining to the whole of Whitehall bureaucracy! Not to mention the organising and construction of every major war, treaty, palace and building that Henry VIII, the tyrannical monarch you worked for, had a penchant for ordering-up, on a whim! Quite an awesome, Mount Everest-sized amount of responsibility, that not even the presentday The Right Honourable Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire & of Hartlepool in the county of Durham, formerly Minister at the Cabinet Office, Secretary of State at the Department of Trade & Industry (1997-1998), Secretary of State for Business, First Lord and President of the Privy Council, First Secretary of State (2008-2010), could take it all on alone, I fear. 89
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The Government Art Collection at Work 3 June-4 September 2011 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, displayed a work Lord Mandelson hung when in office : Queen Elizabeth I (1533-
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In Tudor times, Hartlepool was the postern gate to Scotland, and of great strategic military value. In Tudor times, to coin by reference to our American cousins modern baseball game as a useful analogue, a now long-forgotten English hero stepped up to the batting-plate whenever he was required, and he hit the ball clean out of the park, home run, every single time without fail for fifty or sixty years, consecutively : Ralph Sadler. The symbol of the Lancastrians, a solid-gold interlinked double ss wrought chain-of-office, would have been worn by Ralph Sadler. A famous portrait (of Sir Thomas More(1527) by Hans Holbein
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) depicts this actual piece of official-jewellery, in the most-realistic fashion.
The power that came to Principal Secretary Sadler in 1540 was effectively that of a ViceRegent to the king, a stand-in for when the current monarch was in absentia, with similar gravitas shown by one and all to the holder of the office of Principal Secretary to the King-inParliament, as if to the ruler in person. At least, it was when Ralph Sadler first took the job. Ralph Sadler would run that office effectively for over fifty-years, despite his own chameleon-like changing of official designations and his apparently constantly changing offices and official duties. His loyalties were to be always to his monarch, as being the physical embodiment of England, of the State, and of what it was to be English, and he would serve Henry VIII and then serve his three children as they each successively took the reins of power, with an unswerving doggedness and steely-determination. The policies
1603) c. 1585-95 (oil on panel) Unknown 16th-century British artist. Government Art Collection , where the queen is depicted with the red rose of the Lancastrian Tudor dynasty in her hair, and is holding up directly to our eyeline a brooch with an intaglio-style depiction of the Lesser George, the emblem of the Order of the Garter. See also, Art, Power, Diplomacy : Government Art Collection, The Untold Story (2011) Scala Publishers. 90 * Authors comment : Ah. I have a book in preparation about Hans Holbein, so Ill leave further comment until then.
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themselves had all originated under the founder of the Tudor dynasty, Henry VII, with the prevention of insurrection and of civil war against his illegitimate-claim to the throne, at their root. Just as Sutton House in Hackney was an improvement on Thomas Cromwells nearby foundered-attempt at house-building, now that he was Principal Secretary, Ralph Sadlers refounding of the totalitarian state-bureaucracy that Cromwell had begun would itself be so much greater of an improvement.
When legislation had made Thomas Cromwell the Vicar-General, Vicegerent-in-Spirituals (just before his execution) it was effectively Vice Regent to Henry VIII. That level of status was inherited and improved-upon by Principal Secretary Ralph Sadler, with an Act of Parliament confirming it, and he quietly pursued it for the rest of his life, extemporising and ad-libbing domestic and foreign policy-decisions for fifty years, for and on behalf of England, with his own initiatives and agendas, and ensuring all was done as he wished, and the English people thereby gained their sense of an England, and of their Englishness, thereof. The rest followed.
Firstly, by founding the State Paper Office, with himself as top-dog, then secondly with his appointing his friend, William Paget, Clerk to the Privy Council, as the inaugural Stationers Registrar (this being the top-position at the also-new Stationers Register Office, a subdivision and an official-body to channel, tabulate and deal with state-censorship and every published and printed-word in England), Ralph Sadler established what we know today as the Whitehall civil-service machinery and its administrative bureaucracy. With his also effective-control over the official state-censors Stationers Register Office, and by the
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channelling of its business through the State Paper Office, Ralph Sadler completed a personal-stranglehold on the means of propaganda-production for the state. And, as Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament, Ralph Sadler, in effect, was the State, by law. Much of the historical source-material Ralph Sadler controlled through the State Paper Office was within the Collectaneia Satis Coposia manuscript collection and others of Dr. Edward Fox and Archbishop Thomas Cramner from the 1530s, which had delighted Henry VIII.
From 1540 on, until his death forty-seven years later, there would have been no state-secret, no matter of foreign or domestic policy, that Sir Ralph Sadler would not have had access to or been privy to, and have had the direct-influencing over thereof, for those many decades left of his life to come. This influence was imbued in him the moment he became Principal Secretary to the-King-inParliament and never went away, in fact being most exceptionally and especially to the fore when he was the leading-light, and effectively her top-secret and virtual de facto permanent Principal Secretary to the-Queen-in-Parliament, during the first twenty-nine years of Elizabeth Is reign, which were to be among the most profound years in Ralph Sadlers long service to the monarchy, and to Englands future. Ralph Sadler was running the country as Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament, and at the same time caring intimately for the actual King Henry VIII throughout the latter portion of that reign, and Sadler would then go on to continue as such a vital-asset to the country in the reigns of the next three, if not four or five, ruling monarchs, most especially as a leading light to Elizabeth I. 123

Portentously, as it fell out, Henry VIII married Catherine Howard that same 28th of July day as Thomas Cromwell was executed in 1540; sixteen months later, in November, 1541, Henry was persuaded by Archbishop Thomas Cramner (who was in possession of anonymously supplied secret information) of Catherine Howards adultery before marriage; any personal uncertainty Henry VIII may have had regarding calls for her subsequent execution, was removed for him when the web he himself was caught in was cast wide by the publication of an anonymous and vicious propaganda-pamphlet maligning her character and actions, which was mass-published and then anonymously mass-distributed across Europe, by Ralph Sadler and Thomas Wriothesley. This event has been described as a great political-coup, and one its results became all too-apparent on the 13th of February, 1542, when Henry VIIIs fifth-wife Catherine Howard was beheaded.
Catherine Howard was buried in the Vinicula Chapel within the confines of the Tower of London, the pieces of her body placed next to where Anne Boleyns pieces still lay from five years previously, in the old wooden Beefeater arrow-chest makeshift coffin. Both women had been commoners, and Henry VIII had no compunctions as to their executions on that score.
On his next embassy to Scotland in 1541, various of Ralph Sadlers tracts to Henry VIII have included in them the verbatim descriptions and exchanges of those concerned, usually only when matters touch on James V. En route to Edinburgh, Ralph Sadler faced an angry local Yorkshire mob down without flinching. When he gets to Edinburgh, James V makes a big show of denying a Bishop from the house he then puts Ralph Sadler in. (Wry Scottish humour allround, Id say.)
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Sadler is likely to have been a designated knight-banneret of the unblooded in battle type at his official 1538 knighting by Henry VIII, as in 1541 he is billeted now in Edinburgh with an equivalent man in that sort of degree, the Scottish Herald and already famous in his day as a published warrior-poet and playwright, the highly-educated, highly-cultured and erudite Sir David Lindsay. No doubt Sadler could discuss the poetry of his own friends John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard with Lindsay, as well as theatrical plays in performance and their propaganda values. Uncle Henry VIII was supposed to meet his nephew James V for a chat at York in 1541, all of which diplomacy was originally-suggested and then fully-arranged by Ralph Sadler during the course of his embassy, but silly sonny James de facto chose to indicate his support for French interests, by making a last-minute excuse to Ralph, and then not attending on his Nuncle Henry at all.
Uncle Henry was not pleased with his nephew over this, fuming at the perceived disrespect.
Also of interest to note here is a mysterious fire, on Christmas Eve, in that year of 1541, at the house of Sir John Williams, Master of the Crown Jewels, after Ralph Sadler had held the office jointly with Cromwell. It also happened that Henry VIII was short of money just then, and in 1542 would embark upon simultaneous, massive wars of attrition against the French, the Scottish, and particularly against the French in Scotland. Of the fire, Doran mentions: In the evacuation many of the royal jewels stored there were stolen.
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pp. 185. . Susan Doran The Tudor Chronicles: 1485-1603 (2008) Quercus.
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Ralph Sadler, when he was twenty-nine, personally inventoried the Crown Jewels, in 1536; and in correction of William Cecils shoddy work, when Sadler was aged sixty-seven, he then made a further inventory of 1574, for which we still have the immaculate original manuscript account-books, at the British Library, co-signed by Sadler with Walter Mildmay and with William Cecil. Scholars need look no further than here to see superb autograph-examples of Ralph Sadlers signature, and his clear signing of his own surname ending, given as eyr . Henry VIII denuded Englands currency, between 1542-46, clipping all coins, (an offence entailing automatic bodily mutilation under the law if committed by ordinary folk, the tops of the ears and the end of the nose being sliced off selectively, per. each offence, hanging for a third offence) including even copper-ones, and reducing the overall amounts of true-silver or, indeed, gold, in the nations coinage to pay for his wars, for the second and much more far-reaching time of his reign, seriously impoverishing the whole country. (Henry VIII had dabbled, but Wolsey had shown him the way previously, years before, when paying-off for the Field of the Cloth-of-Gold, but that was small-potatoes compared to what now went on.)
Unexplained accounting-discrepancies are part of what was officially-cited at the time in order to account for Cromwells final execution, rather than any mention of Henrys six-month unconsummated Lutheran German Protestant political-alliance marriage to Ann of Cleves, and no mention of Cromwells involvement in arranging it, therein. Ralph Sadler, always acting autonomously, was always very-closely involved with all of these figures, the people and the sums, both on-and-off the page, literally and metaphorically, Zelig-like once again.
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Elizabeth I was aged eight in 1541. Ralph Sadler was thirty-four, and already ambassador to Scotland, Principal Secretary and anonymous spymaster ruler of all English politics and policies, both foreign and domestic. On the surface, Ralph Sadler appears to shun the limelight. Events around him show the proof of that; he is often there in the record, but fails to get a personal mention, or the documents are next found to be missing, or he overtly arranges to remain anonymous in the record : hence, the amount of work for the historian in even tracking him down is opprobrious at all times. People often played more than one role. Girolamo de Treviso, for example, was an Italian artist, writer and musician, who doubled-up as a technician in war for Henry VIII, between 1538 and 1544. He was killed in the war with France, at the Siege of Boulogne, in 1544. A picture by him hung in Hampton Court Palace, called Protestant Allegory, depicting the imagined stoning to death of the Pope by the four evangelists of the bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, a marvellously executed picture, which is still extant, now of The Royal Collection, copyright Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Ralph Sadler, ostensibly still Treasurer to the Army in Scotland in 1544, the paymastergeneral was personally-present and engaged in the most clandestine and top-secret top secret operations involving that epic battle and the Siege of Boulogne in France, slipping in and out between the two countries, dangerously-flitting and crossing and re-crossing the
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English Channel in all weathers aboard unlit rickety boats, The Moth
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like a hawk-moth
hunting on the scent of the evening breeze, in the very dead of even the most windless nights. Unfortunately, by 1542, the Scottish Cardinal David Beaton had impelled James V into directconfrontation and war with Henry VIII; but the English soon-captured most members of the Scottish nobility in one foul-swoop at the Battle of Solway Moss, and James died shortly after of a broken heart, just after his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots was born; either that, or he was assassinated by poisoning. More unfortunately for Cardinal David Beaton, by 1543 Henry VIII had Sir Ralph Sadler back in Edinburgh on embassy yet again, at one point offering senior Scottish noble James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, a huge bribe in gold (politely proffered by Ralph; gracefully and greedily-accepted by the earl) and adding to it that Arrans son should be made King of Scotland on condition a marriage-contract was made with Henrys second daughter,
Elizabeth, then aged ten years old (who was, fifteen years later, of course, to become in her own unmarried-right crowned as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the First of England) to her eventually wedding Arrans son, with them both to live in England in the meanwhile. Quite what a future that would have precisely-meant for the then-current monarch, the bebe-in-arms Mary, Queen of Scots, or for her mother, Mary of Guise, who was acting as Regent on her daughters behalf, is beyond conjecture. But Ralph Sadler and Henry VIII had already thought one up anyway.
The secret cipher-encoded letters from Ralph Sadler to Henry VIII in yet another Sadler embassy to Scotland of 1543, give a hint of where English thinking on The Scottish Matters
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* Authors note ; see chapter 14, The Moth, now, but only if you wish to know right this second and ruin all the fun!
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lay; Sadler was asked if someone could be found to assassinate Cardinal Beaton. Once Ralph Sadler is safe his in self-imposed Scottish house-arrest at the near-impregnable Tantallon Castle (setting of Sir Walter Scotts nineteenth-century medieval historical fiction novel, Marmion) Sadler is ultra-careful with his replies to that know-anyone-who-can-killCardinal-David-Beaton? inquiry hed received; but the letters he leaves us which survive are the same letters the Scottish saw, when they as a matter-of-course intercepted and seamlessly-hacked all the information contained within those letters, and Sadler appears to be sending the Scottish Catholic interceptors and interrogators of his missives and their French friends the message more-or-less along the lines that, ...if the troublesome priest hes mentioned before in the letters carries on being troublesome, then if hes not too careful of heeding a warning over it, Cardinal David Beatons days may be numbered on the fingers of one hand,... kind-of-thing, so as that is made so-obvious and apparently-discernible to any reader capable of cracking the enciphered parts of the usual diplomatic-bag letters, someone will now definitely-tell Cardinal David Beaton something to clutch his rosary a bit tighter over, one way or the other.
Ralph Sadler is a master-spy, a grandmaster-spy, playing The Greatest Game, that of statesmanship and diplomacy, with all of its spies and spying, codes and ciphers, doublethink, triple-think, and Sadler appears to almost-presciently know his opposite numbers moves, and to also very-precisely know how theyll choose to behave, and seems to knows it all like the back of his underhand dealings.
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1543 was the year Ralph Sadler, alone, thought-up, drew-up, planned, designed, arranged, negotiated and had executed by the 1st of July the diplomatic confection of the English Treaty of Greenwich with Scotland, with the infant child Edward VI being slated to marry baby Mary, Queen of Scots at its already fatally-rotten core. Ralph
Sadler and either his wife or a noblewoman were down to become in loco parentis guardians to Mary, Queen of Scots, at Henry VIIIs personal pleading directly to Ralph Sadler to accept the job, which pleas were listened to and would have been acted upon, whenever required.
The mind simply boggles to contemplate how all that would then have turned out for Mary, Queen of Scots, had it come to pass. Seething Scottish political-factions negated it all by Sadlers return September 1543 embassy, but I believe this is the year Sadler gained complete control for himself over the heart and mind of Henry VIII; he was the only man alive who truly understood Henry VIII on a personal-level, and in the very next year of 1544 would give the English king what he most desired, other than a stable marriage producing healthy male-heirs : an epic war with France, which would (to Henrys mind, at least) finally establish Henry VIII as more than just a minor European prince, but also engender simply-enormous expenses, ones that took England to the very verge of national bankruptcy. Becoming Henry VIIIs sixth and final wife was Catherine Parr, whom he married on the 12th of July, 1543. Henry VIII would pass away on 28th January, 1547; Catherine Parr would marry for a third time, within a month or so of his passing, a shade of Hamlets fathers experiences (whose widow, according to her son Hamlet, remarried ...within a month, - /Let me not 130

think ont, - ) for Henry VIII, had he but known. Like Catherine of Aragon, back in 1513 when Henry VIII had invested the French in Touranne with war, Catherine Parr would be legally made as
the temporary theoretical ruling-monarch, Regent of England, in the 1544 war with France whilst the boss-man was abroad playing at soldiers. (Whilst Henry VIII was in France in 1513, Catherine of Aragon had suddenly been confronted in Scotland with war, and with her temporary theoretical ruling-monarch Regent powers now wielded in actual practice, had those cheeky-upstart Scottish warmongers immediately smashed, and quite completely, too, at the battle of Flodden Field. She then sent Henry a piece of the topcoat of the now-dead King James IV of Scotland as a hurry-home gift. She had very-nearly instead sent Henry the dead kings head, and he said later he wished she had, as it would have made him laugh to receive it. (A charming couple, wed all agree. What springs to my mind is the David BowieBrian Eno musical collaboration Heroes, the title-track lyric that goes : ....and I............................I will be King....and you...you will ...be Queen.....and we can be heroes....just for one day..... . )
Highly-significantly, Ralph Sadler was given a legally-binding on all parties equal-billing as to him also having temporary theoretical ruling-monarch wielding powers in the actual practice of the 1544 temporary Regency of Catherine Parr whilst Henry VIII was in Boulogne, and in the actual practice, Catherine first deferred and then demurred all the decisions that were required to be made entirely to Ralph Sadler, and he made them all for her, throughout the period concerned. The power behind the throne is usually just a metaphor; but in our particularly extraordinary case, it is a stark-reality : Ralph Sadler remained always as the real power 131

behind the throne in England whilst he lived, monarch or no-monarch, and no-one seems ever to have noticed much, throughout history, he was just that entirely discreet. Catherine Parr would soon-enough follow her second husband Henry VIII to the grave, dying naturally in 1548. Sudeley Castle, near Cheltenham was Catherine Parrs last restingplace.
Chapter 10
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Thomas Cromwell, a London lad, was of low-born stock; lowly-born too, was William Cecil, from Stamford, Lincolnshire. We recall Ralphs father, Henry Sadler, being in service to Sir Edward Belnap (Belknap) for Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth-of-Gold, and as his being involved as a handicraftsman and an artificier of that event : with his jobs and his status, he may have been an ungentle-gentle, or first generation gentleman. Intriguing then, are Rowses comments on the attainment of gentleman status; professional education through divinity studies or the law was preferable, but it was : ...allowed that ascent from a low house or a poor stock to high office and honour as an un-gentle gentle or first generation gentlemen, was proper enough provided that the man was of good moral character and personality, and that this starting point, his original family status, was above that of goodman, ascribed to handicraftmen. If he became a ...well-beloved and high-esteemed man, a post or stay of the commonwealth... , and rich, it was possible to drag a line of relatives up with him. The...author (Sir Thomas Smith) is bitter on the subject of handicraftsmens sons, who without education but simply through the laying hold of land since the Dissolution of the monasteries by suspect-means, have risen to be knights or esquires .
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Sir Thomas Smith, mss: The Institution of a Gentleman (1568) and pp.131, A. L. Rowse The Elizabethan Renaissance: the life of society (1971) Sphere Books. * Authors comment: x/cff also pp.146 Rowses footnote 30, says the Smith mss lent to him by Miss Sylvia Thrupp; Sir Thomas Smith,
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Ralph Sadler, son of a handicraftsman, of good Warwickshire-yeomanry stock, embodies the whole notion of being above mere goodman status, he looks more exactly than his father like an ungentle-gentle, rising through the ranks as a first generation gentleman; a groomof-the-stool, say, who worked his way up with Thomas Cromwell, then as an esquire and personal secretary to Cromwell; next hes made a proper gentleman, of Henry VIIIs innerchamber; so must have been a ...well-beloved and high-esteemed man, a post or stay of the commonwealth... by, at the latest, 1536. Then he is knighted, gaining land of the Dissolution by suspect-means, until he was eventually the richest commoner in England, and then he gets his eldest son a knighthood,
and then his grandson receives a knighthood.
94
Sir Thomas Smith, unknowingly, (though he
did in fact personally know Ralph Sadler) does a near-perfect thumbnail-sketch of Ralph Sadler, contemporaneously! The more you look, and more youd care to look, Ralph Sadlers invisible presence and anonymous influences become more and more apparent in the record, throughout his fiftyplus years at the top. Ralph Sadler is someone who does not leap out of the record of history at us, and never will be. It was in Parliament, and in the royal court of Henry the VIII, that Ralph Sadler first began his public-speaking career. His natural flair for writing and constructing documents and speeches to be delivered (acted-out) in the public-eye, is reflected in his highly-nuanced verbatim
may well have upset Sadler, son of a handicraftsman, with this tract, as Smith and his son were sent to colonise Ireland, and their fate was fatally sealed, soon after the manuscript was written! (my brackets)
9 94
Op. cit. x/cff A.J. Slavin Politics and profit in the sixteenth-century: a study of Sir Ralph Sadler and the office of the Hanaper, 1507-1547 (1966) Reprinted 2009.
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descriptions of the royal court of James V in Scotland, which were written whenever he was acting as His Excellency, Ambassador Sadler, Orator to Henry VIII, and he was famous for it in his own day. Ralph Sadlers own oratorical skills show an actors talents, coupled with those of a disputational lawyer of a particularly magnetic-personality, one who is able to easily sway both public and private opinions, and of course being a politician demands that you be a natural performer; but remember : Take heed of fair-speeches, for all of their words are mingled with dissimulation. A cunning dissembler will always cover his Vice with the death of Vertue.
95
The writing, performing and touring of propaganda plays for Thomas Cromwell had seriously honed these Sadlerian performance abilities ; being discreet, dignified and actorly were to him all part of Ralph Sadlers stock-in-trade statecraft skills.
Ralph Sadler is the personification of that great man figure, so traduced by more recent trends in the overviews of historians, as being near-useless to explain the larger movements in society. There would appear to be an exception to be made to that particular rule in the case of Ralph Sadler. Ralph Sadlers is of an unprecedented nature, an extra-ordinary case. During the early years of his Scottish ambassadorship, Ralph Sadler was feared being held to ransom by a somewhat rogue-faction among Englands allies in Edinburgh.96
95
Morrall taken from The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke . x/cf Anonymous The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke c.1550s (1630) Francis Grove. BL .shelfmask. HUTH 83. 96 * Authors comment: In 1543; State Papers; tale told variously in existing Ralph Sadler biographies.
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These particular series of embassy to Scotland had not been without frequent incident; an unseen sniper marksman, using some sort of near-accurate rifle, had taken a fairly longdistance (for those days) pot-shot at Ralph Sadler, the would-be deadly assassins bullet skimming his head, fortunately missing, and burying itself in the wall just behind him! Furthermore, a Mr. Patrick Home of Edinburgh had taken exception to Henry VIIIs postman, a soldier from Berwick, who had been repeatedly stealing from him, so Home had taken him a lawful prisoner
97
clapping him in irons, and threatened ...to hang him with his letters
about his neck... .98 The delays this caused to the timings in exchange of communications between London and Scotland worried Henry VIII into fearing Ralph Sadler was in really big trouble. Henry VIII then, against his usually preferred penchant for not writing to anyone, sat down and wrote a long, personal missive, and sent it care of to Ralphs would-be Edinburgh abductors, in which he swore to avenge any wrongdoing or harm coming to Ralph, by he himself attending on their pleasure, King Henry VIII, The Ruby of England, in person, armed with his ...sword of justice... arrayed with his finest troops, on a dedicated-mission
to slay ...to the fourth generation... any who dared such malfeasance, if they did but so much as harm a hair on Ralph Sadlers head. And, as far as we can know, he wasnt even certain that Ralph was in trouble, let alone actually kidnapped!
97 98
pp. 154. L.F. Salzman England in Tudor times (1926) Batsford. ib.id. pp. 154.
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In the whole existing original book and volume of the mass of papers and documents contemporaneous to Henry VIII, no single-other such concrete instance of Henry VIIIs personally-avowed loyalty can be found like it.
Ralph Sadler was indispensible to Henry VIII by at the very latest, 1543, worthy of putting a whole army, personally led by Henry VIII with his sword of justice heading the charge, into the field for, even if it meant war with another nation-state; worthy of handwritten-letters, which explicitly promised Ralphs being personally avenged in blood to the fourth generation, written from the hand of his friend the king.
Yet the whole thing has remained largely unnoticed by historians so far, not commented upon meaningfully, ever.
Here is an early example of Ralph Sadler, aged thirty-six, and his day-to-day level of involvement with state secrecy, from part of a diplomatic-mission letter on the September, 1543 embassy to Scotland, one the many letters plus enciphered attachments in this embassy that was exchanged with Henry VIII : 137
From :
His Excellency Sir Ralph Sadler, English Special Ambassador to Scotland and
Orator to Henry VIII. To : His Majesty King Henry VIII, King of England &Ireland, Defender of the Realm,
Supreme Head of the Church in England &Defender of the Faith.
Edinburgh Castle, Scotland, 24th September, 1543. ...finally, when I was yesterday with the said Dowager, the Governour, and the other Lords here, I demanded the delivery of my post that was taken, and my letters, according to their promise ; which, not withstanding that I had sundry times sent for unto them, they had not performed....as, indeed, within an hour after, they did send the same to me...but whether I shall have the post delivered or not I cannot tell. The letters, being in a packet,99
99
* Authors comment: packet here means specifically a bundle (as in the quiddities
carried in a lawyers bundle of casepapers) or fardel of official administrative paperwork, loosely-tied together with hempen-string identically like a small bundle of firewood (also called then sometimes as a fardel) in order to be capable of its being slung about during its various mail-delivery jaunts in the hands of the messengers and the postmen, via horseback, via boat, or even via postal carrier-pigeon.
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they had opened it, and, as I have credible information, they have had them in this town these two or three days, which, being in cypher, they had kept the longer to prove their cunning in the decyphering of them, which (as I credibly am informed) they could do. In these two short paragraphs, we see illustrated Ralph Sadlers early involvement with spying, his skills as a writer, modern, erudite, without stereotypes, informative and perceptive as any sophisticated thirty-six year old court-level correspondent in the Europe of 1543, and indicative of his personal strong words being able to gain him within-an-hourcontrol over the Scottish Courts dealings with him, whenever necessary. The level of his intimacy with Henry VIII comes through in the tone used, and we are alerted to the (implicitly threatening to any further prying-eyes, then) open discussion of a security-breach concerning the illicit-Scottish purloining of and deciphering of officiallyciphered secret English government-communications, and the implication writ-large, that if an unfortunate diplomatic-incident were required to browbeat the Scottish Court with, this would do nicely. How Sadler discovers the letters are being interfered with, who his credible source was precisely, we do not know at this date right now : later, it would be Thomas Randolph (alias : Barnaby) and Sir James Croft : but its a straight-shot to his having all the Scottish letters he could get his hands on opened and copied, then replaced, seamlessly.
I have examined and have made my own copies by hand of some of the original manuscript letters and their enciphered attachments between Ralph Sadler and Henry VIII from these particular embassy periods : Sadlers handwriting is always swift, sure and legible : his ciphered letters are exquisite works of art. Id have said they were a specially-created prop for a modern film they are so weird and wonderful. Sadler generates between
139
writing in cursive English, continuing within a word or a sentence structure to finish in cipher, and sometimes back again into English, flawlessly, I scarce received from him a blot in his papers.
Henry VIIIs handwriting, on the other hand, to coin a phrase, looks like he stabs at the paper with the pen, famously incredibly scratchy when he does write, utterly distinctive, but not in a nice way like Ralphs writing. Henry VIII didnt seem to enjoy to read or to write for himself very much.
Writing in codes was totally second-nature to Ralph Sadler, and in all the examples of him writing which we have, encoded or not, I am sure we are only allowed to see what he himself allowed and knew would be seen by others, as the intercepting of letters was the spying name of the ambassadorial and diplomatic-game in sixteenth-century Europe. He talks at one point of some other code to be used if there is to be any further discussion of some other matter, but says anything said about that would have to be ciphered in a letter so secret, in a cipher so secret, that if it was necessary, it would happen, but it would have to then go via the other, secret, top secret route...and thats as much as I know, as much as the record records!
140

Those pages of the letters in this part of correspondence between the two men that are in enciphered code appear to have never been decoded back into English by any historian, only by the Scottish secret services in 1543, wherever those deciphered translations ended up.
100
Mind you, as the codes in themselves look like a ragged calligraphic mixture of Demotic Ancient Greek, random symbols, numbers and arcane squiggles done by a very drunk Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphist in a hurry, itll be a hats-off! to any Times or Telegraph expert crossword-puzzler who cracks it!
101
Ralph Sadler Spymaster-General, leader, statesman, diplomat and warrior is here, at thirtysix years old, already approaching a decade with this type of high-level statecraft under his belt; confidently collecting credible information, milking his spies, bribing those who needed
100
Note : I will attach a facsimile page/photo of an enciphered page I copied as an inserted page illustration here. QV. 101 The word puzzle (v.1595, Onions O.E.D.) is itself, ironically, a bit of a puzzle, being of unknown sixteenth-century etymological origin as it is. Onions typically illustrates here with an example from the Shakespearian works : But that the dread of something after death/The undiscoveredcountry, from whose bourn/No traveller returns, puzzles the will,... (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act III, scene (i) within lines 76-82; see also, below, pp.120-121). Incidentally, you may have noticed in regards the word Shakespearian that I personally always use and prefer the first spelling given in the C.T. Onions (1933) two-volume O.E.D. as Shakespearian(adverb), rather than the sub-set variant secondary-spelling following it of Shakespearean. The ean-ending usage seems to be entirely in use today from American-style journalistic practices. Onions is the O.E.D. of choice for the Shakespearian scholar, as so many of its definition citations and their accompanying illustrative quotations of word-usage in context are taken from the Shakespearian works. This practice gave rise to the urban-myth of 80% of the English language as deriving from the Shakespearian works; in fact, what is being erroneously referenced there is that about 80% of the illustrative quotations in the Onions O.E.D. are sourced from the Shakespearian works; but to know ones Onions is the proper academic, rather than horticultural, source of that particular expression, and the delight to be obtained from simply reading that particular dictionary in its bound, folio-form is inestimable. The debt of gratitude I owe to Ms. Shirley F. Ellis for providing me throughout my writing process with access to an original two-volume A-Me & Me-Z set of Onions superb 1933 works is also inestimable to me, and my thanks here to her are profuse and unbounded.
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bribing, obtaining choices of solutions and outcomes, always staying several steps ahead of the game, waving the banner of the monarch in the face of Englands enemies, daring them to do their worst. Ralph Sadler would undo the despotic Henrician ways somewhat by Elizabeths reign. By that time, Ralph Sadler had ensured the monarchy would function purely as a titularcontrivance, the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Parliament would do as he and the Privy Council instructed and manipulated them to do, and Ralph Sadler could always distort history itself to suit, if necessary.
Failing all that, there was always the sheer-tyranny of the Star Chamber and its diplock courts, with no sitting-judge, and nor then were any sitting-jury or witnesses required, or even allowed. Or, the using of the Act of Attainder in Parliament would give that Star Chamber effect, anytime.
History is psychological change as J.W. Allen puts it. 142
Chapter 11
Ralph Sadler : Storm-Bringer
143
The so-called rough wooing period that paused at the 1543 Treaty of Greenwich, had technically and psychologically begun at the instant of the 1542 birth of Mary, Queen of Scots, and wouldnt stop until after 1547 and the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, propelling Mary to France to finally escape being wooed, roughly or otherwise, by the English. The purpose of the rough wooing was to try and fulfil Ralph Sadlers and Henry VIIIs ambitions to unite the two nations of England and Scotland (and by default simultaneously knock France out of all involvement in Scotland) by the marriage of Edward VI to Mary, Queen of Scots and a like-it-or-not-style of roughwooing was mooted. A Ralph Sadler-led campaign of propaganda wooing in Scotland began at once. 144

Unfortunately, it was quickly overwhelmed by a Henry VIII-led sheerly rough brute-force series of violent debacles in his dumb-attempts to try and speed things up. An anonymous mass-printed and mass-distributed propaganda-prayer was formulated to assist, emanating, as it were, from the Ralph Sadler Public Propaganda Department/Manipulating Scottish Perceptions Section-type government source, and was ordered by proclamation to be read aloud in churches nationwide. It is of an especial interest; both for its wording, and for its spelling-out of the official English policy towards Scotland, directly, as public propaganda : Ye shall also make your heartie and effectual prayer to Almighty God, for the peace of all Christian regions, that the most joyful and perpetual peace and unity of this realm and Scotland may shortly be perfected and brought to pass, by the most Godly and happy marriage of the Kings Majesty (Edward VI) and the young Queen of Scotland (Mary, Queen of Scots). And it would please the Almighty to aid with strength, wisdom and
power, and with his Holy defence, all those who favoureth and setteth forth the same, and weaken and confound all those who laboureth or studyeth to the interruption of so goodly a quiet whereof both these realmes should take so great a benefit and profit...
102
102
Anonymous English propaganda-prayer to be read-out in churches, deployed in the Scottish rough wooing campaign. c.1543. (my brackets)
145

That poetically political alliterative call for perpetual peace...perfected wasnt to be realised until nearly sixty years later, with the coronation of Marys son, King James VI of Scotland, as also king of England. That part of the line : ...so goodly a quiet whereof both these realms should take so great a benefit and profit... strikes tellingly as conforming to Sadlerian ideals and beliefs; anonymous and a propaganda-prayer though it be. At the culmination of the rough wooing would come the English final blow, the preplanned, simultaneous genocide of all the troublesome Scottish clans, at the eventual and momentous Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, near Musselburgh, September,1547.
Astonishingly, Henry VIII had been dead for eight months by then, and the rough wooing policy would continue and culminate in Ralph Sadler personally leading the troops out in battle at Pinkie Cleugh, and this appears to be the only occasion in history when a deceased monarchs wishes are known to have been followed-through on, and astonishing for completeness in their fulfilment.
In his first 1543 report of the-then three-month old Mary, Queen of Scots, Ralph Sadlier said she was: ...as goodly a child as I have ever seen and as likely to live...
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which is so close in form to when Emilia in the Shakespearian play,The Winters Tale says : A daughter, a goodly babe, lusty and like to live... that in a moment it reminds us that the baby-princess in The Winters Tale is separated, in the plot, from her homeland for the same length of time that Mary, Queen of Scots, as a baby-princess, was separated, in real-life, from her homeland, having been spirited abroad from Scotland to France after the massacre of the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. Sir Thomas Carwarden took control as Chief Messuager of Nonsuch Palace on the 29th of September, 1543, just as Ralph Sadler returned from the coronation in Scotland of the then nearly one-year old Mary, Queen of Scots. Ralph Sadler later surrendered his Steward and Keeperships of Nonsuch Palace to Sir Thomas Carwarden in March, 1544. Carwarden was later to be a Master of the Revels for Elizabeth I.
The Court of King Henry VIII and the household of Thomas Cromwell were the seed-bed of it all for Ralph Sadler.
In 1546, Peter Assheton (Ashton) translated Jovius Paulus ; a short treatise upon the Turkes chronicles, and dedicated it to Ralph Sadler. The dedication page reads : 147

The Glasse that Plato speaketh of...maye be taken not without cause for the books of wisdom and manours, whiche the Philosophers and wyse men left to their posteritie in writing, but especially for Chronicles and Histories, wherin all things mete and neccessarie for men of every degree and estate, be most plenty-fully and lyvelyst set forthe. The treatise itself covers : ...the form and figure of all Empires and Common wealthes .
103
The year following Ralph Sadlers book dedication was the time of Pinkie Cleugh, in Scotland. : Empire. Two years after that, in Norfolk, England, came Ketts Rebellion : Commonwealth. An inspiring book. Dedicated to an already inspired thirty-nine year old Ralph Sadler, with his own literarysensibility, and whose personal views were reflected by the contents. Not that Ralph Sadler needed any instruction in how to handle empire and commonwealth: that was his normal day-job, him handing-out instructions for the smooth-running of the form and figure of the English empire and commonwealth. 1546 was also the year that Ralph Sadler had Cardinal David Beaton assassinated : Empire.
103
pp.108. Lucy Bess Campbell Shakespeares Histories (1947)
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Ralph Sadler had curbed Henry VIIIs enthusiasm and natural impetuousness for the assassination of Cardinal David Beaton since 1543, until Sadler adjudged the political time was fully-ripe; now, he personally-selected and paid in English gold those who were to carry out the dark deed at St. Andrews Castle. Once Beatons dead body had been slung over the castle battlements and one of his common assassins had urinated in its mouth to public view and approbation, the now festering corpse was flung down, salted and preserved in a wooden barrel, then abandoned in the tide-race inundated bottle-dungeon of St. Andrews Castle. John Knox, later the vehement leader of the Protestant Scottish Reformation, was then introduced into the castle during the course of a year-long stand-off by the murderous Ralph Sadler-paid cabal who were defiantly trapped there, and when the murder cabal eventually surrendered to the French, Knox ended up sentenced to work as a galley-slave, rowing ships for eighteen months.
Henry VIIIs achievements at the time of his own death in 1547 had been precisely only a permanent diminution of the authority and financial independence of the Crown; the loss of all the land-holdings gained from dissolving ecclesiastical properties into private hands; the domestic economy in ruins; still-evolving foreign-entanglements and wars.
Henry VIII had been both terrible and magnificent; his propaganda-machine called him The Ruby of England; some of his people called him The Great Basilisk, a fearsome, hideous and ravening mythical-monster; and Ralph Sadler had been his best-friend, Orator to Henry VIII, his pinkie-finger, lead-propagandist and supporter, through thick and thin, and beyond.
149

With Henry VIII now dead, the Spymaster-General was minus a powerful friend and a mentor, but he remained very much in demand. And Ralph Sadler had by now made himself utterly-indispensible to the ongoing efficient running and general well-being of this country.
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By 1547, aged just forty-years old, Ralph Sadler is named Privy Council and made one of the four personal Wards to Edward VI during his minority in Henry VIIIs last-will-and-testament, Sadler also becoming a personal beneficiary of the will himself, to the tune of 200 (worth 20,000 today). The reign of Edward VI was the seed-time of important enterprises,...the effective work was done without much antecedent publicity, on the advice of men...whose minds were of the secretive type.
104
During 1546, Henry VIII had begun arranging for foreign mercenaries to wage war on the English side in Scotland. Negotiations begun with German mercenary captains discussed employing 12,000 Landsknechts, 2,000 horsemen from Cleves and 1,500 Albanians.105 The Landsknechts were covering themselves in glory at the Battle of Muhlberg this year, and their ruthless reputation was always the stuff of legend, hence Henrys permanent attraction to them. Tudor practicality won out over the mere fact that Henry VIII was dead by the time it came to contract for the Scottish war, so Ralph Sadler also varied the original plan, and cued a mercenary force of some 2,000 Landsknechts up for an autumn Scottish campaign in 1547. The terms were the usual; half the payment in gold upfront before battle ever commenced, the other half paid only after the victory was won.
104 105
pp.62. J. A. Williamson The Ocean in English History (1941) Clarendon Press. Letters and Papers Henry VIII xxi (i) 1166 ; xxi (ii) 451, 575 ; Henry VIII State Papers v.572-4 on various contacts with German Landsknechts, and Swiss & Flemish mercenary captains. Also Correspondance de Selve 61-65, 67-68, 71.
151
On the 10th of September, 1547, the two sides had amassed among the small hills and valleys around the knob-hill of that short, green-knuckle still known as today as Pinkie Cleugh. The Scottish clansmen showed up in their droves, and in their droves they were slaughtered by the English and their foreign mercenary forces. Pinkie Cleugh was the high ground, and on it Sir Ralph Sadler would shake his spear for king and country, willing to fight and die to protect the English monarchs pennant-colours, and not give an inch of ground. A war veteran at forty years-old, Ralph Sadler had already seen action at home during The Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) and more recently when abroad at the Siege of Boulogne (1544). The annihilation of thousands upon thousands of Scottish clansmen not similarly-armed in the (currently) worlds first full-scale guns-versus-swords battle, by an efficiently-trained mercenary army equipped with highly-effective small-arms, is a largely-unspoken, almost unspeakable chapter in English history. Thirty-six thousand Scottish clansmen had been lured by English-propaganda rumours spread by Ralph Sadlers spy-network during the course of the preceding year, 1546, to muster against a weak force of English armies, which the Scottish clansmen could then collectively defeat by their own sheer weight-of-numbers, in a once and-for-all genocide of the Englishmen.
152
But the Scottish clansmen were completely fooled by the Sadlerian propaganda-fantasy ; the sixteen thousand English troops actually had at least two-thousand highly-trained and fullypaid foreign-mercenaries, mainly Germans, Swiss and Flemings (direct-successors to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles Vs dreaded Landsknechts mercenary force resource) amongst them, who were trained and equipped with the most up-to-date, accurate-firing rifles as their personal firearms. The Pinkie Cleugh clash would be the world-premiere of the new gunsversus-swords technological-struggle, on a large-scale. A truly monumental, generational-slaughter of the Scottish clans inevitably took place. Casualty-figures are uncertain, estimates ranging from as few as one thousand five hundred to all thirty-six thousand dead on the Scottish-side, certainly next-to-none dead on the English-side, as few as one-hundred.
153
Ralph Sadler was present and performed feats-of-arms on the battlefield, in the formal role of Knight-Banneret, servant of the Royal flag, winning his trick (coat-of-arms) of fame as the stand-in representative symbolising the King in battle. The formal work of the knightbanneret was to appear before the front-lines of the opposition after any attempt at parley had finished, and parade on horseback in a purely symbolic, purely chivalric display of medieval pageantry, all the while waving the personal-colours of the monarch contained on the banneret pennant-flag mounted at the tip of a specially-customised flexible spear, and yelling your war-cry to frighten and warn-off the enemy from engaging in the battle. And, of course, we find this in the Shakespearian play, Hamlet, : To my shame I see The imminent death of twenty-thousand men, That for a fantasy and a trick of fame Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Wherein the numbers cannot try the cause,
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Which is not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain. 106 Ralph Sadler, the veritable shaker-of-the-spear, indeed! An eye for an eye Pinkie Cleugh was not. Much more a case of if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. Pinkie Cleugh is definitely a small patch of ground among scrubland wherein the numbers could not try the cause; Scotland nowhere near enough of a large-continent to act as tomb for the numbers slain that day. The attempted-genocide never achieved its aims; Mary, Queen of Scots fled abroad to become the Queen of France.
The Knight-Banneret has an ancient and noble lineage, appearing in the very-earliest records on chivalry and ceremony. Sir Rafe de Brer, the Knight of Marston, Cheshire, the first in the Brereton family-tree, is named on an extant title-deed for land...dated 1090.107 His coat-of-arms would be displayed on a gonfalon flag, a Knights-Pennant, to be ridden into battle with him. He was a preux chevalier, a valiant or gallant knight, a Knight-Banneret. This is the earliest-example I could find to cross-reference in the usage of the term KnightBanneret and, coincidentally, also of the use of the name Rafe. Taking notes for history and for the College-of-Arms (his employer at the time) was JuniorClerk William Cecil and William Patten, his immediate then-boss. This moment exemplifies the differences and relative importance hierarchically between William Cecil, to whom overmuch has been subscribed by historians, and Ralph Sadler, whose true importance in
106 107
Hamlet,, Act IV, scene (iv), lines 59-65. pp. 6. x/cf Anthony Salusbury-Brereton Anciente Whispers (1999) Brereton Press. The definitive tome on the subject of the Brereton family-tree, with its virtually-unprecedented unbroken line of thirty-one generations, that stretches from 1090 to the present-day.
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history has thus far received very little or no credence nor coverage in a deserved manner from historians. Ralph Sadler, the Spymaster-General, is in the field fighting; William Cecil, clerk, is in an actual nearby-field, writing, and even that was days after the battle was over. The hierarchy of outstanding English top assistants to the Tudors should begin with Thomas Wolsey, then Thomas Cromwell, and then it should be Ralph Sadler, then quite interchangeably, William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham, along with Robert Cecil. This covers the Tudor period from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, and is in order of both age-seniority and dates. Historians cannot continue to ask that the older Wolsey was younger Cromwells superior, but that the younger William Cecil was then the older Ralph Sadlers superior; it is an inconsistent thing
to ask, and an untrue thing to even say, as the record clearly shows : Thomas Cromwell was older than the younger Ralph Sadler, and for most-part, we imagine the younger man defers to the older man, by age and experience, if not ranking by degree gained of seniority. At the present time of writing, Ralph Sadler is entirely-missing from that list, and is virtually gone from history. The attempted-genocide of Pinkie Cleugh never achieved its aims; Mary, Queen of Scots fled abroad to then become also the Queen of France in her first marriage, with the young Dauphin, later crowned as Francis II. Consider then, this highly-organised, charming, charismatic, cultured, erudite, subversive, authoritarian, complex-man, far-ranging and well-schooled, with a tough, inquiring nature. This is Ralph Sadler, English Tudor hero, a veteran diplomat and soldier, the royal shakes-
156

spear servant of the flag, a man of a slow, judiciously-cautious temperament, with the eye of a hawk and a mind like a never-blunted Occams razor.
I imagine Ralph Sadler at his most personally-harmonised in 1547, with his accountancy and his warring-skills both paying personal dividends for him; the Spymaster-General in his prime.
Ralph Sadler was a most-remarkable man, the veritable and the ideal-model of an English Tudor Renaissance gentleman .
In the English revolts against the popular-unpopular Enclosures Act associate to which was the Ketts Rebellion of 1549, a spokesman for Kett, John Flotman, summed up the reason for their rebellion 108 : The Commonwealth is now almost utterly overthrown, and is daily-declining through the insolence of the Gentlemen :...
108
See also, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A. Fletcher Tudor Rebellions in its latest edition. Professor MacCulloch reminds me that Edward Seymour as Duke of Somerset was encouraging John Hales, yetanother close-confederate of Ralph Sadler, to prevent the enclosures.
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Just as theyd found in Scotland, the English Tudor gentlemanization process was not to all tastes. Twenty thousand English people rose up to popularly protest the Enclosures Act, another Ralph Sadler-type legal concoction to grab land that wasnt his by both fair means and foul. The general civil unrest (quite a few Catholics thought this an appropriate moment to ask their religious beliefs be fully-restored to them) throughout the country in 1549, led Ralph Sadler yet again to the re-employment and deployment of the dreaded Landsknechts foreign mercenaries from the Pinkie Cleugh campaign against the English people themselves now, and their merciless number assisted in the killing of eight thousand people across the country to quell the rebellion. Nine-hundred rebels were taken to the cliff-tops at Clyst Heath, Cornwall, and then had their throats simultaneously-cut. Their anguished rebel yells and cries rang out and hushed the whole country. Now you must entirely know why Edward VIs reign is considered to be extreme Protestantism, what with the domestic slaughter of Ketts Rebellion following relatively so hard on the heels of the foreign massacre at Pinkie Cleugh.
Ralph Sadler was present during Ketts Rebellion when, surrounded by masses of rebels attacking, he and his immediate companions stood back to back, kissed their swords, and the cry went up of :
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Death before dishonour !
109
Ralph Sadler is that rarer thing to history : a true hero.
Associate to the problems connected to land and its enclosure, were what we would call slum landlords, who across England started perpetrating Rent Racking, robbing their tenants blind, including taking their properties entirely and evicting them, as and when it suited the rent-rackers, and the practices were notorious. Ralph Sadler was an early-adopter of rent-racking, lots of practice on the real rack at the Tower of London, I guess, and had a quick-silver sense of humour around it : Sadler once had a very old lady thrown out of her house and the house burnt down in front of her, simply to demonstrate to her that the newly-invented debt-collecting methods of rent-racking were perfectly legal! He noted chatting with her as the house burned to the ground, and her turning her back so as not to watch it go up in flames, guttering chimney oranges and St. Vituss Eve reds for Ralph Sadler to dance around in. Im sure at the slightest turning nasty of the very old lady he would have as like as not danced in her blood. Ralph Sadler was that kind of a funny man, I should have said. Quick-silver is of course, a red mercury-oxide compound, and a fatal contactpoison.
109
* Authors comment: Astonishing. Verbatim. Ralph Sadler, aged forty-two, was present as a battlefield-combatant, one of four men who stood back-to-back with each other, as they literally said their prayers together, and then each muttering a private-prayer to themselves, to then ritually kiss their weapons before they shouted oaths in defiance, one of which was recorded as having been Death before dishonour! as they flung up their swords towards the faces of the mobbing-enemy, who were closing-in, rapidly......
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Between 1550 and 1553, Ralph Sadler owned a large country house called Haselor Manor, situated three-and-a-half miles from Stratford-upon-Avon town centre, Warwickshire. More intriguingly, John and Mary Shakespeare, who would later have children together, had one son very notable to history and seemed to have called home at some point one of the tied-cottages of Haselor Manor, one of three cottages which were physically adjoining to the manor house boundary wall, in fact. Their notable son, William Shakespeare, had a slightly older friend and mentor named Hamnet Sadler, who is related as a great-nephew to his great-uncle Ralph Sadler, if in fact they are related; Hamnet Sadler would later supervene in writing and interlineate and insert the names of Richard Burbage, and those of Burbages fellow Globe theatre members, into the already written-out last-will-and-testament of the deceased William Shakespeare in 1616. Ralph Sadler sold Haselor Manor in 1553.
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Also in the 1550s, Ralph Sadler was first the Steward, then also the Constable at Hertford castle. I think this must have been nearly entirely to distance himself from his friends Edward Seymour as Duke of Somerset and John Dudley as Duke of Northumberland, but we really dont have time to go into quite-everything in a short biography, sorry. See References. In Act IV, scene (ii) of the Shakespearian play, The Winters Tale, the linen-filcher, Autolycus, feigning having been robbed, and in the course of pretending (acting) to describe his assailant, is busy robbing the purse from off-of his would-be good samaritan ; and gives us this portrait (of himself, as a good lie is one that is readily to hand) : A fellow, sir, that I have known him go about with troll-my-dames; I knew him once a servant of the prince: ... I know this man well: he hath been an ape-bearer;
then a process-server, a bailiff; then he compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son
And married a tinkers wife within a mile where my land and living lies; 161

and, having flown-over many knavish-professions, he settled only in rogue:
some call him Autolycus.
110
There is a chronology in the order of ascendency in that speech that chimes nearidentically with the story of Ralph Sadlers life : He was in a lowly ape-bearer or groom of the stool-type of position, at first, when working for Thomas Cromwell , probably. He was then to become an attorney ; a process-server. He was then a bailiff, as Constable of Hertford Castle . Real-life Ralph Sadler has the same date-order and similar jobs and chronology as the fiction of the play. The quintessential Shakespearian character, then.
Then we come on to the strange expression about a Prodigal Son, with the initialletters capitalised for us. At least, they are so-capitalised, authentically, in Rowse editions of the Shakespearian works ; if Id relied only on the newly-issued Royal Shakespeare Company 2007-edition , I should have missed it, as they, in their wisdom, have chosen to drop such authentic-features of the Shakespearian works text in their latest published-version.
110
ib.id. Act IV, scene (ii) between lines 65-67 and 71-75.
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Maybe there is more than one way to think of Autolycus and his compassing a motion .
Maybe he is thinking of more than just-being a prodigal son returning home.
To compass a motion also means to propose or table a motion, as a subject for debate, in Parliamentary jargon, or to bring to the attention of Mr. Speaker amendments to a Bill or Act you wish debated on, then as now.
Professor David Starkey really has something with him saying nothings changed between the Tudor times and our own! If we concentrate for just a moment more, we notice that ...compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son would be ...compassed a motion of the P. S. , if it were the initial-letters that we stressed, and as the type-face seems to encourage : a code for us to easily solve quickly, instantaneously, whether hearing or reading it. Recall our mans title : Ralph Sadler, P. S., as a signature for P. rincipal S. ecretary , and the many tabled motions he had compassed in his long, long Parliamentary-career. The name Autolycus is associate with the onrush of a charging-wolf, just like the names deriving of it, Ranulf, Ranulph, Rapax, Ralph, Rafe, Raff, the powerful wolfcounsellor.
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Vulgars corruptly used to call him Rafe, so saith John Skelton. Ralph Sadler was a very busy man, being a Privy Councillor, all his life rushing about all-over the country, dealing with the vulgars, both foreign and domestic. Ralph Sadler bigamously (unbeknownst to himself, or so he would later claim) married Helen Barre, already the wife of Matthew Barre, an Irishman, ...married a tinkers wife.... (I think of the terms in use in the England of the sixteenth-century, and intend no inference or association to any racial-slur.) When Sadlers wife-to-be was young, she lived right-near to where his land and living lies .
And who better to ...fly over knavish-possessions than the Master of the Kings Hawks ? Especially knavish-possessions that were knavishly-obtained of the Dissolution. Those few lines, every word, nearly, it seems to me, fit themselves also to Ralph Sadler like a pair of hand-made silk-gloves of a master silk-glove maker.
The Shakespearian play The Winters Tale is full of courtiers and courtly-manners, and also full of gardening, tailoring and glove-metaphors. You could bet consummate courtier, Ralph Sadler, had a few different tailors as he went on, and plenty of nice suits to not do any gardening at-all in, when he was Keeper of the 164

Gardens at Nonsuch Palace, and dozens of pairs of sturdy gloves and gauntlets, what with all that horse-riding and hawking he did, not to mention the special silk ones for Court and ambassadorial duties.
The gauntlet glove worn by the gentleman in the Hans Holbein, Court Painter to King Henry VIII, painting that began this book is of the highest quality. This led to this painting being sometimes called an unknown nobleman with a hawk . Art-students from all-over Europe flocked to try to view this picture in the seventeenthcentury, when it was also known as the painting of the tintinnabulation . This was because the solid-gold bell around the hawks leg is so realistically painted, youd swear you could hear it ring , for one, and, for two, art-students practice until they are Olympic athlete standard at closing one or other of their eyes, in order to flatten perspective lines when they draw, to draw better.
Now, my old art-teacher at Quarry Bank in Liverpool was a chap called Professor Alan Plent, and he taught me a trick, which I pass on to you now. What you do, is you focus on just one point of your choosing, on just the objects and the things that would move in real-life (the escapement on a clock, the clapper of a bell) that are depicted in a lot of Holbeins works, and then oscillate your vision, by alternate eye-toeye rapid-blinking. Due to your stereoptical normal-vision being interrupted, the brain searches for fixity of space and time. 165

A combination of physics now, combining of the persistence-of-vision effect, your blindspot at the fovea centralis, and your continued persistence-of-vision within your field of vision, and the concentration at the focus of what youre looking at, and, with a lot of practice, hey presto! Things in vision start to jump about before your very eyes, to coin the phrase. When youre focused on one place, little tics can appear to appear, painted deliberately, by the artist, to add-movement, viz. liveliness to the subject painted by Holbein. The very first moving pictures that we know of, then. In the finely-tooled copperplate engraving, thought to be from a self-portrait(lost) of Hans Holbein, he looks surprisingly and ever-so slightly boss-eyed. There are currently-500,000,000 million people on this planet who are inflicted by cross eyed-ness to some degree, so Holbeins being cross eyed wouldnt be all-that surprising, but what it may in fact surprise you to know, is that cross-eyed people can often paint and draw like champions. You must view the clock-door on the clock which sits on the table in Portrait of George Gize(1526), and try it!
My frontispiece picture-illustration is today called an unknown man with a hawk (Rowlands 1985, no. 75), and he lives in the Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague.
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The painting may have been begun sometime around 1535 (when Ralph Sadler was aged twenty-eight), then completed around the date depicted on the painting itself, 1542.
111
Holbein may-well have been absented abroad by Henry VIII from around 1532-38 for any or no periods of time, really, its very fuzzy in the record. The hawk originally has its head tucked up under its wing, as is usual with hawks, as hawks and falcons tend to do, so the birds head we see today is an horrifically-dodgy seventeenthcentury addition. Which is a REAL shame, as, can you imagine? hawk and man would give the appearance of being blended together, hidden-in-plain-sight, just like the falcons and hawks do landing on tree-stumps, had the portrait remained untampered with.
Bit like the unification of England and Scotland, if you ask me : blended, grafted-on to each other. Power, propaganda and art. Be that as it may, the sitter in an unknown man with a hawk is almost certain to be Ralph Sadler. Sadler would have been on intimate terms with his masters Court Painter. Hans Holbein
112
in fact painted a peregrine falcon in this picture, a symbol used by Anne
Boleyn, and there are other factors, such as the ruby-red silk slashed at the sleeves, the small blood-red ruby ring the sitter wears are both symbolic for the dynastic eras of Henry VIII and for that of Edward VI, who were both themselves sitters for
111
* Authors note : the painting measure 9 & 7/8ths inches by 7 inches or 25x19cm in the new money. 112 * Authors note : more on all of this Holbeinery in my upcoming Holbein book.
167
Hans Holbein, but most importantly, the face of an unknown man with a hawk is identical and identically proportionate to the death-mask sculptured face on Ralph Sadlers tomb effigy.
My favourite picture to do the Holbein tics on, has to be The Ambassadors(1533) in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square. There, you can get Jean De Dinteville apparently kicking at the anamorphic skull! Am-az-ing!
Enough here for now of the Holbeinery chit-chat.
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Described as a Protestant prude, William Thomas, The Welsh Merchant of Venice, spent a number of years spying for the English in Venice disguised as a general trading merchant, and he is one of the only all-things Italian-obsessed Welshmen of his day. Between 154952, he was now returned into England, and writing hugely-influential books. An enthusiastic propagator, too, of Italian culture, William Thomas was well-equipped enough with the Italian language to be able to offer himself up for English government bilingual diplomatic service duties. William Thomass History of Italy is the best account of any foreign nation before the seventeenth century. 113 Along with his Principalle Rules of the Italian Grammar, with a Dictionary for the better understanding of Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante, William Thomas wrote another book, il Pelligrino, which tackled legal and philosophical points over Henry VIIIs divorcing, and he dedicates yet another of his books, The Vanity of this World, to a female member of the Herbert family. A seemingly forthright man, William Thomas was noted for the clarity of his first impressions, and for not resorting to stereotypes in his writing.
113
pp.118. L. Einstein The Italian Renaissance in England.
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Just the sort of man Ralph Sadler would get on with, in fact. Sadler had already been to Italy, could speak Italian, and was well-versed in all-things Italian decades before William Thomas was. William Thomas was engaged as the Clerk to the Privy Council, when Ralph Sadler was its principal senior member, under Edward VI.
In a report commissioned by the Privy Council, he wrote an able analysis of Englands present dangerous isolation in foreign affairs, and of our weakness in the dilemma between the Holy Roman Empire and France, and the line of approach he proposed was a sensible one said the eminently sensible A.L. Rowse. William Thomas also suggested methods of stabilising the nations currency, though this stabilisation process was not actually then begun until 1560 : when it was by then under Ralph Sadlers personal and direct supervision. William Thomas also prepared a discussion paper for the Privy Council on the subject: Whether is better for a Commonwealth that the power be in the Nobility or in the Commonwealth. After a New Years gift to Edward VI of a translation of Barbaros account of travels in Tara (The Crimea) and Persia, William Thomas was sent with Catherine Parrs brother to France, to begin negotiations for a potential marriage regarding Edward.
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By 1553, William Thomas was in Flanders acting as the English ambassador, negotiating with Charles V. Having made a second marriage of his own with Sir Walter Mildmays sister, William Thomas became a victim of regime change, and was beheaded, in 1554, by Mary I. Ralph Sadlers friend and colleague, Sir Walter Mildmay obtained (from John Tamworth, Francis Walsinghams brother) some of the manuscripts that had been written by his brotherin-law, William Thomas, which Sir Walter eventually published.
Sir Walter Mildmay was co-signing the highest levels of governmental-accounting reports, political documents, and was working intimately with Ralph Sadler from the 1550s well into the 1570s.
Both the founding-fathers of the English sonnet poetry, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, had flourished back in the 1530s and 40s.
Both men remained unpublished, until Ralph Sadler utilised his powers at the State Paper Office and Stationers Register Office to put them into print, with the book Tottells Miscellany (1557). Even then, Wyatt remained anonymous and Howard only partially credited, as both men, though long-deceased, were still not favourites of a variety of royal persons nor of various of political-factions concerned. It is a testimony to Sadlers singlemost powerful influence that it was ever done at all, even. 171
Both Wyatt and Howard were credited in later editions, but with some anomalous and strange Shakespearian-style anonymous poems unattributed to either man left in, the book went on to be the first-ever of its kind to have multiple-editions done. Seven editions, in fact, all between 1557 and 1587, when Ralph Sadler died : and then that particular project was deemed no longer of the right propagandistic nature or intensity to be worthwhile ensuring its continuance.
Chapter 12
Elizabeth I : 1558-1603 Elizabethan era
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The decade of 1558 to 1568 was to prove a very busy time for Sir Ralph Sadler. On Elizabeth Is accession to the throne in 1558, Ralph Sadler picked up where hed left-off at Edward VIs death, and virtually single-handedly reasserted Henrician ideology and policies. Elizabeth I was still only twenty-five years old.
173

Ralph Sadler was a full fifty-one years old, and had a vast experience, upon which Elizabeth I would quintessentially draw and rely-upon for the next twenty-nine years. Until his death, in 1587, Ralph Sadler was working in the role of being Elizabeth Is closestadviser, something that, from simple repetition of poor sources, currently and continuinglymistakenly is being attributed to William Cecil. Only then, when Ralph Sadler was dead could the reign be termed as purely Elizabethan. Up until then, it was more-or-less Henrician in nature, and secretly, fundamentally, all of the time, it was in fact, Sadlerian, just as it was in the last part of Henry VIIIs reign, and as it was for the whole of Edward VIs reign. Ralph Sadler spent the whole of Mary I in her 1553-58 reign as queen quietly subverting it to his own ways. Ralph Sadler was alone with Elizabeth I immediately-before she held her inaugural Privy Council meeting. Ralph Sadlers influence is apparent straight away : he is appointed First Lord and President of the Privy Council. Ralph Sadler then moved the young queen into Nonsuch Palace, the palace he had built for her father.
Ralph Sadler had total control over the 500,000 thousand pounds per annum budget that was the governments to run the whole country, the royal court included.
174

That would be around 5 million pounds in todays terms. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth IIs Duchy of Lancaster portfolio, currently worth around 400 million pounds annually, is just for covering her royal court expenses, and is far and away the most taxpayer money spent on maintaining any European head of state. In the summer of 1559, Elizabeth I was entertained at Nonsuch Palace by nouveau CatholicProtestant Henry Fitzalan, the super-rich 12th Earl of Arundel, to whom Nonsuch Palace had been sold. This was a man somewhat alike to Ralph Sadler, in that he lived a long-life and served all the Tudor monarchs, bar Henry VII. After the entertainments, in August, 1559, we find Ralph Sadlers still-extant manuscript document, endorsed on the undated cover page in his hand, as: A special memorial for the Q. and myselfe. At the top of the first page of this personal-memorandum, is a notation: Memorial of thinge to be emparted the Queens Majestie.
115 114
In the course of the writing of this missive, Ralph Sadler curiously experiments with the English language, and the, by that period, already accepted spellings : and instead of England, writes Ingeland . And then, in a yet-differing spelling : ...between Ingland & Scotland there be may be a ppetuall peace made between these two realms...
116
114
f.19. rear leaf. Sir Ralph Sadleyr: correspondence and papers: 1554-1585 volume one (9th May, 1554 - 31st October, 1559) (three volumes) BL 2421 (a) British Library. To him, Elizabeth I is The Q. , to her Ralph Sadler is her Raff . What a truly-intimate portrait of their standing towards each other it is that that paints for us! Hurrah for mss! 115 f.18. two pages. ib.id. 116 ib. id.
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whose ppetuall peace (try saying it out-loud, sounding on both the ps , pronouncing phonetically, and you realise the commonplace foreshortening notation simply elides the er, and gives per) springs immediately to mind the rough wooing policies and the old anonymous propaganda-prayer from Scotland of the mid-1540s, mentioned already, above, as well as echoing the wording of the original Treaty of Perpetual Peace, organised in 1502, between Henry VII and James IV of Scotland, when Lord Dacre had first started distributing bribes of English gold to disconsolate Scottish and English border-reevers. Ralph Sadler was always in sole charge of dealing with The Scottish Matters, for the whole of the fifty-years from 1537 to 1587. Ralph Sadlers personal memoranda of things to be imparted between himself and the queen appears to have been imbibed as verbatim-medicine by Queen Elizabeth I. He writes down what English foreign-policy in regard The Scottish Matters is going to be on a piece of paper, she signs it. A pretty straightforward-deal. In giving him letters-patent authorising a top-secret English covert armed-insurgency mission to Scotland, Elizabeth I countersigns in her own hand the three-and-a-half pages of notes that had already been hand-written out by Ralph Sadler, yet they are now entitled: Instructions given by the Quines Majestie to Sir Rafe Sadleyr.
117
Elizabeth I countersigns at the document-heading.
The end of the document is signed as:
Raff S.
117
f.13. ib. id.
176
There then follows a further, single-page of instruction, now with a written date, the 8th
of
August, 1559, again in Ralph Sadlers own-hand, and again countersigned at the documentheading by Elizabeth I. Then, the official legal-authorisation in the letters-patent commission itself, written-out from the total overall four-and-a-half pages of Ralph Sadler notes, now entirely in Elizabeths own-hand: Front cover : To : From : To our trusted and well-beloved Sir Raff Sadleyr. Sir Ralph Sadleyr, Knight-Banneret. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth Nonsuch Palace, Surrey, 8th August, 1559. We authorise you to confer treate or practise in any manner of person in Scotland or England for those purposes and for ye furderance...to make a permanent concord betwixt the Nation of Scotland and ours, we do authorise you to reward any manner of person of Scotland with such sums of money as you shall think mete to be taken of ye sum of three thousand pounds which we have ordered should be transferred to you in gold. After a hard days work by Ralph Sadler and Elizabeth I, apart from the phrase ppetuall peace shifting slightly-sideways to become permanent concord , what is truly interesting and remarkable here, is that this official-sanction on direct-bribery and armed-insurgency had a deeper-level : Ralph Sadler had secretly-arranged already, before anything was writtendown, for 1,000-worth of the 3,000 of gold-bullion to be over-stamped to make it look exactly like the French gold coinage of the day.
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Elizabeth I was not made privy to the real details already-arranged by Ralph Sadler, nor would she ever really-understand her First Lord and President of the Privy Councils way of thinking on The Scottish Matters.
Elizabeth I would simply do as she was instructed, or she might get no pocket-money, and maybe even have her crown and all her palaces taken-off her, by her Uncle Ralph, if she didnt behave like he said. Things that look like one thing then turn out, in fact, to be another altogether: the Ralph Sadler trademark. Ralph Sadler is in charge. Ralph Sadler is an all-powerful, omnicompetent minder of the realm. The gold coinage faked to look like French-coinage worked itself quicker than a dose of salts into Scottish society. The confusion, resentment and factional-splitting such a foreign-specie distribution by selective bribery caused in Scotland would be immeasurable. The tradition had been well known since Lord Dacre began it during the reign of Henry VII, and the Scottish nobility was totally-riddled in corruption. This would be a deeper, more intelligent thrust at taking Scotland than that of the pureHenrician rough-wooing methodology; but just how privy Elizabeth I was to all the details is not very-apparent. Ralph Sadler and the powers-that-be are caring for the public-image of the monarch again, I suspect, and the multiple loose-ends they left behind to deliberately confuse, always leave you not fully in the know.
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In 2007-8, Scotland Yard paid out 2,131,786 in rewards for information received, and this would seem to imply of our own modern government that it, too, keeps a low-level of bribemoney, to be distributed now at the discretion of the police force, as part of general internalsecurity arrangements in the nation, and it is similar percentage-wise to that used to infiltrate Scotland in Tudor times. Inflation and populations dont stand still, but some things never change. Where subversion is universally applauded the true subversive may be the authoritarian.
118
Ralph Sadler had done a secret deal with Mary of Guise, then acting as Regent in Scotland, possibly as early as 1551 (Mary, Queen of Scots, was still in France, as Queen of France, and still married to first husband, Francis II), and a newly-equipped gold &silver milling-facility factory mint was established, secretly, based in Scotland, and fitted with the latest-equipment ; it was in fact a duplicate of an also secret and newly-equipped and identical gold &silver milling-facility factory mint that had been established, secretly, and was already based in England, and which was, of course, also fitted with the latest equipment. Henry VIIIs clipping depredations and wars, as well as those abuses which had occurred under the Edward VI, the Edward Seymour, the John Dudley and the Mary I consecutive stewardships of the English specie to damage the true-value of gold, and of silver, needed to be fixed, at once, or Elizabeth Is reign would surely founder before it ever really got going; but no worries on that score, with Ralph Sadler, Master of the Top-Secret Gold &Silver Milling Facility Factory Mints in England and Scotland, in total charge. Ralph Sadlers very-own
118
pp. 276. A. D. Nuttall Shakespeare the thinker (2007) Yale University Press.
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patented and approved-method was to have milled-edges cut on the coinage, to prevent any clipping, which it did very effectively, and no doubt in the process saved a good many people up and down the country from losing their noses and ears, as well as saving the throne for Elizabeth I. The 3,000-worth of gold-bullion Ralph Sadler took for this mission, in the course of his behaving like some sort of individual Chancellor of the Exchequer-without-portfolio, would have had 1,000-worth of it over-stamped as French coinage in these top-secret gold &silver milling facility factory mints, so Mary of Guise in Scotland would not have been made privy to that occurring, just as Elizabeth I in England wasnt; they were both left out of the loop. Elizabeth I was not ever made privy to any of these private and secret arrangements. Elizabeth I was not in the loop at all with her own advisers. Ralph Sadler, the ring-master, had her jumping through his hoops.
Ralph Sadler, her trusted and well-beloved, her most experienced counsellor. Had Elizabeth attempted to take any or all of these decisions entirely by herself, she would have floundered. Ralph Sadler already had over twenty years direct, hands-on experience of The Scottish Matters. And he had a vast experience of many other important matters. Why wouldnt he know best?
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Waste not, want not, spare not was a motto of Ralph Sadlers that he was said to have had carved into the chair-back of his throne at Standon Lordships, and never tell a secret to two was said to be Ralph Sadlers personal-motto and credo, his personal-philosophy. Ralph Sadler stuck religiously by both mottoes. No-matter what Elizabeth I thought or knew, or thought she knew, historical events would now twist, then turn, and then flap around like a very heavy and angry at being caught fish landed on the deck of a ship in a rainstorm. The force of this French-made hurricano wouldnt blow itself out until the peace treaties of the early 1560s.
Mid-August, 1559, and Ralph Sadler was now arrived in Scotland, at Berwick Castle, which he had rebuilt with Giovanni Portinari and Jacopo Concio.
Elizabeth I wrote again from Nonsuch Palace, on the 24th of August, 1559 :
Front cover: To our trusty and wellbeloved Counsellor, Sir Raff Sadler, Knight at Barwyk (Berwick). To : His Excellency Sir Ralph Sadleyr, Knight-Banneret, Ambassador to Scotland, Berwick
Castle, Scotland. From : Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth.
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Nonsuch Palace, Surrey, 24th August, 1559. Trusty and wellbeloved we greate you well..., we think it convenient that ye shall
imparte such money (of the 3,000 of gold-bullion) as was committed to you at your departure or so much thereof ye shall think mete in ye secretest manner ye can to such persons and intents as ye most effectually furder and avoice ye manner of service ye have been specially recommended unto you. And therein we do recommend the manner and circumstances hereof to your discretion...[to choose either]...Sir James Croft or Henry Percy...or any other trusty servant there.
119
Specially recommended unto you here, is, we note, a euphemism for the things you imparted to me; this is also among one of the first and only proper examples that we know of anyone officially-addressing the title knight-banneret in the contemporaneous record to describe Ralph Sadler during his lifetime.
Many, many of the books about the Tudor period speak of it as commonly taking three weeks for letters or any form of inter-communication to make its travels around the land. This notion can be dispelled, and a suggestion made, as to the possible realities of the true situation. Continuance in the sequence of events out-lined, is possible :
A letter 120 marked :

119
f.48. Sir Ralph Sadleyr: correspondence and papers: 1554-1585 volume one (9th May, 1554 - 31st October, 1559) (three volumes) British Library BL 2421 (a)(my brackets) N.B. note Elizabeth I using both Sadleyr and Sadler here. 120 pp.154-155. Sylvanus Urban Correspondence of Sylvanus Urban August, 1883 (1883). * Authors comment: Urban gives his own references in his footnotes as this being taken from: Sir Ralph Sadlers State Papers, (i) 437.
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To : Sir Ralph Sadleyr and Sir James Croft. Front-cover superscription message regarding delivery: Hast, hast, hast, for life, life, From : Posted : Recieved : William Cecil, Lord Burghley. (in the a.m.) 11th September, 1559, Theobalds House, Hertfordshire. (11a.m.) 14th September, 1559, Berwick Castle, Scotland.
Another letter from the Secretary to Sir Ralph Sadler, dated the 12th Sept. 1559, written from Burghley(Cecil), and marked Hast, hast, hast, hast, for lieff, for liff, for lyff, arrived at Newcastle on the 15th, at 10a.m. and was received by Sir Ralph at Berwick at midnight of the same day.
121
Three or four days, then, rather than weeks, for Ralph Sadler had first-class communications and travel networks in place throughout the land. The secret-in-plain-sight-code for delivery looks like a hast equals one days travel and a liff a nights, and they would be added as befitted the specific-urgency. On the front cover, those who were in on the code could see at a glance the status of any particular package, or fardel, or packet, and respond accordingly. ...who would fardels bear? as it says in the Shakespearian play Hamlet,.
The historian Hasler says :
121
pp.154-155. ib. id. (my brackets)
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...Sadler was in Berwick with Sir James Croft, under a commission to arrange peace on the borders of Scotland. He was to supply the Scottish rebels with money so that the Queen should not be a party thereto ...in October Sadler...was appointed Warden to the East and Middle-Marches...he continued to act as paymaster to the Scottish Protestants, distributing 3,000 in French coin to disguise its origin, and managed a network of agents to infiltrate the organisation of The Lords of the Congregation, and to survey the fortifications at Leith so that the rebels could be advised how to capture it from the French. ...Sadler was authorised to supply the Scots with powder and ammunition from Berwick,...
122
It is 1559, and from examples set as far back as the 1160s by Thomas Becket with his panEuropean spy-network, and Henry IIIs secret-service assassins in the 1290s, or from more recent ones to his own day, such as Henry Tudors spy-network when exiled if France, or the increasingly sophisticated administration of the Yorkist kings that had gone on to be developed by, first Thomas Wolsey and then Thomas Cromwell, into what may certainly be described as a nascent police-state, and it is extensively proved by the contemporaneous documentation that Ralph Sadler has his own network of agents, in fact a comprehensive and nationwide communications spying-network, with its own first-class letters delivery system between London and Scotland : that he has other forces of men at his disposal who are fully-equipped with guns, ammunition and explosives, has bribe money (worth around 1.5m pounds today) and that he now has a black ops mission to infiltrate, subvert and overthrow the Catholic members of the Scottish government and kill or forcibly deport all their French supporters, and which begins by his heavily-arming their opponents. Ralph Sadler was already in charge of the English government, had been for decades.
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pp. 317. P.W. Hasler The House of Commons 1558-1603 (1981) volume III, HMSO. * Authors comment: Hasler seems not to note the over-stamping of the gold with forged French-markings clearly enough, as other sources say only 1,000 was Frenchified, not all 3,000.
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Ralph Sadler, the Spymaster-General since the time of Henry VIII, personally suggested and organised all of this mission, and Elizabeth I has willingly written-out just what she was told to, and legalised it with letters-patent, officially rubber-stamping Ralph Sadlers ideas. And the current mission was getting hot.
Our paper trail still continues contiguously : A letter to Sir Ralph Sadler and Sir James Crofts at Berwick , from Secretary Cecil, dated Westminster, 25th November,1559, and marked for liff, liff, liff, was received at Stilton on the 27th at 6p.m., at Newark on the 28th at 9a.m., at ____ on the 28th at 2p.m., and at Newcastle on the 1st of December at 11a.m. When it got to Berwick does not appear.
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These correspondences would seem to say, that, just as in our own day, when it positively, absolutely has to be there, there were ways and means. A first-class letter today can easily take three days or more to get from London to Scotland; just as in Tudor times. Historian David Starkey is right, we are the inheritors today of all-things Tudor! The reality of the true situation may in fact have been, that Ralph Sadler and his ilk secretly utilised the sea-routes between our two countries, for ultra-speedy, top top-secret communiqus; it only took two days by sea from Scotland to London, and much investigation of this is still required. The sea-routes from Scotland to Ireland, Denmark, Iceland and allpoints north had only a few more days to their landfall. If the North Sea, Irish Sea or English Channel weather held!
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pp. 154-55. Sylvanus Urban Correspondence of Sylvanus Urban (1853) x/cff footnote 127, above, Sir Ralph Sadlers State Papers, (i) 602.
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Elizabeth Is perceptions of the overall situation may or may not have been that personally well-informed, but on the ground now in Scotland came turmoil, and disaster, another case of the best-laid plans of mice and men, and sometimes maybe even Ralph Sadlers, going awry, perhaps. The Seige of Leith in 1560 saw French soldiery inside their notional client-state of Scotland, intensively raining bullets upon the heads of the English, and eventually massacring eight thousand Englishmen, who filled up unto the top the breach theyd made in the town-wall with their English dead, whilst Leith town remained steadfastly in French control ; the English and Scottish assault on 7th May had tried to utilise siege ladders that were a full six-feet (1.2m) too short to reach the ramparts, but theyd charged into a preexisting breach theyd made in the wall anyway, as there wasnt any time to fix the ladders, hoping to make the ladders they did have work out on the already-damaged parts of the wall ; but they didnt make it at all, and a thousand besiegers had been killed on that one day alone. The Seige of Leith is the considered by scholars to be the model for the Shakespearian play, Henry V. Henry V is a perfect riff on the Seige of Leith in 1560, which Ralph Sadler was at, in person, organising things. Also present was errant warrior-poet Thomas Churchyard (1520?-1604), formerly a personal Page to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was, we recall, co-founding Father of the English Sonnet with Thomas Wyatt, poet, all of them friends of the SpymasterGeneral, Ralph Sadler.
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Ralph Sadler, having begun acting as an attorney in 1526 and in the earliest part of the Dissolution of ecclesiastical property, chose now to become also a qualified lawyer, entering Grays Inn at the age of fifty-four, in 1561. He had actually been making and helping pass laws all his career by then, at one point, in 1545, introducing his own personal Act of Parliament
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in order to legitimise in the eyes of the law his own children, who had been
bastardised by a then-recent disclosure that the Sadlers marriage of the past eighteen years, having been technically-bigamous, was therefore always null and void, and with brassneck, Sadler included his natural son to become legitimised in the Bill at the same time! Unsurprisingly, it was passed, totally unopposed! The written records of Ralph Sadlers unprecedented case regarding his marriage became somehow detached from other contemporaneous Parliamentary paperwork ; but Sadlers being in charge of the State Paper Office meant any amount of access to official paperwork and printing materials, for him to manipulate, detach or censor at his leisure.
Ralph Sadler was the perfection of English Renaissance Man, in an unassailable position of power.
124
Known as The Unprecedented Case of Ralph Sadler the verbatim report of which from the Commons finally ended up by our day at the London Museum, is marked as a former P.R.O. document.
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On the 19th June, 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots, now aged twenty-three, (and married for the second time, after the death of first husband, Francis II, in 1560) was helped in childbirth by a wise-woman, a white witch, if you will, who cast-away the pains of child-labour for her, using natural magic, and James VI was born ; finally making possible the achievement of the long-sought for perpetual union of the two nations of England and Scotland with those of Wales and Ireland ; no more rough wooing now, with the bride turned into a groom!
Although Ireland was to prove just that bit more tricksy and was to become a more nebulous member of the union, in the long-run. Perpetual peaceful union of the nations could now be prepared for, and, for twenty-one of the thirty-seven years that were to elapse before James VI of Scotland could become James I of England, and enable the actual birth of Great Britain legally and legitimately, Ralph Sadler would dedicate himself to fulfilling that ultimate-aim in seeking the perpetual peaceful union. From 1550 on, midwives in England had been required to only work under issue of a licence allowing them to do so. James VI would be brought up in the Calvinist doctrine. Calvin said that to blame fate was to abrogate free-will. This was a clash for James VI, as there was a natal-belief, which struggled within philosophy throughout the sixteenth-century, for it was also considered atheistic not to believe in witchcraft. Persecuting witches must have seemed highly-logical to James VI, and he was to pursue it with vigour: inspired by Reginald Scotts anti-witchcraft book, the Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) James VI then wrote his own tome, Daemonology. Scotts book is a startling example of an effective, if not actual, nationalistic, regimesupporting and propaganda-piece misfire: details from its sources were described precisely
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enough within the book for it to become a handy ready-reference on witchcraft and its rituals, for everyone to use! James VI was a cynical opportunist, who hated politics: a frustrated writer, perhaps? He also, it is claimed, wrote Essayes of a Pretense in the Divine Art of Poesie and A Counterblaste to Tobacco, aided and abetted maybe by others, and precisely which one of those others was Ralph Sadler, and precisely how they interacted, are questions for another time and place.
Chapter 13
Ralph Sadler : Scottish Reformation Homeland security and insecurities.
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In February, 1567, Lord Darnley, King of Scotland, was assassinated in Edinburgh, and Mary, Queen of Scots, lost her second husband. After her second husband, Lord Darnley, King of Scotlands death, Mary, Queen of Scots, was married for about a month to James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, so he became King of Scotland, technically, but then she was captured, and he escaped/fled, only for his to later be imprisoned at Elsinore (Helsingor) Castle, Denmark, setting for the Shakespearian play, Hamlet,. Ghosts were then seen late at night on the Edinburgh streets, dressed in the customary black clothes such as Darnley always wore, impersonating him and calling for revenge ; Ralph Sadler even had, care of the Ralph Sadler Public Propaganda Department/Manipulating Scottish Perceptions Section-type government resource organisation at his disposal, some copies sent down to London of the Darnleys Ghost scripts that were being used, for William Cecil gawk at, and then to file-away. As to theme and content in the Shakespearian works, historian A.L. Rowse noted that of the twenty-four plays, published during William Shakespeares working-lifetime, fourteen have as their central subject-matter overt notions of public-disorder and political-unrest.
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No writer contemporaneous with the Shakespearian works chose such theme or content, ...how different in this respect from other dramatists! notes Rowse, and goes on to say of William Shakespeares supposed fellow writers, that they ...displayed no sense of social responsibility and not much political understanding in their work. And yet, the Shakespearian plays display in themselves a normative, moderate viewpoint, and are trying to appeal to the average sixteenth-century bluff-hearted Englishman. A general rule-of-thumb in the plays is to suggest patriotism is an integral-part of the then newly-emerging English national identity.
After her second husband, Lord Darnley, King of Scotlands death, Mary, Queen of Scots, in May, was married for about a month to Scottish laird James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, the Protestant/Catholic hero/madman patriot/traitor single-agent/double-agent/triple-agent, he was maybe some or none or all of them, but was certainly one of the men whod maybe even personally killed her second husband, Lord Darnley, who was also her first cousin. With spies, traitors, ghosts and turncoats all bought-and-paid-for by Ralph Sadler and his war of infiltration in Scotland, and with the faked-up French-ified English gold ravaging both the Scottish economy and minds of its people, with all the worst day-to-day trouble headedup by her own natural-brother, James Stuart, Earl of Murray, and with all the bad-luck rabidly dogging her every move, a full-blown Protestant-led revolution by her own people against Mary, Queen of Scots, started in June, 1567. By the 24th of July, 1567, Mary, Queen of Scots, aged twenty-five, had recently enough quite possibly lost Bothwells twins in a still-birth, been deposed from her throne, was held under duress and imprisoned at Loch Leven Castle, then on that day had abdicated in
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writing, but only under direct-threats to otherwise have her throat cut issued by Patrick Lindsay, who was certainly also one of the men whod maybe even personally killed her second husband, Lord Darnley, King of Scotland, and this Patrick Lindsay being a nasty bloke in full-dudgeon who obviously meant it, abdicating just then in favour of her son James seemed a good option, so he was crowned five days later as James VI of Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots only surviving child, aged just thirteen-months, on the 29th of July that same year, 1567. Elizabeth I was nearly thirty-five years old and unlikely now to have children of her own.
A token effort was made on Marys behalf to restore her to her rightful place, as it were, by Ralph Sadler between July and August; it was this good faith being apparently-shown by the English towards her cause that encouraged Mary to think if she lost her next battle, she could find a temporary safe haven in England. By the 2nd of May, 1568, Mary, Queen of Scots, had escaped Loch Leven Castle, and with her troops had made a last stand at Langside and Pinkie Cleugh, the traditional fighting grounds, on the 10th of May. Roundly defeated before her last stand really found any legs, she made her way across the English border.
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Three days later, 13th of May, 1568, Mary, Queen of Scots, had landed on English soil at Workington, Cumberland, later claiming shed been tricked into doing so, and was marched by Ralph Sadler into detention, for her own safety at Carlisle Castle. After nineteen continuous years of detention Mary, Queen of Scots would be accused of high-treason against the throne of Elizabeth I, then be curtly trialled and executed. On the 16th of May, 1568, Ralph Sadler received and accepted the greatest officialaccolade of any of the monarchs he served, being created Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with a personal handwritten royal warrant off Elizabeth I subsequently given in 1572, allowing him to take the quarter coat-of-arms of Scotland incorporated to Marys coatof-arms for his own badge, as the untressured Lion of Scotland, eventually awarded by the College of Arms in 1575. This fact, criminally, appears never to have been associated, in any historiography written thus-far, with the effective-capture of the Mary, Queen of Scots ; yet Ralph Sadler had been solely in charge of Scottish affairs for over thirty years by 1568. Historians seem to have dropped the ball a long way on this one.
The award of the Palatinate of the Duchy of Lancaster and its title, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has been synonymous with the highest in the land for time out of mind, certainly since the time of the Norman Conquest. Sir Thomas the conscience-of-the-king More was a former holder, so Ralph Sadler knew all the details from an early age. The post originally was an effective, independent mini-fiefdom, with its own laws and courts ; the city of Leicester, in fact, being the actual home-base headquarters of this de facto Head of Homeland Security in the sixteenth-century. 193

In 2009, in a re-run of Tudor times, the then-current, and, as is usual with anyone created in office by Royal Appointment, wholly unelected-holder of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster-post was in this case the peculiarly ironically-named it seems to me, Lady Royall, who was also then-currently Leader of the House of Lords, and had more recently been accused of knowingly-employing illegal immigrant-labour, and despite her then being charged, trialled by a judge in the presence of a jury of her peers (sic.) and by them Lady Royall being found to be guilty in a majority verdict, she received as her criminal punishment, not incarceration in a womens jail like she deserved for bringing shame on her public office by her knowingly-criminal duplicity, but justice in her case was simply a mere fine to go with her newly-acquired criminal record. Lady Royall then anyway had the absolute brass-neck not to salvage what little dignity and credibility she and her office may have had left, and gracefully do the right thing and finally resign over the matter, but, no, she blithely chose to remain in office, with all her titles intact. Legal it may be, but its just not cricket nor is it a usual or decent way of playing that English Establishment game. Royall by name but a right rotter by nature, it appears. Her former illegal immigrant employee was incarcerated in prison, and faced automatic deportation for alleged U.K. visa-requirement infringements. Most peculiar, all throughout the obviously massive and noisy democratic presscoverage, there seemed some sort of tacit undemocratic agreement in place with all of the media, that Lady Royalls position as Leader of
the House of Lords and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster should remain largely anonymized, air-brushed out, uncommented upon, her titles seemingly being treated as not part of the story for the public consumption. 194

How very Sadleresque, how really very English Tudor all of that is. Could it be there is some arcane English Tudor power yet still-left in being selected as the incumbent to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, by Royal Appointment. ? Nicolai Patrushev, Head of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said in October, 2007 : Since the time of Elizabeth I, British secret services have worked according to the principle of the end justifies the means. Money, bribery, blackmail, these are their recruitingmethods.
The already very-familiar words to us of Ralph Sadler come tellingly to mind once more as being worth repeating yet-again at this appropriate juncture : The greatest prince in the world, if he have all the riches in the world, and lack the hearts and minds of his people, he hathe nothing, nor can stand in any suretie... Ralph Sadler, aged fifty-four, said during a speech to the House of Commons, 1561. The Duchy of Lancaster-portfolio of land, property and assets nowadays comprises Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth IIs private estate. Worth 397million in 2007-8, it lost 75million from effects of the credit-crunch recession in 2008-9.
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Ralph Sadler kept the 1568 appointment to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for the next nineteen-years, until his natural death, aged eighty, a month after Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded, in 1587. On legal advice from her Privy Council, Ralph Sadler the foremost amongst them, Elizabeth I had been persuaded that Mary, Queen of Scots, was now technically no-longer legally a legitimate-monarch of anywhere in particular, following her abdication and the crowning of her son, as King James VI of Scotland; who was also as a result now himself technically a potential hereditary heir to the English throne, should Elizabeth I leave no child of her own to inherit directly from her. The Privy Council insisted that by default of Mary, Queen of Scots detention in England, she was also therefore now technically a subject of Elizabeth, and, therefore, technically now like any other English-subject, and therefore open to prosecution for any provable treason against the Crown. Such grounds of treason were later discovered in the Babington Plot, 1586, having been near-identically foreshadowed in the Ridolfi Letter intrigue of 1571 and the associated events then, events which would result in Thomas Howard, The Last Tudor Duke, being beheaded.
Mary, Queen of Scots denied and ignored there was any validity or legitimacy in all or any of these English legal points, and continued to refuse to treat on terms with the English to the day she died.
Intriguingly, the Shakespearian play Henry IV is known and already considered by scholars as a thinly-disguised and seemingly first-hand account of the 1569 Catholic rebel contrived popular uprising, sometimes called the Rising of the Northern Earls, on the Scottish borders. Asides from another Shakespearian works play, Macbeth, it is just about the only
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Tudor play touching on events in Scotland, as no other Tudor playwright ever bothers majorly with our Scottish cousins.
Ralph Sadler would have had his hands full looking after Thomas Cecil, William Cecils eldest boy, as a personal favour, when they marched together with the Earl of Sussexs army into Scotland to meet the Rising of the Northern Earls. William Cecil sounds just like the old fusspot Polonius from the Shakespearian work Hamlet, chiding son Laertes with good advice, in the letter of good advice he writes beforehand to his son, Thomas, regarding this trip. Equally intriguing "...in emotional interest was an anonymous popular expression of feeling, registered as a broadsheet at Stationers' Hall in 1571 ; it was headed : " A Song between the Queen's Majesty and England ", and was in the form of alternate verses between England and the Queen.
' I am thy lover fair
Hath chosen thee to mine heir ,
And my name is Merrie England.
Therefore come away,
And make no more delay,
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Sweet Bessie, give me thy hand! '
Elizabeth's passion for her kingdom has been celebrated gloriously, but never better than in the simple lines the ballad-writer here put into her mouth :
' Here is my hand
My dear lover England,
I am thine both with mind and heart.
For ever to endure,
Thou mayst be sure,
Until death we two do part. '
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Now, here we have an "anonymous" poem, in which the Tudor propaganda dream of there even ever having been a " Merrie England ", is wedded to the notion of " mind and heart " being captured, in this song by our anonymous patriotic nationalist ballad-writer : the wedding arises from the psychology of true love, the heart and mind enraptured and captured.
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pp.158 Elizabeth Jenkins " Elizabeth the Great " her footnote #1 for the poem is Harleian Miscellany X (1958) Gollancz.
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At this point in history, the 1570s, there is only one person of real seniority left in government from this kind of level of involvement of the Henrician propaganda era ; that person is Ralph Sadler.
Neither of William Cecil, Lord Treasurer or Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary (who consistently anyway both worked secretly and exclusively for Ralph Sadler, acting also as the Spymaster-Generals official conduits and mouthpieces) nor Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, self-aggrandising patriotic gadabout, nor even the young Thomas Sackville, Queen Elizabeths favourite patriotic propagandistic cousin, none of them have left the use of the phrase or concept of 'hearts and minds' (sic) in the record : but Ralph Sadler did, and I say he actually coined the phrase and concept surrounding ' hearts and minds ' in his 1561 speech to Parliament of a decade prior to this anonymous patriotic ballad-song poem of 1571. In it, Elizabeth I is ' wedded ' to what came before, she is to be considered as a living embodiment and continuation of the Henrician reign of her father, ' Good King Harry and his Merrie England '. Sadlers most sage words are always worth yet another quintessential look : The greatest prince in the world, if he have all the riches in the world, and lack the hearts and minds of his people, he hathe nothing, nor can stand in any suretie... Ralph Sadler, aged fifty-four, said during a speech to the House of Commons, 1561. ' Hearts and minds ', the real love of the people towards you, are always and only ever what's at stake, at all times; and violence brings results, that sounds like there might be 199

confliction, pandemonium, in fact, and the master of mayhem, the iron hand in the velvet glove, the chief English Tudor propagandist and the fearless and peerless English Tudor political pugilist of very-nearly the entire English Tudor age, was our man in Scotland, Ralph Sadler, a long-forgotten English Tudor hero all-along, The Hero of Pinkie Cleugh, the mostsingular statesman His Excellency the Special Ambassador to Scotland, Orator to Henry VIII, Sir Ralph Sadler, Knight-Banneret, attorney & lawyer, K.G., P.C., M.P., of the Manor of Standon Lordships(also, Steward of Standon to Anne Boleyn and then for Jane Seymour) in Hertfordshire, Sheriff of Hertfordshire, Private Personal Attendant-Secretary to King Henry VIII, Privy Council and Gentleman of the Inner-Chamber (1536), Steward & Keeper of
Nonsuch Palace (1538), Master of the Kings Hawks, Prothonotary in Chancery, Clerk to the Court of Augmentations, Clerk to the Court of the Hanaper (1536-87), Master of the Crown Jewels (1536,1574), Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament (1540-43/without portfolio1587), Treasurer of the Army (1544-45), also, Privy Council and Master of the Great Wardrobe and Ward to King Edward VI, also, Steward & Constable of Hertford Castle (1550), also, Hertfordshire Captain of the London Trained Bands militia muster and Royal Wardship Master to Queen Mary I (1554-56), also, First Lord and President of the Privy Council (1558), Grandmaster of the Queens Hawks and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1568-87) to Queen Elizabeth I, Last Knight-Banneret of England.
Here is a man who was simply of himself a living mot juste for all of the seasons, ages and regimes he designed, formed and participated in directly.
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For the Tudor period, he is a long and very nearly-forgotten English Tudor hero.
Chapter 14
The Moth
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That particular year, of 1571, had seen Ralph Sadler, Orator to Henry VIII, a man of both his own and Henry VIIIs word then, dramatically arrested Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, by going with an arrest-warrant to front door of the Dukes house in The Strand, London, accompanied by the Sherriff of London and an armed company of the London Trained Bands Militia soldiery, at 2a.m., and in the wee-small hours of that autumnal September morning, smashing the door down and arresting and manacling Thomas Howard, who was to prove to be the last of the Dukes of England that were created by the English Tudor monarchs. The Duke was then ignominiously frogmarched by the elbows and hurried directly through the streets to his imprisonment, without charge or trial, straight into the Tower of London; after an eventual charge being made, and a bit of a sham of a trial being performed, on the 2nd of June in 1572 Thomas Howard, The Last Tudor Duke and former friend of Ralph Sadler was, under the terms of the usual prerogative to his degree in standing in Tudor society, summarily executed by beheading for high-treason, but in the public view on Tower Hill, not usual, and he was ignominiously killed instead of the Scottish-queen being killed, as the Privy Council and both the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the English Parliament 202

had been demanding Mary, Queen of Scots head loudly, all from the supposed fear of Howards overtures to marriage with Mary, Queen of Scots possibly threatening usurpation of the English throne if they came to fruition.
Quite at whose exact behest The Last Tudor Duke was arrested to be beheaded, and on whose and what exact advice exactly, Ralph Sadler, the arresting-officer in the case, quiteprobably could tell us, and in some exquisite precisely detail, but certainly it wasnt Elizabeth I doing the choosing, despite her ostensibly giving the orders.
The Scottish Matters of Tudor times were always highly-secret, highly-sensitive, highlypolitical, and also were always and only the direct-concern and were autonomously administered from within the ambit of an elite part of the Privy Council; with their discreet elite chief and sage dictator of all the important policy-decisions being finally-made only by The Hero of Pinkie Cleugh, the most-singular English Tudor dynasty statesman His Excellency the Special Ambassador to Scotland, Orator to Henry VIII, Sir Ralph Sadler, KnightBanneret, attorney & lawyer, K.G., P.C., M.P., of the Manor of Standon Lordships in Hertfordshire, Sheriff of Hertfordshire, Private Personal Attendant-Secretary to King Henry VIII, Privy Council and Gentleman of the Inner-Chamber (1536), Steward & Keeper of Nonsuch Palace (1538), Master of the Kings Hawks, Prothonotary in Chancery, Clerk to the Court of Augmentations, Clerk to the Court of the Hanaper (1536-87), Master of the Crown Jewels (1536,1574), Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament (1540-43/without portfolio-1587), 203

Treasurer of the Army (1544-45), also, Privy Council and Master of the Great Wardrobe and Ward to King Edward VI, also, Steward & Constable of Hertford Castle (1550), also, Hertfordshire Captain of the London Trained Bands militia muster and Royal Wardship Master to Queen Mary I (1554-56), also, First Lord and President of the Privy Council (1558), Grandmaster of the Queens Hawks and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1568-87) to Queen Elizabeth I, Last Knight-Banneret of England. To give him the most of some of all of those, which are his actual official-titles listing. Unofficially : Grand-Master of the Top-Secret Gold &Silver Milling Factory Mints in England and Scotland. Spymaster-General. The unelected lifetime C.E.O. Scottish of the Ralph Sadler Public Propaganda source
Department/Manipulating organisation.
Perceptions
Section-type
government
The Moth, to give him one other of his secret unofficial titles, but that one is once again taken from the official record; maybe he only came out when it got dark : when he then might tear holes in you with his bare teeth, nibbling away at you till you fell to pieces, and seemingly afterwards to always go endlessly and energetically fluttering back to fly around the light of Elizabeth I : and then, in an even more arcane and metaphysical paradoxical conundrum of a twist of Shakespearian complexity and proportions, it was in ironic reality Elizabeth I to whom he was himself just such a type of leading light.
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1572 was also the year of The Blazing Star, a supernova recorded in the constellation of Cassiopeia, and which was visible during both the day and the night time from London; and Elizabeth I is famously recorded as saying : My steadfast hope and confidence Are too firmly planted in the Providence of God To be blested or affrighted by these beames. Jacata est alea! (The die is cast!)
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Ralph Sadler was sixty-five years old in 1572, and had been in charge of policies connected to foreign and domestic affairs for best-part of five decades, and was well-capable of coming up with a few pithy propagandistic mots juste words like that anytime, all of the time. And of finding someone to write them down and attribute them to Elizabeth I if he wished, never mentioning his own name or part in any of it. That was his job. He would remain, throughout the whole of his final decade, as ever, at the very top of his game.
For those final years remaining in his own life, Ralph Sadler continued dedicating himself to bringing that more permanent concord of England and Scotland into being; it would bring benefit and profit for all by so goodly a peace whereof .
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Lord Henry Howard A Defensative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies (1583). (my brackets) n.b. please note, this is not the co-founding Father of the English sonnet-form Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had died in 1543.
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A month before Ralph Sadler passed-on, in 1587, the execution by beheading of that living pearl Mary, Queen of Scots, the transition of her quintessential-essence into dust, would make perpetual peace and the union in a permanent concord with Scotland a stone-cold certainty.
Since the Treaty of Medina del Campo in 1489, struck between Henry VII and Ferdinand and Isabella, there had been peace for England and Spain. General European piracy of Spanish ships returning from Spanish territories laden with bullion was constant, but even when all piracy was at its peak the Spanish ships came packed with so much silver from Mexico (and gold from Peru) that it would eventually lead to a silver-glut, affecting currencies throughout Europe. The initially sporadic and mainly random English piracy of Spanish vessels was curtailed somewhat when Philip II of Spain married Queen Mary I and became King of England, but within a few years of Elizabeth I taking the throne, English and Dutch piracy was getting to be a professional trade and calling, and trouble with Spain was bubbling-over. The Herbert family, whom William Thomas dedicated books to in the early 1550s, had a family fortune that was largely-founded in the Montgomeryshire-branch of the clan, and for some very good reasons. Starting in the 1530s , and going on until the 1580s, for fifty-years the Herberts owned and controlled the whole of the Welsh seaboard. They did this by increasing their landholdings and gaining all the important posts in the government Customs and Excise services throughout Wales. They were supported throughout by Ralph Sadler, who colluded with them in their amassing of fortunes, by using delaying- and confounding-tactics, whenever
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officially-appointed government commissions tried to do anything to prevent this piracy; at one stage, with Sadler being appointed to be in overall charge of such anti-piracy endeavours! Ralph Sadler also had a lot of connection to Bristol, owning a lot of land there (indeed, a known from-life portrait of Ralph Sadler exists on a 1548 parchment-roll gifting him lands in Bristol, where he is depicted on bended knee, accepting just such a parchment roll from the hands of an enthroned Edward VI - a sort of a play-within-a-play cartooned-caricature scene) but as the English economys focus shifted to London during the course of the century, Ralph Sadler moved his land-holdings and finances with it. The Herbert family and especially William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, were indebted to Ralph Sadler forever; the second he died, their pirating exploits died with him. Thank goodness Ralph Sadler encouraged and protected national piracy in its infancy. Without the pirates of The Mumbles and the pirates of Penzance, we should have lost to the Spanish Great Armada, and been generally a lot poorer-financially, as a nation. In 1562, John Hawkins took three-hundred slaves from the coast of Guinea, Africa, an annoyance to the Portugese, and sold them in Spanish enclaves, an annoyance to Philip II of Spain in his enclaves of the West Indies islands of the Caribbean. Another Hawkins voyage in 1564 passed without incident, this time with Elizabeth I as partowner in the ship Jesus of Lubeck. During a third Hawkins voyage, in 1568, news was abroad of the detainment of Mary, Queen of Scots, in England. Philip II of Spain chose now to switch up a gear, and he moved from a covert to an overt position of patronage regarding Mary, Queen of Scots claims on the English throne. The perceived insult of Elizabeth Is refusal to marry him ten years previously, after the death of
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her sister who was also his wife, Mary I, was honour satisfied to him by his support now for Mary, Queen of Scots : but Ralph Sadler knew it was a bluff, Mary, Queen of Scots
being crowned as also Queen of England would possibly or certainly mean the French taking de facto in power in England, sooner or later, and so long as Philip II feared for that, Mary, Queen of Scots would be strategically kept captive and alive by Ralph Sadler.
The English supported Dutch Protestant champion William, Prince of Orange in a successful battle against the Spanish, on 23rd of May, 1568, at Heilgerlee. For Philip II, English support of Dutch rebels could now be answered, with fierce Spanish battle, throughout the Low Countries of Holland. In June, 1568, Elizabeth I recalled John Man from ambassadorial duties in Spain, on the grounds of his not being given specific permission to perform Protestant services within the confines of the English embassy building. On the 25th of September in that year, 1568, at the port of San Juan de Ulua, 127 Mexico, the English fleet of Hawkins third voyage comprised of six ships had drawn up to revictual and repair, under a flag of truce. John Hawkins allowed entry to the port, of Don Martin Henriquez, Spanish Vice Regent of the Americas, and to the Spanish ships under his command. The Queens ship Jesus of Lubeck was suddenly attacked by the Vice Regents ship, along with the others, whilst all were riding at anchor.
127
* Authors comment: spelling variant found as San Juan del Ulloa .
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The now almost-defenceless English sailors of four ships were slaughtered.
Upped-anchor already, and riding seawards in the harbour-mouth, Francis Drake, a Ralph Sadler protg, aboard the Judith and another of the Queens embattled ships, the Minion, managed to both escape and eventually to get separately home to Mounts Bay in Cornwall ; only fifteen men on a dead-mans deck were still alive and breathing aboard the damaged and limping Minion when she arrived back. Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! the pirates song continues. War with Spain would need more than a stiff-drink, and when the Englishman-in-the-street heard of the maritime atrocities in Mexico, it meant war with Spain. The Spanish sea-going Great Armada would not arrive at English shores for another twenty years. Plenty of time for the pirates of Penzance and The Mumbles to do their worst to the Spanish treasure-fleets! Commenting on John Hawkins, the slave trade, and the public knowledge of it, Williamson says : These activities involved diplomatic troubles with Spain and Portugal, and it was therefore desirable to say as little about them as possible. Thus they invoked little public discussion and no propaganda 128
128
pp. 63. J. A. Williamson The Ocean in English History (1941) Clarendon Press.
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But what began as a cold war between 1554 and 1568 now became irrevocably hot. Spanish wage-ships en route to pay Alvas men in the Netherlands, were waylaid going up the English Channel in December, 1568. Philip II complained ; taking advice from Ralph Sadler, Elizabeth promised, in a Sadlerianvein, to look into it. The plans for the great Spanish armada fleets and the military invasion of England began to be drawn-up by Philip II. The plans of Ralph Sadler were then ditto, but in the defence against of that ever coming to be.
Chapter 15
Ralph Sadler : Secrets & Beer
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The phoney (though hot) war continued until 1585, when, curiously enough, the Treaty of Nonsuch (Palace, signed on the 2nd&10th of August) between the English and the Dutch Protestants changed everything. This Ralph Sadler-created treaty, and its promising of open English military-aid to Dutch rebels against the Spanish yoke of occupation in the United Provinces of the Low Countries, turned the phoney war all-too real, and the fighting went on for most of the next twenty years, until the 1604 Somerset House Conference at the beginning of James VIs reign brought peace with Spain. For as long as Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain were alive at the same time, wars would continue. As with the wars in Scotland, the coronation of James VI of Scotland as also James I of England was a kingly coronation devoutly to be wished, as several large-problems could be
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settled simultaneously once the English crown was perched upon that Calvinistic Scottish head. James VI of Scotland would always need support among the English people, and no-one saw this more clearly than his personal mentor, Ralph Sadler. Elizabeth I was a woman, and had always been made to be irrelevant in the Tudor scheme of things.
In 1584, Ralph Sadler, aged seventy-seven years old, Englands special ambassador to Scotland for the forty-seven years preceding, had latterly been in personal charge as jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was now aged forty-one, and whom hed personally known since she was three months old, and who was now in her sixteenth year of detention, for her own safety being held at Tutbury Castle.
Ralph Sadler M.P. was an indefatigable Member of Parliament many times, for many differing constituencies, so indefatigable that he helped introduce the Bond of Association Act, 1584/5, described as : ...the most utterly lawless provision ever proposed in English statute law...
129
129
pp.267. J.E. Neale Queen Elizabeth (1934) Jonathan Cape. * Authors comment: Really excellent, this book was once described as ...the greatest biography of the twentieth century. It was written to appear as being extempore, a spontaneous contiguous-narrative, and was published without any printed footnotes, Neale having been encouraged by and then following on from an original idea of his friend and then-publisher, Jonathan Cape. Tudor historian Alison Plowden recommends also particularly Neales second volume of Queen Elizabeth and her Parliaments (vol II 1584-1601) (1957), so Ill also particularly recommend volume one covering 1559-1581 to your approval : Ralph Sadlers 1561
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It, too, was used to damn Mary, Queen of Scots at her trial, indeed the Bond of Association Act, 1585, was the technical legal statute she was executed under. Elizabeth I, now aged fifty-one, encouraged by Ralph Sadler, had finally seemingly-entered into negotiations directly with Mary, Queen of Scots, though not face to face, indeed, they never met in the real world, only in letters, and there was seemingly a chance of negotiations having a view towards Marys release now after sixteen years of her detention : but the detention situation was always totally intractable and immovable once begun. (Our currentAmerican allies have their Guantanamo Bay problems rooted in the same detention grounds.) James VI foreswore his mother in her detention ; she would not call him King. All of them were archly-manipulated, throughout their lives, directly, by Ralph Sadler. Neither of James nor his mother Mary would share power. Mary, clinging to the belief that her claim to the English throne was a unique one ; that her cousin, Elizabeth I, was a bastardupstart, and convincing herself that she, Mary, Queen of Scots, would somehow win-through, by the power of her divine-right as a monarch. James VI, once assured by Ralph Sadler that a continued silence on his mother would eventually bring to him the prize of inheriting the English crown directly, said little or nothing.
There seems to have been a commonality among those imprisoned during the medieval times, especially when royalty was imprisoned, to always be able to maintain their external lines of communication, despite their having the inconvenience of incarceration.
speech is in there, and theyre a diptych bookset. Sir John E. Neale was knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
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Ralph Sadler, having been involved with unsealing, copying, and re-sealing documents his whole-life, undoubtedly hacked into and tapped Mary, Queen of Scots communications conduits, as it being a routine matter of national importance for him, just as it would be if the same situation existed in our own day. He would do the same to James VI ; in fact, to be on the safe-side, Ralph Sadler hacked into and tapped the communications network of everyone he came in contact with, its how he began his career, and he inevitably linked in to thousands of others whom he never even met or would have cause ever to meet. Knowledge is never too dear, as Sadlers man Francis Walsingham is said to have said; perhaps he was simply echoing what hed heard from studying with his master, Ralph Sadler : sounds like Lesson #1 to me! Sounds just like things happening then really were just like the things happening now in our own day! This level and intensity of national and international spying was what an elder-statesman, a Spymaster-General and gentleman-courtier of fifty years service, would be bound to do, for and on behalf of his monarch and his country, in the Tudor England of the sixteenth-century. Francis Walsingham may have so-far taken the limelight in our day for the events which followed in and around Mary, Queen of Scots story, but he was certainly only the coordinator of a much-more intricate Ralph Sadler conceived and eventually executed plot, if I may inadvertently produce a kind of direct-pun around the subject of someone losing their life. Mary, Queen of Scots, was cut-off entirely from her usual exchanges of secret letters in January, 1585, when she was at Tutbury Castle, by now with Sir Aymas Paulet and Ralph Sadler in charge of her proceedings, directly.
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An extract from a letter Ralph Sadler wrote, to the Lord Treasurer, William Cecil : To : From : Lancaster. Tutbury Castle, Derbyshire, 28th February, 1585. For four months and more I have borne the whole charge of my said number of horses, and sometimes of more, as occasion has been given, whereof at my return I will make a just and true account, trusting to have some reasonable allowance of the same,...with such other charges as I have sustained in this service,
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William Cecil, Lord Treasurer, Westminster, London. Sir Ralph Sadler, Knight-Banneret, Chancellor of the Duchy of
towards the which, neither before nor since my

132
coming from home, 131 I have received one penny of Her Majesty.
This letter serves to show the exceptional care Ralph Sadler took over his horses, and that he was able to call Cecil to book on terms ; Her Majesty and her purse being personified in William Cecil, Lord Treasurer. The tone of the letter, rebuking, not one penny, has a reflection of how things stood between the two men, when we consider that as late as 1586,
130
* Authors comment: The service of caring directly for Mary, Queen of Scots, as she was moved around detention-facilities at the negatively-concluded negotiations with Elizabeth I which had tried to end the detention situation. It is weird, wonderful and worth-noting, that the Babington Plot is discovered so soon after those failed negotiations ; at a moment when Mary has never been quite so closely-watched, this seems more than just a little lax on the part of all parties concerned. More especially so, as Mary, Queen of Scots was in fact a now near-worthless piece in the English diplomatic game being played with Philip II of Spain. 131 * Authors comment: home being Standon Lordships, his magnificently appointed, petite countrymansion manor house, in Hertfordshire, today known as Lordship Manor, and now the home of Lord and Lady Trenchard. 132 pp. 155. Sylvanus Urban Correspondence of Sylvanus Urban (1853). x/cff footnote 27, above, Sir Ralph Sadlers State Papers, (ii), 527. * Authors comment: This is the time at Tutbury Castle, when Sadler famously takes Mary, Queen of Scots from confinement to go out hawking on the downs. I have amended the Tudor English spellings in this particular letter, to match our modern-style, without changing or updating tenses, or altering the meaning.
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a year before Sadlers death, Cecil writes letters asking outright, literally, of Ralph : what should I do?
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and betrays his lifelong, constant reliance on his mentor by that; not to
mention his being upbraided here for thoughtlessly-excessive parsimony on behalf of the Queens purse! The superior older man berates his inferior junior : their relationship, in a nutshell.
On the 25th of June, 1586, Mary, Queen of Scots, made her final and fatal error of judgement : she wrote back to Anthony Babington. Babingtons next reply letter to her said a half-a-dozen men would assassinate Elizabeth I and simultaneously release Mary, Queen of Scots from detention at Chartley House where she then was, and that a similarly co-ordinated amalgamation of foreign-forces would also invade England. The return reply letter of Mary, Queen of Scots, then approved wholeheartedly of the whole scheme. On the version of the decipherment of the Babington plot letters sent to Walsingham, Thomas Phelippes, the master code-breaker, drew a thumbnail sketch of a gallows at the letterhead ; ironically though, it was simply the symbol being utilised in Ralph Sadlers
English secret service code-breaking department at that time, and its meaning was toppriority and was only to be sketched on the most important and urgent documents. Now, it seemed chillingly-prescient in regards of the fate that would befall Mary, Queen of Scots, and she would remain on the baited hook, blithely unaware, continuing to write and send what
133
Passim. See the entire general ms correspondence between William Cecil and Ralph Sadler of 1586, in order to fully-grasp what was transpiring at that date between the two men.
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she thought were her secret letters, until just two days before the first-arrests in the Babington Plot, which arrests started taking place during August, 1586. Nothing could exceed the care with which the commission for her (Mary, Queen of Scots) trial was prepared...the actual writing of it, since it was to be a memorial to continue in after ages , was committed to an old clerk, who alone in this age of declining penmanship could write perfectly in a set hand.
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I wonder what source Neale got the phrase he uses as his quotation, to continue in after ages , from? Damn it is, that Neale didnt use any footnotes in his book! I wonder if that old clerk writing up the commission for the trial was in fact Ralph Sadler himself?
Ralph Sadler could write perfectly in a set hand, his calligraphic-style writing was exquisite. At Mary, Queen of Scots trial, one of the exquisite, unique and top top-secret details to partially-emerge was the secretion of enciphered letters, placed in some especially hollowedout beer-barrel bungs. (And/or, an airtight box, floating inside, attached to the bung, depending on veracity of secondary sources information.) The brewer of the beer was part of the duplicity, in that the beer-barrel bungs were examined and resealed at his premises to give the appearance that no tampering had occurred, when in fact all of Mary, Queen of Scots communications were being copied and deciphered.
134
pp.274. J. E. Neale Queen Elizabeth (1934) Jonathan Cape. (my brackets)
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As when a letter is sealed with a wax-seal, so the bung of a filled beer-barrel in the sixteenth-century was smeared on its top surface with a mud-seal made of loam-putty , then duly over-stamped with the brewers mark seal impression. This loam-putty was a : ... loose plaster-mix, formed by mixing clay, straw and sand...
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and was applied as a loam-putty over the top of a beer-barrels actual bung-type stopper, doubling as an air-gap sealant, once the stopper has been hammered into the bung-hole by the brewer. The loam-putty sealant was indented with that brewers personal mark before it driedout, just as a wax-seal with its impressed mark from the writers signet-ring or other stamping-devices are applied to a letter ; in order, too, that it prevent any tampering, or, indeed, leakage of any kind, to any unauthorised-persons. Secrets and beer have always been, and will always be, I suspect, vulnerable to being purloined in theft, due to their almost universal-appeal, to both innate-curiosity and to a dry thirst, as well as both for possible access to
potentially arcane-knowledge, and to the general-merriment that may (or may not!) ensue from risking such a purloining, if said items are left lying around with no-apparent owner in sight. Secrets and beer. A dangerous combination in all ages.
135
Op. cit. Ed. C.T. Onions O.E.D. (1933) definition of loam-putty.
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If the intact-looking loam-putty seal on the beer-barrel bung trick had not always been being played on her, on the 16th of January, 1586
136
it began to be played with a vengeance.
Mary, having recently been subject to a deliberate regime which had starved her of correspondence, immediately took the bait offered her, swallowing it hook, line and sinker, as the year unfurled those four hundred and thirty-five years ago. This loam-putty sealant business is worth contemplating, examining and re-examining, over and over. Anon, in the Shakespearian play Hamlet, we find: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till afind it stopping a bung-hole?... ...the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam...might they not stop a beer-barrel?
137
Note here the dualistic reference to Alexander the Great, who was both a monarch and a pagan; necessarily then, this line in Hamlet, has been considered by scholars as its being a barbed comment aimed exclusively towards Mary, Queen of Scots and her Catholicism. As this would intimate the greatest of the Shakespearian works possibly as being fundamentally Protestant propaganda, it is hardly ever brought up for discussion.
136 137
Same day on which I was born in 1960. Hamlet, Act V, scene (ii) lines 198-206.
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Obviously, no dual meaning needs be ascribed to the use of loam to stop a beer-barrel. It is not the bung for the bung-hole that is being referred to, but the loam sealing-substance, the loam-putty , as already described above, used to prevent tampering and stopping any leakage of the precious substance inside. Mary, Queen of Scots, believed in the fantasy that her mail was safe from interception precisely because the mud-seals on the beer-barrels and the wax-seals on her letters looked in untouched, mint-condition. The quintessence of noble dust that comprised her very being was soon enough to be available for stopping any number of beer-barrels, her trial a foregone-conclusion. Hamlet summons all his philosophical skills when he posits: ...and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
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From an adaptation of the mediaeval Latin, quinta essentia (used as an adjective in French), quintessence, is the fifth element of ancient philosophy; considered the latent animus of all things. By the 1570s, the era when scholars think a lost Ur-Hamlet, play is beginning to be written/performed, quintessence was understood to mean the purest or most perfect manifestation of something, and we see it here used in its most perfect, and truly original, Ur-manifestation. Mary, Queen of Scots, had been the quintessence of James V, a quite-literal fifth element, then. A quintessence of dust would be her undoing at the Babington Plot, when the inch-thick painted on loam-plaster on the beer-barrels passed as safe, and she felt sure her letters were for her eyes only.
138
Hamlet, Act II, scene (i) line 312.
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Now get you to my ladys chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch-thick, to this favour she must come.
139
utters Hamlet out aloud to Yoricks skull, a favour the token at the tilt
of a lady to a knight.
Mary, Queen of Scots was, of course, reputedly a renowned beauty in life, ...beautified with plastring art... spying. This moment in the play is filled with poignancy for Ralph Sadler ; hed known Mary, Queen of Scots from when she was three-months old, until now, at forty-three years old; when he personally supervised her ignominious execution by horrendously (possibly, purposefully) botched beheading. Princess Perdita in the Shakespearian play, The Winters Tale is described, aged sixteen, as: ...a creature, Would she begin a sect, might quench the zeal Of all professors else, make proselytes Of who she bid but follow. ...The rarest of all women.
141 140
as the play explains, and to be doomed by the arts of loam-plastering and
which I feel gives us a direct-flash of the conflicting feelings of fear, loathing and love Ralph Sadler would precisely have seen for himself in Mary, Queen of Scots, the Living-Pearl, the
139
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (i) lines 187-188. * N.B. The quotation has been considered by scholars to refer directly to Mary, Queen of Scots. 140 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act III, scene (ii) line 60. 141 The Winters Tale Act V, scene (i) lines 104-07, 112.
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rarest of all women, and a perfect-description of her as a sixteen year-old, by all accounts : which is why many scholars have associated these lines with their being directly-allusive to that internationally-renowned young beauty, Mary, Queen of Scots : beautiful enough to turn Protestants into Catholics, just as the words of the play allow.
In his first 1543 report of the then three-month old Mary, Queen of Scots, we recall Ralph Sadler said she was: ...as goodly a child as I have ever seen and as likely to live... which is so close in form to when Emilia in,The Winters Tale says : A daughter, a goodly babe, lusty and like to live... that in a moment it reminds us that the baby-princess in The Winters Tale is separated, in the plot, from her homeland for the same length of time that Mary, Queen of Scots, as a baby-princess, was separated, in real-life, from her homeland, having been spirited abroad to France after the massacre of the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. We could now then, look to the incipiently insane King Leontes of Scicily in that same play as having been almost entirely-based on what probably were Ralph Sadlers personal experiences of the real-life teeteringly-totteringly mad King Henry VIII ; Princess Perdita is forced by King Leontes away from Sicily and grows up for the next sixteen years in Bohemia. Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced away from Scotland to France by Henry VIII when she was a bebe-in-arms, and was away for the next sixteen years. 222

Princess Perdita is shipwrecked, with the ship described as being stormtossed : ...as youd thrust a cork into a hogshead...
142
whose themes of beer-barrel stoppage-devices, young princesses under pressure and the like, we have already had somewhat of a mention of, in our discussions on Hamlet,, above. And now, below :
That Shakespearian play, Hamlet, has Hamlet make the droll-gravedigger remark that in England ...there the men are mad as he..(Hamlet)
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without the droll-gravedigger having
realised it is in fact Hamlet himself that he is addressing the remark to. A case of mistaken identity, then, but disguise and things not being quite what they first appeared were also a stock-in-trade for Ralph Sadler. He was the Spymaster-General, the mentor of both the older William Cecil and also of his son Robert Cecil, and Sadler the same mentor to Francis Walsingham : the three specific men who, up until now in history have always gained an unwarranted-kudos for actions we can now surely see as more properlyascribable to Ralph Sadler. I was so lucky a couple of years ago; I was sitting up on the Hampstead Heath one afternoon in the early-autumn sun, when a falcon, a kestrel-hawk, flew-low across the field I was sittingin, landing on the broken-stump of a blasted oak-tree. In an instant, as I observed it by directly looking at it, the falcon suddenly tucked its head under its wing, and just
disappeared. No matter how hard I then looked, I just could not see it, the blending of the
142 143
The Winters Tale Act II, scene (iii) line 95. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (i) lines 149-150. (my brackets)
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kestrels coloration with the colour of the tree was symbiotic, and the creature was suddenly invisible, hidden in plain-sight. Just as Ralph Sadler had managed to do to himself, for fifty years of the historical record despite being in the public eye, even in the form of a Hans Holbein portrait of the fellow! Hidden in plain-sight : the ultimate disguise of the SpymasterGeneral.
You really need to see this phenomenon for yourself, to appreciate it properly.
Chapter 16
Ralph Sadler : Hamlet Autolycus
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Nearer to the start of the Shakespearian play, Hamlet, we hear Hamlets mothers first speech saying to him : Do not forever with thy vailed lids, Seek for thy noble father in the dust, Thou knowst tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.
144
The Authorised Version (King James) bible and the style of lyricism used in its Psalms is what springs easily to mind with that last line. James VI would be suspicious of the version of the Authorised Version bible that was offered him on his accession ; hence, it has a delayed publication until his paranoia is won-over.
144
Hamlet, Act I, scene (i) lines 70-73.
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The naturally-occurring system in Tudor England of to thine own self be true that James VI inherited, was a living, breathing, vibrant, modern society, with honour retained for the individual through rights enshrined in law, and a proviso of personal-responsibility to keep to the morality contained in the bible, and it was a system developed by Ralph Sadler personally, between 1530 and 1580, and put in place equally-personally. The system would prove to be unwieldy in James VIs hands, as the power of Parliamentary representation grew and grew. Humanism gave birth to the concept of the individual. In the Shakespearian play, Hamlet, questions are posited about what it means to be an individual.
The rise of Protestantism, as the Reformation of the Church in England continued, had internalised Christianity. Hamlet, is notable as the first truly internalised play by any author. Hamlet,, with its complex ideological, phenomenological, metaphysical and early humanist philosophical arguments, in a style very much displaying a sensibility that predates the language used by the later Euphuists, seems to broach early humanist-beliefs, the very ones that even made possible the concept of the individual, and imply through the medium of the play, if not the emotion-packed poems that are the soliloquies : What is the point of being an individual ? This question, posited within the overall musings of the play, is often mistaken in Hamlet, for an apparent nihilism on the part of the author, when in fact it was a perfectly legitimate
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and reasonable thing to interrogate the newly-emerging philosophy of humanism for in its day; a zeitgeist query, rather than a rhetorical question, to be or not to be? . In the most famous of the Hamlet, soliloquies, then, Hamlet says : To be, or not to be , that is the question, ... For in that sleep of death what dreams may come... ...makes calamity of so long life : For who would bear the whips and scorns of time ... ; who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary-life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered-country , from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of ?
145
We have already met with these highly-portable, loosely-tied with hemp-string packages, packets or fardels of letter-bundles, as a normal part of Ralph Sadlers day-to-day routine, more usually concerning the exchange of top-secret enciphered government-
145
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act III, scene (i) lines 56, 66, 69-70 and 76-82. The parenthetical quotation marks within this extract to certain of the words done by me are to show where I consider the emphasis occurs in relation to my arguments for the purposes of clarity in this book. X/cf again my footnote #46, pp above, as regards puzzles in etymological usage and history.
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communications, via the nationwide post network, which he took the lead in the organising of nationwide, from the very start of his career. Ralph Sadler, in his long life, had fardels bearing down on him every single day, which he had to bear, just like his post men bore the letters they carried across the nation, as part of his job. So just who would fardels bear ? And why is it that in The Winters Tale, fardels is considered to be a letter-bundle, yet in Hamlet, the word has always been supposed to refer to a bundle of sticks? Sheer-laziness, I suspect.
But then, who would fardels bear?
Mercury, the winged-messenger is the symbol of ambassadors : ambassadors just like His Excellency, Sir Ralph Sadler, Orator to the King, who dealt daily with the secret-letters and packages of the monarch. Autolycus is confided in regarding the items washed-up on the shore with Princess Perdita, and by way of persuading of his trustworthiness, Autolycus says : Whether it like me or no, I am a courtier cap-a-pe (head-to-toe);... and one that will either push on or pluck back thy business there...
146
146
The Winters Tale Act IV, scene (iv) lines 752, 760-62.
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He is portentously warned : ...there lie such secrets in this fardel and box, which none must see but the King...
147
Undaunted, Autolycus says : Ill bring you to where he is...tender your persons to his presence, whisper him in your behalfs : and if it be in man besides the King to effect your suits, here is the man to do it.
148
A near word-perfect self-description of Ralph Sadlier and the position he held for fifty-years. A quick aside of Autolycus is observed between his two audience of muttering men on the stage with him : He seems to be of great authority : close with him, give him gold ; and though authority be a stubborn bear, yet he is oft led by the nose with gold : ...
149
Now bribery is being mentioned, another part of Ralph Sadlers stock-intrade. Autolycus is ready for any criticism :
147 148 149
ib.id. Act IV, scene (iv) lines 782-83. ib.id. Act IV, scene (iv) lines 824-8. ib.id. Act IV, scene (iv) lines 829-832.
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...call me rogue...I am proof against that title and what shame else belongs tot.
150
At which point we must turn to the worlds greatest-living commentator on the Shakespearian canon of works, A. D. Nuttall, and read what he has to say, with ever-widening eyes : It is not inconceivable that the author of this prodigious body of work...was ashamed of what he had done.
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Ralph Sadler had a lot more to be ashamed of than William Shakespeare ever did, and was a lot more capable of doing something about it ; but then he did live a life twenty-six years longer than William Shakespeares time on earth, so had more time to get himself into trouble! Ralph Sadler was a supremely rich, powerful, intelligent, erudite, sophisticated Renaissance gentleman. As to the talk of the exploration, as it were, of some idyllic woodland bourn of undiscovered new-found lands that we must all necessarily visit one-day, and of being able to fly as a mere matter-of-course whenever confronted, the way the whole set of the imagery is bundled and bound-up in just a half-a-dozen lines in such an amazing who would fardels bear...but that the dread of something after death...puzzles the will...? kind-of philosophical packet of its own, that it is, and will remain, totally-exquisite and unique in the annals of literature for all the ages. To be, or not to be was an old starting-proposition from Italian philosophical-debate of the 1450s.
150 151
ib. id. Act IV, scene (iv) lines 870-72. pp. 376. A. D. Nuttall Shakespeare the thinker (2007) Yale University Press.
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Following hard on the heels of such questioning was metaphysical-poet, philosopher and preacher Dr. John Donne, who provides a response, thus : No man is an island unto himself The humanism of the English Renaissance seems to supply what we consider today all the quintessential ingredients of what it is to be English, to be human ; saying, in sum, that there can and does exist such a thing as the individual alongside and within a society . The Tudors really were a very intelligent, practical, pragmatic and realistic bunch. Most especially, Ralph Sadler. When one gives tolerance and space so that that society can thrive, it must be done from the perspective of an English Tudor lady or gentleman, whose cosmopolitan education has produced in them a well-rounded, commonsensical-mind, whose thoughts and actions have a notion of, and responsibility towards continued well-being for all as the quintessential requirement for a smooth-functioning of the society. The lesson is in the Authorised Version (King James) bible : To thine own self be true. The soliloquy exemplifies out-loud internalised-thought, and Hamlet, has the best of their type. Though incredibly layered and dense, when you fully understand them in context, the soliloquies help make the play open to perhaps a truer analysis and interpretation. Ralph Sadler made it possible for the monarch to act as an individual, by Acts of Parliament, resulting in a divine right of the monarch to act tyrannically.
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Twenty-six years after the Shakespearian First Folio, the divine-right of a monarch to be tyrannical would be put to rest forever, with the execution of Charles I, the son of James VI. Chapter 17
Ralph Sadler : Circumventing God & the Law Free, foul and fair speech.
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In English prose there are two main lines of development to trace. On the one hand a vigorous colloquialism, on the other a highly-artificial elaboration. The colloquial style, with its proverbs and folk-speech words...in its more restrained form...is the language of the Authorised Version (King James bible).
152
So, on the one hand, the Shakespearian works are packed with the vigorous colloquialism of everyday English language found in one-branch of the development of English prose, and they also use the same colloquial style as that found tempered within the Authorised Version (King James Bible). On the other hand, the highly-artificial elaboration style based in Latin belonged to another branch, collectively : ...the Euphuistic writers, aiming at sonority and rhythm, coined strange ink-horn terms, delighted in antithesis and piled up redundant similes...the source of this highly-patterned style was Latin.
153
The expression I utilised above to describe Mary, Queen of Scots trial, as its being a foregone-conclusion, is also mentioned in Hamlet, and was Sadlerian Elizabethan-era sophisticated metaphysical bawdy slang, a foregone conclusion is a substitute for the pejorative utterance of the oath fuck!, as in sexual intercourse; to mean its doomed before it starts, and is found for the first recorded time in the English language in Hamlet,. We would approximate it with its a mess that was waiting to happen! or theyve had it, before it even happens! or youre screwed! as it were, and fuck! s already very many
152 153
pp.18 L. F. Salzman England in Tudor times (1926) Batsford. (my brackets) ib.id. pp.18 The most famous exponent of Euphuism was John Lyly, his book Euphues (1579) having coined the word.
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variant adaptations in current use, are really all already very, very old, but nary a soul realises what the root and actual meaning of foregone-conclusion is; but if you think about it, its own vigorous colloquialism is most-apparent. In Hamlet, Polonius, the old-retainer persona, is disposed of soon enough. Wrapped in the arras, a wall-hanging tapestry, he is stabbed and killed in Queen Gertrudes private apartments, by Hamlet, who is dressed in his own customary black clothes. This is
considered by scholars both a mirror of and a parody for dramatic
purposes of the real-life murder of Mary, Queen of Scots personal assistant, the Italian David Rizzio, by Henry Stuart (Stewart), Lord Darnley, who was always known as being dressed in his own customary black clothes. Rizzio, too, is said to have become entangled in the arras, stabbed and then hacked to death with a battle-axe. This event took place in front of a then-pregnant with James VI in her womb, Mary, Queen of Scots, at her private apartments in Holyrood House. Ralph Sadler received eye-witness accounts within three days of the event in March, 1566, from his spies, and it does seem that some of the actual details of the real murder are simply somewhat conflated here in this play. As a man, Ralph Sadler lives long enough to see all the years of Mary, Queen of Scots life pass before his prying eyes, her whole destiny was really always only and ever in his hands. In the next-to-last (an anti-masque) scene of Hamlet, we find Hamlet and Horatio in the graveyard, chatting to the droll-gravediggers. Being philosophy students at Wittenburg University, a Protestant establishment (Ralph Sadlier, Englands leading arch-puritan Protestant, would be glad to see the young protagonists enrolled there, where the 234

philosophers-in-residence were busy discussing the circumvention of God by the new ways) which hosted debate, in these conversations between Hamlet and Horatio we may see some curiosities : When Hamlet begins musing : ...that skull had a tongue in it,... or that another skull : might be the pate of a politician,...; one that might circumvent God, might it not?
155 154
Here, we can become acutely aware that Ralph Sadler was a politician of the highest order, and had been a politician for beyond the life-span of many of his fellows; one that might circumvent, well, anything.
Still wondering on skulls, Hamlet continues : ...or of a courtier?...

156
Ralph Sadler grew up in the English Renaissance royal court of Henry VIII, and was a consummate courtier and gentleman, exemplifying the standards of the day. Next, Hamlet wonders:
154 155 156
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (i) line 75. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (i) lines 77-79. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (i) line 81.
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Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? 157 Where be his quiddities now,...his tricks? Quiddities essence of a thing : ...when he used a word, all possible meanings of it were commonly present to his mind... as the Shakespearian scholar John Dover-Wilson reminds us regarding the Shakespearian author.
158
is co-identical with quintessence, to mean the real nature or
Another Shakespearian scholar, A. D. Nuttall remarks, ...a near-obsession with law has long been discerned in Hamlet, .
159
Ralph Sadler, having begun acting as an attorney in the
earliest part of the Dissolution of ecclesiastical property, qualified as a lawyer, entering Grays Inn at the age of fifty-four. He had actually been making and helping pass laws all his career by then, and in 1545, when introducing his own, personal Act of Parliament, to legitimise his children, (bastardised, youll recall, by his technically-bigamous marriage) he included in his natural son, Richard, in the Bill at the same time!
157
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (i) lines 95-6. * Authors comment: Tricks is taken as meaning traps, legal ensnarement, here ; or a coat-of-arms, viz. finery. When he used a word, all possible meanings of it were commonly present to his mind, as Shakespearian scholar John DoverWilson reminds us regarding the Shakespearian author, repeated in my main text, as its always being worth repeating. 158 * Authors comment: This refers specifically, in fact, to the official case-history precedents in the loosely-bound document court-bundles, or fardels, carried to and fro at legal-assizes and all court trials. The quibbles of the quiddities, as it were, are the cross a lawyer must bear, carrying the finer points of the quiddities in their heads, so as to be as fluent in case-history precedents; as fluent as the lines learnt by an actor. 159 pp.8. A. D. Nuttall Shakespeare the thinker (2007) Yale University Press.
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Finally, Hamlet reflects: Hum! This fellow might be ins time a great buyer of land...the very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in his box...
160
By the time Ralph Sadler was created Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in 1568, he was reputedly the richest commoner in England, and he bought and was the owner of vast land tracts, throughout the whole of England. His landholdings and dealings had begun decades before, back in the 1520s. A politician, a courtier, a lawyer, a great buyer of land ; all descriptive of Ralph Sadlers life, chronologically. Ralph Sadler was all four of those things by 1540, and would continue to be for the next forty years. Neither Hamlet nor William Shakespeare could match themselves against that list as precisely and directly as Ralph Sadler. William Shakespeare bought and sold a little land. Fictional Hamlet, the Danish courtier and law-student, was appointed Ambassador to England in Hamlet,.
His Excellency Ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, lifelong consummate politician and courtier, was a fully-qualified lawyer, and bought and owned vast tracts of land, and all those traits are listed chronologically in the play, Hamlet, just as theyd occur in Ralph Sadlers life.
160
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (i) lines 100-109.
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All you would ever really need to know about Ralph Sadler is summed-up in those few lines spoken in the graveyard. Its almost like its some-sort of detailed short biography of him. A kind-of sixteenth-century snapshot in words, words, words.
In the final scene of Hamlet, Act V, scene (ii), Queen Gertrude dies of poisoning when she drinks from a cup containing an union
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the archaic term, even in Tudor times, for a
natural pearl. It is considered by scholars to be concomitant with Mary, Queen of Scots, and of her being effectively-killed by the union of Scotland and England, most especially as her own son, James VI, a true King of Scotland, then twenty-years old, who would not come to her aid in the hour of her trial, as he did not want to concede to her in any kind of power-sharing agreement. She seems to have stubbornly and consistently rejected his coronation as king of Scotland, always considering her abdication forced upon her.
Mary, Queen of Scots, the living pearl, as she was sometimes known in her day.
By the 29th of October, 1586, Mary, Queen of Scots, with questionable evidence against her having anyway been entirely smeared across with all-sorts of verbal loam-putty before, during and after her trial before her accusers, she was found guilty, and Ralph Sadler
161
Hamlet, Act V, scene (ii), line 270.
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officially-announced to Elizabeth I that the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Parliament were petitioning for her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots immediate execution.
Elizabeth I declared against Mary, Queen of Scots, publicly by the 4th December, and the bells of London rang out for joy in consequence; Ralph Sadler in the meanwhile had secretly concluded a league with Marys son, James VI.
Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad : and in trust I have found treason...as for me, I see no such great cause why I should be fond to live or die. Elizabeth I.
162
said
Christmas and the Twelfthtide-holiday must have seemed very bleak and gloomy-looking to both the queens, of England and of Scotland, in the waning of that particular year, a year that was now eleven days behind and out of joint with most of Europe in its retention of the Julian calendar, England and Scotland having had ignored the new Gregorian calendar since the 1582 changeover. The time is out of joint: O, cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right!
163
162
pp.204, Anthony Burgess Shakespeare (1970) Jonathan Cape. This is Anthony Burgess, writing as an amateur Shakespearian works interpreter, affettuoso, with real love of his subject, and in this capacity, as a Shakespearian investigator, too. Read it if you havent, it is Anthony Burgess writing and thereby painting his own portrait of the man who wrote the Shakespearian works. His book is a grossly-undervalued resource that is invaluable to any serious Shakespearian works examination or investigation. 163 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act I, scene (v) lines 206-206. * Authors note : Most of Europe adopted the Gregorian Calendar-system in 1582, England lagging behind twelve-days due to sticking with the Julian Calendar-system. Time doesnt get out of joint much more than that!
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as it says in the Shakespearian works play Hamlet, where it also says : ..All is not well: I doubt some foul play. Would that the night were come. Till then, sit still my soul: foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth oerwhelm them, to mens eyes.
164
It was now come the night for Mary, Queen of Scots, the restless soul of The Moth was abroad, and foul play and foul deeds were on the rise; and to mens eyes things had been out of joint, but the time was now come for The Moth who was born with cursed spite to set it right. All was not well, and all of the loam-putty earth of The Moth had thrown up in the air was about to fall down, overwhelm and bury Mary, Queen of Scots. The death-warrant was signed and sealed after the turning of the year, and on 8 th February, 1587, the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots took place at Fotheringay Castle, and for her the rest was a silent-quintessence of dust.
Ralph Sadler must have then waited with bated breath; however, luckily for him : ...the Nation steadily supported the Crown, even when it seemed tyrannous, for the fear that to weaken it might open up the door to disorder once more...
164 165
165
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act I, scene (ii) lines 268-271. pp. 230. G. T. Warner&C.H.K. Marten The Groundwork of British History (1912) Blackie &Son.
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No-one ever wanted any kind of a War of the Roses-type situation to return in England. It must, though, have seemed touch-and-go a lot of the time to Ralph Sadlier, as he only participated in the events that we ourselves know as history as they actually unfolded, in real-time. Thats life for you, though, I suppose. Fortunately for him, and with Mary, Queen of Scots execution, all resistance in Scotland to union with England and vice versa had gone, and Ralph The Moth Sadler could stop his mothman flapping and rest in the light of Elizabeth I in peace.
* Authors note : who were, in order, Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Jane Grey, Mary I and Elizabeth I.
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Chapter 18
Ralph Sadler : Secrets & Questions
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It was now sixteen years since his mothers execution by beheading, and after the son came out, the child of Mary, Queen of Scots, The White Queen, the white lily of the French Guises, and the-now thirty-seven years old James VI of Scotland, would finally get to be crowned as a Sun King, just as Ralph Sadler had arranged, and be named also as James I of England, unifying the nation from 1603 to this day. ( Though having said that, our friends in Scotland didnt actually sign the Act of Union with England until 1707. And may anyway now even have changed their minds entirely......)
Elizabeth I, The Red Queen the red rose of the Lancastrian Tudors, the very last one, now sixty-three ravaged years old was still all very much alone in her personal life, was a sad and long-since faded-bloom by her end in 1603. Ralph Sadler was eighty-years old when he died, soon after his last official public act of presiding as the Chief Judge and Prosecutor over Mary, Queen of Scots trial and execution; he had lived under the rule of a quintessence of all six of the different crowned English Tudor monarchs*, acting as the effective Vice-Regent of this country for nigh-on fifty years. He was the oldest surviving political-promulgator of Henrician policies regarding dynastic succession and the Tudors. With his passing, the countrys economy would unwind like a broken mainspring in a clock and the Elizabethan era become moribund and hidebound for its final sixteen years. Ralph Sadlers pupil, William Cecil, was destined to fade without his master, even though he and his son, Robert, would inherit all of Ralph Sadlers former charges. Ralph Sadlers death coincides exactly with the well-noted unexplained decline of Elizabeth Is reign, a decline which also came after and in despite of the storming English victory over Philip II, who was then Europes most powerful-ruler with his Great Armada fleet and armies.
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The Spanish Great Armada arrived in the English Channel in July, 1588.
Then it blew away again, routed in battle, assisted by English fire-ships giving them the shock of their lives, one dark and very, very stormy-night. On the 9th of August, 1588, Elizabeth I is reputed to have given the famous Great Armada Victory speech at Tilbury, to an enrapt and cheering crowd. 166 The Tilbury Speech, as this piece of overt, blatant nationalistic propaganda is known, was circulated in manuscript or printed-pamphlet form, abridged or paraphrased possibly, but the language the speech uses is the language of the Shakespearian works, that vigorous colloquialism again, straight-to-the-bone as it slices through the crowd. It seems to me that the Tilbury Great Armada Victory Speech is a smear of loam-putty, with English Tudor anonymous propagandist-superstar Ralph Sadlers tell-tale makers-mark impressed upon it; maybe it was his final gift to her. In it, Elizabeth declares : I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a King of England too...
166
167
421-45 J.M. Green I My Self:Queen Elizabeth Is oration in the Tilbury Camp Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997) 167 * Authors comment: The absolutely dastardly way Ralph Sadler makes the play on the word king, and leaves the audience no time to recover, as they ponder the pun of the idea of Elizabeth I being the daughter of Henry VIII, The Ruby of England, was a King of England, too! Breathtaking. Audacious. It sounds poetically identically-like lines from the Shakespearian plays, Henry V, perhaps, or maybe from Macbeth. That anyone would dare to suggest that Elizabeth I wrote it herself is in and of its self, well, simply dastardly.
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In a work thought to be of the 1550s and like the Tilbury Speech, not printed until the mid1600s, we find : ...I am but..of small body, yet my heart is as big as the best,
and the workemanship thereof... These are the words of Parvis the Wren, one of the female characters in the book The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke. Two other characters in the book are the eponymous-hero, Cawood the Rook,168 and his boss, Rapax the Hawk . The short-story of The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke is packed with morralls, and it is all about how Rapax the Hawk took the over the effective powers from, and then ruled as a stand-in representative to The Parliament of Birds for the King of the Eagles, at that kings behest.
168
* Authors comment: Cawood, whose name is spelt throughout the book with only one w : yet the book itselfs printed title-heading carries a two w form of spelling. Strangely enough, it also caused near-panic at the BL the first time I ever requested it, as we looked for a single w spelling without realising, and then couldnt find any ms listing! Of course, the librarian spotted my mistakenlyspelt error, eventually.
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Based around Aesop-type fables, the moral of the Owls story 169 is appropriate here : When men strive to show learning at unseasonable times, it makes them prove ridiculous.
170
Ralph Sadler, and his being now entirely-absent from the English governmental power structure, entirely-explains with exactitude that previously seemingly-paradoxical unravelling and unexplained decline into morbidity from around 1587 of all-things Elizabethan to us, most precisely.
169
Chapter III rear of leaf (iv). Anonymous The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke c.1550s (1630) Francis Grove. BL .shelfmask. HUTH 83. * Authors comment: The political meaning of this tirade is not obvious a later commentator has pencilled onto the front flyleaf of the BL mss copy of this book. If only hed read my book! Then hed know what a real political tirade meant! The Pleasant History is an immaculate, almost unique example of the true art of printing, as printing was still developing (along with uniformity in spelling! see previous, footnote#146) and the sheer quality and style make the actual BL mss copy look as though it had been printed yesterday by a sheer-genius of the art of printing. Thought to have been written by Ralph Sadler, or, possibly by one Gervaise Cawood, who was employed as a Steward in Sadlers household. Printed by Thomas Coates, a former apprentice to William Jaggard &son at the time of the 1623 First Folio printing, just then beingundertaken, on behalf of the Shakespearian plays in publication financial developers and investors, William and Philip Herbert, to whom the Shakespearian works are dedicated, and who I think were in fact the direct-inheritors of Ralph Sadlers campaigns of nationalistic propaganda, and had been responsible for those enacted since the time of Ralph Sadlers death thirty-six years prior. Coates was by now a publisher in his own right, producing the Shakespearian works Third Folio, in 1632. 170 ib.id. leaf (v). * Authors comment: Professor Mike Gray of the National Trusts Sutton House first drew attention to the idea of Gervaise Cawood possibly as having been the author of The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke, which idea David Starkey has said he found interesting. *Authors personal observation : I wonder to myself whether Professor Gray recalls our many conversations over the years, as I recall them all, fondly. It was me who very first broached with him, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my original idea and the whole notion of Ralph Sadler as having been the real and sole-author in the Shakespearian works. Near that time, I discussed all of my ideas with family-friend Brian Ash, Q.C., at my mother and fathers house in Liverpool. We all agreed, together and separately, with the opinion expressed by Anthony Burgess, that it is the right of everyone to be free to paint their own portrait of the man who wrote the Shakespearian works. My favourite thing, ever, that I ever did at Sutton House, has to be the time Mike invited me in to examine the Garderobe Room, on the very day, within just an hour after, in fact, of its 1994 astonishing rediscovery, and us discussing the exciting notion that Sutton House should now be re-designated as a lost palace of Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour. I am unsure to this day whether any particular conversation modified the opinion, lightly-conveyed in Mike Grays charmingly greeting me on one occasion with : Ahhah! Adrian Johnson! The only man alive who knows more about Ralph Sadler than I do! but I would hope not after me writing this book! Im still going for the world record, Mike! Get in touch with me, if you read stuff like this on that beach in Spain!
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Mary, Queen of Scots, also previously Queen of France, with a reputation as a Queen-ofHearts, died aged forty-three years-old, at Fotheringay Castle, Staffordshire, found guilty of treason against the Crown, and executed by beheading, in February, 1587. Ralph Sadler died, aged eighty years-old, in March, 1587, within a month of Mary, the nolonger Living-Pearl, Queen of Scots. Those are pearls that were her eyes... as T. S. Eliot might have said. What he did say was : I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes. Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head? But O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag Its so elegant
So intelligent What shall I do now? What shall I do?

171
Precisely, in fact, what Mary, Queen of Scots would have been thinking in 1567 as she faced the Scottish Protestant Reformation taking all she had and leaving her with nothing.
171
lines 124-131. T. S. Eliot The Wasteland (1922) Faber&Faber. * Authors comment: Shakespeherian has an almost aphetic tendency, like when people say squire instead of esquire, to make it sound a bit like you are at the home of rag-time music, New Orleans, and o-o-o-o-a-bitdrunk, when said out-loud. What a champion spelling! Poetic refinement in the referential use of the English language like this derives in a direct-lineage of the Shakespearian works and sensibility. Reproduction here is in the usual typesetting display for this poem.
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Shades of the Rent-Rackers there in that.
Ralph Sadler, the deceased English Tudor hero, who was James VIs friend and mentor since James birth, had an eldest-son of his own, called Thomas; James VI would knight him, as a tribute to the memory of the late-Sir Ralph Sadler, dubbing him as Sir Thomas Sadler in the great hall at Ralph Sadlers main family-home, Standon Lordships country-mansion manor house, where James also slept the night before he was crowned. James VI would then live in The Scottish Palace, a large house in Bromley-by-Bow that was previously Ralph Sadlers. Ralph Sadler was born in 1507, five hundred and four years ago, not during the reign of Elizabeth I, nor of that of Mary I, Elizabeths elder sister, nor in the reign before that, of their younger brother, Edward VI; nor even that of their father, Henry VIII; but during the reign of Henry VIIIs heirs grandfather, who was called at birth as Henry ap Maredudd ap Tudur, whos Welsh family-surname when Englysshed and transliterated into the common-parlance in use of fifteenth-century England is then given out as being just plain old Tudor, and he became the very-first English Tudor monarch, reigning as Henry VII from 1485 to 1509 of the English Tudor Henrician era.
Elizabeth I had learned to speak, read and write in Welsh fluently when she was a child, on the knee of her ancient retainer nurse, Nanny Blanche Parry, who herself had a bit of a reputation for her being known as some-sort of Welsh-witch, not improved by her definitely being a friend to one Doctor John Dee, Necromancer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and close-associate of Ralph Sadler.
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We dance around in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.
Robert Frost.
Never tell a secret to two. Ralph Sadler.
Five hundred and four years since Ralph Sadlers birth at the beginning of the sixteenthcentury, in 1507, probably, the secrets of The Hero of Pinkie Cleugh, the most-singular English Tudor dynasty statesman His Excellency the Special Ambassador to Scotland, Orator of Henry VIII, Sir Ralph Sadler, Knight-Banneret, attorney & lawyer, K.G., P.C., M.P., of the Manor of Standon Lordships (also, Steward at Standon to Anne Boleyn then for Jane Seymour) in Hertfordshire, Sheriff of Hertfordshire, Private Personal Attendant-Secretary to King Henry VIII, Privy Council and Gentleman of the Inner-Chamber (1536), Steward & Keeper of Nonsuch Palace (1538), Master of the Kings Hawks, Prothonotary in Chancery, Clerk to the Court of Augmentations, Clerk to the Court of the Hanaper (1536-87), Master of the Crown Jewels (1536,1574), Principal Secretary to the-King-in-Parliament (1540-43/without portfolio1587), Treasurer of the Army (1544-45), also, Privy Council and Master of the Great Wardrobe and Ward to King
Edward VI, also, Steward & Constable of Hertford Castle (1550), also, Hertfordshire Captain of the London Trained Bands militia muster and Royal Wardship Master to Queen Mary I
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(1554-56), also, First Lord and President of the Privy Council (1558), Grandmaster of the Queens Hawks and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1568-87) to Queen Elizabeth I, Last Knight-Banneret of England, aka The Moth, may finally start to reveal themselves to us here in 2011.
I drew my breath in pain to tell the Ralph Sadler story, wounded name and all, and explain the unknown things that live-on beyond him, for hes not alive any more, to hear with us the news from England, that England which was wont to conquer others, that at least hes not unknown anymore, and that were going to look-over all his inky-blots and rotten parchmentbonds, and look-over them a lot more carefully this time, with a lot more care taken in our looking. I dont think hell mind us finding out about everything now, enough time has elapsed; wed have to give it to him, that he was totally successful hiding in plain-sight, and hed have liked to know that.
Ralph Sadler died in 1587, just five years before the first Shakespearian play, Henry VI was published and performed in public, in 1592; twenty-two years after Ralph Sadler passed-on the Shakespearian Sonnets were published, in 1609. The Authorised Version (King James Bible) eventually came along twenty-three years after Ralph Sadlers death, in 1611, and the Shakespearian plays would be published some thirty-six years after Ralph Sadlers demise in First Folio(1623). Rather than simply being thirty-six years since Ralph Sadlers demise, the year of 1623 means that both of the greatest books ever in the English language, within the first twenty years of James VIs reign, have both now been published.
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The first complete Shakespearian works collection, with the poems, songs, sonnets and plays published in a compendium together for the first time, wasnt actually until 1798, when it was finally considered to be a viable commercial financial-proposition, and the cult of the Shakespearian works we live in thrall to in our own day first began, two hundred and eleven years since Ralph Sadler had inhearsed his last breath. Ralph Sadler, Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, none of them ever saw that particular big book of First Folio. Neither did Henry VIII or Hamnet Sadler. Theyd all died natural deaths. Henry Herbert was there, as Master of the Revels, looking after things for the next forty-years.
The Authorised Version (King James Bible) and the Shakespearian complete works could more-commonly be found together, side-by-side, high on the average English familybookshelf, up until more recent years.
Ralph Sadler lived through a life full of momentous and tumultuous-events with many, many, personal, enduring, towering and over-arching achievements to his name.
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This is a lifetimes work for me studying English Tudor history, and despite my two and a half decades study of him, I do not know, nor do I claim to know, every last-detail concerning Ralph Sadler.
I know that as an ambassador, he would have been swopped gifts with by all and sundry, maps, codes, secretly-opened letters as these were the political and diplomatic currency for nation-states and their statesman, then as now. Maybe Ralph Sadler had something to do with Henry VIII getting hold of that 1537 modern map of the Italian coastline? Ive seen that map; its very beautiful. Ive also seen the many other maps ordered compiled and drawn-up by Ralph Sadler.
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Chapter 19
Ralph Sadler : Lies & Silences
253
I often do more than just fear that someone has already-beaten me to Ralph Sadler : A young Scotsman, Walter Scott, who would later invent and coin the term War of the Roses, was one of the worlds first biographers of Ralph Sadler, was employed as the assistant to E.H. Clifford, the senior co-author, whod co-opted Scott to do the grunt work. Remarkably, these men Clifford and Scott say in their introduction (written by Scott) to the voluminous book they produced on Ralph Sadler in 1809, that an anonymous old vicar had approached a living descendant of Ralph Sadler, the Reverend Richard W. Sadleir, when those two were neighbours, and the old vicar had said that he recognised the name Sadler, as he was part-way through transliterating a fardel of some eight hundred original letters of Ralph Sadlers, that he claimed to have found in an old chest. Mr. Sadleir reported regretfully that his neighbour the old vicar had already thrown away nearly two hundred of the letters, as they were foxed, or damaged in other ways, and beyond all readability. The remaining six hundred letters the old vicar eventually transliterated, and they were given in a bundle as a present to the Reverend Richard W. Sadleir, who had then allowed access to them by Clifford and (mainly) Scott during the research phase of their book. Even more weirdly, Clifford laments that the only document that was missing to aid the research was some sort of a day-to-day Ralph Sadler diary that he muses Ralph Sadler might have kept, being as how Ralph Sadler was such a prolific writer. What is curious to my mind is that the whole career of Sir Walter Scott was launched by his foray into researching and writing that Ralph Sadler biography, a lot of which was plagiarised from an anonymously authored book on Sadler already published in 1720, anyway. Cliffords project on Sadler was Scotts first piece of notable published work. Walter
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Scotts prolific output after that date was entirely based in a popularisation of medieval historical fact. His historical fiction books, starting with the so-called Waverley Novels, were admired for their seeming-authenticity in their depictions of life in medieval Britain. Scott was, literally, as a result, to inspire and inform what came to be known as the Gothic sensibility of the whole Victorian era through the initial reception of his fiction writing.
Another thing the ubiquitous Sir Walter Scott achieved single-handed : following his selfappointed consultation (he waved his knighthood at them) and his free- advice to them, the Tower of London Armouries sold stuff to him he specially picked out, foisted by himself from their military collections, and then, on his say-so, the Beefeaters used rangoon oil, a harsh-abrasive metal-cleaning paste, and scrubbed the all the metal of the armours to a gleaming burnish, repeating the medicine on all of the medieval suits of armour then in their care, as Scott had told them that the then-existing hand-painted finishes were inauthentic and a mere fantasy aggregated from intermediary years. Mysterious it is then, that in Sir Walter Scotts still-preserved house in Scotland, there are various suits of armour covered in painted decorations... Some of those decorations on the Tower armour were, in fact, the originals as painted on by Hans Holbein himself. Great Scott! if Im allowed to coin an expletive phrase here, minus a choice swearword or two of my own. To a give closure to this particular subject, for now, I say this : I am of the avowed opinion that Walter Scott purloined various historical-documents and manuscripts along the way, in order to plagiarise them and in order to thereby-further his burgeoning career as a popular-writer, burning the evidence as he finished with stripping it of
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what he needed, but that foremost amongst these thefts were Ralph Sadlers memoirs and diaries. Sir Walter Scott may have considered that Ralph Sadlers works were the writings of an individual, rather than some sort of a potential historical state-archive deposit : in that sense, to plagiarise and then destroy original manuscripts may not have seemed a bad idea in order to cover his greedy and grasping tracks at having stolen them just to steal from them. Or, being Scottish, he may have held deep-seated subliminal race-memory resentment towards Ralph Sadler.
I can say what I like, the mans dead a hundred years, and, like Ralph Sadler, hes suing noone now : but Id say it to his face if he were alive today, and dare him to take it to court.
The character of Young Prince Fortinbras is considered by scholars to be a representation of James VI of Scotland in the Shakespearian play, Hamlet,. I will now use the final words in Hamlet, which I think nicely substitute and sum-up as being Ralph Sadlers probable thoughts (and this will have to do for now, in the absence of any currently-available Ralph Sadler diary entry for me to use turning up expectedly or unexpectedly any time soon) at the time of his own death :
Hamlet :
O, God, Horatio, what a wounded name Things standing thus unknown - shall live behind me! 256

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story... (the tread of soldiers marching is heard afar off, and later a shot within ;...) I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy thelection lights On Fortinbras, he has my dying voice, So tell him, with thoccurrents more-and-less Which have solicited the rest is silence. (he dies)
Horatio :
Now cracks a noble-heart. Good night, sweet-prince ; And flights-of-angels sing thee to thy rest ! ----------------------------Why does the drum come hither ?
257

(Enter Prince Fortinbras, the English ambassadors, Drum, Colours and others.) 172 The final lines spoken by Horatio in Hamlet, have always stood out; he seems to pronounce a prologue, a beginning, not an end to the play weve just watched : ...let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about: so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Falln on thinventors heads: all this can I Truly deliver.
173
Whose words are hook, line, and sinker the near-perfect description of Ralph Sadlers lifetime. Casual slaughters like Pinkie Cleugh in 1547, or Clyst Cliffs in 1549, for example.
172
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (ii) between lines 292-311.
173
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act V, scene (ii) lines 377-384.
258

Deaths put on by cunning and forced cause like those of Archbishop David Beaton or Mary, Queen of Scots. You can guess at some of the other parallels to carnal, bloody and unnatural acts in these lines here for yourself, take your pick, from any given year in Ralph Sadlers long life from 1507 to 1587. Ralph Sadler left his dying voice to James VI, the new king who would arrive when the old monarch was already dead, in the form of Ralph Sadlers unknown legacy of truly-gargantuan patriotic propaganda efforts, with a Sadlerian sentiment reflected in the built-in clause mentioned in the Shakespearian play, Richard II, that it was England itself that was : This royal-throne of kings, this scepterd-isle, This Earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-Paradise, this fortress, built-by Nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war : This happy-breed of men, this little-world, This precious-stone set in the silver-sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall , Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less-happier lands ;
259

This blessed-plot, this Earth, this realm, this England ,...
174
Nothing was, quintessentially, of England per se, in the person of the monarch themselves. There was a fine revolution there for people, an if they just had their wits, they would see it. Very little has been written about Ralph Sadler, and what there is has tended to be confused and piecemeal. Yet his story is a vital-component to how we live and are governed today, on our outlooks and degree of socialisation and what it is to be a citizen of England. Ive delivered him truly and honestly to you, Ralph Sadler, Spymaster-General, The Hero of Pinkie Cleugh, the all-powerful, anonymous and darkly-mysterious Last Knight-Banneret of England, a longsince dead and longforgotten English Tudor hero : this was the worlds first more fully-comprehensive unabridged short biography to become available about him, and its all true tis, tis all : just have a glance back over the abridged short biography chapter 9 Ralph Sadler : the play-within-the-play , maybe, before you leave :
Whatever will appear in the future or has appeared in the past is essentially in a dormant state. What is past has not disappeared forever.
174
Richard II Act II, scene (i) lines 40-49.
260

The substance of what has disappeared as well as what may appear always exists. Whether or not they are evident depends upon the direction of change.
175
Little in history is inexplicable if the evidence survives.
176
The rest on Ralph Sadler is, for now, silence.
Actually, not quite : this historiography of short biography is dedicated also to Professor Diarmaid N. J. MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the church at the University of Oxford, who also appears in References, as well as having several citations to the footnotes : including footnote #1, so, as he, as it were, started it, I feel it only fair and proper that, I, a
175 176
Kaivalyapadah IV-12, Yogasutras of Patanjali. pp.1 R.A. Griffiths & R.S. Thomas The making of the Tudor dynasty (1985) Sutton Publishing.
261

schmo of an ex-private-eye skiptracer, should leave the final word to him, the professional historian, and the best in the world as far as Im concerned :
History is a matter of context; the evidence should be presented in order to establish the motive of actions arising and ascribed to any one individual.
Professor MacCulloch said to me in person at our meeting last year in the British Library that he enjoyed the idea of Ralph Sadlers being an omnicompetent Tudor statesman , and we agreed together as we may be missing a few manuscripts or so connected, maybe, to Ralph Sadler, and as this book has relied so heavily on both of Professor MacCullochs work and the of Shakespearian works, (and, of Ralph Sadler and of his works!) and as he and I have discussed my work at length, including the difficulties faced in tackling it, I feel it most appropriate and apposite to repeat here part of the contents of our e-mail correspondence (mine &the Professors, not me and the author of the Shakespearian works, I mean they didnt even have e-mail back in the sixteenth-century) from during 2010. I think we were having a discussion, among other topics, about the availability of original manuscript sources, and in relation to his critique of an earlier version of this book, take it from me, Professor MacCulloch said :
262
We have no authorial manuscripts of any play by anyone printed in England between 1590 and 1640. The same is true of authorial music composed at the time. They were clearly regarded as disposable once the work was done.
177
177
Authors note : from a private e-mail correspondence with the author.
263
Citation & References
History is now, and England! as T.S. Eliot insisted. 264
I, Adi Johnson, ancient daoist of Highbury Fields, London, England, reserve the right to be known as my being the sole author in this work.
Adi Johnson, ancient daoist of Highbury Fields, London, England. This book had better-be historically-accurate by use of all-dates mentioned in it, or else. This book was completed during sixteen-or so separate drafts starting March, 2008 and finalised at 09:09a.m. on 08.12.2009; revised 29.12.2009; entirely redrafted 08.03.2010; and final revision made by 10.06.2010 : and once again re-revised, re-entirely redrafted and yet another final final revision made by 14.07.2011. Last stetted to personal galleys 20.07.2011 @ 06:00hrs B.S.T.
Written by Adrian N. Johnson / finalised between August, 2008 14th July, 2011.
Contact e-mail : adiskype@gmail.com 0794.419.8956
Tel.
Ralph Sadler : in citation : biography/history/literature/sociology/psychology/ : monograph :
265
Title of my next expository-volume on Ralph Sadler :
Spymaster-General : King of Infinite-Space .
I am currently also working on a multi-layered map, where the places owned and visited by Ralph Sadler are compared and contrasted with the places named-and-visited in the Shakespearian works. The results so far are stunning, and will be included in a future-volume. You can visit the map on the internet as a work in progress by clicking here :
RS places.kmz
I would have never had done anything without my time and experience with Professor Dai Freke, when I worked for his Research/Rescue archaeology unit at Liverpool University, or without the input from Professor Norman Russell and Professor Alan Plent at my old school, Quarry Bank, nor indeed the influence and encouragement and sound advice I got from Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch of Oxford University as to my establishing historical veracity and accuracy in my work, and to Julian Portinari for steering me onto the straight and narrow. Thanks a lot, guys! I did my best, only because you showed me how!
266

Chronology Chapter Notes Sources Bibliography Index
267
268

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Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ch 14 pp 178-187 Ch 15 pp 189-198 Ch 16 pp 200-205 Ch 17 pp 207-218 Ch 18 pp 216-224

Secrets & Beer

Circumventing God & the Law

Secrets & Questions

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General : a short-biography of a long-forgotten English Tudor hero.

I love books. Time spent in a library for me is the clock stopped.

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Context

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

and the first mention ever of King Leir, with

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

in Paris, to persuade Louis VII of France to

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

and gave rise to Magna The Provisions of the

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

showed sound vision, it

ib.id. pp. 188. ib.id. pp. 205.

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Richard II is shown in the Shakespearian works as ...feckless, wilful and petulant...

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

very like the

258. 264. (my brackets) 264. 265. 266.

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Henry V has his streak of native pugilism

caught in his Shakespearian portrait as Prince

ib.id. pp. 266. ib.id. pp. 265.

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Catherine and Owen had three sons, Edmund, Jasper

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

pp.29. ib.id. (my brackets)

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

, who deposed Edward V in June 1483, after Edward IVs

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

and taken to Salisbury by Sir James Tyrell, where he was executed

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

ib. id. pp. 121.

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General

The Tudor dynasty

Henry VII : 1485-1509 Henrician era : part (i)

Ralph Sadler : Spymaster-General