IN THE SHADOW OF THE KING

During the 1540s most English evangelicals were safely hidden from view. One of their strongholds, however, was the most terrifyingly public place in England: Henry VIII's court and the upper echelons of his government. Since Anne Boleyn's rise to influence, evangelicals had received irregular but significant patronage from the regime. One of the key facts of the last years of Henry's reign is that this patronage continued. There was no mass cull of reformers after Cromwell's fall, although there were occasions on which such a purge threatened. A significant body of evangelicals and their sympathisers survived, and indeed won new recruits: in personal service to the king, amongst the nobility and gentry who dominated the court and who administered both peace and war, and amongst the senior clergy. Their proximity to the crown made their experience of the 1540s markedly different from that of their co-religionists in more humble positions. It was of course more dangerous. As the king's vindictiveness and paranoia accelerated during the last years of his life, royal service became increasingly perilous. Yet the reformers at court could also draw on royal protection. The king would not readily dispose of trusted or favoured servants simply on the say-so of their enemies, especially when he was at least as suspicious of the enemies themselves.