The Traitor’s Mark
Henry VIII is on the throne. The monasteries have been shut down, the monks and nuns evicted, the land and buildings sold off and the money raised used, largely, to fund Henry’s war with France. After a wet summer the crops rotted in the fields while London suffered from a return of the plague. To add to all this, the Church was divided between those adhering to Henry’s new Reformation and those still clinging to the Catholic persuasion and the rule of the Pope. Plots and counter-plots abounded, not least the Prebendaries Plot of 1543 when plans were made by some of the wealthiest in the land to indict Archbishop Cranmer for heresy and have him burned at the stake. On a more mundane level Hans Holbein, the court painter, disappeared suddenly; did he die of the plague, was he murdered or did he just quietly return to his own country? In any event he was never seen again.
D. K. Wilson has taken these facts of 1543 and woven a credible story of murder, kidnapping and intrigue around them. The tale itself is fiction – none of it really happened – but, set against a very real background and interspersed with real people of the day – Holbein, Cranmer, Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk, Stephen Gardiner the Bishop of Winchester, to name but a few – it could have. I enjoyed this book and learned more of the Prebendaries Plot, of which I had heard but knew very little. The fictitious characters blended in well with the real protagonists, the pace was good, and the red herrings abounded as they should in any good mystery tale. Recommended.
