Author's Note 

 

There are many reasons why I have written this novel – all valid, I feel, in view of present day trends. The inspiration to write it was a compelling one. For me, it was a way of keeping alive events in my life and the research my Cousin Philip and I did into the ancestral line of Pop, our grandfather William George Coward, and an important period in our history which is no longer taught – as a general rule – in our schools.

 

Pop told me when I was in my teens that his Coward forebears didn’t like Henry VIII. He said that it stemmed from the time of the  dissolution of the monasteries and that it was something to do with Anne Boleyn, but he didn’t know what it was.

 

When my Cousin Philip and I researched his line, we proved it back as far as Wolstan Coward who farmed land belonging to the Wilton Estate. We also found two earlier records for Cowards that farmed Wilton land, one back to the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, but we couldn’t find anything that linked them to Wolstan.

 

Philip and I were convinced that Wolstan and the earlier Cowards were related. They were all farmers who farmed land belonging to the Wilton estate and, even though our research of the line seemed exhausted, the thought of a connection between them all would not go away and I started to write a novel called Coward Line in which I attempted to solve what is a nagging mystery.

 

By the summer of 1997, Coward Line was approaching the equivalent size of a two hundred page paperback novel and, as the storyline developed, a new title emerged: Kings, Queens and Cowards. In the first draft of Kings, Queens and Cowards, I conjured up a fictional link between the earlier generations of farming Cowards and Wolstan. The story was coming together but I was not satisfied as something appeared to be missing and I did not know what it was. But in Whitehaven on Black Wednesday in September 1992 an unexpected twist of fate reminded me of what Pop told me when I was in my teens.

 

I went into an old bookshop and ended up browsing through a copy of William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation. After a few minutes of reading a bit here and a bit there, instinct told me I should buy it. The old bookseller who sold it to me said that he was sorry to see it go. He said that it had been on the shelf for years, and he paid me a back-handed compliment saying, ‘I knew that one day someone would have the good sense to buy it.’ And I am very glad I did.

 

The book was a new edition of Cobbetts earlier work with notes by F.A. Gasquet, a prominent Roman Catholic priest. What intrigued me about this edition was that it was given short shrift and found little favour with so-called respectable historians at the time. They decried both Cobbett’s work and Gasquet’s notes. But Cobbett’s submission – that the Reformation in England had little popular support and was in fact the product of a handful of fanatics backed by the power of the Tudor Monarchy and the greed of those who looted the monasteries and Churches – has since been increasingly accepted by modern historians.

 

Believing that truth will always come out in the end, I decided to do a little bit of research of my own after reading something about Anne Boleyn in Cobbett’s book. I tried to pin down her birth year. I found there were three versions spanning a period of seven years – 1501, 1507 and 1501-7. She had an elder sister, Mary, whose ‘official’ birth year is just as vague – 1499-1508. I also found out that, over the centuries, there has been a lot of debate as to the date year of Anne Boleyn’s younger brother with a consensus among modern historians being a generally accepted vague ‘guesstimate’ of about 1504. It seemed very strange to me that the birth year of three prominent children of such noble birth could be left so vague in the annals of history. Was it deliberate? I wondered.

 

I knew that recorded accounts of events in history varied from author to author, even though historical sequences of events shared the same common thread. It all depended upon the perception and bias of the historian involved. I also knew that ‘official’ versions for public consumption were sometimes ‘edited’ and toned up or down for political expediency, including covering things up to hide the truth when it didn’t suit.

 

Also, by 1997, what I considered to be ‘real’ history wasn’t being taught in schools anymore, and, if this trend continued, ‘real’ history might be in danger of being lost forever. I’d seen enough of life to know that the biggest mistake in the history of man is that man never learns from mistakes in history. I felt that an easy-to-read factually based novel would help to keep the bones of a particularly brutal period of our history alive and, by then, I had included what Cobbett had said about Anne Boleyn into the storyline of Kings, Queens and Cowards, wondering if it might have had a bearing on why Pop’s forebears did not like Henry VIII.

 

Extract from William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation (written 1824-7) revised with notes by Francis Aidan Gasquet, D.D. O.S.B. in 1896, Chapter II – Henry VIII – The Divorce, Paras 67-8.

 

Cobbett wrote:

67. It is now four years or five years since the King and Cranmer had begun to hatch the project of a divorce; but, in the meanwhile, the King had kept Anne Boleyn, or in modern phrase, she had been “under his protection,” for about three years. And here let me state that in Dr. Bailey’s Life of Bishop Fisher it is positively asserted, that Anne Boleyn was the King’s daughter, and that Lady Boleyn said to the King, when he was about to marry Anne, “Sir, for the reverence of God, take heed in what you do in marrying my daughter, for, if you record your own conscience well, she is your own daughter as well as mine.” To which the King replied, “Whose daughter so ever she is, she shall be my wife.” Now, though I believe this fact, I do not give it as a thing of truth which is undeniable. I find it in the writings of a man who was the eulogist (and justly) of the excellent Bishop Fisher, who suffered death because he stood firmly on the side of Queen Catherine. I believe it; but I do not give it, as I do the other facts that I state, as what is undeniably true. (19) God knows, it is unnecessary to make the parties blacker than they are made by the Protestant historians themselves, in even a favourable record of their horrid deeds.

 

68. The King had had Anne about three years “under his protection,” when she became the first time with child. There was, now, therefore, no time to be lost in order to make “an honest woman of her.” A private marriage took place in January 1533. (20) As Anne’s pregnancy could not be long disguised, it became necessary to avow her marriage, and therefore it was also necessary to press onward the trial for the divorce, for it might have seemed rather awkward, even among “Reformation” people, for the King to have two wives at a time!

 

Gasquet’s notes:

(19) The terrible suggestion here given is not without a certain amount of evidence to support it. The curious reader may consult the examination of the matter made by Mr. D. Lewis in his Introduction to Sander’s Anglican Schism, pp. xxxi-xliv. The result is given in the following words: “We have now the confession of Cranmer, of two Houses of Parliament, and of the King, that the impediments (sc. to his union with Anne) were not only detriment but also unknown. Admitting, then, that the impediment was unknown – we must shut out from the question the relations of Henry with Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, and her daughter Mary, for they were not unknown – nothing remains but to accept the fearful story told not by Dr. Sanders only, nor by him before all others, and say that, at least by the confession of the King and Houses of Parliament, Anne Boleyn was Henry’s child.”(p.xliv.). The learned Bollandist, Father Van Ortroy (Vie du B. Martyr Jean Fisher, p. 268-9, note), has upon examination of the evidence come to the same conclusion, although he says he can fully understand how it is that every argument has been brought to bear against so unwelcome a theory. He points out how, as early as 1536 this very charge was made in the street songs of Paris (p.10, note 1).

 

(20) The marriage ceremony was apparently performed by Roland Lee, very early in the morning of January 25, 1533 (cf. Archæologia, xviii., p. 81; Harpsfield, The Pretended Divorce, pp. 234, 235; Mrs. Hope, The First Divorce of Henry VIII., pp. 294-6). As Elizabeth was born within eight months, the date was subsequently falsified.

 

Twenty years after he revised Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation, Francis Aidan Gasquet was appointed Archivist of the Vatican Secret Archives. His notes prompted me to try to pin down the year of Anne Boleyn’s birth. It was the vagueness surrounding the birth years of the Boleyn children, his note concerning the ‘not unknown’ relations of the young Henry Tudor with Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, and the reference to date falsification that led to its inclusion within the storyline of Kings, Queens and Cowards.

 

The land records of earlier Cowards, who farmed land belonging to the former Wilton Abbey and, later, ‘Black Will’ Herbert – Earl of Pembroke – exist.

 

The historical accounts have been gleaned from various sources within the public domain, as well as a B.B.C. Radio broadcast in the 1980s THE PEMBROKES OF WILTON and confirmation of date information concerning Black Will Herbert supplied by courtesy of Wilton House Estates.

 

Some of the characters surrounding the earlier Coward family are based on actual people who lived locally at the time – who may or may not have been associated with the Coward family – and others conjured up by me.

 

The priests and the Abbess of Wilton were people of the time.

 

John P. McColl Mills