Henry VIII,the Reign
The Royal Progress 1535
Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire
Sudeley was ravaged for years in the civil war between Matilda and Stephen and was taken as a garrison by Stephen Here also lived John de Sudeley, father of William de Tracy – one of the knights who murdered Thomas Becket at Canterbury in 1170. The story recounts that William, placing his foot on the dead prelate’s neck, exclaimed, ‘Thus perishes a traitor.’
When the royal train arrived at Winchcombe (near Sudeley) in 1535, William’s descendant Richard Tracy held the manor of Stanway, a little over three miles away (he also had property at nearby Toddington). The manor was owned by Tewkesbury Abbey but two years earlier Cromwell had obtained the lease for Tracy.
Richard was a younger son of another William Tracy. William had died in 1530 and had made a will in which he refused to bequeath anything ‘for that intent that any man shall say or do to help my soul’. When the will came to be proved, it was referred to the Convocation of Canterbury, which was sitting in parallel to the second session of the Reformation Parliament, and on 23 March 1531 the will was condemned as heretical.
Thomas Parker, Chancellor of Worcester, was subsequently instructed to exhume the body of William and proceeded to have it burned at the stake.
Parker may have believed he was working within a law that had been enacted in 1401: the statue known as the De heretico comburendo (2 Hen.4 c.15), which had effectively made the Henry–Johnites outlaws and required the punishment of heretics by burning at the stake. It was devised to wipe out Lollardy and punish ‘divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect … they make and write books, they do wickedly instruct and inform people … and commit subversion of the said catholic faith’. Chancellor Parker, however, had not obtained the necessary writ to authorise the burning of the body – in the changing political climate it seems doubtful that he would have obtained it anyway – and thus he had shot himself in the foot and was fined £300.
Worse for the Catholic Church, the arch-Protestant Wycliffe apologist William Tyndale lauded Tracy as a martyr and published Tracy’s will with a detailed commentary on it in his treatise The Testament of Master William Tracy Esquire, Expounded Both by William Tindall and John Frith.
Emboldened by Tyndale, over the next decade Richard Tracy embarked on many an evangelical discourse, often in tandem with his ward and protégé Bartholomew Traheron.
A royal proclamation dated 16 November 1538 ‘commandeth that from henseforth the sayde Thomas Becket shall not be estemed, named, reputed, nor called a sayncte’. Richard’s ancestor William Tracy is mentioned in the proclamation’s explanation.
Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, one of the most venerated in Christendom, was destroyed by the end of that year.