Sovereign

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to the staff of the libraries of York City Council, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire County Councils, and the Universities of Sussex and London, for their help in locating research materials about the Progress of 1541. The Richard III Society, American Branch, enabled me to download the Titulus Regulus from their website. The highlights of a research trip to York were the remarkable re-creation of a late-fifteenth-century house at Barley Hall in the city centre, and the excellent and imaginative exhibition on St Mary’s Abbey at the Yorkshire Museum. I am most grateful to Warwick Burton of York Walks for a very informative tour of King’s Manor and for his help with subsequent queries, to Robert Edwards for driving me across the route of the Progress from York to Hull, to Rev. Nigel Stafford for showing me round the lovely old church at Howlme-on-Spalding Moor, and to Mrs Ann Los for sharing her information on Leconfield Castle. Andrew Belshaw kindly found Arnold Kellett’s The Yorkshire Dictionary (Smith Settle, 2002) for me, which was very helpful on matters of dialect. Thanks also to Jeanette Howlett for taking me on a visit to the Sussex Working Horse Trust, where I learned much about the type of horses that moved the Progress across England; to Dr Jeremy Bending, who kindly advised me about Wrenne’s cancer, and to Mike Holmes, who corrected my wildly inaccurate notions about what the sea journey would have been like. Needless to say, any errors in interpreting the wealth of helpful information I was given are my own.

More thanks – once again – to Roz Brody, Jan King, Mike Holmes and William Shaw for reading the book in draft, and to my indefatigable agent Antony Topping for his help and comments – and for the title. Thanks again to my editor Maria Rejt and to Mari Roberts for her copyediting; and to Frankie Lawrence for a mammoth bout of typing.