Henry VIII Relied on This Courtier to Enforce His Orders During the English Reformation. Behind the Scenes, the Tudor Politician Defied His King by Secretly Saving a Catholic Text

In August 1533, an English courtier named John Gage requested permission to leave Henry VIII’s court, finding himself “more disposed to serve God than the world,” in the words of a friend. A few months later, the Spanish ambassador reported that Gage had “retired to a Carthusian convent” with the intention of taking holy vows. The exact circumstances of Gage’s departure from court remain unclear, but as historian David Potter wrote in a 2002 journal article, the timing of his absence might indicate that this “conventionally pious” courtier disapproved of the Tudor king’s decision to break with the Catholic Church and cast aside his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in favor of Anne Boleyn.

Regardless of Gage’s personal views, he soon abandoned his plans to become a friar, instead playing an active role in the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry’s campaign to seize the Church of England’s riches for himself. How did Gage balance his apparent Catholic sympathies with his work on behalf of the reform-minded king? A new study published in the journal Notes and Queries suggests that the courtier coped by engaging in a covert act of disobedience: namely, preserving a Catholic text that he’d been sent to destroy.

Although researchers have known for decades that a fragment from Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ was housed somewhere in Sussex, cataloging errors had prevented them from determining its exact location. The study’s authors not only found the six missing pages but also tracked down the medieval manuscript that originally contained the fragment. Yale University’s Beinecke Library acquired the text from collector Toshiyuki Takamiya in 2017; Takamiya, for his part, had purchased it at auction in 1976.

Exactly when the Keep fragment was separated from the rest of the manuscript is unknown, but Walter and Wade note that it must have taken place “between Gage’s acquisition and the manuscript’s rebinding in the 19th century.” The most striking feature of the Yale manuscript appears on its final page, which likely lists the book’s owners. Gage’s signature appears alongside the names of two “religious women,” testifying to his acquisition of the Catholic text, according to the statement. Love was a Yorkshire monk who translated a popular Franciscan Latin text into Middle English in the early 15th century.

His Mirror was “endowed with a specially privileged status,” licensed by an archbishop “as an implied alternative to the Lollard Bible, the reading of which had been restricted,” literary scholar Kantik Ghosh wrote in a 2017 book chapter. (Lollardy was a proto-Protestant religious movement that espoused radical views for the era, including the belief that the Bible should be freely available in English rather than Latin.) “It was a hugely popular work of English prose in the 15th century, and the reason it’s so important is because it’s right on the fulcrum of orthodox and heterodox belief,” Wade tells Scientific American. Despite this shift, at least medieval 65 copies of the text survive today—an impressive figure that shows “how a work that became suspicious and dangerous for some could also be valued and preserved by others,” Wade says in the statement. Beyond his efforts on the crown’s behalf during the Reformation, Gage held multiple prominent positions in the kingdom, including comptroller of the royal household, constable of the Tower of London and member of the Privy Council.

John Gage and Thomas Cromwell After Henry’s death in 1547, Gage served his heir, the young Protestant king Edward VI, on an on-and-off basis but was only fully restored to royal favor upon the accession of Edward’s Catholic sister, Mary I, in 1553. Gage died in 1556 at age 76. And he made a fortune in the process.