Reign of Henry VIII

The Reign of Henry VIII is a turning point in the novel’s history of church property, religious authority, and the Woolgar family. In 1540, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Crown acquired church lands and Henry VIII granted Stapley Manor and its entire estate to Richard Staffon, a London mercer. The estate’s later connection to the Woolgars brings this national religious upheaval into the local history of St. Joseph’s Church in Banfield.

Reformation and the Transfer of Stapley

The novel places the transfer within the Reformation in England, when the Roman Catholic Church was dispossessed of lands and properties. In 1540, Henry VIII granted Stapley Manor and the full estate to Richard Staffon. Staffon lived there with his family until the reign of Mary Tudor, when the return to Catholic rule brought persecution of Protestants. The narrative describes Staffon and his family as fortunate to escape into exile, while nearly three hundred others were burned as heretics.

This sequence makes the estate more than a setting: its ownership records successive shifts in religious and political power. The property moves from the Roman Catholic Church to a Protestant grantee and, through what the narrative calls devious means, eventually to a Catholic supporter. The history of the land thus mirrors the instability of religious allegiance across the Tudor period.

The Woolgar Connection

The estate passed to Sir John Woolgar as a reward for his loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church during Henry VIII’s reign. A wealthy Sussex businessman, Sir John was also the father of the priest serving at St. Joseph’s Church in Banfield. The family connection ties Stapley to Banfield and gives the later parish history a material inheritance shaped by earlier religious conflict.

The account also distinguishes this earlier loyalty from the political changes that followed. Sir John remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and Mary Tudor later favored him for his steadfastness. His position consequently links the transfer of an estate to the patronage and religious alliances that determine who holds power in the narrative’s historical past.

Memory and the Parish Record

The Reign of Henry VIII is recalled through the historical research and manuscript material that Fenn examines, rather than through a scene set at the Tudor court. Thomas Woolgar’s account describes the parish as maintaining the Roman Catholic faith during what it calls heretical times, a perspective that presents religious change through the experience of a local priest and community.

That account also sits within a troubled chain of records. Fenn learns that the old parish chest, containing records of St. Joseph’s Church and Banfield, was transferred to St. Peter’s Church at Stapley after Thomas Woolgar was removed from Banfield. The manuscript’s account of the Tudor period therefore connects the transfer of church land to later efforts to preserve, move, and interpret parish history. The reign matters both as a historical rupture and as the beginning of a local inheritance whose surviving documents shape the novel’s investigation.