Iam particularly indebted to the excellent work of Professor Eric Ives on Henry VIII’s will. I am grateful to the staff of The London Library, The British Library, The National Archives and the Bodleian Library, who have been so kind in helping me locate sources.

I am thankful, too, for the support I have received from my colleagues and students at New College of the Humanities, particularly from Dr Hannah Dawson, Dr Lars Kjaer, Dr Joanne Paul and Professor Anthony Grayling. My student Paula Erizanu acted as a research assistant for me in the early stages of this book, and her bibliographic research was invaluable. Thank you to all fellow members of the Ottoline Club, our interdisciplinary faculty club, for their helpful comments on my early paper on this material, and to Dr David Mitchell for the invitation to present my research. Thank you, too, to my second-year students who endured digressions into the subject of the will during their Michaelmas 2014 tutorials on the Tudors.

For the elegant construction of this book, thank you to Anthony Cheetham and Richard Milbank at Head of Zeus. Thank you very much, too, to Jessie Childs for reading this book in manuscript so carefully and at short notice. Thank you to Mark Hawkins-Dady for impeccable copy-editing, which licked this body into good shape. Thank you too to Dr Tom Licence, Peter Foden and Dr Gavin Robinson for palaeographic help. My excellent agents, Felicity Bryan, Helen Purvis and Sue Ayton, support me to an astonishing degree and I am very grateful to them.

Personally, I want to thank Marie-Noëlle Raynal-Bechetoille and Philippe Raynal for creating such a wonderful atmosphere in which to write; Suzanne Phillips and Sarah Broughton for their massive practical help and encouragement as I started out writing; and my parents, Nick and Marguerite Lipscomb, for their great support and hands-on help. Thank you, also, to all my friends for encouragement, companionship and welcome distraction, but especially to Hannah Dawson, Thomas Leveritt, Josh Dell and Simon Schama.

Finally, I particularly want to thank my dear friend Dan Jones, who cajoled, encouraged, bullied and inspired me into writing this.

SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB