Pages 8-9 of The Keep fragment of Nicholas Love’s early 15th-century Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, from Chapter 34, on the Raising of Lazarus. Image shows the manuscript’s thread binding. Credit: Courtesy of The Trustees of the Firle Estate Settlement and the University of Sussex.

King Henry VIII’s dissolution enforcer, Sir John Gage, stashed a Catholic manuscript, and its lost pages have just been rediscovered.

Gage, a key figure in Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, saved a dangerous Catholic book from likely destruction, a new study suggests.

The identification of six lost pages of a medieval bestseller – illicitly prized by Catholics in the Reformation – as belonging to Gage, exposes the split loyalties of one of Tudor England’s great survivors.

Fans of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy will recall Gage appearing as a religious conservative and yet dependable enforcer for Henry VIII, as Constable of the Tower and Privy Counsellor.

But new research suggests a bold act of subterfuge by Gage, in which he shielded a treasured Catholic text from the very destruction the king ordered him to enforce.

Archival sleuthing by researchers from the universities of Sussex and Cambridge has reunited six fragile pages in The Keep archive, Brighton (UK) with a manuscript held 3,500 miles away at Yale University in the US – Nicholas Love’s early 15th-century Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.

Dr Katie Walter from the University of Sussex and Dr James Wade, from Girton College, Cambridge, overcame a cataloguing puzzle which had frustrated scholars for nearly a century, leaving the fragment ‘hiding in plain sight’.

A trail of clues left by various archivists and scholars eventually led Wade and Walter to a digitised manuscript known as ‘Takamiya MS 20’ held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Scrolling through it, they found the gap where The Keep pages belonged – just before a controversial passage on the importance of oral confession to a priest – and matched the scribe’s handwriting and the content of the missing passage to prove the connection.

On the final page of the Yale manuscript, among a list of names of likely owners, including those of two religious women, is the signature of John Gage.

Walter said: “The fact two possible owners before Gage were religious women suggests the manuscript might have been in a monastic house before it came into his possession.

“The dissolution of the monasteries led to the destruction of many books but others were taken and then circulated through informal networks.

“Considering Gage’s active role in the dissolution, it’s very possible he acquired the book during this chaos.”

Wade said: “One possibility is that John Gage went to a monastic library and brought it home.

“Another is that someone else smuggled it out, and it briefly circulated from hand to hand until Gage acquired it.

“The key thing is – he kept it safe when he was meant to destroy books precisely like this one.”

Portrait (unattributed) of Sir John Gage. Credit: Courtesy of The Trustees of the Firle Estate Settlement.

Love’s precious/ deadly words

Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ went from being an approved, orthodox bestseller in the early 15th century to a ‘risk to life’ book in the English Reformation a century later.

Love completed his English translation and adaptation of an earlier Latin text around 1409, at a moment of intense anxiety about the rise and spread of heretical beliefs.

The Lollards, a proto-Protestant religious movement, were boldly arguing people should have access to the Bible in English and challenging the role of the Pope and of priests.

In 1401, an act was passed to suppress heresy, condemning seditious heretics, including the Lollards, to punishments that could include death by burning. 

Walter said: “In the early 15th century, having bible translations in English could get you killed.

“Nicholas Love’s translation offered a safe alternative. It was considered orthodox and circulated with the seal of approval of Archbishop Arundel, the outspoken opponent of the Lollards.”

In the Reformation, however, some of Love’s words became toxic.

Most problematically, he appended a treatise arguing for the real presence of the blood and body of Jesus in the sacrament.

He also included passages about oral confession to a priest as well as other orthodox Catholic sacraments – all of which became hotly debated in Henry VIII’s reign and in the tumultuous years of Reformation and counter-Reformation which followed.

Wade said: “65 copies of Love’s text survive today. That’s a lot for a 15th-century manuscript but so many could have been destroyed in the Reformation.  

“It shows how popular it was, but it also shows how a work that became suspicious and dangerous for some could also be valued and preserved by others.”

The study is published in the journal Notes and Queries.