I have tried to put myself there, wondering what it was like in early Tudor Ipswich, that English port town, around 1530. As the overland pilgrim route took one through Colchester and on to where seagulls would start to cry in the air as Ipswich grew closer, every few days news filtered up from London: the King had put aside his wife, the saintly Katherine of Aragon.
It felt like only a few harvests before that first the Queen and then, sometime later, King Henry himself had made pilgrimages to the town. There had been so much excitement ahead of the royal visits, and many prayers offered at the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace, a place of the greatest importance in the region. The shrine was the destination for countless thousands of pilgrims, being the second most important Marian shrine in the kingdom. Old England was proud of her title of ‘Our Lady’s Dowry’, and Ipswich of its deeply special Lady Shrine, in Henry’s time already a proud feature of the town and its greatest attraction for well over 300 years.
