The old assumption that the monastic orders offered little, if any, resistance to the Henrician Reformation has been modified in recent years with further instances recovered not only from the northern counties but even from the ‘great and solemn’ monasteries of the peaceable south-east. Yet it remains the case that only one of the orders represented in England could be said to have mounted anything approaching a corporate challenge to the religious policy of the crown. The brethren – both conversi and the professed – of the Carthusian order were among the first high-profile clergy to challenge the battery of anti-papal legislation after 1533. Their opposition was led by the London Charterhouse under Prior John Houghton but it was reinforced by representatives from the provincial houses, where sporadic outbreaks of protest served only to intensify the embarrassment and frustration of the king's commissioners. It was their stance that shaped the politics of the royal supremacy in the spring and summer of 1535. Prior Houghton and his counterparts of Axholme and Beauvale were executed in early May, an act of public violence which perhaps more than any other alerted continental observers to the oncoming storm. A further three of the London brethren followed them to the scaffold before the end of May, and another twelve in May 1537; ten were never executed but abandoned to their deaths in Newgate.

The Historia edited here provides a unique witness to this, the first, and perhaps most violent confrontation between the monastic religion and the Henrician regime. Maurice Chauncey (b. 1509) entered the London Charterhouse in 1532–3, initially opposed the royal supremacy but was pressured into submission and, subsequently, to the surrender of the convent in November 1537. His vocation survived, however, and at Marian Sheen, and later in exile at Bruges and Louvain, he became spokesman for the remnant of the English congregation. His text, originally composed in 1547, is a simple narrative as much devotional as it is documentary, enlivened by imagery that is almost exclusively biblical. Clark is a careful editor and Cunich's introduction a concise summary of the Carthusians' struggle both before and after their annus momenti of 1535.