John Lascelles

John Lassells (also Lascelles; died 1546) was an English sixteenth-century courtier and Protestant martyr. His report to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer initiated the investigation which led to the execution of Queen Catherine Howard. Life Lassells was the son of Richard, or George, Lassells of Gateford, Nottinghamshire (d. 1522), gentleman, and his wife Dorothy, the daughter of Sir Brian Sandford. The exact date or place of his birth is unknown. He entered the household of Sir Francis Bryan in the 1530s after studying law at Furnival's Inn, but was dismissed in 1538 because of his advocacy of religious reform. He was in the service of Henry VIII's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, an advocate of religious reform, as a messenger in 1538–9. In late 1539 Lassells, a client-friend of the Earl of Surrey, was appointed as a Sewer in the King's Privy Chamber. After Cromwell's execution on 28 July 1540, Lassells is recorded as having advised his fellow reformers in September of that year that although Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, the principal members of the conservative faction at court, were obstacles to further religious reform, they would eventually overthrow themselves if left alone. Despite this advice to his co-religionists to let matters take their own course, Lassells was personally involved in the following year in the downfall of Norfolk's niece, Queen Catherine Howard. Before her marriage to John Hall, Lassells' sister Mary had been in the household of Norfolk's stepmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk at Lambeth while Catherine was a young girl under the lax guardianship of the Duchess, her step-grandmother. When Catherine became Queen, Lassells, an ardent reformist, had suggested to his sister that she should seek a place in Catherine's household, but Mary refused, giving as her reason that she knew Catherine to be 'light both in living and in ’, and describing the Queen's several sexual indiscretions before her marriage. They included that with her music master, Henry Manox, and a Howard kinsman, Francis Dereham, in the Dowager Duchess's household. Lassells immediately reported Mary's words to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, setting in motion a process which ended with the Queen's execution.