by C. J. Sansom
‘That I think we can do without.’
‘How is our carrot-head doing?’
‘Still brooding. That’s why I want more work for him. But a little better since he separated from Beatrice Kenzy.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. With Warwick firmly in charge now, people talk of setting new commercial schemes afoot, and some will need lawyers.’
‘Good.’
Shortly after, as the snow began to come down thickly, they left for home. I went to my study, to brood.
I had not attended the great show trial to which Robert and William Kett had been subjected at the end of November; it would have been impolitic. I heard both men had pleaded guilty to the long list of charges read against them. They were first sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn but shortly after it was decided they should die in Norfolk, no doubt as a deterrent to further rebellion. I thought of Robert Kett, a man not far off sixty, being slowly raised from the ground to the dizzying heights of the castle roof in the bitter cold. With disgust I remembered John Flowerdew, gleeful at the prospect of giving evidence at the inquest into his property.
There was a quiet tap at the door, and Liz entered, Mousy in her arms, fast asleep now after the earlier excitement. She gave me her gentle smile, and said, ‘I thought perhaps you might like to take Mousy for a little.’ I looked into Liz’s clear blue eyes and thought, yes, she, too, remembers what day this is. We had never spoken of her husband’s part in the rebellion, nor mine, yet she had divined my feelings.
‘Thank you, Liz,’ I said quietly. ‘I should like to. It was thoughtful of you.’
She said hesitantly, ‘I knew, sir, that today would be hard.’ As she handed over the sleeping child, our hands touched, and I felt a sudden urge to grasp the soft, plump warmth of hers. Liz reddened, lowering her head. She stood there, but when I did no more she curtsied and left the room.
I held Mousy to me, feeling the gentle rise and fall of her chest. She was getting heavier now. There was a warm fire that heated most of the room, but I returned to the window, despite the cold draught there, and looked out again at the snow, falling in thick white flakes. The wind driving it came from the east. It would already be lying thick on Mousehold Heath, covering the burned-out ruins of the great camp, the bare branches of the Oak of Reformation, and softly blanketing the unmarked mass graves of thousands of brave commoners – old Hector Johnson, Natty, Peter Bone, Toby, Simon. I held Mousy tight, but the warmth of her little body was small comfort against the cold.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, huge thanks to my superb agent Antony Topping for all his help in getting Tombland into print. Thanks to my editor, Maria Rejt of Mantle, to Marian Reid, Liz Cowen, Josie Humber, Kate Tolley and Philippa McEwan of Pan Macmillan, and to my US editor, Joshua Kendall, and agent Jennifer Weltz.
Roz Brody, Mike Holmes, Jan King and William Shaw again made helpful comments on the manuscript. Special thanks to Roz for accompanying me on research trips to Norwich when I was not in the best of health.
I am very grateful to friends in Norwich – Colin Howey, Leo R. Jary, Adrian and Anne Hoare and Dr Matt Woodcock, for illuminating discussions on 1549. Thanks to Dr Clive Wilkins-Jones for advice on sources. Colin Howey and the Norwich Stonemasons’ Guild Master, Stephen Critchley, discussed the medieval Guild, which they have revived and which goes deservedly from strength to strength – thanks, too, for making me an apprentice!
I’m also grateful to those who showed me around sites that feature in the book: Adrian and Anne Hoare showed me round Wymondham. Will Stewart, Warden of Mousehold Heath, showed me the surviving section of the Heath. The Kett’s Heights Society is doing wonderful work in restoring the Heights, where a part-wall of St Michael’s Chapel survives. Nick Williams took me round the Guildhall, and Rod Spokes showed me the surviving city walls. Paul Dixon took me round the Maid’s Head, and Cathy Terry discussed textiles with me at the magnificent Strangers’ Hall.
Many thanks once again to Graham Brown of Fullerton’s for his help, including photocopying and enlarging pieces of sixteenth-century Norwich maps.
HISTORICAL ESSAY
REIMAGINING KETT’S REBELLION
INTRODUCTION
In April 1548, the year before Kett’s Rebellion, an orphaned minor gentlewoman of around fourteen, Agnes Randolf, was riding over Mousehold Heath with her married older sister and a young servant. They were accosted by John Atkinson, servant to Sir Richard Southwell, one of the most prominent gentlemen in Norfolk, and a companion. Atkinson attempted to abduct Agnes and when she tried to escape tied her on to his companion’s horse, saying, ‘Sit, whore, sit.’ She was taken to Sir Richard Southwell’s house and, later that week, forced to go through a marriage ceremony with Atkinson. Then he took her to London.1
Agnes’s brother-in-law, Thomas Hunne, seems to have been a man of remarkable determination. He went to London and himself presented a supplication to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of England during the minority of Edward VI, as the Protector entered the council chamber at Westminster. Such direct access to the ruler would have been inconceivable under Edward’s father Henry VIII, but it was part of Somerset’s style to show himself accessible to those seeking justice. Two days later Southwell was examined before the Council, and Atkinson committed to prison.
Then problems began. Hunne made suit to the Council for Agnes to be restored to him, but was told by William Cecil, Somerset’s senior secretary, that he should obtain legal counsel. No fewer than seventeen East Anglian lawyers, however, refused to represent him until Cecil ordered one to do so. Such, apparently, was the fear that Southwell inspired. Cecil tried to persuade Agnes to let the marriage stand but, as determined as her brother-in-law, she refused. Cecil then said she must return the wedding ring, which she immediately did.
Although under suspicion of abducting a minor, Atkinson was released. For the next four years, however, he tried to force Agnes’s return through the courts, on the grounds that they had been lawfully married – even after Agnes had, later, married someone else. Norfolk gentlemen could be extraordinarily obsessive.
This story features three people who appear in Tombland – Southwell, Atkinson and Cecil. It demonstrates the power wielded, in Norfolk and London, by Southwell, the brutality of which he and his entourage were capable (he had been found guilty of murdering another gentleman during a quarrel in London in the 1520s, but obtained a pardon from Henry VIII), and both Protector Somerset’s accessibility and its limits. Were it not for the great courage of Agnes and her family, the marriage would have stood. It is worth noting that Agnes’s family had gentleman status; their clothes, bearing and accents would have aided their way into the Protector’s court. One wonders how a peasant family might have fared.
It is however the ‘non-gentle’ classes who feature most prominently in Tombland, those who made the huge peasant uprisings that swept England in 1549. Roughly south of a line between the Severn and the Wash, though there were also risings north of there, common people set up camps outside towns and sent petitions to the Protector. It was the largest popular uprising between the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt and the Civil Wars a century later. There were substantial pitched battles between rebels and government forces in the West Country, Oxfordshire and Norfolk. The Venetian ambassador estimated that 11,000 died in the rebellions; as a proportion of the population, today’s equivalent is almost 150,000.2 If anything this is probably an underestimate, since casualties among government forces were played down.
Yet most popular histories of Tudor England say little about the rebellions. There are several reasons: their unusual structure – forming ‘camps’ instead of marching as a single force on London; the misconception among historians, until fairly recently, that the only serious revolts were in the West Country, where they were concerned mainly with religious changes, and in Norfolk where they focused on social issues. However recent studies by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Andy Wood, Ethan Shagan and most esp
ecially Amanda Jones have shown the number and the connectedness of the risings across southern England.
Perhaps also, in these days of the ‘royalization’ of popular Tudor history (I do not exempt myself from guilt here) – focusing on the larger-than-life personalities of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I – a rebellion that took place during the short reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI, is less likely to gain attention. But the rebellions of 1549 caught my imagination a long time ago, as a colossal event that has been much underplayed.
In Tombland, as with all my novels, I have tried to base myself firmly on the source material, although that is scattered, fragmentary and sometimes unreliable. For example, we have no idea what Robert Kett or anyone else on the rebel side actually looked like. When it comes to Robert Kett’s great camp on Mousehold Heath, I have had to imagine what daily life could have been like there, day by day; this has thrown up some interesting, if speculative, ideas.
THE BACKGROUND: CLASS AND STATUS
To understand what happened in 1549 we must first look at the social structure. The essential division was between the ‘gentleman’ classes, who did not need to work with their hands to live – perhaps some 2,000 people – and the rest, who did. True, the gentleman classes were divided into a ‘society of orders’ with social divisions between gentlemen, knights and the various levels of aristocracy rigidly enforced by the ‘sumptuary laws’ defining what different social ranks could wear.1 It is also true that gentleman status was not just about wealth, but also rules of gentlemanly behaviour – in the words of Thomas Elyot, a gentleman would have ‘more sufferance, more affability, and mildness, than . . . a person rural or of a very base lineage’.2 That, at least, was the theory.
According to contemporary belief this division was ordained by God. A 1547 homily stated, ‘Almighty God hath created and appointed all things . . . in a most perfect order . . . Some are in high degree, some in low; some kings and princes, some inferiors and subjects . . . masters and servants . . . rich and poor.’3
Comparison was often made between social ranks and the human body, with the king as the head, the gentle classes as the arms and hands, and the poor as the feet.4 Sir Thomas Smith spoke of four sorts of people – gentlemen, citizens or burgesses of cities, yeomen, and artificers or labourers. Only the first two could hold office, although yeomen (the more prosperous small farmers) could hold power in their own villages and towns and so ‘must be exempted out of the rascality of the popular’. He admitted however that in villages members of the ‘proletarij’ were commonly made churchwardens and constables, though this was new.5
Economic changes were also taking place. The enclosure of arable land for profit, especially for running sheep for their wool, had been going on since the fifteenth century, bringing a new rural ‘gentry’ class into existence, and in the mid-sixteenth century there was a new, assertive gentry capitalism, not least in Norfolk.6 Enclosure took place at different times in different parts of the country, and indeed the enclosure of common land by landowners would still be a political issue in the eighteenth century. In the reign of Henry VIII, however, the sale of former monastic land by the Crown meant that a whole new land market sprang up.
Marx saw capitalism emerging from transformations in both landownership and the relations of production between around 1450 and 1600. The earlier liberation of serfs from bondage, he argued, resulted in a class of small peasant proprietors who, particularly in the sixteenth century, were then expropriated by capitalistic landowners. Subsequent research confirms there is a good deal in this, though Marx pretty much ignored the development of the smaller landowning class, the yeomen.7 As Jane Whittle has observed, ‘we are left with a lengthy period of time which is neither fully capitalist nor feudal’.8 In the sixteenth century even serfdom – the tying of the bondman to his lord’s land – was not quite extinct in some parts, including Norfolk.9
Thomas Smith’s ‘labourers’ were never, however, completely powerless. In 1525, when Henry VIII imposed massive new taxation, opposition in East Anglia compelled him to withdraw it.10 This, however, was a rare success and, like the 1536 Northern uprising, involved the commons and elite classes operating together on issues affecting both – though in 1536 involvement of the gentleman classes was sometimes reluctant.11 The forces of the State, however, were able to overcome all large-scale peasant rebellions, like the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt and Cade’s Rebellion of 1450.
While, as some historians stress,12 common people had wills of their own and would take whatever advantage they could of changing circumstances, what they could not do, by virtue of their lowly status, was demand a share in the government of the realm. This fact was at the heart of the tragedy of 1549.
THE RULE OF PROTECTOR SOMERSET: INFLATION AND WAR, RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL REFORM
When Henry VIII died in 1547, his will provided for a Council of sixteen, with alternates (including Sir Richard Southwell) provided in case a member died or left, to rule England until Edward VI, then nine, reached eighteen. Edward was not, as popular culture has often portrayed him, ‘sickly’. He was fit and highly intelligent. There was every reason to believe he would grow to manhood.
Within a matter of weeks the Council had devolved power upon the Duke of Somerset, eldest brother of Edward’s mother Jane Seymour, who became Protector. Substantial bribes were involved.1
There are two views of Somerset. One is that he was ‘the Good Duke’, concerned for the welfare of the poor, who abolished the draconian treason legislation of Henry VIII and led the country, for a time at least, into ‘milder climes’. The second, to which I subscribe, is that Somerset was obsessed with the war he instigated against Scotland, despite its military failure and disastrous economic effects. All other issues were secondary. Meanwhile the ‘milder climes’ soon turned into a new religious authoritarianism, radical Protestantism.2 As a man, Somerset was widely viewed as proud, tactless and obstinate.3 His incompetence speaks of a man promoted beyond his abilities; his performance in dealing with the 1549 rebellions was remarkably inept. Though he often acted like an autocrat, in the end Somerset’s position depended on the Council’s consent, something he realized too late.
Henry VIII had left England in a mess. Since the break with Rome in 1532–3, his religious policy had oscillated between semi-Protestantism and a conservative ‘Catholicism without the Pope’, leaving an atmosphere of religious division and uncertainty. His wars with France and Scotland had been costly failures; he made a peace with France in 1546, which included France’s Scottish ally, though details remained to be negotiated with Scotland.4 But in 1547 Somerset launched a full-scale war against Scotland. This in turn affected relations with France, making Henry’s peace a short one.
THE GREAT INFLATION
Henry’s wars had been enormously costly. The state coffers were emptied, heavy taxation levied, and much former monastic land sold. To obtain gold and silver, the silver coinage especially was debased, adulterated with copper. In domestic as well as foreign markets, sellers became reluctant to accept these coins at full value. The result was high inflation, previously unknown in England.1 In 1549 prices were over fifty per cent higher than in 1540, and in that crucial year spiked by eleven per cent.2 The poor were worst affected, as wages, limited by statute and local custom, did not rise. The earnings of a semi-skilled workman remained steady at around fourpence a day, a sum whose purchasing power fell by a third in less than a decade, causing drastic impoverishment.3 Financially, the last thing England needed after Henry died was another large-scale war.
There were two contemporary explanations for the inflation. One, which was wrong, concentrated on agrarian factors – high rents, marketing problems and enclosure – the replacement of food-producing agriculture by sheep farming. The agrarian situation indeed caused major social problems and huge injustice, but the second explanation, that inflation stemmed mainly from the debasement of the coinage, caused in turn by war, was the right one. Somerset, however, determined on his Scott
ish war, was naturally predisposed to the ‘agrarian’ explanation.4
THE SCOTTISH WAR
Why was Somerset so fixated on Scotland? In 1547 it was no threat to England. However, Henry VIII had wanted to marry Edward VI to his fellow child-monarch Mary, Queen of Scots, thus ending for good the ‘Auld Alliance’. Somerset, though, intended fully to unite the two countries. Protestantism was growing in Scotland, and Somerset believed many Scots would support his invasion. He also believed, wrongly, that he had the military key to conquering Scotland – the building of a series of forts in the lowlands on the new Italian model, which would act as local bases for attack and also attract Protestant Scots.
In September 1547 Somerset met initial success at the Battle of Pinkie, defeating a massive Scottish army.1 However, the number of sympathetic Scots proved to be small, and his fortresses fell one by one to the Scottish Governor, Arran. In 1548 Mary, Queen of Scots was shipped to France, which was already providing aid to the Scots, killing the marriage plan stone dead. By early 1549 the remaining English garrisons, with up to 17,000 men, were under siege, underpaid and ravaged by plague. Conditions in Scotland were so bad that foreign mercenaries refused to serve there.2
The Scottish war was a contributory cause of the 1549 rebellions, not only because it made inflation worse but, I suggest, also because of the importance of angry deserters from the English army in helping instigate rebellion. Desertion rates in Tudor armies were about fifteen to twenty per cent and, given the conditions and lack of pay in Scotland, the figure for that war may be higher.3 Interestingly, the contemporary soldier Elis Gryffydd noted during the 1544 French campaign that it tended to be prosperous yeomen who urged poorer soldiers to desert.4
Despite the complete failure of his war, Somerset planned yet another campaign for 1549. This, however, was overtaken by the rebellions.5