The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys

by Derek Wilson

  For days the government was at sixes and sevens. Forces were mustered to be sent north then ordered to stay where they were to defend the capital. Henry announced that he would march at the head of his army to face the rebels, then thought better of it and despatched the Duke of Suffolk to Lincolnshire and the Duke of Norfolk to Yorkshire. Ordnance was taken from the Tower to the rallying point of the royal forces at Ampthill but when fresh intelligence reported that the rebel host was on the road south it was trundled off to Windsor where the king had resolved to establish his headquarters.

  John Dudley was at the centre of all this frenzied activity. As Master of the Tower Armoury he was kept very busy supervizing the supply of weapons and equipment. Then, on 9 October, he was ordered to muster two hundred men in Sussex and join Norfolk’s army. His contingent was one of the largest contributions to Howard’s force of about 8,000 men which made its way up the Great North Road. Meanwhile, Richmond, York, Pontefract and the surrounding areas were in rebel hands, recruiting bands were active throughout remoter regions and the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Robert Aske, was variously reported to have between 20,000 and 40,000 armed men at his back.

  Somewhere ahead of the Duke of Norfolk lay a fanatical horde which far outnumbered his own. Behind him was a king who expected him to crush that horde and who sent repeated messages to that effect. Moreover, Henry, as the duke was well aware, did not fully trust him. Howard’s conservative sympathies were well known and, in order to ensure that he did not make common cause with the rebels, Henry had ordered him to leave his two sons behind. The word ‘hostages’ was not used but Norfolk knew that that was what they were. He was not being overly dramatic when he wrote to commend his family to royal care in the event of his failure to return. John Dudley must have shared his commander’s anxiety. His life was increasingly at risk with every northward mile of the royal troops’ advance. Even if he survived the fighting there might be question marks over his future. He was known to be an ally of Cromwell and committed to his programme of religious and social reform. If the minister fell and was replaced by advisers who had the support of a large traditionalist constituency he might, at best, be allowed to retire to his estates and, at worst, lose his head.

  It was Dudley’s popularity with Cromwell and the king that kept him out of harm’s way. Norfolk had to keep his master fully informed and that meant explaining why he had decided to disobey his instructions to go for all-out military victory. As he sat up late at nights composing draft after discarded draft of his reports he needed messengers who would be well received at court and who would be able to handle cross-examination by the king and the Lord Privy Seal. Thus Dudley became one of the principal intermediaries between a woefully unhappy general and an anxious, impatient monarch. Norfolk grovelled. He would, he insisted, ‘rather be torn in a million pieces than show one point of cowardice or untruth to your majesty’.4 And when he offered a truce to the enemy and promised that the government would consider their grievances (which was all that, given the circumstances, he could do), he dragged up every excuse he could think of to explain his decision:

  . . . it was not the fear of the enemy [that] hath caused us to [negotiate], but three other sore points. Foul weather and no housing for horse nor man, at the most not for the third part of the army, and no wood to make fires withall, hunger both for men and horses of such sort that of truth I think never English man saw the like. Pestilence in the town marvellous fervent . . .5

  Doubtless the general was in some difficulty. Aske’s army, encamped at Doncaster, was much better organized and they had commandeered most of the available victuals and fodder. Norfolk’s rapidly assembled force lacked an adequate commissariat. But it was the military situation which really tied his hands. He was obliged to forsake any thoughts of honour and to make all manner of promises in order to persuade the enemy to disperse. These lessons were not lost on John Dudley when he led the king’s men against the next major rebellion thirteen years later.

  Norfolk’s trickery worked. The leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace abandoned their position of advantage and sent their followers home. Within weeks many of them were hanging from gibbets and church towers throughout the north. The Duke of Norfolk revenged himself enthusiastically for his humiliation and wrote his loyalty to the king in the blood of peasants. But Dudley had no part in the final sanguinary scenes of the failed rising. In January 1537 he was appointed one of the vice-admirals of the coast and went to sea immediately with a small squadron of ships. Naval command was thought to require no maritime expertise. Warfare at sea was traditionally only an extension of warfare on land; ships were floating platforms for conveying troops to where they were needed or for grappling enemy vessels whose crews could then be engaged in hand-to-hand fighting. Slowly, this situation was changing: the fighting ship was coming into its own as artillery experts and marine architects experimented with ways of increasing the firepower of naval cannon and providing vessels with the necessary stability to keep up a sustained bombardment. Europe’s rulers were vigorously competing with each other to construct bigger and better ships and no one was more enthusiastic than Henry VIII. It was an enthusiasm Dudley came to share. Perhaps he volunteered for naval command in order to stay in the king’s good books and to avoid touring the northern counties as an agent of royal vengeance. Whatever his motives, the sea definitely got into his blood.

  Dudley’s commission was to patrol the eastern end of the Channel and keep it safe for English and other merchant vessels. The country was not at war but piracy was ever present. The king’s captains and sailors had every incentive to hunt down marine raiders because every legitimate capture meant prize money. After several months, during which his commission had been extended to cover the whole of the Channel, Dudley was frustrated at not having apprehended a single marauder. The situation was redeemed, however, on 22 August 1537 when he brought four Breton pirate ships to action in Mount’s Bay and, after five hours’ fighting, took two of them prisoner. Unfortunately, his triumph came to naught thanks to the interference of politicians. Following a protest by the French ambassador, who insisted that the impounded vessels were legitimate traders, they were released. Weeks later the captains of these ‘merchantmen’ were up to their old tricks and waylaid an English trading vessel out of Calais.

  By this time the Seymour clan were cock-a-hoop. The long-awaited outcome of Queen Jane’s first pregnancy was a boy, born at Hampton Court on 12 October. Henry was delirious with joy and relief. This was the vindication of all that he had done over the past decade. God had rewarded him for his patient suffering. The dynasty was secure. Everyone currently in favour shared in the rejoicing and the outpouring of royal bounty that accompanied it. John Dudley was among the courtiers, diplomats and church dignitaries who crowded into the chapel for Prince Edward’s christening three days later. The good news from England had political significance internationally and messengers were rapidly despatched to courts throughout Europe, among them Dudley.

  He was sent to the imperial court with letters for the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and had been selected for the mission because Cromwell trusted him and because he was an old friend and privy chamber colleague of the ambassador. Wyatt’s career had closely mirrored Dudley’s and though the courtier–poet had almost been ensnared in the plot against Anne Boleyn, the king’s friendship had saved him and later exalted him to one of the top diplomatic jobs. There were important and delicate matters on which the minister needed well-informed, confidential information. The international situation was, once again, finely balanced and he wanted a shrewd, intelligent assessment of the attitudes of the principal players. John Dudley was, therefore, more than a mere messenger. He found the peripatetic imperial court at Barbastro, in the Pyrenean foothills half way between the Biscayan port of San Sebastian and Barcelona on the Mediterranean.

  What the Lord Privy Seal required of Wyatt was nothing less than that he would make diligent enquiries, ‘in such discreet and
temperate sort, as at the return of . . . Mr Dudley, your good friend, his highness may perceive that thing which his grace desireth to know, that is the Emperor’s good inclination towards his majesty or the contrary, if it shall otherwise appear unto you.’6 Dudley had brought back an offer from the emperor to mediate between Henry and the pope. However, reports from elsewhere suggested that Charles was guilty of ‘fraud and deceit’.7

  For the next couple of years John Dudley absented himself from court and capital for long periods of time and devoted his energies to consolidating his territorial empire. There may have been an element of pique in this. He had entertained hope of being advanced to a senior post in the royal household but nothing had come of this and he had watched while the likes of the Seymours passed him by in the race for wealth and rank. But he also had a genuine desire to rebuild his family’s prestige in the Midland counties and the Welsh border lands. At the same time the dangerous rivalries of the court were making life at the centre increasingly perilous.

  Sir John associated himself more and more with the social and political life of the Midlands and believed he could serve the Crown effectively on the border, certainly more effectively than his own relatives had in the past. In July 1539 he sent a poacher in chains up to London to be examined by the Council, explaining that the leniency he had displayed up to that point had not effected any change of behaviour by the offender and his kin. ‘When let off,’ he pointed out to Cromwell, ‘these men get worse and worse, as they did in the old Lord Dudley’s days.’8

  Lawlessness in the principality and the adjacent shires was a constant irritant and establishing effective royal power there was one of Cromwell’s major concerns, as Dudley knew. The Lord Privy Seal had given the old Council in the Marches of Wales sharper teeth and, in 1534, appointed Rowland Lee, Bishop of Coventry as its president. The bishop was at odds with many of the nobles and gentlemen who held sway in the area and resented being under the thumb of an ecclesiastic who was determined that his own authority should be totally superior to and independent of the common law courts. Cromwell received a string of complaints from Lee and his opponents and there were definitely rumours in 1538–9 that Lee had fallen from favour and was about to be replaced.

  In the summer of 1539 Sir John asked for Lee’s job. Being President of the Council of the Marches would give him enormous power and prestige and he probably felt that, as an established leader of border society, he had a better chance of being accepted by his peers than had the abrasive bishop. He wrote to Cromwell, ‘I have spent a great deal of my life and my youth in the court about my master [continuing that he was] now drawing homewards where I trust to make an end of my life in God’s service.’9 Strange words for a man of thirty-five! Whatever Cromwell thought of the letter, he did not agree to replace Lee with Dudley.

  From this point we can observe competing, almost schizophrenic, aspects of Dudley’s character. Alongside the old self-confidence and drive there appears a diffidence, a desire to distance himself from the pressures of court politics. He still lost no opportunity to add to his territorial empire. For example, in March 1540, two guests, Andrew Flammock and his son, arrived at Dudley Castle and, within days, showed signs of plague. Sir John reported this to Cromwell, lamenting that the king was on the point of losing a staunch servant but, at the same time, suing for ‘the office at Kenilworth’ that Flammock held. Yet he refused to make a great show of his own importance. Thus, for instance, he kept no impressive establishment in Westminster or London.

  Dudley’s letter to Cromwell reads like the world-weary plaint of a man who is disillusioned with the court and the constant struggle for worldly wealth and success. He writes about devoting the rest of his life to God. It has been customary to regard him, and other leaders of the reforming party, as opportunists, men who climbed on the religious bandwagon as soon as they saw that it was gathering momentum. This is to underestimate the impact of the fervour that was gripping large numbers of people in the 1530s. At the end of his life Dudley dated his conversion to the evangelical faith to around 1536–7 and he was far from being alone in being won over to evangelical religion at that time. The intoxicating new ideas were being taken up at all levels of society and church authorities were no longer able to dismiss heresy as the errors of simple-minded peasants and semi-literate tradesmen. ‘What made the Reformation successful was not the support (if any) it received from deviants and the marginalised, but the support it received from the established elites in Church and state.’10 The educated and the powerful were being targeted by preachers and pamphleteers. Their campaign was, in part, political. Cromwell and his agents and protégés were engaged in an ideological struggle against Rome which both transcended national boundaries and aimed to influence national policies. But the outer cladding of bellicose realpolitik would not have survived and in several countries prevailed without a solid framework of personal devotion and conviction theology. The fundamental ingredient of Lutheranism and the other evangelical strains which diverged from it was salvation for the individual sinner by faith alone. The sacrifice of Christ called forth from men and women, not observance of ecclesiastical rites, but metanoia, a turning from the world, the flesh and the devil and a reliance on nothing but the mercy and love of God.

  It was impossible for John Dudley, as he went about his daily life in the court and the capital, to avoid exposure to zealous exponents of evangelical religion. For one thing, Cromwell was energetically patronizing preachers, pamphleteers and others whose talents could be useful to him. John Dudley was no scholar and he was certainly not the stuff of which religious martyrs are made. No extant document contains a summary of his fundamental beliefs, but he aligned himself with the new movement in English Christianity and during his years in power promoted it vigorously. For those, like him, at the centre of national life it was impossible to avoid the ideological battle that was raging throughout the middle decades. When rival preachers were vilifying each other from their pulpits; when ‘papists’ were being hanged, drawn and quartered for treason and ‘sacramentaries’ burned for heresy; when Protestant zealots were smashing statues and Catholic zealots ransacking people’s homes in search of banned books; when the king’s pendulum conscience swung between new revelations and old orthodoxies; when, for the first time, the framing of foreign policy had to take into account the confessional allegiance of European rulers; when the biggest land speculation in English history was in full swing, in short, when men had to face the devastating fracture of western Christendom, taking sides became inevitable.

  The new spirituality was in fashion at court. Several of John’s colleagues were devotees who eagerly listened to Latimer and other avant-garde preachers, acquired pocket New Testaments and suspect books, and attended secret meetings in London back rooms. The king’s brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, was an evangelical. So were his physicians, Doctors Butts and Huick. So were members of the Council and the privy chamber staff, Ralph Sadler, George Blagge, Philip Hoby, Anthony Denny and others. Younger courtiers climbed on the bandwagon because the religious novelties were new, exciting, dangerous and challenged old-fashioned assumptions but there were many others who were genuine converts with convictions that ran deep. All of them had to be circumspect about the public expression they gave to private faith. If pressed most of them would probably have given the answer that Thomas Cromwell gave to those who sought to probe his doctrinal allegiance. An envoy from one of the German princes reported that the minister inclined to Lutheranism but that, ‘as the world stood, [he] would believe even as his master the King believed.’11 It was the only safe answer that could be given by men who were close to the quicksilver Henry and well aware of the eager ears around the court waiting to detect any unguarded word. First and foremost in their thinking had to be their allegiance to the king.

  This was no problem for John Dudley. His father and his guardian had schooled him in unswerving loyalty to the Tudors. What the Reformation did was provide a luxuriant theological appar
el in which to dress up what had hitherto been an emotional rather than a closely reasoned commitment.

  . . . the office, authority and power given of God unto kings is in earth above all powers; let them call themselves popes, cardinals or whatsoever they will. The word of God declareth them (yea and commandeth them under pain of damnation) to be obedient unto the temporal sword, as in the Old Testament all the prophets, priests and Levites were.

  So Miles Coverdale pronounced, in the preface to his Bible. William Tyndale, in The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) had stated – or overstated – the case for royal authority: ‘The king is in this world, without law and may at his lust do right or wrong and shall give accounts but to God only.’12 Monstrous though such a justification of tyranny may seem to us, it had a distinct appeal to those whose fathers and grandfathers could tell them tales of fifteenth-century anarchy and to those patriots who supported England’s casting off of the papal yoke. For John Dudley the arguments for unlimited royal power based on biblical exposition chimed perfectly with his own deepest feelings.

  The raging politico-religious debate touched another spot deep in John’s psyche, his admiration, bordering on veneration, for the intelligentsia. Walter Haddon, one of England’s leading classicists, writing in later years to Robert Dudley, observed, ‘your father, although he acknowledged himself uneducated, was yet most devoted to learning.’13 Jane Guildford, his wife, though not a bluestocking, was one of a growing band of Renaissance ladies who benefited from the enlightened ideas of contemporary educational reformers. The Dudleys paid close attention to the schooling of their own children. At least one, John, the scholar of the family, was attached to Prince Edward’s household and benefited from the instruction of Richard Cox, Anthony Cooke, John Cheke and Roger Ascham, top-drawer academics and formidable members of the New Learning brotherhood. As for Sir John, he enjoyed the company of thinking men, often corresponded with Cranmer, Cheke and Sir Thomas Wyatt and patronized promising authors. He was particularly interested in the developing sciences of mathematics, cosmography and astronomy. It is far from fanciful to imagine this intelligent man of mature years deciding that he wanted to escape the atmosphere of religious controversy and live quietly in the country, devoting himself to ‘God’s service’. There was much of the introvert in John Dudley. He was given to self-examination. But this could also metamorphose into self-dramatization and he frequently wore his heart on his sleeve.