A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  The general public were required to help in catching fugitives from justice; whenever the JPs proclaimed the hue and cry, every inhabitant in the parish was expected to turn out to find the criminal. If a felony was committed in any parish and the perpetrator was not found, all the householders in the parish were liable to a fine. This was a great hardship to the people of Burnham in Berkshire, for the roads from London to Henley-on-Thames and from London to Reading ran for three miles through the parish, and through the woodland that was called ‘The Thicket’. Thieves often hid in the Thicket and attacked and robbed the travellers as they passed along these two busy highways; but how could the poor husbandmen of the villages and hamlets in Burnham, who were working in the fields, prevent these robberies? Especially as the travellers who were robbed did not usually report the thefts until they reached the town of Maidenhead, and the authorities at Maidenhead often forgot to pass on the information to the bailiffs and constables of Burnham. After the inhabitants of Burnham had had to pay fines for not catching the thieves, amounting to £255 in the course of a single year, a statute of 1597 relieved them from their liability to pay the fine if the theft had not been immediately reported to them. Parliament also modified the rigour of the law for all parishes in England by enacting in 1585 that if several criminals were involved in a crime, the parish where it was committed could avoid being fined even if only one of the criminals was arrested.

  From time to time, the government adopted another method of inducing large numbers of the population to participate in upholding the law. When Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1534 which obliged everyone, when asked, to take an oath that he believed that the children of the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn would be the lawful heirs to the throne. Anyone who refused to take the oath when required to do so could be sentenced to imprisonment for life. The oath was put to everyone in authority; the Privy Councillors, after taking the oath themselves, administered it to the sheriffs; the sheriffs administered it to the JPs; and the JPs to the masters of households in their district, who were supposed to administer it to all their family and servants who were over fourteen years of age. There are no surviving records of exactly how many people took the oath, but we know that it was administered to 7,342 people in the first three months alone, and a substantial proportion of the population must have taken it.

  Next year, another Act required everyone, if asked, to swear an oath that he believed that the King was Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England; and as another Act made it high treason to deny the King’s right to any of his titles, anyone who refused to take the oath could be executed as a traitor. The Oath of Supremacy was not administered to the general public, but only to holders of offices. A handful of people, like Fisher, More and the Carthusian monks, refused to take the oath, and were executed as traitors; but nearly everyone to whom it was administered agreed to take it.

  In Elizabeth I’s reign, everyone in a position of authority was required to take a new Oath of Supremacy, by which he swore that he believed the Queen to be the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. No one could hold any official position, or any ecclesiastical benefice, sit in Parliament, or practise as a lawyer, unless he was prepared to take the oath; and a refusal to swear, when asked to do so, was punishable by death as high treason for the second offence. This practice of making the people swear an oath was an effective way of enforcing compliance with government policy, because the people were taught, and believed, that a man committed a mortal sin and endangered his soul if he swore a false oath, although the Pope was prepared to grant a dispensation allowing people to swear a false oath which they were forced to take under duress, if, before they took it, they made a secret protestation that they did not intend to be bound by the oath that they were about to take.

  Despite the lack of an effective system of law enforcement, the law-abiding majority of the English people ensured that order was maintained in general in nearly all the shires in the realm. At the beginning of the Tudor Age, there were two exceptions: in Wales and parts of Northumberland, the government was unable to enforce its authority. The Council of the Marches of Wales, which sat at Ludlow under the presidency of the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, was quite unsuccessful in suppressing crime in Wales; but the situation was largely remedied by the legislation of 1536. Wales was divided into counties on the English model which continued in existence until 1974, and a number of Welsh gentlemen were persuaded to act as local JPs, although the new laws abolished the Welsh law of inheritance and banned the use of the Welsh language in the law courts and on all official occasions. Measures were also taken to control the river traffic across the Severn in order to stop criminals from escaping into Wales and Welshmen from crossing into England to commit crimes in Gloucestershire and Somerset. By an Act of 1535 any ferryman at the passages of Aust, Framilode, Purton, Arlingham, Newnham or Portishead or at any other ferry across the Severn between England and South Wales, was prohibited from carrying any person, cattle or goods in his ferry at night, between the hours of sunset and sunrise; and he was not to carry any traveller at any time unless he knew who he was, and was able to tell the authorities his name and address if he were asked to do so.

  The situation was not so easily remedied in Northumberland as in Wales. Along the northern and southern banks of the Tyne there was complete lawlessness, for Tynedale and Redesdale were what would today be called ‘no-go areas’. The family loyalties and feuds made it impossible to find local gentlemen who were prepared to act as JPs and administer the local government, as in the other counties of England; and although the English and Scottish robbers on both sides of the Border often raided and fought each other, they were also usually prepared to shelter the robbers of the other nation who escaped across the frontier whenever the English or Scottish authorities took action against them. The Lord Warden of the Eastern Marches at Berwick periodically sent men-at-arms into Tynedale and Redesdale to arrest notorious outlaws, and occasionally succeeded in catching them. But it was only once or twice in a decade that a leading criminal from these districts was brought to Newcastle, put on trial, and hanged.

  Henry VII tried to remedy the situation by an Act of Parliament of 1495. The Act stated that the murders and felonies committed by the criminals in North and South Tynedale, and their collaboration with the Scots, were endangering the safety of the King’s subjects in Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Hexhamshire, the bishopric of Durham, and parts of Yorkshire. It enacted that any landowner who let his land to a new tenant was to find two other landowners who owned land worth £20 a year, who would stand surety for the good behaviour of the new tenant; if the land was let without these sureties, the landlord was to be fined forty shillings per acre and the tenant was to be imprisoned for a month. But this Act proved quite ineffective, and lawlessness in Tynedale and Redesdale was worse in the sixteenth century than at any other time before or since.

  The government of Elizabeth I made another attempt to deal with the lawlessness in Tynedale and Redesdale in an ‘Act for the more peaceable government of the parts of Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland and Durham’ in 1601, because many of the inhabitants of these counties had been kidnapped, sometimes from their homes and sometimes when they were travelling on the highway, and held as prisoners until a ransom had been paid for their release; and there were also many cases in which inhabitants of the Border region, ‘being men of name’, threatened to burn villages, houses, barns or corn unless they were paid money ‘commonly there called by the name of blackmail’. Yet these criminals ‘ordinarily resort and come to markets, fairs and other public assemblies and meetings and do there converse, traffic and trade with other Her Majesty’s subjects’. So the statute enacted that these offences should be felonies punishable by death. Whenever one of these crimes was committed in these counties, the names of the criminals who had perpetrated them were to be proclaimed and read out once every six weeks in
Carlisle, Penrith and Cockermouth in Cumberland, in Appleby and Kendal in Westmorland, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the county of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in Morpeth, Alnwick and Hexham in Northumberland, in the city of Durham, in Darlington, Bishop Auckland and Barnard Castle in the bishopric of Durham, and in the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. They were also to be proclaimed at every fair held in any of these places. Anyone who should ‘relieve, entertain or confer’ with a proclaimed outlaw, or who did not ‘do his best endeavour to take and arrest’ him, was to be imprisoned for six months, and not released until he had found two sureties who were prepared to be responsible for his good behaviour for a year.

  But all the efforts of Wolsey, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I and her ministers to enforce the royal authority were unsuccessful. Tynedale and Redesdale remained lawless throughout the Tudor Age until the union of the crowns of England and Scotland under a Stuart King made it possible at last for the royal authority to be enforced on both sides of the Border.

  Although the rest of England was normally law-abiding, there were occasionally serious riots, like the attack on aliens in London during the ‘Evil May Day’ riots in 1517; and there were eight rebellions against the government during the Tudor Age. In 1497, at the time when Perkin Warbeck was periodically landing somewhere in England and trying unsuccessfully to persuade the people to rise in his support, the Cornishmen revolted against the taxes which Henry VII had imposed on them, and marched on London. They got as far as Blackheath before they were defeated and dispersed. Henry contented himself with executing three of the ringleaders, and did not punish the others.

  In October 1536, a revolt broke out in Lincolnshire against the dissolution of the monasteries and against the lower-class politicians – the ‘villein blood’ – in the Privy Council, especially Thomas Cromwell, and the ‘heretic bishops’. It had petered out within a few days, but not before it had spread to Yorkshire, where there was a far more serious insurrection under the leadership of the noblemen and gentlemen of the county. By the end of November, 40,000 rebels, armed with pikes, were at Doncaster, ready to cross the Trent and march south. Henry VIII’s general, the Duke of Norfolk, had only 7,000 troops with which to oppose them; and the dry autumn had caused the water level in the Trent to fall so low that it would soon be possible to ford the river at many places. So Norfolk persuaded Henry VIII to grant nearly all the rebels’ demands and to pardon them for having taken part in the rebellion.

  Henry most graciously received the rebel leaders at Greenwich, and their followers dispersed and went home; but two months later, a very minor revolt broke out in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Henry used this as an excuse to arrest and execute nearly all the leaders of the earlier revolt and to hang some four hundred of their followers, not for their participation in the first rebellion, for which they had been pardoned, but on trumped-up charges of having taken part in the second abortive rising. Three of them were executed as traitors because they had called on the people to stay quietly in their houses and not help the rebels; for it was argued that this was treasonable, as they should have told them to leave their houses and help suppress the rebellion.

  In the reign of Edward VI, two formidable revolts broke out almost simultaneously in the summer of 1549; and at the same time there were riots against enclosures of land in several counties in south-east England. The people of Devon and Cornwall were rebelling against the recent introduction of the Protestant Book of Common Prayer, and demanded the restoration of the old Catholic Mass and the burning of heretics. The people of Norfolk, most of whom were Protestants, demanded an end to enclosures of common land.

  The rebels in the West murdered one prominent local Protestant, and several Protestant supporters fled from the district. One of these was a Protestant seaman, Edmund Drake, who later became a clergyman; he fled from Tavistock to Kent with his family, including his infant son, Francis Drake. Francis spent his adolescence learning seamanship on the Medway, and imbibing the Protestantism of his neighbours in Kent.

  The government expected the Western rebels to march on London, and took the precaution of destroying the bridge at Staines to prevent them from crossing the Thames and reaching the northern bank; but the army that Somerset sent against them, under Lord Russell and Sir William Herbert, defeated the rebels at Clyst St Mary before they had left Devonshire. The government sent Sir Anthony Kingston and other officers to try the rebels by courts martial, and many were executed, including the Mayor of Bodmin. When Kingston arrived at Bodmin, the Mayor invited him to dinner. Kingston accepted the invitation, but told the Mayor to erect a scaffold in the courtyard of his house, as it would be necessary to hang some rebels. After dinner, the Mayor told Kingston that the scaffold had been erected. Kingston then ordered the Mayor to go up on to the scaffold, as it was he who was to be hanged on it.

  The Protestants were convinced that the rebellion in the West had been instigated by a handful of Papist priests, particularly by the vicar of Poundstock, near Bude, in Cornwall.

  The vicar of Poundstock, with his congregation,

  Commanded them to stick to their idolatry.

  They made much provision and great preparation,

  Yet God hath given our King the victory.

  They did rob and spoil all the King’s friends;

  They called them heretics with spite and disdain;

  They roffled a space like tyrants and fiends;

  They put some in prison and some to great pain;

  As was William Hilling, that martyr truly,

  Which they killed at Sampford Moor in the plain;

  Where yet God hath given our King the victory.

  John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, defeated Kett’s rebels on Mousehold Hill, a few miles north of Norwich, and suppressed the rebellion. Kett and several of the rebels were executed. Warwick returned to London to plot the coup d’état which overthrew Somerset, who was thought to have encouraged the rebellions by his liberal policies.. Warwick became the ruler of England, and two years later was created Duke of Northumberland.

  He persuaded Parliament in 1550 to pass an Act against unlawful assemblies. If twelve or more persons assembled with the object of removing a member of the Privy Council from office, or bringing about any change in the law, or burning houses or barns, or obtaining lower rents or a lower price of corn, they were to be executed as traitors or felons. If more than forty of them assembled, anyone, including their wives or servants, who brought them money, weapons, food or drink was also to be executed as a traitor. If two or more persons, but less than ten, assembled for any of these purposes, they were to be punished by a year’s imprisonment and a fine. No mayor or JP who killed any of them in dispersing them was to be liable to punishment or damages; and tenants of a lord of a manor who were between the ages of eighteen and sixty were to forfeit their land if they refused to serve in the forces against them.

  Northumberland was overthrown by another revolt, which broke out when Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen after the death of Edward VI in July 1553. Mary called on the people to support her as the rightful Queen, and within a few days 40,000 people had assembled at Framlingham, ready to fight on her behalf. It shows the moral effect of the royal name, and the attachment of the people to the principle of hereditary monarchy, that this was the only revolt during the Tudor Age which was successful. Wyatt’s Protestant rising in Kent next year, in protest against Mary’s plan to marry Philip of Spain, was suppressed; and so was the Catholic rebellion in the North against Elizabeth I in 1569, when 5,000 men rose under the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. They captured Durham, burning the Book of Common Prayer in the cathedral and celebrating Mass there; but the rising in the North was suppressed before Philip of Spain had time to send them any effective aid. More than 600 of the rebels were executed after summary trials by courts martial.

  In 1601, Elizabeth’s former favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, led a revolt in London, ostensibly to protect himself against the members of the Privy Council who were
planning to arrest and assassinate him. It was easily suppressed, and Essex and five of his supporters were executed.

  Whenever a rebellion broke out, the government was confronted with the same problem which it faced on the outbreak of war, because there was no standing army at the King’s disposal, except for the garrisons in the two frontier outposts at Berwick and Calais. There was also a very small force of men-at-arms who resided at court to protect the King’s person. Within a month of his victory at Bosworth, Henry VII had created a corps of fifty men-at-arms whom he named ‘the Yeomen of the Guard’; and Henry VIII increased their number to 600 in 1520.

  In times of war and rebellion, the King relied on the old system which had existed in feudal times. He ordered his nobles to summon the gentlemen in their counties to come with their tenants, bringing a specified number of horsemen, infantrymen and bowmen, to muster at a certain place on a certain date. When there was a threat of invasion by the Scots, or an invasion of Scotland was being planned, the lords and gentlemen of the northern counties were ordered to assemble at Newcastle, usually in about three weeks time.

  When the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out, Henry VIII called on the nobles and gentlemen throughout the West Midlands to go with their tenants to join the Duke of Suffolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury at Nottingham and Mansfield for service against the rebels, while the gentlemen in the South of England were told to come to Ampthill to form a reserve army. He was able to assemble an army of 7,000 men within a fortnight.

  When a French invasion was expected in the summer of 1545, Henry made preparations for armies totalling 90,000 men to be ready to assemble to repulse an invasion attempt at any point between Lincolnshire and Cornwall. Preparations were made to light beacons on the hills all the way between the South Coast and the North of England, so that the people throughout the realm could be warned of the invasion far more quickly than any horseman could ride from the Channel to the Scottish Border. Three beacons were built on every hill; one fire was to be lit when the enemy fleet was spotted; a second fire when the enemy approached within four miles of the coast; and a third when they landed. When a French raiding party landed at Seaford and burned the town and Sir John Gage’s house at Firle, all three beacons were lit, and the levies of Kent and Sussex were ordered to assemble at Uckfield; but by the time they arrived there, the French had already re-embarked.