by C. J. Sansom
I have made one alteration to historical fact: Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk was in fact co-organizer of the Progress along with the Duke of Suffolk and was present in York. However, as he featured so prominently in the last Shardlake novel, Dark Fire, I thought it would overcomplicate the plot if I brought him back in a minor role here. While Henry VIII did seek petitions for justice along the route, I have invented the arbitrations in York.
The Progress was indeed beset by cold weather and unremitting rain in July, and calling it off was discussed. I have, however, invented the stormy weather of October 1541.
*
The north of England had never been fully reconciled to Tudor rule. Under pressure of changing trade patterns, falling wages and the enclosure movement, discontent grew in the early sixteenth century until the religious changes of the 1530s brought the commons of the doctrinally conservative region to rebel in October 1536. Within weeks, an army of perhaps 30,000 armed northerners was camped on the river Don, prepared to march south, collect support and remove Cromwell, Cranmer and Rich from the council.
Henry broke his promises to meet some of the rebels’ demands if they disbanded, and ruthlessly suppressed fresh outbreaks of rebellion in 1537. Robert Aske and the other leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace were executed. There are conflicting accounts on whether Robert Aske was hanged in chains and left to die at York Castle, or whether he was granted a speedier death. I think he was hanged in chains; for Henry VIII to keep his promise that Aske would be dead ere his head was struck off in such a macabre way seems to me exactly in tune with the King’s character.
After 1536, the dissolution of the larger monasteries, which meant the seizure of their resources by the Crown and the remittance of rents and profits to London, together with the effects of heavy taxation in 1540-1, caused further economic distress and religious discontent. Anger can only have festered deeper in 1537-41, for all that things seemed quiet. The revived Council of the North in York, set up to maintain royal control there, would almost certainly have operated a network of informers. Sir William Maleverer is a fictional character, but I think he was probably not untypical. And in early 1541 a conspiracy was uncovered. It was planned by a group of gentry and ex-religious and was to start with a rising at Pontefract Fair in April. The limited evidence indicates that the 1541 rebels were prepared to go further than those of 1536 – the French ambassador Marillac reported to Philip V that they called the King a tyrant; surely this indicated they intended to dethrone him. Even more surprising and dangerous, Marillac reported that they were prepared to make an alliance with the still Catholic Scots. Northern English people looked on the Scots as uncivilized, dangerous barbarians (exactly the way the southern English looked on the northern English), and the conspirators’ anger must have been desperate indeed to consider allying with the ancient enemy. There was no evidence of a link to conservative Gray’s Inn lawyers in 1541, though there may have been one in 1536; I have revived this aspect for my plot.
The prospect of another army of northern rebels marching towards London, this time perhaps accompanied by the Scots, and perhaps even the Scots’ allies the French, must have been the ultimate nightmare for the Henrician state. Foreign ambassadors reported in 1541 that the English rulers were even more alarmed than they had been in 1536. After the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Royal Progress to the North had been mooted, but the idea was shelved. Now it was quickly revived, and Henry’s anxiety is indicated by the extraordinary speed with which the gigantic Progress was organized – it set out three months after the conspiracy was exposed. This was a remarkable feat, for not only was it at least three times the size of a normal Progress, not only did it travel much further than a royal Progress had since the 1480s, but it was an armed Progress, with a thousand soldiers accompanying the King and England’s artillery shipped to Hull. Meanwhile, the heir of the alternative (and Catholic) royal line, the Countess of Salisbury, was butchered in the Tower without trial.
*
For details of how the Progress looked, sounded and smelt I have had to rely on the books cited below, and on my imagination, to flesh out the limited information provided by the French ambassador Marillac’s reports and other records in the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII. The portrayal of the supplication of the City of York at Fulford Cross is based on the official account in the York civic records.
What struck me forcefully, reading the state papers, were the many indications that the King and his advisers were frightened they might meet with hostility and even violence in the north. The organizers made certain that the gentry and city councillors who came to submit themselves along the way, both in the towns and in rural stopping-places, came in numbers limited by them. Henry’s soldiers were always there.
This most political of Progresses was brilliantly choreographed. The local ruling classes would meet Henry and Queen Catherine along the way, make gifts to them, and those who had rebelled in 1536 would read long submissions begging forgiveness before taking fresh oaths of loyalty. Oaths were vitally important in Tudor times; those who swore knew for sure they had the King’s forgiveness for the past, but equally that if they broke their oaths their fate would be terrible. And no doubt favours and positions were handed out behind the scenes. The attempt to bring James IV of Scotland into an English alliance failed, however; the following year a decade of aggressive warfare against Scotland began.
The ordinary people who had created the great army of 1536, and could have formed another in 1541, played no part other than as spectators. The whole strategy was based on the belief that if Henry could decisively win the loyalty of the northern elites, he would be safe. It worked; there were no more rebellions in Yorkshire in Tudor times. In 1541, however, given the prevailing mood in the north, I think there must have been some hostility to the Progress among the commons, and this is the mood I have portrayed in York; a sullen populace who, as the city records show, drove the council to their wits’ end by refusing to lay sand and ashes before their doors to ease the King’s passage through the streets.
*
The Blaybourne story, remarkable as it may seem, is founded on fact. There is evidence that Cecily Neville, mother of the Yorkist kings Edward IV and Richard III, claimed that Edward IV was not fathered by the Duke of York, and rumours at the French court identified the father as an English archer named Blaybourne. Michael K. Jones’s Bosworth 1485 (Tempus Publishing, 2002) relates the story, which was also told in a Channel 4 documentary, Britain ’s Real Monarch (2004). They traced the man who would be the rightful King today if Cecily spoke true, an amiable Australian sheep farmer (and republican) who would be King Michael I. I am not entirely convinced that Cecily Neville spoke the truth; I think there are flaws in some of Dr Jones’s lines of argument, particularly on possible dates of conception for Edward IV. But it might be true. Certainly the story was known to Thomas Cromwell; the Spanish ambassador Chapuys asked him about it in 1535, perhaps to annoy him.
What is still true – astonishingly, in the twenty-first century – is that Queen Elizabeth II retains the title Henry VIII took for himself: Supreme Head of the Church of England, Defender of the Faith and – in theory at least – God’s chosen representative in England.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to the staff of the libraries of York City Council, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire County Councils, and the Universities of Sussex and London, for their help in locating research materials about the Progress of 1541. The Richard III Society, American Branch, enabled me to download the Titulus Regulus from their website. The highlights of a research trip to York were the remarkable re-creation of a late-fifteenth-century house at Barley Hall in the city centre, and the excellent and imaginative exhibition on St Mary’s Abbey at the Yorkshire Museum. I am most grateful to Warwick Burton of York Walks for a very informative tour of King’s Manor and for his help with subsequent queries, to Robert Edwards for driving me across the route of the Progress from York to Hull, to Rev. N
igel Stafford for showing me round the lovely old church at Howlme-on-Spalding Moor, and to Mrs Ann Los for sharing her information on Leconfield Castle. Andrew Belshaw kindly found Arnold Kellett’s The Yorkshire Dictionary (Smith Settle, 2002) for me, which was very helpful on matters of dialect. Thanks also to Jeanette Howlett for taking me on a visit to the Sussex Working Horse Trust, where I learned much about the type of horses that moved the Progress across England; to Dr Jeremy Bending, who kindly advised me about Wrenne’s cancer, and to Mike Holmes, who corrected my wildly inaccurate notions about what the sea journey would have been like. Needless to say, any errors in interpreting the wealth of helpful information I was given are my own.
More thanks – once again – to Roz Brody, Jan King, Mike Holmes and William Shaw for reading the book in draft, and to my indefatigable agent Antony Topping for his help and comments – and for the title. Thanks again to my editor Maria Rejt and to Mari Roberts for her copyediting; and to Frankie Lawrence for a mammoth bout of typing.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The only study of the 1541 conspiracy I have found is an article written by Geoffrey Dickens as long ago as 1938: A.G. Dickens, ‘Sedition and Conspiracy in Yorkshire’ (Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, vol. xxxiv, 1938-39). Michael K. Jones’s book, cited above, was fascinating and thought-provoking on the Blaybourne legend. For the Catherine Howard story, Lacey Baldwin Smith’s A Tudor Tragedy (Alden Press, 1961) remains the fullest account, with David Starkey’s Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (Vintage, 2004) giving an interesting modern perspective.
R.W. Hoyle and J.B. Ramsdale’s article ‘The Royal Progress of 1541, the North of England, and Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1534-42’, in Northern History, XLI:2 (September 2004) is useful on the politics of the Progress, though I think it seriously underestimates the centrality of the conspiracy in Henry’s journey north. For details of what the Tudor court on Progress might have been like I am indebted to Simon Thurley’s The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (Yale University Press, 1993) and David Loades’s The Tudor Court (Barnes & Noble, 1987). Dairmaid Mac-Culloch’s Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale University Press, 1996) helped in my attempts to get the measure of that most complex of men. For both the conspiracy and the Progress the ambassadorial reports in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. XVI provide material that is fascinating but frustratingly limited.
R.W. Hoyle’s The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (OUP, 2001) and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Pilgrimage of Grace (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002) were both very useful. Moorhouse tells the story of the Mouldwarp legend.
D.M. Palliser’s Tudor York (OUP, 2002) was a mine of information on the city. Christopher Wilson & Janet Burton’s well-illustrated St Mary’s Abbey (Yorkshire Museum, 1988) was very helpful on the layout of the monastic precinct. There is still debate in York about whether Henry stayed at King’s Manor when he was there. I think he did; it makes obvious logistic sense. The idea that the hundreds of workmen known to be present and building tents and pavilions were building a scaled-down version of those used at the Field of the Cloth of Gold is mine, but it fits with the limited evidence in the Letters and Papers. And there was no time to build anything more substantial; they had less than two months to get there and complete everything.
The song welcoming the King to York in Chapter 16 will not be found in any book on Tudor music; I made it up. I hope it has an authentic ring.
C J Sansom
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