While there is a horror in the twenty-eight people burned as heretics after 1540, and the fourteen executed for papistry, Henry’s accommodation with Protestantism meant that England did not see the bloody inter-Nicene wars of the continent. In Holland, in 1539–45, 105 people died, while the later Wars of Religion in France were bloody affairs – 2,000 people died in Paris alone on 24 August 1572 in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Yet it is ironic that Henry’s desperate anxiety about religious unity could not prevent the religious extremes and reverses the reigns of his son, Edward, and his daughter, Mary. The tutors that Henry VIII chose for his son – Richard Cox and John Cheke – were reformist, evangelically inclined scholars from Cambridge, and Edward, together with his Lord Protector (the brother of Jane Seymour), presided over a thorough reformation during his reign. Had Henry VIII known or guessed this would be the case? Mary’s accession to the throne turned the tide the other way, and 300 were executed for heresy in her five-year reign, including the former archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, in Oxford on 25 March 1556. It was the idiosyncrasy of Henry’s religious beliefs that made the division likely.1
Perhaps the real successor to Henry’s reformation was Elizabeth I. It may be easy to contrast the policies of the queen who famously had no desire ‘to make windows into men’s hearts’ with the king who published an act ‘abolishing diversity in opinions’. Yet in reality the substance of the Elizabethan religious settlement reflected, in large part, the priorities and values of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559 powerfully echoed Henry’s commitment to the English Crown as Supreme Head (although Elizabeth became Supreme Governor, partly in deference to her gender), and to Henry’s preoccupation with unity. They illustrated Elizabeth I’s intention to keep religion under the control of the Crown, as her father had done. The Spanish ambassador to her court, Count de Feria, reported that she ‘resolved to restore religion as her father left it’. Under her archbishop, Matthew Parker, who had been Henry VIII’s chaplain, Elizabeth mediated a course between the extremes of Edward and Mary as if determined to adhere to Henry VIII’s middle way between the ‘abominations of the bishop of Rome’ and ‘novelties and… things not necessary’. In addition, following Henry VIII, the Elizabethan Royal Injunctions of 1559, and later, in 1563, the Thirty-nine Articles, showed a resolve to continue the eradication of idolatry and superstitious practices, such as pilgrimages, invocation of saints and the worship of images and relics, while avoiding the intense iconoclasm of Edward VI’s reign. The wording of the Act of Uniformity, in contrast to the original Reformation bill, allowed for a continued understanding of the Eucharist as the real presence of Christ, a view that Henry VIII had insisted upon. Elizabeth told Feria that ‘she differed very little from [Roman Catholics], as she believed that God was in the sacrament of the Eucharist and only dissented from two or three things in the Mass’, even though the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563 explicitly rejected ‘transubstantiation’. Henry and Elizabeth may well also have shared opinions on purgatory and the sufficiency of scripture and, although clerical marriage was permitted in Elizabeth’s reign, she herself appears to have abhorred it, and never received the wives of clerics at court.2
Only in one crucial aspect did Henry’s daughter substantially alter her religious inheritance. The Thirty-nine Articles adopted that most Protestant of doctrines, that the justification of man came by faith and not by works. As a result, only two sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist) were to be recognized by the Anglican Church – not the three of Henry’s Ten Articles (or the four of the King’s Book). The third, penance, had no place in this new Protestant understanding of justification. Yet even here, the change appears to be simply one that was a logical result of the passing of time and changing attitudes towards what were the extremities of faith in the 1530s. Few mainstream evangelicals during Henry’s reign held to this Lutheran doctrine. In addition, the Thirty-nine Articles were keen to stress, immediately after the assertion of solafidenism, the need for good works that ‘spring necessarily of a true and lively faith’, suggesting a continued deference to the faith of her father, in spirit if not in letter.
Henry VIII was a more pious and devout man than is currently touted in popular history. His personal beliefs came to define the religion of a kingdom. From 1536 until Henry’s death in 1547, there was, between Catholicism and Protestantism, ‘Henricianism’, and while it was unable to protect England from the confessional divisions of Edward and Mary’s reigns, it greatly influenced the Elizabethan religious settlement, which has shaped and defined Anglicanism to this day.3
In 1521, Cardinal Wolsey commissioned the master craftsman Giovanni del Maiano to make him eight terracotta roundels to adorn his palace at Hampton Court. These painted and gilded roundels were busts of Roman emperors, and in this age of humanism, they symbolized the qualities of a good ruler, which Wolsey, in commissioning them, was celebrating in his king. When Henry VIII took over Hampton Court a few years later, the roundels remained. Yet the paragons of good rule either side of the Great Gatehouse at Hampton Court were – and still are – busts of the emperors Tiberius and Nero. One was not afraid to be hated and famously bestowed severe punishments on traitors and the other known for persecuting Christians and pursuing his lusts; both, in other words, renowned tyrants. Although in 1521, Henry was regarded as England’s golden prince, in 1536, observers may have had good reason to link these unfortunate examples of oppression more closely to the kingdom’s crown. For such injudicious choices inadvertently prefigured an opinion that was gaining ground in England in the 1530s, culminating in 1536 – that Henry VIII was, in fact, a tyrant.
This is the image of Henry VIII that has descended to posterity. It is the one that fills films and popular literature today. Even mere decades after Henry VIII’s death, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, in the preface to his History of the World, the infamous lines:
Now for King Henry the Eighth; if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life, out of the story of this king. For how many servants did he advance in haste (but for what virtue no man could suspect) and with the change of his fancy ruined again, no man knowing for what offence? To how many others of more desert gave he abundant flowers, from whence to gather honey and in the end of harvest burned them in the hive? How many wives did he cut off, and cast off, as his fancy and affection changed? How many princes of the blood (whereof some of them for age could hardly crawl towards the block) with a world of others of all degrees (of whom our common chronicles have kept the account) did he execute?
Yet, for those who lived during Henry’s reign, it was a perilous thing to call one’s king a tyrant. From 1535, it could even be fatal. A remarkable act passed in 1534, which came into effect in February 1535, stated that ‘if any person or persons… do maliciously wish, will or desire by words or writings, or by craft imagine, invent, practise or attempt any bodily harm to be done or committed to the King’s most royal person’ or to ‘slanderously and maliciously publish and pronounce… that the King our sovereign lord should be heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper of the crown’, they would be guilty of high treason. The charge was often not directly spoken in England, for walls had ears. But it was the talk of foreigners, was alluded to in English court poetry and was whispered among commons; for 1536 saw the largest ever single popular uprising against a reigning English monarch. This uprising was a series of linked rebellions in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire of up to 50,000 rebels from the north who called themselves Pilgrims of Grace, and whom Henry did not have sufficient troops to face, let alone defeat, in battle. It was whispered among these Pilgrims that perhaps the king was the ‘mouldwarp’ or mole, an evil and tyrannous king prophesied by Merlin, who would bring down the kingdom. Why had the country, which had rejoiced at Henry’s accession, broken faith with him? Opposition stemmed, in part, from the dubious legality and shocking treatment of Thomas More and Bishop John Fish
er in 1535, but this further disloyalty, in a year of challenge and betrayal, only entrenched Henry’s position such that the events of 1536 and afterwards were to make More and Fisher’s deaths look like harbingers of worse to come. By these latter years of his reign, Henry VIII had become intransigent, volatile, reactionary and dangerous to know.2
CHAPTER 15
The Pilgrimage of Grace
The events of early 1536 had exposed Henry VIII to betrayal, ill health and his own mortality, all of which had made him both disillusioned and mistrustful. But the accompanying challenge and ridicule of his virility, which carried with it the question of his ability to rule a household (and thus a kingdom), helped produce in the king a reaction that cemented his pride and obduracy. These elements were all present in his response to those who rebelled against him between October and December 1536, and the cycle of perceived treachery and reaction was to be repeated again and again, with important and long-lasting consequences.
The rebellion, which was actually a series of linked local revolts, started with an uprising in Louth in Lincolnshire. Two days after Michaelmas, on Sunday 1 October, Thomas Foster, a yeoman with land worth £10, had warned the congregation assembled to process around the church after Mass that they ‘be like to follow [the crosses] no more’. He was referring to the valuable silver processional crosses belonging to the church. His outburst ignited the currents of fear that were sweeping through the area as a result of the religious changes of the last few years, namely the break with Rome, the royal supremacy, the new doctrine recently set out in the Ten Articles, the treatment of the clergy and the act commanding the dissolution of the lesser monasteries. In October 1536, three sets of government commissioners were working simultaneously in Lincolnshire: one to evaluate the resources of the smaller monasteries; one assessing and collecting a government subsidy; and another investigating the morals and competence of the clergy. The presence of these commissioners had sparked anxious rumours about the pace of religious change and the future intentions of the government towards those things which the commons regarded as their own and central to the spiritual well-being of the kingdom: the parish churches, the monasteries and the jewels and plate used in processions and Masses, of which the silver crosses at Louth were fine examples.1
The rumours suggested that the king planned to charge a tax on all cattle, prevent the commons eating white bread, pig, goose or capon without paying a gratuity, exact taxes for weddings, christenings and funerals, and, most importantly, confiscate the goods of the parish churches and pull down churches so there would be only one in each five-mile radius. For people who had seen the number of holy days (read ‘holidays’) reduced and monasteries being suppressed, such fears were far from irrational. As John Hallom recalled under examination in 1537, ‘because the people saw many abbeys pulled down in deed, they believed the rest to be true’.2
Against this background, Thomas Foster’s comment stirred up the crowd led by Nicholas Melton, nicknamed ‘Captain Cobbler’, which that very evening, demanded the keys to the church treasure house from the churchwarden in order to protect the parish plate and jewels from the commissioners. When the bishop of Lincoln’s registrar arrived the next day to carry out the assessment of the clergy, he was seized by the ever-increasing crowd, who burned his papers before marching him to Legbourne nunnery, where they captured the king’s commissioners at work there. At the news that the subsidy commissioners would be working in nearby Caistor the next day, the commons of Louth, now numbering 3,000, marched to Caistor, and the commissioners fled at the sight of this great multitude advancing upon them. Caistor and Horncastle joined the uprising and by 4 October, the gentry had taken leading roles. On the same day, Dr John Raynes, the despised Chancellor of the bishop of Lincoln, was dragged before the commons in Horncastle and beaten to death with their staves.3
A few days later, 10,000 men marched to Lincoln, where they produced a set of articles or list of demands, which was sent to the king. These contained five complaints: the first was against the suppression of religious houses; the second and third dealt with issues of taxation: the Act of Uses enacted in 1536 – a statute that had rectified a loophole in land-ownership which had prevented royal dues being paid, and a direct tax called the ‘fifteenth and the tenth’, which was felt unreasonable in the economic climate. The final two complaints concerned those people advising the king. The commons complained that the king’s council was made up of ‘persons of low birth and small reputation’, who had ‘procured these things [above all, the dissolution] for their own advantage, whom we suspect to be Lord Cromwell and Sir Richard Rich, Chancellor of the Augmentations’. Finally, they named seven bishops whom they felt had ‘subverted the faith of Christ’. Henry’s damning response, to which we shall return below, rebuked the commons in no uncertain terms and threatened severe retribution unless the rebellion was quelled instantly. The gentry, fearing for their lives, refused to proceed, and this rising foundered.4
The rising at Lincolnshire was, however, only the beginning. On 8 October, there was a rising in Beverley in Yorkshire, also in response to the rumours, and now prompted by the catalyst of the Lincolnshire revolt. One Robert Aske emerged as leader. He was a lawyer who became known as the ‘Chief Captain’; by the end of October, there would be nine armies totalling 50,000 men, each army led by a captain under Aske’s leadership. The rebels started to march towards York and were joined on their way by other groups from East Riding and Marshland. By the time they reached York, on 16 October, the force had snowballed to 10,000 men and the city yielded to them. Aske had started to talk of the revolt as a pilgrimage, a ‘pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth’, in that they sought the king’s grace for the health of the kingdom. In York, Aske spelled this out, proclaiming,
this pilgrimage… is for the preservation of Christ’s Church, of the realm of England, the King our Sovereign Lord, the nobility and commons of the same, and to the intent to make petition to the King’s Highness for the reformation of that which is amiss, within this his realm and for the punishment of heretics and subverters of the laws.
That same week, there were risings in the North Riding, and troops assembled at Richmond and swore in their local gentry as their leaders: Lord Latimer of Snape (who was married to Kateryn Parr, later Henry VIII’s wife), Sir Christopher Danby of Masham and, chiefly, Sir Robert Bowes, another lawyer. They sent forces to join Aske in York on 18 October. There were also risings in Westmorland and Lancashire. The amassed troops marched to Pontefract Castle, where Lord Darcy, Edward Lee, the archbishop of York and other gentlemen had congregated for safety. Darcy had been writing desperate letters to Henry asking for support: ‘the insurrection has so increased all over the North that we are in great danger of our lives and see no way it can be repressed’, but amazingly the government appeared unaware of the scale of the revolt – thinking it had all quietened down after Lincolnshire – and Darcy was forced to surrender the castle on 21 October. Before long, however, Darcy and even Sir Robert Constable, who had helped Henry VII defeat the Cornish Rebellion in 1497, had joined the rebel leadership.5
Henry sent Lancaster Herald to Pontefract on 21 October to read a proclamation to the rebels, but Aske refused to let the proclamation be read, for its contents were incendiary. Lancaster Herald’s report back, however, provided insight into the Pilgrims’ intentions. Aske said he intended
to go with his company to London on pilgrimage to the King to have all vile blood put from his Council and noble blood set up again; to have the faith of Christ and God’s laws kept, and restitution for the wrongs done to the Church, and the commonalty used as they should be…
In addition to sending Lancaster Herald, Henry had also deployed the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Duke of Norfolk to lead the royal troops against the rebels. Aware of the vast discrepancies between the sizes of the two armies – the royal army was a maximum of 9,000 men – Norfolk arranged a meeting between the two sides at Doncaster Bridge. Here it was agreed, on
27 October, that two representatives of the Pilgrims, Sir Ralph Ellerker and Sir Robert Bowes, would take a copy of the Pilgrims’ petition to the king, and a truce would be observed until their return.6
When the king read their petition on 2 November, he dashed off a self-righteous and condemnatory reply (see below). Norfolk persuaded him not send this (although in fact it was leaked), and instead a ‘kind and mild’ message was sent back with Ellerker and Bowes that did not respond to the complaints made by the rebels (except to call them ‘general, dark and obscure’), but offered the prospect of further negotiations between the Pilgrims and Norfolk. The Pilgrim representatives arrived on 18 November and gave a detailed account of their visit to Windsor before the Pilgrims’ council in York on 21 November. A second meeting with Norfolk at Doncaster was fixed for 6 December and meanwhile a council was arranged for 2–4 December to clarify and encapsulate the rebel concerns. This council, aping the form of a parliament, drew up a manifesto of 24 articles, which were also agreed by convocation of clergy gathered in Pontefract Priory. Finally, 40 Pilgrim representatives met Norfolk on 6 December.7
1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII Page 13