1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII

by Lipscomb, Suzannah

  Norfolk had strict instructions from Henry on how to act and what to offer, but what Norfolk actually agreed was rather different. He promised a free pardon to all and that a parliament should be held at York to re-examine (and it was implied, redress) the concerns raised by the rebels. Crucially, there are no proper records of what else was agreed, a fact that was to become a matter of contention over the following months. It was later unclear, for instance, whether Norfolk had agreed that the abbeys that had been restored during the Pilgrimage should remain standing until the parliament met, and whether in the same period, the disputed taxes should remain unpaid. Even Norfolk’s promise about the parliament may have simply been that he would be a suitor to the king for the parliament – not quite the same thing at all. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims accepted the terms as a clear-cut victory, which was announced by Aske on 7 December; and on 8 December, Lancaster Herald read the king’s pardon to the assembled crowds and they dispersed homeward. It was, for the king, a serendipitous turn of events. If the Pilgrims had continued to march on London, the royal troops would have been powerless to stand against them. As J. J. Scarisbrick wrote of Henry and the Pilgrimage, ‘the truth is that, if it had wanted, it might have swamped him’.8

  Reasons to Rebel

  Historians writing about the Pilgrimage of Grace have chiefly disagreed over the motives and aspirations of the rebels and whether economic or religious preoccupations were uppermost. The truth is probably that different groups of rebels had slightly different priorities, although there are some clear themes.9

  Certainly, there was concern that taxes were being levied in unconventional ways. It was normal at this time for the population to be taxed only to support wars, and there was usually a rebate for the poor, but the subsidy, the fifteenth and the tenth did not conform to these standards. Henry VIII pointed out to the rebels that the subsidy was only levied on men possessing goods worth £20 – so did not affect the vast majority of the rebels – and even then, was only 6d in the pound, ‘so,’ he complained, ‘a man worth £40 is a very traitor for that 20s’.10

  Henry was missing the point though – it was the unprecedented circumstances of the tax that was the chief sticking point and, with it, the fear that this would open the door to other impositions – such as those taxes rumoured on cattle and weddings. The taxes were linked, in the popular mind, to the king’s intentions regarding the jewels and plate of the parish churches and the riches of the monasteries. This also stuck in Henry’s throat, as he wrote on 19 October, ‘we know also that ye our commons have much complained in time past that most of the goods and lands of the realm were in the spiritual men’s hands; yet, now pretending to be loyal subjects, you cannot endure that your prince should have part thereof’. This concern with the material culture of religion should also be recognized as an important part of popular spirituality and a sense of things being rightly ordered and conducted. Behind the rebellion ‘was a set of fundamental and almost universal notions about the failures and inadequacies of the Henrician regime: the government was avaricious, sacrilegious and led by evil counsellors’. And avarice and impiety were believed to go hand in hand.11

  Religious motives were, however, paramount. From the beginning of the rebellion, Aske had proclaimed that ‘evil disposed persons, being of the king’s council, hath… incensed his grace with many and sundry new inventions, which be contrary to the faith of God… and thereby intendeth to destroy the Church of England and ministers of the same’. Therefore, the pilgrimage was ‘undertaken for the preservation of Christ’s Church’. Representing themselves as pilgrims was in itself controversial as recent government injunctions had denounced pilgrimages as ‘superstition and hypocrisy’. The rebels also adopted badges and carried banners bearing the five wounds of Christ – vestiges of a crusade led by Lord Darcy in 1511 against the Moors – which symbolically asserted their claim for the moral high ground, pronounced the essentially religious nature of their venture and situated their religiosity within a strong medieval tradition of devotion to the wounds of Christ. Their religious worries were that only three of the seven sacraments and ‘no purgatory’ had been included in the Ten Articles, and that heresies and heretics were infiltrating the country, chiefly through certain bishops and counsellors, such as Cromwell. They were also disturbed about Henry’s adoption of the title of Supreme Head ‘touching cure animarum (the care of souls)’ because the rebels felt that this should ‘be reserved unto the see of Rome as before it was accustomed to be’. The importance of this has been debated: one commentator has recently suggested that the qualification ‘touching cure animarum’ meant it was not a total condemnation of the king’s new position. Yet Aske also said that ‘all men much murmured’ about the supremacy and said ‘it could not stand with God’s law’, while its qualification probably stems from the fact that it was actually treasonous to deny the king’s supremacy. Nor did the qualification count for much: Henry clearly envisaged that his role as Supreme Head encompassed the care of souls.12

  But the central theme in the rebels’ rhetoric was the suppression of the monasteries. Later, Aske was to cite the importance of the dissolution in sparking off the revolt, stating ‘in all parts of the realm men’s hearts much grudged the suppression of the abbeys and the fruits by reason the same would be the destruction of the whole religion in England’. He posited it as the dominant issue in the uprising: ‘those bruits [rumours] were one of the greatest causes, but the suppression of the abbeys was the greatest cause of the said insurrection, which the hearts of the commons most grudged at’. This was why Richard Rich as chancellor of the Court of Augmentations – the organization responsible for administrating the dissolution – had been included in both the Lincolnshire articles and the Pilgrims’ Pontefract articles. As they went along, the Pilgrims restored sixteen monasteries out of a total fifty-five that had been suppressed by the king’s commissioners.13

  Henry VIII’s Reaction

  On hearing of the outbreak of rebellion, Henry’s initial response was one of alarm. Chapuys recorded on 7 October in a letter to Charles V that ‘the King is all the more dejected, and as Cromwell’s nephew said today in secret to an honest man, he [the king] was in great fear’. Just as he had with Anne Boleyn’s apparent infidelity, Henry quelled his panic at the rebels’ deceit with the pride and stubbornness that were characteristic of him. His letters, proclamations and instructions to the rebels and his commanders from this point on all focus on the maintenance of his honour, and are filled with hectoring, bombast and intransigence.14

  From the outset, he saw the uprising as unequivocally treasonous. The rebels were ‘false traitors and rebels’ of ‘wretched and devilish intents’, concerned with perpetrating the ‘malice and iniquity of this rebellion’. He also believed their fears were wholly unfounded and lambasted them for rebelling on the basis of ‘light tales… and such light causes’. At one point in his answer to the Lincolnshire rebels, he exclaimed contemptuously, ‘we marvel what madness is in your brain!’ He believed that the rebels acted with ‘great unkindness’ and ‘much unnaturalness’. Above all, he was affronted that his subjects should tell him how to rule:

  Concerning choosing of counsellors, I never have read, heard or known, that princes’ councillors and prelates should be appointed by rude and ignorant common people; nor that they were persons meet or of ability, to discern and choose meet and sufficient councillors for a prince: how presumptuous then are ye the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm… to find fault with your prince for the electing of his councillors and prelates, and to take upon you, contrary to God’s law, and man’s law, to rule your prince, whom you are bound by all laws to obey…

  He rebuked them for their interference and advised them to:

  show yourself as bounden and obedient subjects, and no more… intermeddle yourselves from henceforth with the weighty affairs of the realm, the direction whereof only appertains to us your king and such noble
men and councillors, as we list to elect and choose.

  Henry also stressed that consent by these noble men, knights and gentlemen gave legitimacy to his policies in these ‘weighty affairs’. He pointed out that all had been agreed and ‘granted to us by Parliament and not set forth by the mere will of any councillor’ and that, in religious matters, he had ‘done nothing but what the whole clergy of the province of York, as well as that of Canterbury, have found to be conformable to God’s word’. To Henry’s mind (a classic example of the aforementioned dissonance theory, perhaps? See page 72), it was clear that everything he had done had been lawful and with the consent of others, which therefore made the actions of the northerners wholly inappropriate and illegitimate.15

  Such unprovoked treason would be dealt with severely. In his first letter of early October to the commissioners of the subsidy, he recommended that the commissioners send ‘100 of the ringleaders, with halters about their necks, to our lieutenant’, or else threatened his army of ‘100,000 men, horse and foot, in harness, with munitions and artillery, which they cannot resist’, adding savagely that this army would ‘burn, spoil and destroy their goods, wives and children with all extremity’. Later in October, having heard of a rising at Sawley Abbey, he commanded the Earl of Derby to act ruthlessly towards the monks, instructing: ‘You are to take the said abbot and monks forth with violence and have them hanged without delay in their monks’ apparel.’ This was summary justice, to be delivered without trial or process of law. Despite all evidence to the contrary, right up until the December pardon, Henry continued to believe in a military solution and ordered the continued muster of troops and construction of fortifications. He continued to boast of his overstated army. He also adamantly held out for the execution of a number of ringleaders and for the rebels’ official submission before opening negotiations. Crucially, he believed his ‘honour would be touched’ if circumstances were otherwise. They were, and, as we shall see, it was.16

  The Question of Obedience and Tyranny

  It might be helpful to put Henry’s response in some context. All mainstream thinkers in the sixteenth century believed that subjects were commanded to be obedient and active rebellion was forbidden, no matter how abominably a king had behaved. Archbishop Cranmer, for example, wrote, ‘though the magistrates be evil and very tyrants against the commonwealth, yet the subjects must obey in all worldly things’. Even radicals such as Robert Barnes, who was executed as a heretic in 1540, concurred: he wrote ‘the Scripture commands us to obey wicked Princes’. This was also clearly Henry VIII’s point of view. Henry had wholeheartedly approved of Anne Boleyn’s gift of a copy of William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man. In it, Tyndale argued that, ‘He that judges the king judges God; and he that resists the king resists God and damns God’s law and ordinance… 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.’ It was an objection that Henry raised with the Pilgrims. In a circular sent to his bishops in November 1536, Henry commanded them to go from place to place within their dioceses declaring ‘the obedience due by God’s law to the Sovereign, whose commandments they have no right to resist even though they were unjust’. He raised this point directly with the rebel representatives Sir Ralph Ellerker and Sir Robert Bowes on 27 November, reminding them that ‘God commanded them to obey their prince whatever he be, yea though he should not direct them justly’. Henry knew his political theory.17

  The corollary to this doctrine of obedience was that kings were to act for the common good. In 1517, Erasmus had sent Henry a copy of his book The Education of a Christian Prince in which he set forth his vision of how to prepare princes to rule justly and virtuously. According to Erasmus, a good king knows that he is dependent on the consent and will of his subjects, and that it is only such consent that entitles him to exercise authority. In addition, to be good a king ought to take advice and seek wisdom, for Erasmus warned, ‘power without goodness is unmitigated tyranny’, so ‘make it your business to acquire for yourself the greatest store of wisdom so that you alone of all men may best be able to see what should be striven for and what should be avoided’. A tyrant would, by contrast, surround himself with flatterers who would not speak frankly to him. A monarch served by good, strong counsellors preserved the kingdom from tyranny and held evil at bay. It was a duty incumbent on courtiers to counsel their king, and it was the king’s responsibility to listen to his counsellors. ‘The ‘uncounselled king’ was, almost by definition, a tyrant’.18

  This left the Pilgrims in something of a tricky situation. Most responded by trying to square the circle by blaming, at least in their rhetoric, evil laws on the king’s counsellors rather than the king himself. Most of the rebels, mindful of the 1534 Act of Treason, did not go as far as the abbot of Colchester, who openly and angrily spoke out against the king, saying ‘what a world is this: I hear say that all the abbeys shall go down: these tyrants and bloodsuckers doth thrust out of their houses these good religious fathers against all right and law’. Nor did they go as far as another man, who told a royal servant, William Breyar, ‘thy master is a thief, for he pulls down all the churches in the country’. The response of the crowd around Breyar was to protest angrily, ‘it is not the king’s deed but the deed of Crumwell, and if we had him here we would crum him and crum him so that he was never so crummed’ (a play on words of Cromwell’s name), ‘and if thy master were here we would new crown him’! The Lincolnshire rebels declared that Cromwell, Richard Rich, Thomas Audley, Sir Christopher Hales (Master of the Rolls) and the ‘new bishops’ were ‘the devisers of all the false laws’ and ‘the doers of all mischief’. Aske similarly denounced certain ‘evil disposed persons, being of the king’s council’, while the Pontefract articles and other demands specifically identified Cromwell and the others as heretics and subverters of the laws. In fact, the rebels believed they ‘had not offended the King’, as their complaint was against ‘the gentlemen [who] caused the proclamations to be made in his name’. With no trace of irony, the rebels proclaimed themselves the king’s ‘true and faithful subjects’.19

  It was ostensibly a safe route. In 1525, Henry had sought to raise money to invade France and had asked his subjects for voluntary donations, which became known as the Amicable Grant. When his commissioners had met widespread resistance, Henry had made it known that he was appalled that his subjects had – without his knowledge – been imposed upon so unreasonably. He had shifted the blame to his chief councillor, Thomas Wolsey, who had publicly admitted that the enterprise was his own, and Henry had been able to play the role of the benevolent and just prince (in practice, Henry had had a central role in levying the tax).20

  Yet, in 1536, Henry took the rebellion personally. This time round, he did not take the easy way out of allowing the rebels to blame his counsellors and leave him in the clear. Instead, by volubly objecting to their attempts to dictate his choice of counsellors, chastising them for their presumption in finding fault with his choice and insisting on his right to appoint whom he wished, Henry neatly snookered himself. Had he forgotten the words of Erasmus? If a sixteenth-century tyrant was one who only listened to flatterers and didn’t remove evil counsellors, it looked as if Henry had appointed himself to this role. Erasmus, who died on 12 July 1536, was probably fortunate not to see the king on whom his hope had rested brought so low.

  The Post-Pardon Revolts

  Events in early 1537 have influenced history’s view of the rebellion and pardon, but two historians, Michael Bush and David Bownes, have argued that by examining the situation in December 1536 without the benefit of hindsight, one realizes that the pardon offered to the rebels would have been greatly humiliating for the king. Despite bluster and boasts about the vast army he would bring to bear on the rebels, no such large army was forthcoming for Henry: the rebels outnumbered the royal troops by a large margin (50,000 to 9,000). Failing a military option, Henry always intended that a pardon should be offered on the b
asis of a prior oath of submission to him, with the exception of a certain number of ringleaders (as had been the case in Lincolnshire), and without any concession to the rebel demands, conditions which Norfolk had, in the face of the rebels’ superior might and resolve, been forced to relinquish. Adhering to the terms agreed with the rebels would have meant holding a parliament that would probably have overturned many of the religious changes of the previous years. Bush and Bownes suggest ‘what is certain is that the Anglican Church would have returned to Roman Catholicism; the dissolution of the monasteries would not have occurred… most of what Thomas Cromwell stood for would have been rejected…’ This is not, however, what happened, and why it did not has much to do with the course of events in early 1537 and, above all, with Henry’s intention that once the government was in a position to do so, those who had humiliated Henry in the past would be made to pay.21

  At first glance, Henry’s actions immediately following the pardon appear quite curious. In late November, in a letter to Norfolk, Henry had described that ‘villain… Aske’ as ‘having neither wit nor experience… a common pedlar of the law’. Yet in mid-December, he wrote inviting the ‘trusty and well-beloved’ Aske to come to court secretly, claiming a great desire to speak with him and ‘to hear, of your mouth, the whole circumstances and beginning of that matter’. When Aske arrived, Henry ‘received him into his favour and gave unto him apparel and great rewards’, and soon after he left, Aske wrote to Darcy that the king had been a ‘gracious sovereign lord to me’ and extended ‘mercy from the heart’. Other rebel leaders had also been invited to join him at court, and when they returned home in January, all were confident of the king’s ‘liberal pardon’, and his intentions to hold a parliament and crown Queen Jane at York.22