by Linda Porter
It is true the commons for the most part of Yorkshire be up and today we hear there meet before York above 20,000 men, besides many who have gone to them in Lincolnshire. There is no doubt the commons of this shire and Lincolnshire receive messages from each other. They increase in every parish, the cross goes before them … We remain here according to your advice and indeed know not whither we could depart in surety. I, Darcy, have twice written to the King of the weakness of the castle but have got no answer, and without speedy succour we are in extreme danger, for Tuesday next, at the furthest, the commons will be here as they do affirm, not withstanding your proclamation was sent to York to them to be read. And whereas we hear that the commons of Lincolnshire are on the point of returning home on certain conditions … we think it right expedient that the like comfort should be sent hither.10
And to this gloomy prognosis was added in a postscript the information that ‘news has just come that Lord Latimer and Sir Christopher Danby be taken with the commons and be with them’. So it was known, a week before Latimer arrived at Pontefract, that he had gone over to the rebels, albeit unwillingly.
The letter was signed by the archbishop of York and the other lords waiting uneasily inside Pontefract, but its chief author was Thomas, Lord Darcy, constable of the castle. Darcy was an old soldier who had fallen out of favour with Henry VIII, or perhaps more accurately, with, Henry’s former chief minister, Wolsey. He had acquired considerable wealth from his lands but little royal patronage and there are indications that he found the continual obligation to defend England’s borders with Scotland irksome, a resentment shared by many northern noblemen. But he was also, like Lord Latimer and Robert Aske, a religious conservative. He did not want to die a heretic and though he never considered himself a traitor, he had talked of rebellion before 1536. Darcy had opposed the king’s divorce and was a supporter of Princess Mary’s claim to the throne. He and other gentlemen of his persuasion in northern England considered her still to be the true heir of Henry VIII, despite her loss of status. Yet it would be wrong to assume from this that the Pilgrimage of Grace was long planned, or that it was politically inspired and masterminded by a cabal of discontented nobles. The timing of the uprising and the involvement of such large numbers of the common people seems to have genuinely surprised Darcy. In London, it was thought that he protested too much, that he was always in league with Aske. Why else would he have given Pontefract up without a fight and joined the rebels?
The simple answer is that he had little choice. He had been unable to muster men, as the king commanded – they had all gone over to the rebels. Without sufficient manpower to defend it or a ready supply of munitions, Pontefract was merely a hiding place. Certainly no one else seems to have been keen to assume the mantle of leadership. The most senior figure in the castle was the archbishop of York, Edward Lee, but he was not the man to challenge Darcy for this unenviable role.
Lee was in a very difficult position. The second prelate of the realm was no Cromwellian reformer but he did not share the passion of the men of the north. Always careful to stay on the right side of Henry VIII, it was his decision to spend more time in his archbishopric than his predecessor Wolsey had ever done that meant he could not escape the Pilgrimage of Grace. Along with Darcy and his fellow detainees, Lee took the pilgrims’ oath at Pontefract after the surrender to Aske’s forces. There was little for him to do now but to await the outcome of events.
Once he had made the decision to support Robert Aske, Darcy turned all his experience of soldiering to the rebels’ advantage. In Sir Robert Constable, another Yorkshire gentleman sworn by the rebels, he now had someone with whom he could work closely and whom he trusted. The two had fought together twenty-five years earlier against the Moors in Spain, in the service of Ferdinand of Aragon. But they had not taken up arms for the Catholic King just as adventurers; their Christian faith had been central. Now that very faith was under threat in England. There can be no doubt that they subscribed to the articles later drawn up in the name of the Pilgrimage, which called for ‘the heretics, bishops and temporal, and their sect, to have condign punishment by fire … or else to try the quarrel with us and our partakers in battle’.11
Aware that the number of their supporters was growing all the time, but as yet uncertain of the precise tally, Darcy and Aske were confident of fielding an army of 20,000 to 30,000 men by the beginning of the last week of October 1536. Their aim was nothing less than to march on London, nobles, gentry and commons united in their determination to remove the evil counsellors around the king and to make Henry change his mind on the religious direction that had been set. This was, at root, an attempt to turn back the Reformation that had already begun. There were no threats against the person of Henry VIII himself, but belief in the sanctity of kingship, embodied in the coronation rite, had proved an ineffective last resort for four kings of England in the previous two hundred years. Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Richard III had all been removed by force from the throne and met miserable ends. Henry could not have taken much comfort in these precedents. Surprised and greatly angered by this huge uprising against him, he had no intention of leading from the front. That task he would leave to others.
The greatest burden of responsibility fell to Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, England’s premier aristocrat. It was Norfolk who confronted the rebel hosts at Doncaster, as they prepared to journey south. Here, on 27 October, he was met by a group representing the rebels that included Lord Latimer, commander of the Durham and Richmondshire force. The surroundings of this first series of exchanges between Latimer and Norfolk were inauspicious, to say the least. Latimer, however, was a straightforward man and clearly a troubled one, for all the military might displayed behind him. There must have been something in his demeanour that softened Norfolk, a man not given to idle sentimentality; later, he would speak up on Latimer’s behalf, against the hostility of both the king and Cromwell. But for now, the duke was merely thankful that he had avoided a battle he knew he could not win.
THOMAS HOWARD, duke of Norfolk, was a small man and his visage was far from heroic. In his portraits he looks more like a vinegary priest than a warrior noble. He had much experience as a soldier but that does not mean he was an especially good one, though he had been present at the great victory of Flodden and had harried the Scots in the brutal summer campaign of 1523. He had also passed two wearying years as lord lieutenant of Ireland, where he became so ill with dysentery that his health seems never to have fully recovered. Yet he was, as his enemies came to know to their cost, a difficult man to gauge. His prime motivation in all things seems to have been to maintain his own power and influence and, by extension, that of his family. He could be devious and hard-hearted but there was in him a strain of almost melancholic realism that predisposed him to eschew confrontation, or at least, to avoid it until he was sure he could emerge victorious. Perhaps this was the result of his years spent as a diplomat, in frequent, fruitless negotiations with the French, whom he seems rather to have favoured as England’s international ally. Norfolk knew, better than most, that much of sixteenth-century warfare was about endurance rather than bravery. One poet described him as ‘the flower of chivalry’, but Norfolk was well aware that chivalry meant mud and diarrhoea and lack of sleep. Undoubtedly, he was proud, though the Howards were not of the old aristocracy, and his second wife Elizabeth, a Stafford, looked down on their pretensions to nobility. Like most English lords, Norfolk had resented Wolsey, and did not mourn his fall. But then he watched as another low-born adviser, Thomas Cromwell, rose in Wolsey’s place. And of his monarch’s ruthlessness, he could have been in absolutely no doubt. Thomas More, Norfolk’s friend, went to the block for his conscience. The duke was not prepared to make such a sacrifice himself, nor did he attempt to defend his niece, Queen Anne. In fact, he presided at her trial. Such responsibilities went with his high office, as well as affording him an opportunity to emerge unscathed from the debacle of the Boleyn marriage. The duke knew w
hen to show restraint, however, and the earlier events of 1536 no doubt heightened a well-developed sense of caution. Besides, he knew that if he could avoid ‘an effusion of blood’, his own standing would be greatly improved. It has been said that he held the future of the Tudor dynasty in his hands in the autumn of 1536, and this is no exaggeration. In persuading the rebel armies to accept a truce and disband when he met them at Doncaster, he may well have saved Henry VIII’s throne.
On 27 October, in relentless autumn rain, Thomas Howard and the earl of Shrewsbury, the ailing commander of the king’s force in Nottingham, held two meetings with representatives of the pilgrims at Doncaster. The second of these meetings, on the bridge that spanned the river Don, was attended by Lords Darcy, Latimer and Lumley, as well as Sir Robert Constable. Robert Aske was not there on either occasion, but this does not mean that he had been sidelined. Indeed, it was probably his aim to continue to demonstrate that the pilgrims were led by men of birth and influence. They were, after all, articulating his demands, with the full force of the rebel armies in view. Shrewsbury had always been nervous and Norfolk saw very clearly that the best victory he could hope for would be a truce, leading to the disbanding of the rebel fighters. He put it very simply: ‘It was therefore impossible to give battle or to retreat, as we had no horse and they all the flower of the north.’12 He had assured the rebel leaders that their demands would be heard in London, that they and the Lincolnshire rebels would be pardoned, and that there would be a special sitting of parliament to discuss their grievances. Sir Robert Bowes, who commanded the Richmondshire contingent, and young Sir Ralph Ellerker, from the East Riding, were to accompany Norfolk back to the king, who would receive the rebels’ petition. In return for the duke’s assurance that matters would be handled honourably, the rebels agreed to disband and to make no further proclamations until Bowes and Ellerker returned.
Their confidence was utterly misplaced and their loss of momentum disastrous to their cause. Some of the rank and file sensed this; Aske did not. Norfolk had spent long days in the saddle, with nights of broken sleep at best. Part of him was too tired to think beyond the immediate necessity of maintaining the line he had sold to the rebels – be good subjects, avoid bloodshed and all will be well: ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote in exhausted desperation to the Privy Council, ‘help that his Highness cause not my lord of Suffolk to put any man to death unto my coming, nor openly to call the lord Darcy traitor.’ But the shrewd politician that he was probably calculated that the worst of the danger was past.
WHAT, THEN, of the rebels? Norfolk’s reticence about accusing Darcy publicly was only a ploy. In the same letter he had denounced the old lord in unequivocal terms: ‘Fie, fie upon the Lord Darcy, the most arrant traitor that ever was living.’ Darcy himself had gone back to his home in south Yorkshire, where he awaited the outcome of Bowes and Ellerker’s mission to London, and continued to consult with Robert Aske. Lord Latimer’s whereabouts during early November 1536 are unknown, but it seems probable that he returned home for at least a time. Other rebel leaders did the same. If so, it was a brief interlude at Snape with his family, coloured by the knowledge that there was still resentment and unrest among the commons and anxiety about how his own part in the uprising would be viewed by the king.
Latimer’s position was unenviable. Compelled to act as spokesman and negotiator for the rebels, he was highly visible. Both sides were suspicious of him all along. From the perspective of Henry VIII and men like Cromwell, he was unreliable. For the rebels, there was always unease that those they had coerced were not fully on their side, despite having taken the oath. Could a man like Latimer be trusted to relay their demands accurately and effectively, to represent them wholeheartedly, without coming to some private arrangement that would save his skin? Personally, Latimer identified with Aske’s summation of the ills that beset the realm and what needed to be done to rectify them. Yet he knew the likely consequences of opposing royal authority. Caught in the middle of this great crisis, he could not yet see his way to a comfortable conclusion.
Neither could the king and his advisers, so they decided to play for time. In early November a general pardon was issued ‘to the commons dwelling north of Doncaster, who have lately committed open rebellion, tending to the ruin of the country and the advancement of our ancient enemies, the Scots’ (a pointed reminder of the vulnerability of the north of England and the international implications of the Pilgrimage). Initially excluded from this pardon was Robert Aske himself, and nine other men. Nothing was said about the nobles involved in the rebellion. The proclamation went on to say that the duke of Norfolk was appointed as lieutenant-general and, as such, would receive the rebels’ submission. And it ended on a far from conciliatory note with the threat that further insurrection would be met by the king in person, ‘with a main force and army to repress their malice to their utter confusion’.13 The Privy Council, however, were subsequently able to persuade the reluctant king that the pardon should be without exemptions.
Bowes and Ellerker were gone for almost three weeks. They returned to Yorkshire with only verbal assurances from the king and, in Henry VIII’s own words to the duke of Suffolk, ‘no certain answer to the petitions of the Northern Men’. In his instructions to the two representatives of the pilgrims, Henry had characterized the articles presented to Norfolk in Doncaster as ‘so general, dark and obscure as to be difficult to answer’. This was mere procrastination, mingled with righteous indignation, for Bowes and Ellerker were also to make it clear that ‘his Highness taketh it marvellously unkindly that they being his subjects and having long experience of his clemency and his readiness to hear the petitions of all and redress grievances, would attempt a rebellion rather than sue to him’.14
These delaying tactics caused divisions among the leaders of the Pilgrimage and in the third week of November they held a general council in York, at which Latimer was present, to decide the way forward. The mood of the York meeting became more angry as Sir Robert Constable revealed the continued involvement of Cromwell and his duplicity in trying to split the leadership. The resolutions from this meeting, which were to form the basis of the agenda for a much larger gathering at Pontefract in early December, were sent to the duke of Norfolk. The king chose to respond himself, on 27 November, in a letter full of venom and threat, which shows how determined he was to maintain his authority, even in the face of renewed action. It also reveals his exasperation with the attitude of the nobility who had been caught up in the Pilgrimage of Grace and his hatred for Robert Aske. He told Ellerker and Bowes: ‘We have read the letters addressed by you and others from York to the duke of Norfolk, and greatly marvel at the ingratitude shown to us in this insurrection, especially by men of nobility and worship, and the great slackness of you twain that were messengers from the whole company of that assembly to us, especially that you have not made us a full answer of your instructions.’ There was not much comfort here for men like Latimer, or, indeed, the archbishop of York. But worse was to come:
We are much surprised that, as the commons be now down, and perhaps not so ready to rise again as some pretend [this was wishful thinking in London] the nobles and you, the gentlemen, should have signed such a letter to the duke of Norfolk, by which it seems they make themselves a party with the commons … And now the intent of your pilgrimage with the devotion of the pilgrims may appear, for who can reckon that foundation good which is contrary to God’s commandment, or the executors to be good men which, contrary to their allegiance, presume, with force, to order their prince?
He was particularly incensed that the rebels should question his good faith and the safe-conduct offered. Even the Scots did not behave this way. The rebels’ reaction was a form of insanity. ‘What madness has seized them,’ he demanded, ‘not to see that a small continuance of this will destroy themselves and utterly devast those parts which they inhabit.’
But Henry’s full fury was reserved for the rebels’ captain:
We think it no l
ittle shame to all you that have been accounted noble to suffer such a villain as Aske, having neither wit nor experience, to subscribe the letters sent to the duke of Norfolk before you all as if he were your ruler. Where is your nobility become to suffer such a villain to be privy to any of your affairs, who was never esteemed in any of our courts but as a common pedlar in the law? We and all the nobles here consider your honour greatly touched by the same. It is only his filed tongue and false surmises that have brought him in this unfitting estimation among you.15
The minds of the pilgrim leaders were focused on the discussions at the forthcoming Pontefract meeting and there does not seem to have been much immediate reaction to the king’s diatribe, except from Ellerker and Bowes themselves. Chagrined or frightened, both were turned on a path away from the colleagues they had been deputed to represent.
THE ARTICLES drawn up at Pontefract on 2 December, after considerable discussion, represent the most complete rejection of his policies that the king had encountered during his reign. He had been nearly thirty years on the throne, surviving war with France and Scotland, growing economic problems, occasional local uprisings and dissident nobles. Viewed as a schismatic in Europe, in England his authority had grown immeasurably following the split from Rome. But he was not merely driven by the power that came with the Act of Supremacy, or the undoubted attraction of filling his coffers with the proceeds of the sale of Church lands, but a belief, shared with some of his closest political advisers, that his Church needed to be reformed. He was no Lutheran, but he looked for an improvement in the spiritual health of his country. His opponents in the north of England were similarly concerned about spiritual wellbeing, while also being anxious about land enclosures and government interference. They felt excluded and betrayed. Aske might be ‘a common pedlar of the law’ but he had given them voice. His eloquence can be seen in the Pontefract articles; he still carried most of the northern gentlemen and clergy with him.