The process, however, was not always a swift or quiet one. When the visitors determined that the rood loft in the priory of St Nicholas in Exeter should be pulled down, a crowd of angry women entered the church to seize the workman ‘and hurled stones at him, insomuch that for his safety he was driven to take to the tower for refuge’. Yet they pursued him so eagerly that he was forced to leap out of a window and ‘very hardly he escaped the breaking of his neck, but yet he brake one of his ribs’.
At the end of September the monks of Hexham in Northumberland also resisted the encroachments. When the commissioners came into the town they saw ‘many people assembled with bills, halberds and other defenceable weapons, ready standing in the street, like men ready to defend a town of war’. As the commissioners rode towards the monastery the common bell of the town and the great bell of the monastery were rung; the doors were shut against them and several monks were gathered on the roof and steeple with swords, bows and arrows. ‘We be twenty brethren in this house,’ one canon shouted, ‘and we shall die all before you shall have the house!’
They also had another weapon besides swords and bows. The archbishop of York had begged the king to spare the monks of Hexham and had indeed received a grant to that effect under the Great Seal. When the commissioners saw this grant, they withdrew. On the following day the monks came out of their house, two by two, and with their weapons joined the people of Hexham in ‘a place called the green’. From there they watched until the commissioners ‘were past out of sight of the monastery’. Yet they were punished at a later date. The king mentioned Hexham by name in a letter to the duke of Norfolk in which he states that the monks ‘are to be tied up [executed] without further delay or ceremony’.
Popular anger or frustration was further created by the publication of certain ‘injunctions’. These were issued as a result of the rulings of the Ten Articles and, among other matters, forbade the mention of purgatory and abolished many saints’ days that had hitherto been celebrated as holidays. In this year Thomas Cromwell also ordered the destruction of the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. It was another attack upon the ‘superstitions’ maintained and exploited by the monks. To many people, and perhaps especially to the citizens of London, these were matters of indifference. But the more orthodox, and the more devout, were angry. Their resentment soon turned to open rebellion.
9
The great revolt
By the spring and summer of 1536 rumours and whispers were circulating through the kingdom. A priest from Penrith in Cumberland had travelled as far south as Tewkesbury, where he said in an alehouse that ‘we be kept bare and smit under, yet we shall rise once again, and 40,000 will rise upon a day’. He may have been in his cups but the people of the north, in particular, were aggrieved at the dissolution of the smaller monasteries. They had been providing food and comfort, in somewhat bleak circumstances, for many generations.
An Essex priest went with a labourer, by the name of Lambeles Redoon, to gather the sheaves of corn. ‘There shall be business in the north,’ the priest said before adding that he, and 10,000 others, would flock there.
‘Little said,’ the labourer wisely replied, ‘is soon amended.’
‘Remember you not what I said unto you right now, care you not for that, for before Easter comes, the king shall not reign long.’
Rumours abounded that all the jewels and vessels of the parish churches were to be removed and replaced by tin or brass. The sack of the shrines lent a certain credit to the reports. It was whispered that parish churches were to be situated at least five miles apart, and that any in closer proximity were to be pulled down. It was said that all christenings, burials and marriages were to be taxed and that no poor man was to be allowed to eat white bread or goose without paying tribute to the king. Edward Brocke, ‘an aged wretched person’, had said that there would be no end to bad weather while the king still reigned.
The fall of Anne Boleyn was believed to have been prophesied by Merlin. Other signs and portents were scrutinized. The word passed among the monasteries that ‘the decorate rose shall be slain in his mother’s belly’, which was said to mean that Henry would be killed by the priests since the Church he oppressed was his mother. The language of prophecy was the language of the people pitched against the language of royal proclamations.
Intimations of revolt emerged in the summer. When a priest in Windsor had preached rebellion, he was hanged on the spot. When fifty or sixty men and women in Taunton rose up in riot, twelve were sentenced to death and dispatched in different places for their executions to act as a warning. No priest or friar, between the age of sixteen and sixty, was permitted to carry any weapon save for his meat knife.
The first large revolt erupted at the beginning of October 1536, after three groups of royal councillors had descended upon Lincolnshire with a variety of purposes; one was set upon the suppression of the smaller monasteries, while the two others were concerned with gathering taxes and interrogating the clergy. This interference from London was considered to be too grievous to bear. In the market town of Louth a procession had gathered behind three silver crosses when a singing-man, Thomas Foster, cried out ‘Masters, step forth and let us follow the crosses this day: God knows whether ever we shall follow them again.’ The fear was of confiscation, and that evening a group of armed villagers arrived at the parish church in order to guard its treasures.
The news of these ‘rufflings’ in Louth soon spread, and bands of armed men under the leadership of one who called himself Captain Cobbler began to ride through the county to impede or stop the work of the royal commissioners; the common bells of the various parishes were rung in order to raise the people. The rebels were demanding that the king ‘must take no more money of the commons during his life and suppress no more abbeys’; they also wanted Thomas Cromwell and various ‘heretic’ bishops to be surrendered to them for condign punishment. The vicar of Louth added that the people were dismayed at ‘the putting down of holy days . . . and putting down of monasteries’ as well as ‘the new erroneous opinions touching Our Lady and purgatory’. Religion was at the heart of their protest.
They co-opted the support and leadership of the ‘gentlemen’, willing or unwilling, so that their revolt could have a more legitimate air. Yet when the chancellor of Lincoln was pulled from his horse and murdered by a mob, with the priests calling out ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, the affair became much more serious. The signal came for a general arming of the people, and beacons were lit along the south shore of the Humber. The people of Yorkshire saw the fires and understood the message. A large army of 10,000 men, made up of bands from different parts of Lincolnshire, met at Hambleton Hill. They gathered strength, and it was reported that 20,000 of them were advancing upon Lincoln itself.
The court had of course been informed of these events, and Henry called upon the duke of Norfolk to lead a force against the rebels. Such was his uncertainty that he brought his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, to Whitehall, and ordered the Tower of London to be reinforced. It was possible that the whole country might rise against him. Had he miscalculated the effects of his religious policy? Stephen Gardiner, then bishop of Winchester, recalled at a later date that ‘when the tumult was in the north, in the time of King Henry VIII, I am sure the king was determined to have given over the supremacy again to the pope, but the hour was not then come’. Various reports now reached Cromwell and the king. The apprentices were leaving their masters. The towns were defenceless. The tenants were rising against their lords. There were 40,000 men on the march. The king gathered a group of fifteen councillors around him.
When the rebels arrived in Lincoln, the gentlemen were lodged in the cathedral close; the chapter-house became their meeting place. By now the king’s men had mustered many horsemen, and royal forces had gathered at Nottingham, Huntingdon and Stamford. The rebels were also intent upon battle and demanded that the gentlemen should lead them forward. It would mark the beginning of a civil wa
r, a religious war that might destroy the country. It was reported that ‘all the gentlemen and honest yeomen of the county were weary of this matter, and sorry for it, but durst not disclose their opinion to the commons for fear of their lives’. They were in a sense now being held hostage by the ‘churls’.
They sent a message to the king seeking pardon, and then walked from the cathedral to the fields beyond the town where the commons were gathered; they told them that they would not go forward with them but would wait for the king’s reply. The news bewildered the rebels, who now began to fear that all was in crisis. A large party of them slipped back to their villages, and it was reported that half of their number left Lincoln. A royal herald now arrived at the town, demanding surrender, and in the face of the king’s power the insurgents dispersed. In answer to a petition from the commons Henry had sent a defiant message. ‘How presumptuous then are you, the rude commons of one shire,’ he wrote with more vehemence than tact, ‘and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm . . . to find fault with your Prince?’ Clemency was offered to the largest number of them, and only a few local leaders were hanged. The abbots of Kirkstead and of Barlings were also executed for their part in fomenting the troubles. The rebellion had lasted a fortnight.
But if the rebellion in Lincolnshire was over, it was merely a prelude to a much larger and more dangerous movement elsewhere. ‘This matter hangeth yet like a fever,’ an official wrote to Cromwell ‘one day good, one day bad.’ The men of Yorkshire had seen the beacons beside the Humber and eagerly took up the standard of revolt. If they had not risen in Lincolnshire, a royal commissioner told Cromwell later, they would not have risen in the north. The revolt in the East Riding was essentially a northern drift of the original rebellion, but it took a more organized form. The monasteries had played an important part in the life of Yorkshire, and the suppression of the smaller of them had been widely denounced.
The rebellion under the nominal leadership of Robert Aske, a gentleman, was begun by the bells of Beverley; a proclamation was made to the effect that all should swear an oath to maintain God, the king, the commons and the holy Church. The bishops and the nobles were of course omitted, because it was widely believed that their ‘wicked counsels’ had misled the sovereign. The king, and the common people, and the Church, were deemed to be the bedrock of England. In any case nothing could touch Henry adversely; that would be treason.
It was known as ‘the Pilgrimage of Grace’. Its token was a badge or banner depicting the five wounds of Christ, the holy wounds inflicted at the time of the crucifixion. It is perhaps sufficient indication that the rebels were in large part engaged in a religious protest. Their demands included the return of the ‘old faith’ and the restoration of the monasteries; another condition, interestingly enough, was that ‘the Lady Mary may be made legitimate and the former statute [of her illegitimacy] therein annulled’. So Mary was seen as the unofficial representative of the orthodox Catholic cause.
When the bells rang backwards at Beverley the people flocked into the fields and under Aske’s direction they agreed to meet fully armed at West Wood Green; the whole county was stirred and Aske published a declaration obliging ‘every man to be true to the king’s issue, and the noble blood, and preserve the Church of God from spoiling’. Lord Darcy, the king’s steward in Yorkshire, was informed of certain ‘light heads’ stirring up rebellion in Northumberland, Dent, Sedbergh and Wensleydale; he rode at once to Pontefract Castle and dispatched his son to the court at Whitehall. The rebellions in the North Riding and County Durham were guided by Captain Poverty, a principle rather than a person; it seems likely that the men of these areas, as well as Cumberland and Westmorland, were animated by agrarian and economic concerns as much as matters of religion. In Cumberland the four ‘captains’ – Faith, Poverty, Pity and Charity – marched in solemn procession around the church at Burgh before hearing Mass there.
Robert Aske’s pilgrims were by the middle of October intent upon marching to York. Others had been drawn off to besiege Hull, a trade rival to Beverley, which quickly fell without a fight. Darcy wrote to the king asking for money and weapons to save the king’s treasure in York, where the citizens were ‘lightly disposed’. On 15 October Aske led 20,000 men to the gates of the city and issued a proclamation in which he stated that ‘evil disposed persons’ about the king had been responsible for innovations ‘contrary to the faith of God’; they also intended to ‘spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’. This was a reference to the suppression of the smaller monasteries and to fears about the parish churches; but it also bears some relation to the burden of taxation levied on the people.
The lord mayor of York opened the gates, and Aske entered with his men; the great requirement was order, and it was decreed that the rebels or ‘pilgrims’ should pay twopence for any meal they consumed. Aske brought with him a petition to be sent to the king. This repeated all the earlier complaints and discontents, of which ‘the suppression of so many religious houses’ came first. It also denounced Thomas Cromwell and many bishops ‘who have subverted the faith of Christ’. On the door of York Minster Aske set up an order for ‘the religious persons to enter into their houses again’. Many small monasteries had been established in and around the city. The people escorted the monks by torchlight back to their old homes with much cheering and rejoicing. Wherever they were restored ‘though it were never so late they sang matins the same night’.
The Yorkshire rebels had been sadly disappointed by the failure of the Lincolnshire men, but they were now acting in a far more disciplined and determined manner. They had also gathered the willing or unwilling support of the gentry of the county, to whom they administered an oath stating that ‘you shall not enter into this our pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth but only for the love you bear unto Almighty God his faith and to the Holy Church militant and the maintenance thereof, to the preservation of the king’s person and his issue, to the purifying of the nobility, and to expel all villein blood and evil counsellors’. The dispersal of all those of ‘villein blood’ was another sign of anxiety; it was believed that the traditional social order, and the respect for social degree, were being fatally undermined. The gentry and commons alike were deeply conservative. Aske and his followers seem to have genuinely believed that they were acting on behalf of the king, and that he would in the end thank them for their endeavours.
Aske now marched to Pontefract Castle with only 300 men. He sent in a letter to the lords gathered there that they must surrender or be threatened with an assault; he knew well enough that thousands of his men were not far behind. Darcy decided to treat with him and invited Aske to enter the state chamber where he might debate the grievances of the pilgrims with the archbishop of York and others. Aske stood in front of these great lords and explained to them that ‘first, the lords spiritual had not done their duty’. Two days later Darcy surrendered the castle. It was believed by Henry, and by others, that he had failed in his responsibilities.
The revolt had already spread beyond the bounds of Yorkshire into Cumberland and Westmorland, Durham and Northumberland; or rather it would be more exact to say that existing turmoil and suspicion were exacerbated by the events in the East Riding. Berwick and Newcastle held out for the king, as did the royal castles at Skipton and Scarborough. There was no general campaign, and only a few skirmishes; a large number of people had been mobilized with uncertain consequences.
A royal herald had arrived at Pontefract Castle and was taken to Robert Aske; the herald described him as ‘keeping his port and countenance as though he had been a great prince’. The king’s proclamation was given to him, but it seems to have contained nothing but high words. Then the report came that a royal army, under the earl of Shrewsbury, had gathered just 12 miles south of Doncaster; the soldiers were 25 miles from Pontefract Castle. It was agreed that Aske and his men should move down to the Don and oppose their crossing. It was also proposed that the commons should bear with them into a
ny battle the sacred banner of St Cuthbert, the patron saint of the north. Other bands of armed men now joined Aske in Pontefract and the whole area was in arms.
As the rebels approached Doncaster, the royal herald arrived with a message from the earl of Shrewsbury. He said that the blood of a civil war must be averted, and suggested that ‘four of the discreetest men of the north parts’ should come to Doncaster and explain to the lords assembled there the reasons for their rising. There ensued much debate between Aske and his colleagues. If they failed in battle with the king’s men, their cause would be lost irrevocably. If they won the fight a religious war would ensue, fought largely in the south. Yet this was their best opportunity. The royal army was small and might easily be defeated, leaving the road open to London. The rebels did not know that the king’s men were in disarray and were not sure of the strength or the position of their enemy. But Aske was no Napoleon or Cromwell; he hesitated, and chose the safer option. The lords and the rebels would meet in a chosen place.
The men of Yorkshire and Durham marched towards Doncaster, the priests and monks moving along the lines with words and prayers of encouragement; they proceeded behind the banner of Cuthbert and sang a marching song:
God that rights all
Redress now shall
And what is thrall
Again make free . . .
They chose four delegates, who proceeded to the royal camp, where Shrewsbury had been joined by the duke of Norfolk and other grandees. The delegates had memorized their articles of complaint, about maintaining the old faith and preserving the ancient liberties of the Church, which Norfolk wrote down. It was then agreed that a conference of approximately thirty on each side would meet on Doncaster bridge, where they would discuss all of these matters. The details of their debate are not known, but it is possible that Norfolk intimated that he took their part in religious matters; he was known to be orthodox in his attachment to the old faith.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 13