The king, the fount of justice, was obliged to speak. ‘We do perceive’, the king said to his council, ‘that there is great things objected and laid to my lord admiral mine uncle – and they tend to treason – and we perceive that you require but justice to be done. We think it reasonable, and we will well that you proceed according to your request.’ On the following day, 25 February, a bill of attainder for treason was sent to parliament. One of the articles against Seymour charged him to have attempted ‘to get into your hands the government of the king’s majesty, to the great danger of his highness’ person, and the subversion of the state of the realm’.
On 20 March he was taken to Tower Hill, where he was beheaded. The protector had signed the death warrant, with a shaking hand, but had taken no part in the parliamentary proceedings against his younger brother. It has been surmised that some among the council were happy to pit brother against brother, hoping thereby to accomplish the ruin of both of them. Sure enough some denounced Somerset for fratricide. A ‘godly and honourable’ woman reproached him with the words, ‘Where is thy brother? Lo, his blood crieth against thee unto God from the ground.’ He was condemned as ‘a blood-sucker and a ravenous wolf’ and it was predicted that ‘the fall of the one brother, would be the overthrow of the other’.
19
The barns of Crediton
In the first years of the young king’s reign social, as well as religious, divisions became apparent. ‘In times past,’ Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, said in a sermon, ‘men were full of compassion; but now there is no pity; for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold; he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock – I cannot tell what to call it – and then perish for hunger.’ The coinage had been debased by the authorities, thus unleashing further waves of inflation on a country already impoverished. In the seven years between 1540 and 1547 prices rose by 46 per cent; in 1549 they had risen by another 11 per cent. The trend of an ever-growing population meant that the plight of the poor, and of the agricultural labourer, increased. Food was dear; wages were low. It has become known as the ‘price revolution’, accompanied by dearth and distress on a national scale. In addition the administration itself could scarcely pay its debts.
Latimer knew where most of the blame might be laid. ‘You landlords,’ he said, ‘you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you have for your possessions too much . . . thus is caused such dearth that poor men which live of their labour cannot with the sweat of their faces have a living.’ The principal complaint of the people was raised against the system of enclosure, a term that in fact covered a multitude of practices, which embodied a wholly different concept of land use. One of these movements was ‘engrossing’ whereby many smallholdings were concentrated in the hands of one person; a second amounted to the enclosure of previous common grounds by a landlord who claimed ownership; a third was the conversion of arable into pasture land. So it was that Latimer intoned against ‘these graziers, enclosers, rent-raisers . . . whereas have been a great many house-holders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog’. It has been suggested that the bulk of enclosures actually took place at an earlier date, but the fast rise in prices and the fall in wages created a climate in which all economic woes were magnified.
Hugh Latimer also addressed the problem of debasement. ‘We now have a pretty little shilling [12d.],’ he said, ‘the last day, I had put it away almost for a groat [4d.].’ A shilling was in other words worth only a third of its previous value. John Heywood phrased it differently:
These testons look red: how like you the same?
’Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame.
The copper, in other words, was showing through the thin surface application of silver. When money is not taken seriously, the economy begins to crumble. A reformer, John Hooper, wrote to William Cecil, even then beginning his career at court, that ‘the prices of things be here as I tell you, the number of people be great; their little cottages and poor livings decay daily; except God by sickness take them out of the world, they must needs lack. You know what a grievous extreme, yea, in a manner unruly evil hunger is.’
In the summer of 1549 a number of riots were specifically aimed at enclosures, in which the irate crowd pulled down the hedges that had been planted to separate the land. The hedge itself became a symbol of all the ills assailing the people, among them the encroachment upon waste and common land as well as the loss of tenants’ rights against landlords who persistently raised their rents. Custom was giving way to contract and competition. In response the government of the protector sent out a number of commissioners to investigate why it was that ‘many have been driven to extreme poverty and compelled to leave the places where they were born’; an inquiry would be instituted to ensure that the relevant statutes, from the two previous reigns, were still being obeyed.
It was a measure of the protector’s concern that the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ‘disparked’ or made open and that the common right to land was restored in many parishes. The imperial ambassador observed to his court that ‘I have heard in deep secret that the protector declared to the Council, as his opinion, that the peasants’ demands were fair and just; for the poor people who had no land to graze their cattle ought to retain the commons and the lands that had always been public property, and the nobles and rich ought not to seize and add them to their parks and possessions’. A further thought may have occurred to him. If the new faith did not help to promote social justice and to uphold the rights of the poor, surely it had failed in some of its first duties?
Yet dissent and discontent continued. In the previous reign ‘all things were too strait,’ Sir William Paget told Somerset at the end of 1548, but ‘now they are too loose’. In the old days ‘was it dangerous to do or speak though the meaning were not evil; and now every man hath liberty to do and speak at liberty without danger’. In the reign of a child king, there was disorder.
General discontent was rising. ‘All things in manner going backward and unfortunate,’ Paget also wrote, ‘and every man almost out of heart and courage, and our lacks so well known as our enemies despise us and our friends pity us.’ In the spring of 1549 rumours were circulating through the kingdom, and a proclamation was issued against ‘lewd, idle, seditious and disordered persons . . . posting from place to place . . . to stir up rumours or raise up tales’.
It was reported that the king was dead. ‘In the mean season,’ Edward wrote in his journal, ‘because there was a rumour that I was dead, I passed through London.’ It was said that the war in Scotland was a complete failure. Indeed it had not prospered. It was rumoured that a charge would be levied for weddings, christenings and funerals. It was whispered that the protector and the council were corrupt. The bad harvest of 1549 exacerbated these protests. As a precaution all wrestling matches were forbidden, and all plays or interludes were suspended; it was unwise to allow any large congregation of people. The poor were being accused of sedition, but the reason for discontent might be found elsewhere. Robert Crowley, in a volume entitled The Way to Wealth, accused ‘the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I cannot tell who’ for provoking popular revolt.
In May a rebellion was fostered in Wiltshire, but the forces of a local magnate scattered or slew the protesters. In Oxfordshire the rebels were defeated by an army of 1,500 men led by Lord Gray; some were taken and hanged, befitting a state of war, while others ran back to their homes. Similar abortive risings took place in Sussex and Hampshire, Kent and Gloucestershire, Suffolk and Essex, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire and Worcestershire. Something was gravely amiss in the entire kingdom, even if these pockets of resistance were quickly stifled.
Yet nothing could withstand the force of popular protest that emerged in the early days of June. It has become known as the Western Rising or the Prayer Book Rebellion, attesting to the fact that religious and soc
ial ills were not easily to be distinguished. At the beginning of 1549 the second session of Edward’s parliament had approved the publication of the Book of Common Prayer. It was authorized as part of the Act of Uniformity ‘for the uniformity of service and administration of the sacraments throughout the realm’; it was one of the most important and permanent of parliamentary Acts, effectively prescribing the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for future generations.
The Act was largely the work of Thomas Cranmer in consultation with the bishops, and the freedom of debate among the senior clergy in the House of Lords meant that it did not pass without strenuous opposition. One contemporary wrote that there was ‘great sticking touching the blessed body and blood of Jesus Christ. I trust they will conclude well in it, by the help of the Holy Ghost.’ The Holy Ghost did not intervene and, although the Act was passed, eight out of the eighteen bishops present voted against it.
Cranmer insisted in the course of the great debate that ‘our faith is not to believe Him to be in the bread and wine, but that He is in heaven’. He denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, therefore, and insisted that Christ had only a spiritual presence determined by the faith of the recipient. Neither the Bible nor the holy fathers ever mention the doctrine; Cranmer believed it to be the invention of the Antichrist and his heir, Pope Gregory VII, in whose reign at the end of the eleventh century it had been introduced. Yet the more conservative bishops denounced this in turn as heresy. One reformer, Peter Martyr, wrote at the time that ‘there is so much contention about the Eucharist that every corner is full of it; every day the question is discussed among the Lords, with such disputing of bishops as was never heard; the commons thronging the lords’ galleries to hear the arguments’. These were days when the principles of religion were debated with the same eagerness as the tenets of politics and economics are now discussed.
The Book of Common Prayer, in revised form, is still in use. It is a breviary, a missal and a ritual liturgy. In time it lent strength and unity to the English Church but, like all great agents of revolution, it was fiercely controversial at the moment of its publication. It was a book of worship, written in solemn and subtle English, of which we may take one example. In the medieval marriage service the wife had pledged to be ‘bonner and buxom in bed and in board’. This has the nice alliteration of an older language. Now both partners were asked to ‘love and to cherish’ ‘for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health’.
Another fundamental alteration became evident in the newly anglicized text. ‘Wherefore O Lord and heavenly Father, according to the institution of Thy dearly beloved Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, we Thy humble servants, do celebrate and make here before Thy divine Majesty with these Thy holy gifts the memorial which Thy Son wished us to make: having in remembrance His blessed passion, mighty resurrection and glorious ascension.’ What had previously been deemed a ‘holy sacrifice’ was now a ‘memorial’. The sacrifice of Christ upon the cross was remembered but not repeated or reproduced.
As a result all the more arcane rites of the Mass were removed. There was to be no more ‘shifting of the book from one place to another; laying down and licking of the chalice . . . holding up his fingers, hands, or thumbs joined towards his temples; breathing upon the bread or chalice’; no more secret whisperings and sudden turnings of the body. The theatre of piety was being deconstructed. The host and the chalice were not to be elevated at the climax of the drama; the adoration of the sacrament was curtailed as a symptom of idolatry. There were to be no more intimations of sacrifice and the minister, no longer called priest, was ordered simply to place the bread and wine upon the altar. The Mass was therefore stripped of its mystery.
In the old service the priest had at the moment of the elevation of the host turned symbolically to the east as the site of Golgotha, with his back turned towards the congregation as if he were communing with sacred rites; it was from the east that Christ would come on the Day of Judgment. It was now stipulated that the minister should stand at the north side of the communion table and face the people. The rich vestments of the past were forbidden, and he could don only a white surplice. The traditional calendar of the saints’ days was also omitted from the Prayer Book as arrant superstition.
Most importantly, however, the sacred service would now be performed in English rather than in Latin. One layman repeated what would become a familiar complaint that the English language could not comprehend the mystery of the Mass; it was better for it to be rendered in a language that the congregation did not understand. It was thereby filled with magic, like the ritual pronunciation of a spell. The old service had been chanted and memorized for ten centuries. The words of the hymns and psalms, the very order of the Mass itself, were part of folk memory. Now, in one parliamentary Act, they were all swept away. All these changes represented the decisive rupture with the world of medieval Catholicism.
Any minister who refused to use the new book would be imprisoned for six months and deprived of his position; on any third offence he would be consigned to life imprisonment. This was indeed an Act for ‘uniformity’. Yet if Somerset and Cranmer therefore hoped to stifle dissent, they were soon disabused. A storm of protest arose in the western counties at this break with traditional practice. The new prayer book and service were to be introduced on Whit Sunday 9 June 1549. So they were in the parish of Sampford Courtenay in Devon, where they were greeted with dismay. On the following day the parishioners approached their priest, and asked him what service he intended to use, the new or the old. The new one, he told them. But they informed him that they would have nothing but ‘the old and ancient religion’.
The priest himself was not unwilling to accede to their request. He went with them to the church, where he put on his traditional vestments and proceeded to say the Mass, in Latin, with all the now forbidden rites. The news of this development spread from Sampford Courtenay to all parts of Devon and Cornwall. The bells were rung to spread the good news. It was demanded that the old sacrament be ‘hung over the altar and worshipped and those who would not consent thereto, to die like heretics’. It was added that ‘we will not have the new service, nor the Bible, in English’. This marked the beginning of the Prayer Book Rebellion. The religious discontent turned into social discontent, exacerbated by the general climate of economic hardship. The world was being turned upside down:
When wrens wear woodknives, cranes for to kill
And sparrows build churches on a green hill
And cats unto mice do swear obedience . . .
The rebellion was perhaps only to be expected; one reformer had told a continental colleague that ‘a great part of the country is popish’. Another reformer, Martin Bucer, wrote to his home town of Strasburg that ‘things are for the most part carried on by means of ordinances, which the majority obey very grudgingly’. This was indeed a major cause of the rebellion; the changes were imposed on the people by parliament in London. At a slightly later date Bucer wrote that ‘of those devoted to the service of religion only a small number have as yet addicted themselves entirely to the kingdom of Christ’.
When a local gentleman tried to quell the uprising at Sampford Courtenay and was hacked to death on the steps of the parish church, his body was buried in the alignment of north to south; this testified to the fact that he was considered to be a heretic. The uprising, now touched with blood, soon spread. An historian of Exeter, John Hooker, wrote at the time that the news ‘as a cloud carried with a violent wind and as a thunder clap sounding at one instant through the whole country . . . they clapped their hands for joy and agreed in one mind to have the same in every of their several parishes’. The rebels from Devon were joined with those from Cornwall, and the combined force captured Crediton; it was retaken by loyalist troops but only at the expense of burning all the barns in which the rebels had been hiding. ‘The barns of Crediton!’ became a popular war cry.
A story had just come out of Clyst St Mary, a village 3 miles
east of Exeter. Walter Raleigh, the father of the famous mariner, was riding towards the town when he observed an old woman on her way to Mass praying with a set of rosary beads in her hand. He stopped to rebuke her, ‘saying further that there was a punishment by the law appointed against her’. The woman hurried on to the church where she denounced the gentleman for his ‘very hard and unseemly speeches concerning religion’. She also told her fellow parishioners that he had made the threat that ‘except she would leave her beads and give over holy bread and water the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil therein’. This was a general and impolitic menace to the whole community; Raleigh was found and beaten, while a local mill was burned down. The events became part of the rebellion itself.
At the beginning of July 2,000 rebels marched in procession towards Exeter; they were guided by priests, robed and chanting, and at their head was the sacred pyx, or jewelled container, holding the Blessed Sacrament. They had come to besiege the town as an emblem of detestable heresy. The townsmen of Exeter resisted the siege with valour, despite the restrictions of food and water; one of them said that ‘he would eat one arm and fight with the other before he would agree to a surrender’.
The protesters had drawn up a set of articles in which it was stated that ‘we will have the holy decrees of our forefathers observed, kept and performed and the sacrament restored to its ancient honour’. They denounced the Book of Common Prayer itself as ‘a Christmas play’ or ‘a Christmas game’; this observation came from the fact that at the time of receiving communion the men and women were supposed to form separate groups. This was uncannily similar to the first movement of a festive dance, and so invited ridicule.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 24