The Road Not Taken Read online

  It has been the almost universal consensus of historians that the Cade rebellion was overwhelmingly political in nature, lacking in socio-economic content, and that the battles fought in London and Kent represented conflict within the regime rather than about the regime. The orthodox view, then, is that the 1450 revolt was political in motivation, triggered by resentment at corruption and the failure of the campaigns in France, that Cade was more politically conscious than Tyler, and that this manifested itself in a coherent, written programme for moderate political change.114 However, there are two other competing theories in the field, one concerning the politics of conspiracy, the other a revisionist view of 1450, stressing its social and economic roots. The conspiracy theory – that Jack Cade was, as it were, a prodromos or John the Baptist to the Wars of Roses – receives its classical expression in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part Two, where Cade is portrayed as a political agent of the Duke of York. This is how York explains it:

  YORK: And for a minister of mine intent

  I have seduc’d a headstrong Kentishman

  John Cade of Ashford,

  To make commotion, as full well he can,

  Under the title of John Mortimer.

  In Ireland I have seen this stubborn Cade

  Oppose himself against a troop of kerns,

  And fought so long till that his thighs with darts

  Were almost like a sharp-quill’d porpentine;

  And in the end being rescued, I have seen

  Him caper upright like a wild Morisco,

  Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells.

  Full often, like a shag-hair’d crafty kern,

  Hath he conversed with the enemy,

  And undiscover’d come to me again

  And given me notice of their villainies.

  This devil here shall be my substitute

  For that John Mortimer, which now is dead,

  In face, in gait, in speech he doth resemble.

  By this I shall perceive the common’s mind

  How they affect the house and claim of York.

  Say that he be taken, rack’d and tortured;

  I know no pain they can inflict upon him

  Will make him say that I mov’d him to those arms.

  Say that he thrive, as ’tis great like he will

  Why, then from Ireland come I with my strength

  And reap the harvest which that rascal sow’d.115

  In Act Four Shakespeare, notoriously conservative and anti-radical, goes way over the top in his portrayal of the insensate, mindless, destructive rage of Cade and his acolytes. Cade announces that there will be no more money, that everyone will wear the same clothes. Anyone who can read and write will be put to death as an enemy of the people, parchment, wax and documents are especially anathema, and all archives will be burned. Cade toys with offering Henry VI a deal, whereby the king will reign as a figurehead while Cade has the real power as lord protector. All prisoners will be released as by definition they are ‘politicals’. All great lords will have to pay Cade tribute and all women will have to sleep with him before they are given permission to marry. A form of communism is announced: ‘There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hoop’d pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it a felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common.’116 The hatred of learning and intellectuals is just one of the many ways in which Shakespeare’s Cade is a pre-echo of Mao in the Cultural Revolution or of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Lord Saye excites particular contempt for speaking Latin, while Dick the Butcher declares: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ The mob is shown to be completely moronic, agreeing with whoever has just spoken and capable of being swayed by Cade with a facile reference to Henry V. Eventually Shakespeare tires of Cade and dispatches him from the plot quickly. Cade flees, has no food for five days, climbs into the garden of Alexander Iden (portrayed as a harmless oligarch full of integrity instead of the bounty-hunter he was) and is killed by him in a sword-fight – Cade is too weak with hunger to fence effectively. In this version Cade is even more radical than Tyler, leading Shakespearean scholars to say that the Bard confused his rebels, that his portrait of Cade is really one of Tyler.117 The Cade–York nexus makes for good drama and good conspiracy theory, but few historians have been willing to subscribe to it. The obvious objection is that York showed himself a hard liner when carrying out his commission in Kent and harried Cade’s men mercilessly. Nonetheless there are still those who take seriously the idea of Cade as York’s stalking horse.118

  The Cade–York link may be described as the ‘right-wing’ version of the 1450 revolt, but there is a more plausible leftist one to combat the orthodoxy described above. In brief, this states that Cade’s rebellion was not as different from Tyler’s as is usually thought, and that the roots of the revolt centred around the government’s inability to solve the socio-economic problems of the time. The emphasis of historians has usually been placed on the Kent rebels, but if the men of Sussex are put under the microscope, a more nuanced, less purely political picture emerges. Once again some inchoate notion of general crisis in Europe is helpful. Europe in the 1440s suffered severe deflation because of a general European bullion famine. The main factors in this were the drain of gold and silver to the Near East and the closure and contraction of many European mints and mines.119 The shortage of specie and credit and the general deflation had several consequences in England. More grain, wool and stock were being produced than the market could absorb, while rising rents and falling prices meant that peasants were unable to sell their surplus produce to offset the rent increases. A sudden dip into recession after years of rising prosperity produced all the symptoms of anomie which traditionally triggered rebellion in the late Middle Ages.120 All of these general economic factors merged with the particular issue of economic warfare in the 1440s. Duke Philippe of Burgundy imposed protectionist embargoes on English cloth coming into the Low Countries for the benefit of the cloth-makers of Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Zeeland. In 1448–9 English exports of cloth fell by 32 per cent and other exports fell by 35 per cent, while imports of wine were halved in 1450. The town of Sandwich in Kent suffered a catastrophic slump, with wool exports down by two-thirds and woollen cloth at just one-tenth of the previous figure; wine imports plummeted by 75 per cent. The notorious privateering raid of 23 May 1449 can be seen as England’s riposte to protectionism in the Low Countries. It may be that Sussex was worse affected than anywhere else in England by all these chill winds. Even as the county dealt with the adverse international trade situation, it was still struggling with the burden of villeinage and seigneurial exactions, for Sussex was more backward than Kent in this regard. The crisis of 1449–50 did at least see many tenants negotiate their rents downwards, and there was some successful resistance to customary taxes and fines.121

  Controversy is bound to continue about the revolutionary implications of the Cade rebellion. It is interesting that both the approach stressing international economic recession and the Shakespearean Cade–York conspiracy thesis effectively ‘place’ the 1450 rising as rather more than a mere political disturbance. Naturally it can be interpreted at a more simple political level, with the stress placed on the Hundred Years War. If the Wars of the Roses were essentially an internalisation of impulses thwarted by defeat by France in the continental wars, then the Cade rising can be read as the first of a series of convulsions that would terminate only at Bosworth Field in 1485. Part of the difficulty in providing an accurate reading of both the Tyler and the Cade rebellions is that a study of contemporary turmoil elsewhere in Europe is not as helpful as it might be. For example, it has been persuasively argued that the best analogy for 1381 is not the jacquerie of 1358 or the Ciompi rising in Florence but the German Peasants’ War of 1524–6.122 It is likely, however, that the revolutionary thrust of the Cade rebellion has been underrated by concentration on the men of Kent. The Sussex rebels were more radical and egalitarian than those
in Kent, and some even seem to have transcended the limitations of consciousness implied by the distinction between a ‘good’ king and ‘bad’ courtiers and advisers.123 This simple-minded dichotomy continued to addle the mentality of rebels and confuse their objectives until the regicide of Charles I in 1649 provided the great breakthrough. The idea of a ‘loyal rebellion’ was a priori implausible, since it seemed to assume by definition that a monarch must be an ignoramus and could not possibly know what was being done in his name.124 Both the Tyler and Cade revolts followed the classic pattern of pre-industrial popular revolts and suffered from obvious limitations. In many instances it would simply be anachronistic to expect a higher level of consciousness. As Engels would later point out, the peasantry of the Middle Ages were capable only of ‘communism nourished by fantasy’; they could point to the future but not reach it.125 Yet limited consciousness was not just the prerogative of peasants and primitive rebels. The obtuseness of the chroniclers in viewing all rebellion as wickedness and Satan’s work is palpable. The chroniclers loved to concentrate on the violence and mayhem in all such risings, but always ignored its legitimate causes. As Mark Twain said of the French Revolution:

  There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it; one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon 10,000 persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.126

  4

  The Pilgrimage of Grace

  ALTHOUGH ON SEVERAL occasions in English history rebels and revolutionaries have virtually prostrated the State yet failed to deliver the knock-out blow, the element of ‘near-miss’ should never be discounted. Even if it could be argued that Wat Tyler and Jack Cade caught the government unawares and would not have prevailed in a contest where the elite could bring all its resources to bear, this emphatically cannot be said about the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536–7. This was by far the most serious rebellion in England in the entire period between the Peasants’ Revolt and the Civil War of the 1640s. On this occasion the rebels had the authorities on the ropes with no chance of a comeback, yet unaccountably failed to follow through and deal the coup de grâce. The main problem was the old one of limited consciousness and lack of imagination. It could be argued that the clearest sign of modernity in government was the ability to think outside the ‘box’ of kingship. All societies until about 1640 suffered from this. There were many coups, assassinations of emperors and rebellions by the legions in the Roman world, but no one ever thought of radical change in society; actual and would-be usurpers never considered any possibility other than replacing a deposed emperor with a new one. Similarly, in the medieval world, it was taken almost as an axiom that the removal of a king would but imply the succession of another. Where there was no obvious candidate to succeed a reigning monarch, any rebellion, however formidable, was almost bound to fall at that fence. The rebels of 1536 were particularly at fault in not thinking through the implications of this, for they were dealing with the most bloodthirsty and vengeful sovereign imaginable. Those who claim that the vilest dictators are those who begin as intellectuals (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc) are on safe ground with Henry VIII. This was a man who began as a scholar and would-be enlightened ruler but ended life as the most horrendous of psychopaths.1 Historians have always been kind to the absurdly named ‘bluff King Hal’. On some indices, he was the most despicable human being who ever lived. Where even Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao performed their egregious evil in pursuit of social dreams and goals, however misguided, Henry VIII performed his purely out of hypertrophied egotism, out of a sociopathic rage that any other human being could dare oppose their will to his. The sixteenth century was certainly not an era of bleeding-heart liberals, but even the Europe of the Borgias, Machiavelli and the conquistadores were appalled by the spectre of the English Nero, who is estimated to have executed 72,000 people during his reign.2

  As is well known, the key event in the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47) was the failure of his first wife Catherine of Aragon to provide a male heir. This led the king to petition the pope to have his marriage annulled. Whether Pope Clement VII would have granted this in normal circumstances is unclear, but when Henry approached him in 1527 Clement was the prisoner of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain, following the notorious sack of Rome by Spanish troops that year. The failure to obtain the divorce led Henry to declare himself divorced anyway and also to announce that the pope no longer had religious jurisdiction in England. His principal adviser Cardinal Wolsey was arrested, charged with high treason on the grounds that his sympathies were primarily with the pope rather than his sovereign, and died in captivity, thus probably escaping the headsman’s axe.3 Thomas Cromwell became the king’s principal adviser, but then the reasonably clear outline of the reign grows turbid. Everything about Henry VIII and his incumbency continues to be controversial. Was Thomas Cromwell the evil genius behind the English Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries or was this Henry’s personal policy?4 Did Thomas Cromwell fall because of Henry’s fury about the ugliness of his fourth wife Anne of Cleves – a marriage Cromwell arranged – or were more subtle, diplomatic factors involved?5 Was Anne Boleyn a fanatical Protestant or a moderate Catholic? Was it she, rather than Henry or Cromwell, who really pushed the Reformation in England? Was she really guilty of adultery, as in the official treason charge that brought her to the executioner’s block, or was this an absurd charge trumped up by Cromwell to curry favour with Henry?6 While all these matters continue to be the subject of impassioned scholarly debate, it seems absurd to deny that Henry’s determination to recognise no superior in eccesiastical as well as secular matters was the prime mover in the English Reformation. There has long been a tradition that Henry was merely ‘responding’ to a popular desire for religious change, evinced the century before by the popularity of Lollardism, and that he was a reluctant religious revolutionary.7 However, the evidence for a widespread ‘bottom-up’ desire to break with the papacy and the Catholic Church is thin; the most that can be adduced is an untypical Protestant tendency in the larger towns and cities. Insofar as there was a decline in Catholicism, it was replaced not by an avid Protestantism but by religious indifference.8 The Reformation had no other source than the king and his courtiers, especially Cromwell and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

  It must be remarked straight away that if Henry was reactive rather than proactive in the matter of Protestantism, with the implication that there was a massive groundswell in favour of religious change, the great convulsion of the Pilgrimage of Grace becomes inexplicable. The Pilgrimage of Grace, in short, was a massive groundswell in favour of Catholicism and the old ways, and makes sense only with Henry as the proactive agent.9 To get round this insuperable difficulty, advocates of a uniquely ‘organic’ English Protestantism have been forced to maintain that the motives for the Pilgrimage were overwhelmingly social and economic.10 There were socio-economic factors in the rising of 1536–7, but these were both localised and ad hoc; the only overall binding glue in the rebellion was a desire to undo the Reformation and to return to the situation as it was in 1529. Furthermore, it is clear that Henry himself was the agency actuating the revolt, possibly because he was trying to go too fast. A glance at the legislation of the famous Reformation Parliament of 1529–36 brings this home clearly. In 1530 the c
harge of praemunire (alleging that the accused was primarily loyal to a person outside the realm, i.e. the pope) was reinstated. In 1532 the First Act of Annates deprived the Vatican of all but 5 per cent of its normal revenues from England. The 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals forbade all appeals whatsoever to Rome. The 1534 Act of Supremacy made Henry the head of the Church and in the supplementary Act of First Fruits and Tenths transferred the taxes on ecclesiastical income from the pope to the Crown. The Treason Act of 1534 made it high treason to deny the Royal Supremacy. Finally in 1536 came the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act.11 The calendar is also eloquent on Henry’s insensate speed in 1536. His marriage with Anne Boleyn was annulled on 19 May 1536, she was executed on 19 May and Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour was celebrated on 30 May. All of this was hard on the heels of the execution of John Fisher and Thomas More for opposing the Act of Supremacy (by which Henry made himself sole and supreme head of the Church in England), and simultaneous with the promulgation of Henry’s famous Ten Articles in June 1536 (which introduced Protestant doctrines on baptism, confession, holy communion and purgatory) and the beginning of the dissolution of the monasteries.12 Henry had alienated many of his subjects by his treatment of Catherine of Aragon, his breach with Rome, his proposal to dissolve the monasteries and even by his treacherous execution of Anne Boleyn. He proceeded to alienate many more powerful members of the clergy and aristocracy by two new statutes introduced during the flurry of new laws in 1534–6. The Statute on First Fruits and Tenths in 1534 introduced a perpetual tax on the clergy, allowing the king’s government a one-tenth tithe on all clerical incomes, plus a first fruits tax equivalent to one year’s revenue on each new clerical incumbent. The Statute of Uses of 1536 closed a legal loophole for those who had hitherto escaped feudal payments by setting up a trust. The new statute ordained that any benefits from such trusts had to be paid to the legal owner of the fiefs anyway, which made it pointless to set up a trust.13 All these different streams fed into the mighty river of what was to become the Pilgrimage of Grace.