The Road Not Taken Page 13

  The feelings of anomie and perceptions of chaos resulting from Henry’s over-rapid offensives on a number of simultaneous fronts can be clearly discerned in the outbreak of unrest at Louth in Lincolnshire on 1 October 1536. It has even been suggested that this accounts for the element of ‘premature revolution’ in Lincolnshire and for the fact that the vicar of Louth, Thomas Kendall, ‘fired the gun too soon’.14 The abbey at Louth Park had been dissolved on 8 September after Henry’s first Act of Suppression (his idea was to dissolve the small abbeys and monasteries first and the large ones later). The wildest rumours began flying around the county: the coinage was going to be debased; sheep and cattle would be taxed; Church jewels would be seized; three parish churches would be amalgamated into one. There was particular animus towards John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln and his chancellor Dr Raynes, who seemed to be ardent advocates of Henry’s policies. The traditional tocsin call to rebellion was heard when church bells were rung at Louth and Horncastle. In Horncastle a crowd of 500 people quickly gathered and forced local aristocrats and gentry to take an oath of fidelity to God and the king; anyone who refused or tried to equivocate was put in the stocks.15 Gradually rebellion spread through the county, but with Louth and Horncastle always in the forefront. On 4 October the first clear indication of rebel demands emerged with a call for the death of Thomas Cromwell and the ‘heretic’ bishops of Lincoln and Canterbury. Other clerics put on a ‘most wanted’ list were Cranmer, Latimer, Thomas Goodrich (Bishop of Ely), George Browne (Bishop of Dublin) and John Hilsey (Bishop of Rochester).16 The Lincolnshire gentry quickly became sucked into the rebellion, but from the very earliest days there was tension between the ‘gentlemen’ and the common people. Paradoxically, at this stage the commoners were the most ideological and the gentry were more concerned with economic grievances. Quite apart from the internal strains between old and ‘new’ gentry (roughly the traditional minor nobility and a new moneyed class grown rich from commerce), the gentlemen evinced the latent tensions in the rebellion by distancing themselves from the objectives of the masses. The gentry were concerned to wring concessions from the king while appealing to him as loyal subjects, but the more hard-nosed commons had no compunction about presenting demands. The gentry rebels were particularly furious about the Statute of Uses, which cut into traditional rights to dispose of assets after death and introduced the novel principle of a royal tithe on bequests.17

  From Louth, Caistor and Horncastle the rebels converged on Lincoln, where they mustered on 6 October, about 30,000 strong. The townspeople received them joyously, for Lincoln itself was in decline because of falling wool exports. Here the rebels formalised their demands and couched them in the form of Six Articles – a quite obvious rebuke to the author of the more famous Protestant Ten Articles. The repeal of the Statute of Uses was an obvious item, as were the insistence on the dismissal of Cromwell and the ousting of heretic bishops from their sees. But the insurgents made further demands: no extra taxation should be levied except in time of war, and the Church must have all its ancient rights restored, with no tithes taken by the Crown. This implied both the repeal of the Statutes of Annates and that on First Fruits and Tenths. Moreover, further names were added to the list of those to be purged: Sir Richard Rich, Thomas Legh and Richard Layton, commissioners for the dissolution of the monasteries. Finally, the rebels required the issue of a full pardon once these concessions had been made.18 A series of letters was sent to the king in London, but their ‘impossibilism’ must have been clear to anyone with any knowledge of the psychopathic Henry. The gentry made the elementary mistake of assuming that they could negotiate with the monarch, but Henry regarded the mildest suggestion that he moderate the pace of change as arrant treason. Whereas after a severe military defeat he might have been prepared, under duress, to dismiss unpopular ministers and bishops and repeal the Statute of Uses, he saw his own identity as bound up in the statutes passed by the Reform Parliament and would never concede on these.19 The rebels had made the elementary mistake of not thinking through all the stages of their rebellion and asking themselves what they intended to do if the king defied them. Incidentally, the scope of rebel demands surely knocks on the head the idea that the Lincolnshire rising, as opposed to the later risings in Yorkshire, was a purely local affair involving the peasantry and the Duke of Suffolk.20 The high profile of the clergy in Lincolnshire and the prominence of religious issues, particularly the dissolution of the monasteries, shows clearly enough that events in the county from 1 to 12 October were the opening shots in a would-be English Counter-Reformation.21

  When Henry received the first letter from the Lincolnshire rebels he was, predictably, incandescent with rage. His first instinct was to summon Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, a veteran of Flodden in 1513 where he had acted as deputy commander to his father, the Earl of Surrey, in the decisive victory against the Scots. Now in his early sixties, he might well have been the king’s right-hand man but for his furious opposition to, first, Wolsey and later, Cromwell.22 Another out-of-favour magnate Henry decided to call to court was the 68-year old George Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury, a natural hard liner and one who would presumably give Henry the sabre-rattling advice he wanted to hear. Among Shrewsbury’s achievements was the defeat of the pretender Lambert Simnel at Stoke during Henry VII’s reign.23 But after mulling over his options Henry decided to pass them both over for the supreme command and give it to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Now aged fifty-one, and a veteran of the French wars and the Field of Cloth of Gold, Suffolk had given serious offence thirty years earlier when he contracted a secret marriage with Henry’s sister Mary, widow of Louis XII of France. Only the strenuous representations of Wolsey had saved him from the inevitable consequences of the royal wrath; always venal, Henry had finally been placated by a massive ‘financial settlement’ (i.e. bribe).24 With that shrewdness and insight into other human beings’ dark sides that so often characterises psychopaths, the king had correctly intuited that for this particular operation he needed a person of dubious morality, and Suffolk seemed to fit the bill admirably. It was agreed that Suffolk would be commander-in-chief of the king’s expedition, but it was thought necessary, if only on prudential grounds, to coopt Norfolk and Shrewsbury as well, so they were given subsidiary commands. Together Henry and Suffolk decided on a massive bluff. Although they had no more than 3,000 combat-ready troops with which to oppose the rebels – and in this era so-called regulars were rarely of higher military calibre than rebels – Henry announced that he was sending 100,000 soldiers to Lincolnshire, threatening terrible retribution if the insurrectionists did not instantly submit. His written reply to the rebels’ first letter was scarcely more conciliatory: ‘How presumptuous you are, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm and of least experience.’25

  Whether or not Henry’s spies had told him of the division among the rebels between hard-line commoners and doveish gentry, this was the gap he exploited. On receipt of Henry’s reply to their first letter, the gentlemen watered down their demands, avoiding specifics and referring merely to some vague ‘grievances’ that they hoped the king would address. But Henry, sensing weakness, would have none of it.26 The gentry started to get cold feet. This was now a matter of serious rebellion and even to save face they would have to give battle to the king’s forces. All the indications were that, with their numerical superiority, they would be successful, but the gentry wanted cast-iron certainties, not the hazards of battle. After all, if they lost, at best their fate would be loss of their estates and exile, and at worst they faced traitors’ deaths. Faced with the king’s intransigence, they panicked, tried to dump the commons and petitioned to secure pardons for themselves. Once again Henry proved utterly uncompromising, and in reply demanded that 100 ‘ringleaders’ be handed over to the Duke of Suffolk with halters round their necks.27 Their last hope was that Lord John Hussey, one-time chamberlain to Henry’s daughter Mary, would prove a stout lead
er and reliable rallying point. But, at seventy-one, the aged Hussey turned out to be a ditherer, undecided about which way to jump. While Suffolk organised the royal forces, Shrewsbury acted quickly to arrest Hussey and issue a proclamation ordering the rebels to disperse or face death by battle or execution. Hussey paid the penalty for ambivalence, which to Henry was merely treachery by another name, and was executed the following year.28 The robust response by king and authorities utterly demoralised the rebels. By 12 October only about a third of their original muster remained. The more obscure souls drifted away and kept their heads down, while the identifiable leaders fled north to Yorkshire. The Lincolnshire rebels had made every mistake in the book: they had not thought through the consequences of their actions, had underestimated and misread Henry, had backed the wrong horse in the form of Lord Hussey, and had effectively double-crossed their colleagues among the masses by stalling, delaying while Henry answered the petitions and preventing the commoners from striking south to secure a military solution. By 12 October Henry seemed to have won an easy victory against the opponents of his English Reformation.29

  Some interim conclusions are in order. Henry’s uncompromising stand made a military solution in Lincolnshire inevitable unless the rebels backed down. The king’s rash bravado was a huge gamble, but it paid off, and his paranoia and bloodlust trumped reason again, as they so often had. But this was emphatically not a case of a cool gambler calculating the odds; above all he was lucky.30 The Lincolnshire gentry should have sensed that they were dealing with a psychopath and pressed on south, but they seemed mesmerised by the mystique of royalty and bought the ‘noble lie’ that Henry was basically a good king who was being led astray by his courtiers. Suffolk displayed more political skill. He realised that to quell the Lincolnshire uprising he had to proceed with caution, for a bloodbath would have diminished the chances of a peaceful outcome in Yorkshire, where a fresh insurrection broke out on 8 October. The Yorkshire rebels, incidentally, had nothing but contempt for their Lincolnshire brethren. ‘After so much talk it seemed ridiculous that the earlier rising should be so ignominiously ended and that without other agency than the threats of a blazon-coated herald and the blare of his trumpet: surely there had never been such a fall since the days of Jericho.’31 The more thoughtful rebels in Yorkshire always thought that the rising in Lincolnshire was premature and should have been exactly coordinated with that further north. Lord Darcy (see here), one of the leaders of what became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, was said to have commented: ‘Ah, they are up in Lincolnshire. God speed them well. I would they had done this three years ago, for the world should have been the better for it.’32 The fact that the main rebellion broke out in Yorkshire after the Lincolnshire rising instead of simultaneously has usually been attributed to the overall leader of the Pilgrimage, Robert Aske, who was in Lincolnshire during the early days of October. Aske, it seems, wanted to see how Henry VIII would respond to rebel demands before committing himself in Yorkshire, for it was his cardinal weakness that he always regarded armed rebellion as a last resort. Certainly his ‘wait and see’ strategy was wrongheaded and disastrous, for the sudden collapse of the rebels in Lincolnshire undoubtedly harmed the cause of the Pilgrimage of Grace. It gave confidence to the government, confirmed Henry in his ‘hawkish’ attitude to rebellion and probably convinced many waverers that, with such poor rebel leadership, the king was bound to win in the end.33

  It is a favourite pastime of Tudor scholars to distinguish between the fiasco of the Lincolnshire rising of October 1536 – ten days that certainly failed to shake the world – and the later and more serious insurrection in Yorkshire, which is considered the Pilgrimage of Grace proper.34 There are certainly points of difference – more violence in Lincolnshire, for one thing – but the contrast between a non-existent leadership in the more southerly county and the more vigorous variety in Yorkshire will scarcely wash. It might have been better for the Yorkshire rebels if they had no distinctive leaders, for the ones they had were weak and lacklustre. No account of the Pilgrimage of Grace is adequate that does not give due weight to the poor leadership provided by Robert Aske, but there are many pieces missing in this particular jigsaw puzzle. Little is known of Aske or his early life except that he was a Gray’s Inn lawyer in his early thirties and had only one eye. He was the third son of Sir Robert Aske of Aughton near Selby and Elizabeth Clifford, and was thus the privileged scion of an old Yorkshire gentry family long associated with Swaledale. On his mother’s side he was well connected, for the Clifford family provided the first two earls of Cumberland, both Henrys; the first earl lived from 1493 to 1542 and the second from 1517 to 1570.35 In the 1520s Aske had also been secretary to the 6th Earl of Northumberland. There are two main views on Aske. One was that he was a reluctant revolutionary who stumbled into revolt, tried to avoid it but finally concluded he could not. The other was that he was a prime mover from the beginning: deeply involved in events in Lincolnshire, where he promised the rebels support from Yorkshire, and a committed rebel from the earliest days (certainly 4–5 October at the latest), and already recognised as the de facto leader of the entire revolt by 6 October.36 There is more agreement on his motivation and ideology. There are hints in the official archives that Aske was already regarded as a pro-Catholic political activist.37 Aske was angry that the House of Commons had been dragooned into the acts of the Reformation: the Act of Suppression, the Act of Supremacy, the various acts declaring Mary illegitimate and allowing the king to will the succession, the Statute of Uses, the Statute for First Fruits and Tenths and the legislation that made words a treasonable offence. Aske declared the easy passage of these bills to be the merest corruption, since most members of parliament were pension-holders or officers of the Crown.38 Most of all he was profoundly disturbed by the dissolution of the monasteries in the north of England. Some say that Aske was alarmed by the inclusion of socio-economic grievances in the petitions sent from Lincolnshire to the king. In his mind that made the rebellion a catch-all, not a Catholic crusade. Others say that he joined wholeheartedly in the rising only when he was sure the Pilgrimage would have primarily political objectives, that he moved the dissolution of the monasteries higher up on the Pilgrims’ agenda than his colleagues really wanted, and that he was primarily an opportunist with ambitions to displace Thomas Cromwell as the king’s first minister.39

  8 October was a red-letter day in the history of the Pilgrimage of Grace, for on that day a serious revolt broke out in Beverley under Aske’s leadership. The onset of the Pilgrimage proper once again finds historians divided. Some say a rebellion in the north of England had become inevitable by the mid-1530s, for there was an over-determined causation of multiple causes; actually, using Occam’s razor, we can say that the dissolution of the monasteries on its own would have been enough to trigger rebellion.40 An implausible minority view is that the rebellion was no more than a conspiracy, that its timing was relatively adventitious, and that some factor other than Catholicism was paramount. For some writers that something was the ambitions of the House of York, still vigorous despite the defeat at Bosworth in 1485. Still others locate the conspiracy at court and see it as the outer manifestation of the struggles between the pro- and anti-Cromwell factions; the timing would thus be intimately connected with the sudden and unexpected fall of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell’s virtually overnight hegemony.41 Naturally, there are always radical empiricists in historical interpretation, those who deny any deep-seated causes and motivations in rebellion. On this view, the Pilgrimage of Grace began as a local demand for the redressing of grievances in Lincoln which quickly got out of hand, spiralled out of control and spread to Yorkshire, triggering a general rising in the north of England.42 Yet the study of the evidence makes it clear enough that this was primarily a Catholic revolt. Aske and his entourage were actuated overwhelmingly by religious grievances: dissolution, the plans for Cromwell to proceed against parish churches, the exaction of first fruits, and so on. It is no exaggeration to sa
y that the Pilgrimage of Grace was just as massive an indictment of Henry VIII and all his works as Magna Carta had been of King John and the Grand Remonstrance would be of Charles I.43 Naturally, despite Aske’s efforts, economic grievances loomed large also: the Fifteenths and Tenths due in 1537, the Subsidy tax, the rumoured new taxes on food, livestock and the sacraments and the new powers the government had claimed under the Statute of Uses. Particular indignation was aroused by the Subsidy, and Fifteenth and Tenth taxes for these imposts, usually raised only in wartime, were now being levied in times of peace, with no rebate allowed for poverty.44 There were also economic issues peculiar to the north. The wool and cloth manufacturing industries had declined in the 1530s because of the ‘cold war’ between Henry VIII and Emperor Charles V, beginning in 1528–9, which cut off England from its traditional markets in Spain and the Netherlands. Additionally, the towns of the north-east were victims of a pincer movement, suffering through, in effect, being converted into ‘clients’ of the Hanseatic League in the Baltic, even as Cromwell blatantly favoured London’s seaborne trade at the expense of other maritime towns.45

  Once begun, the rebellion in Yorkshire spread rapidly as if by spontaneous combustion, astonishing everyone by the rapidity of its diaspora through the Ridings and beyond. Lord Darcy, commander of Pontefract Castle, already ambivalent about the rebellion, took out an insurance policy by warning Henry VIII that a rising in Yorkshire was imminent and asking for arms and reinforcements. Henry thanked him for the warning but sent no weapons or soldiers, already suspicious of Darcy and dubious about his true loyalties.46 The initial focus of the insurrection was Beverley, appropriately for a town famous for its veneration of the Virgin Mary. The Beverley rebels at first stressed the spoliation of Holy Mother Church and the ruin of the common-weath by corrupt ministers in their manifesto of grievances; a particular fear was that parish churches were about to be expropriated in the same ways as the monasteries. Later they took a leaf out of the Lincolnshire book and added discontents about tax, especially the exaction of the Fifteenth and Tenths, feudal dues, and taxes on beasts, ploughs and the sacraments. The Beverley manifestos underlined the connection between the despoiling of the Church, the subversion of Christianity and the exploitation of the House of Commons – all of which were laid at the door of Cromwell.47 The men and women of Beverley were particularly upset that the central government had intervened – via subpoenas, decrees and injunctions by the Court of Star Chamber – in the town’s struggle with the Archbishop of York, who was their lord of the manor.48 Moreover, they linked religious and economic grievances by underlining how the dissolution of the monasteries automatically reduced the amount of poor relief available. The Beverley rising was initially led by a lawyer named William Stapulton and was essentially a commons rising directed by the gentry. Alarmed at the incursion of socio-economic issues, which he felt muddied the waters, Aske moved quickly to take over the helm from Stapulton. He saw at once that he commanded a formidable movement, all the more fearsome in that the entire loyalist section of the gentry made itself scarce virtually from day one. Aske’s abiding aim was for the gentry to control the rebellion, to prevent the radical element among the common people from becoming too influential and to play down economic issues while highlighting the religious ones; his view was that only then could he persuade the Yorkshire gentry to join the Pilgrimage en masse.49