1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (18 page)

The rumours suggested that the king planned to charge a tax on all cattle, prevent the commons eating white bread, pig, goose or capon without paying a gratuity, exact taxes for weddings, christenings and funerals, and, most importantly, confiscate the goods of the parish churches and pull down churches so there would be only one in each five-mile radius. For people who had seen the number of holy days (read ‘holidays’) reduced and monasteries being suppressed, such fears were far from irrational. As John Hallom recalled under examination in 1537, ‘because the people saw many abbeys pulled down in deed, they believed the rest to be true’.
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Against this background, Thomas Foster’s comment stirred up the crowd led by Nicholas Melton, nicknamed ‘Captain Cobbler’, which that very evening, demanded the keys to the church treasure house from the churchwarden in order to protect the parish plate and jewels from the commissioners. When the bishop of Lincoln’s registrar arrived the next day to carry out the assessment of the clergy, he was seized by the ever-increasing crowd, who burned his papers before marching him to Legbourne nunnery, where they captured the king’s commissioners at work there. At the news that the subsidy commissioners would be working in nearby Caistor the next day, the commons of Louth, now numbering 3,000, marched to Caistor, and the commissioners fled at the sight of this great multitude advancing upon them. Caistor and Horncastle joined the uprising and by 4 October, the gentry had taken leading roles. On the same day, Dr John Raynes, the despised Chancellor of the bishop of Lincoln, was dragged before the commons in Horncastle and beaten to death with their staves.
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A few days later, 10,000 men marched to Lincoln, where they produced a set of articles or list of demands, which was sent to the king. These contained five complaints: the first was against the suppression of religious houses; the second and third dealt with issues of taxation: the Act of Uses enacted in 1536 – a statute that had rectified a loophole in land-ownership which had prevented royal dues being paid, and a direct tax called the ‘fifteenth and the tenth’, which was felt unreasonable in the economic climate. The final two complaints concerned those people advising the king. The commons complained that the king’s council was made up of ‘persons of low birth and small reputation’, who had ‘procured these things [above all, the dissolution] for their own advantage, whom we suspect to be Lord Cromwell and Sir Richard Rich, Chancellor of the Augmentations’. Finally, they named seven bishops whom they felt had ‘subverted the faith of Christ’. Henry’s damning response, to which we shall return below, rebuked the commons in no uncertain terms and threatened severe retribution unless the rebellion was quelled instantly. The gentry, fearing for their lives, refused to proceed, and this rising foundered.
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The rising at Lincolnshire was, however, only the beginning. On 8 October, there was a rising in Beverley in Yorkshire, also in response to the rumours, and now prompted by the catalyst of the Lincolnshire revolt. One Robert Aske emerged as leader. He was a lawyer who became known as the ‘Chief Captain’; by the end of October, there would be nine armies totalling 50,000 men, each army led by a captain under Aske’s leadership. The rebels started to march towards York and were joined on their way by other groups from East Riding and Marshland. By the time they reached York, on 16 October, the force had snowballed to 10,000 men and the city yielded to them. Aske had started to talk of the revolt as a pilgrimage, a ‘pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth’, in that they sought the king’s grace for the health of the kingdom. In York, Aske spelled this out, proclaiming,

this pilgrimage… is for the preservation of Christ’s Church, of the realm of England, the King our Sovereign Lord, the nobility and commons of the same, and to the intent to make petition to the King’s Highness for the reformation of that which is amiss, within this his realm and for the punishment of heretics and subverters of the laws.

That same week, there were risings in the North Riding, and troops assembled at Richmond and swore in their local gentry as their leaders: Lord Latimer of Snape (who was married to Kateryn Parr, later Henry VIII’s wife), Sir Christopher Danby of Masham and, chiefly, Sir Robert Bowes, another lawyer. They sent forces to join Aske in York on 18 October. There were also risings in Westmorland and Lancashire. The amassed troops marched to Pontefract Castle, where Lord Darcy, Edward Lee, the archbishop of York and other gentlemen had congregated for safety. Darcy had been writing desperate letters to Henry asking for support: ‘the insurrection has so increased all over the North that we are in great danger of our lives and see no way it can be repressed’, but amazingly the government appeared unaware of the scale of the revolt – thinking it had all quietened down after Lincolnshire – and Darcy was forced to surrender the castle on 21 October. Before long, however, Darcy and even Sir Robert Constable, who had helped Henry VII defeat the Cornish Rebellion in 1497, had joined the rebel leadership.
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Henry sent Lancaster Herald to Pontefract on 21 October to read a proclamation to the rebels, but Aske refused to let the proclamation be read, for its contents were incendiary. Lancaster Herald’s report back, however, provided insight into the Pilgrims’ intentions. Aske said he intended

to go with his company to London on pilgrimage to the King to have all vile blood put from his Council and noble blood set up again; to have the faith of Christ and God’s laws kept, and restitution for the wrongs done to the Church, and the commonalty used as they should be…

In addition to sending Lancaster Herald, Henry had also deployed the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Duke of Norfolk to lead the royal troops against the rebels. Aware of the vast discrepancies between the sizes of the two armies – the royal army was a maximum of 9,000 men – Norfolk arranged a meeting between the two sides at Doncaster Bridge. Here it was agreed, on 27 October, that two representatives of the Pilgrims, Sir Ralph Ellerker and Sir Robert Bowes, would take a copy of the Pilgrims’ petition to the king, and a truce would be observed until their return.
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When the king read their petition on 2 November, he dashed off a self-righteous and condemnatory reply (see below). Norfolk persuaded him not send this (although in fact it was leaked), and instead a ‘kind and mild’ message was sent back with Ellerker and Bowes that did not respond to the complaints made by the rebels (except to call them ‘general, dark and obscure’), but offered the prospect of further negotiations between the Pilgrims and Norfolk. The Pilgrim representatives arrived on 18 November and gave a detailed account of their visit to Windsor before the Pilgrims’ council in York on 21 November. A second meeting with Norfolk at Doncaster was fixed for 6 December and meanwhile a council was arranged for 2–4 December to clarify and encapsulate the rebel concerns. This council, aping the form of a parliament, drew up a manifesto of 24 articles, which were also agreed by convocation of clergy gathered in Pontefract Priory. Finally, 40 Pilgrim representatives met Norfolk on 6 December.
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Norfolk had strict instructions from Henry on how to act and what to offer, but what Norfolk actually agreed was rather different. He promised a free pardon to all and that a parliament should be held at York to re-examine (and it was implied, redress) the concerns raised by the rebels. Crucially, there are no proper records of what else was agreed, a fact that was to become a matter of contention over the following months. It was later unclear, for instance, whether Norfolk had agreed that the abbeys that had been restored during the Pilgrimage should remain standing until the parliament met, and whether in the same period, the disputed taxes should remain unpaid. Even Norfolk’s promise about the parliament may have simply been that he would be a suitor to the king for the parliament – not quite the same thing at all. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims accepted the terms as a clear-cut victory, which was announced by Aske on 7 December; and on 8 December, Lancaster Herald read the king’s pardon to the assembled crowds and they dispersed homeward. It was, for the king, a serendipitous turn of events. If the Pilgrims had continued to march on London, the royal troops would have been powerless to stand against them. As J. J. Scarisbrick wrote of Henry and the Pilgrimage, ‘the truth is that, if it had wanted, it might have swamped him’.
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Reasons to Rebel

Historians writing about the Pilgrimage of Grace have chiefly disagreed over the motives and aspirations of the rebels and whether economic or religious preoccupations were uppermost. The truth is probably that different groups of rebels had slightly different priorities, although there are some clear themes.
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Certainly, there was concern that taxes were being levied in unconventional ways. It was normal at this time for the population to be taxed only to support wars, and there was usually a rebate for the poor, but the subsidy, the fifteenth and the tenth did not conform to these standards. Henry VIII pointed out to the rebels that the subsidy was only levied on men possessing goods worth £20 – so did not affect the vast majority of the rebels – and even then, was only 6d in the pound, ‘so,’ he complained, ‘a man worth £40 is a very traitor for that 20s’.
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Henry was missing the point though – it was the unprecedented circumstances of the tax that was the chief sticking point and, with it, the fear that this would open the door to other impositions – such as those taxes rumoured on cattle and weddings. The taxes were linked, in the popular mind, to the king’s intentions regarding the jewels and plate of the parish churches and the riches of the monasteries. This also stuck in Henry’s throat, as he wrote on 19 October, ‘we know also that ye our commons have much complained in time past that most of the goods and lands of the realm were in the spiritual men’s hands; yet, now pretending to be loyal subjects, you cannot endure that your prince should have part thereof’. This concern with the material culture of religion should also be recognized as an important part of popular spirituality and a sense of things being rightly ordered and conducted. Behind the rebellion ‘was a set of fundamental and almost universal notions about the failures and inadequacies of the Henrician regime: the government was avaricious, sacrilegious and led by evil counsellors’. And avarice and impiety were believed to go hand in hand.
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Religious motives were, however, paramount. From the beginning of the rebellion, Aske had proclaimed that ‘evil disposed persons, being of the king’s council, hath… incensed his grace with many and sundry new inventions, which be contrary to the faith of God… and thereby intendeth to destroy the Church of England and ministers of the same’. Therefore, the pilgrimage was ‘undertaken for the preservation of Christ’s Church’. Representing themselves as pilgrims was in itself controversial as recent government injunctions had denounced pilgrimages as ‘superstition and hypocrisy’. The rebels also adopted badges and carried banners bearing the five wounds of Christ – vestiges of a crusade led by Lord Darcy in 1511 against the Moors – which symbolically asserted their claim for the moral high ground, pronounced the essentially religious nature of their venture and situated their religiosity within a strong medieval tradition of devotion to the wounds of Christ. Their religious worries were that only three of the seven sacraments and ‘no purgatory’ had been included in the Ten Articles, and that heresies and heretics were infiltrating the country, chiefly through certain bishops and counsellors, such as Cromwell. They were also disturbed about Henry’s adoption of the title of Supreme Head ‘touching
cure animarum
(the care of souls)’ because the rebels felt that this should ‘be reserved unto the see of Rome as before it was accustomed to be’. The importance of this has been debated: one commentator has recently suggested that the qualification ‘touching cure animarum’ meant it was not a total condemnation of the king’s new position. Yet Aske also said that ‘all men much murmured’ about the supremacy and said ‘it could not stand with God’s law’, while its qualification probably stems from the fact that it was actually treasonous to deny the king’s supremacy. Nor did the qualification count for much: Henry clearly envisaged that his role as Supreme Head encompassed the care of souls.
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But the central theme in the rebels’ rhetoric was the suppression of the monasteries. Later, Aske was to cite the importance of the dissolution in sparking off the revolt, stating ‘in all parts of the realm men’s hearts much grudged the suppression of the abbeys and the fruits by reason the same would be the destruction of the whole religion in England’. He posited it as the dominant issue in the uprising: ‘those bruits [rumours] were one of the greatest causes, but the suppression of the abbeys was the greatest cause of the said insurrection, which the hearts of the commons most grudged at’. This was why Richard Rich as chancellor of the Court of Augmentations – the organization responsible for administrating the dissolution – had been included in both the Lincolnshire articles and the Pilgrims’ Pontefract articles. As they went along, the Pilgrims restored sixteen monasteries out of a total fifty-five that had been suppressed by the king’s commissioners.
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Henry VIII’s Reaction

On hearing of the outbreak of rebellion, Henry’s initial response was one of alarm. Chapuys recorded on 7 October in a letter to Charles V that ‘the King is all the more dejected, and as Cromwell’s nephew said today in secret to an honest man, he [the king] was in great fear’. Just as he had with Anne Boleyn’s apparent infidelity, Henry quelled his panic at the rebels’ deceit with the pride and stubbornness that were characteristic of him. His letters, proclamations and instructions to the rebels and his commanders from this point on all focus on the maintenance of his honour, and are filled with hectoring, bombast and intransigence.
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