House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (17 page)

Then Norfolk added a sting in the tail of his letter. He sniped at the wisdom of Shrewsbury’s earlier tentative advance from Newark to seize bridges across the River Don: ‘If my Lord Steward had not advanced from Trent [Newark] until my coming . . . then I might have followed the effect of my letter written you from Cambridge [and] these traitors, with ease, might have been subdued. I pray God that hap [this mischance] turn not to much hurt.’
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Norfolk’s meeting with the rebel representatives seems to have agreed that their army concentrated on Doncaster should disperse under a general pardon and that two delegates should accompany the duke to court where their complaints would be explained to the king

Reinforcements had now arrived including 100 gunners, who were posted to defend the bridge at Doncaster. Very soon the rebels began slowly to trudge home, under the protection of their royal pardons, and Shrewsbury and some of his colleagues also started to demobilise their troops.

Some time on or after 26 October, a letter was despatched to underline the message the royalists had brought to the negotiating table, signed by Norfolk, Shrewsbury and others who were the king’s lieutenants. Its contents suggest it was the handiwork of the duke, as it did not waste words in any gesture towards conciliation. The letter challenged the insurgents to return home, or else expect the worst from the king. Addressing them as ‘unhappy men’, it castigated them for the folly which seduced them ‘to make this most shameful rebellion against our most noble and righteous king and sovereign, who is more worthy, for his innumerable graces and noble virtues . . . to be king, master and governor of all Christendom, than of so small a realm as England?’:

Norfolk, now at Tuxford, in Nottinghamshire, was exhausted, apprehensive and gloomy. He complained to the Council on Sunday morning, 29 October:

The tone of the duke’s letter then moved to a mixture of truculence, self-pity and hasty explanations to justify his actions. He again showed his contempt for Shrewsbury’s poor tactical manoeuvres:

He also doubted the loyalty of his own troops: ‘Never a prince had a company of more true noblemen and gentlemen, yet right few of the soldiers . . . think their quarrels [with the rebels] to be good.’ Norfolk could not resist the opportunity of yet another dig at his fellow general:

To preserve the terms of the truce, he begged: ‘For God’s sake [ensure] that his highness cause not my lord of Suffolk to put any man to death [before] my coming.’
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Norfolk continued in his negotiations with the insurgents into December, in pursuance of a policy that banked on the harsh weather reducing rebel numbers and weakening their tenacity for the cause. But soon the pilgrims realised that all along they had been deceived by the weasel-worded promises of both king and duke.

In January 1537, the glowing embers of rebellion burst into flames again, fanned by rumours that Henry was reinforcing Hull and the Yorkshire town of Scarborough to create bases from which he could subdue the country and make them safe havens for the loyal local gentry. This new revolt was quickly put down and the ringleaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace and others caught up in the insurgency rounded up. In the middle of the following month there was renewed fighting in Cumberland and Westmorland, led by a man with the egalitarian
nom de guerre
of ‘Captain Poverty’.

Norfolk had wearily journeyed to Kenninghall for much-deserved rest and recuperation after Christmas. At the end of January, he sent a newly written will to Cromwell for safekeeping
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in preparation for his return north. On the way back, on 2 February, he faced some delicate issues over alleged subversion close to home. He thanked Cromwell for interceding with the Duke of Suffolk over his indictment of some of Norfolk’s feudal bondmen - ‘my folks’, as he called them cosily. ‘I never knew till my first going to Doncaster [that] he bore me any grudge. But, as you write, the better we agree, the better the king shall be served.’ He added: ‘Some lewd persons do not yet cease to speak ill of us, as you shall perceive by a prophecy framed of late.’
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Despite Norfolk’s earlier boasts that he had crushed sedition in East Anglia, there were still worrying signs of unrest and agitation. Cromwell received a report later that month of an itinerant fiddler called John Hogan who was going around Norfolk, drawing the crowds with his witty, tuneful treasons. In the butcher’s home at Diss, on the ‘Thursday after Ash Wednesday’ he sang a ditty mentioning Norfolk, his son Surrey and the Earl of Shrewsbury. When he finished, a cautious soul called John James told him:

Hogan steadfastly maintained that if the Duke of Suffolk had allowed the Lincolnshire rebels to ‘join the Northern men, they would have brought England to a better stay [state] than it is now’.
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Henry’s patience had long since ebbed away. The king, who loathed even the thought of negotiating with rebellious subjects, now demanded blood. Norfolk was the man to wreak pitiless retribution on the north. On 22 February, Henry sent him a chilling instruction: he must now impose martial law in the north and mercilessly slaughter all traitors.

The king required the duke to kill them ‘without pity or respect . . . Remember that it shall be much better that these traitors should perish in their wilful, unkind, and traitorous follies, then that so slender a punishment should be done upon them as the dread [of it] should not be a warning to others.’

Henry also thanked Norfolk for his loyalty:

The duke had some old grudges, and he cuttingly wrote to Cromwell: ‘Now shall appear whether for favour of these countrymen I forbore to fight with them at Doncaster as, you know, the king’s highness showed me it was thought by some I did. Those that so said shall now be proved false liars.’
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At Carlisle there were so many prisoners that Norfolk did not know how to incarcerate them all: ‘You will hardly believe the trouble I have to keep the prisoners, there are so many,’ he lamented. There was not a lord or gentleman of Cumberland or Westmorland whose servants and tenants had not joined the insurgency. He informed the Privy Council that he would ‘proceed by the law martial, for if I should proceed by indictments, many a great offender might fortune [to] be found not guilty, saying he was brought forth against his will’.
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In a postscript, he jocularly told Sir William Paulet, Comptroller of the Household:

On 24 February, he ordered that seventy-four ‘principal offenders’ should be hanged, pointing out ‘had I proceeded by the trial of twelve men, I think not the fifth . . . of these should have suffered, for the common saying here [is that] “I came out of fear of my life . . . I came forth for fear of burning of my house and destroying of my wife and children”. [Such] a small excuse will be well believed here, where much affection and pity of neighbours does reign.’
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As normal, their bodies were hung up and displayed until they rotted or were picked clean by carrion crows. But the number of executions was so great that the local chain manufacturers could not fulfil Norfolk’s order in time, so several corpses were left hanging on gibbets by rope.
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When Henry heard that several wives and mothers had cut down the bodies to give them Christian burial, he was enraged and insisted on the women being rooted out and punished.
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He was also disappointed that Norfolk had not quartered the corpses.
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Norfolk moved on, hanging as he went. Cromwell drove him on to even greater cruelty, taunting him that he was soft on the suppression of the monasteries and lenient in his punishment of traitors. The duke retorted: ‘Neither here, nor elsewhere, will I be reputed Papist or a favourer of naughty religious persons’ and disclosed that he had been warned ‘to take heed of what he ate or drank in religious houses for fear of poison’ being used against him.
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Despite Cromwell’s jibes, the king’s harsh injunctions to be ruthless were always in the forefront of Norfolk’s mind. Before moving on to the north-east and Yorkshire, he eagerly reported to Henry: ‘Folks think the last justice at Carlisle great and if more than twenty suffer at Durham and York it will be talked about’ and politely inquired how many the king wanted executed in York.
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In Durham, while presiding over a commission of oyer and terminer to try twenty-four rebels in March, he discovered that the county palatine was not covered by the legal instrument setting up the process, so he and his fellow judges were ‘driven to the extremity of our simple wits [as to] what we should do’. As Norfolk wanted to arraign thirteen accused the following day, he decided to swear in the jury ‘keeping secret from them our lack of authority and I . . . thought to have proceeded by the law martial and to have taken the indictments as evidence’. But their offences were committed before his appointment as king’s lieutenant, so he could not employ martial law against them. It was all rather embarrassing.
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At York, William Levening, of Acklam, who was involved in the January rebellion, was acquitted on 23 March 1537, much to Norfolk’s chagrin. Two jurymen - Thomas Delariver and Sir Henry Gascoigne - were empanelled by the duke himself to ensure the right verdict. With four others, Delariver was convinced that Levening was ‘worthy to die’ but seven said he was their neighbour and they ‘knew better his conversation’. The jury debates continued and an impatient Norfolk sent in his usher to ask ‘whether they were agreed or no’. When no unanimous verdict was forthcoming, an angry duke ‘took away from them all that might keep them warm’ and refused them food and water.
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But all was to no avail and Levening was freed after more than thirty-six hours of jury deliberations.
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Norfolk had learned a hard lesson from this second fiasco: in future trials at York, he packed the jury with compliant gentry.

Overall, Norfolk was thoroughly satisfied with his efforts, ‘though the number be nothing as great as their deserts did require to have suffered, yet I think the like number has not been heard of put to execution at one time’, as he commented at Carlisle. Almost two hundred and twenty had been executed in the north and, in London, forty-four of them from monasteries, including the abbots of Kirkstall, Jervaulx, Fountains, Sawley and Whalley. One of the abbots he executed was Dr Matthew Mackerell
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of the Premonstratensian abbey at Bar-lings, Lincolnshire, who had preached that startling homily at the funeral of his father, the second duke of Norfolk, back in 1524. Robert Aske, the pilgrims’ leader, had been hanged in chains at York Castle. A self-satisfied Norfolk summed things up: ‘These countries, thanked be God, [are now] in such order that I trust never in our life, no new commotions shall be attempted. Surely, I see nothing here but fear.’
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