Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (13 page)

T
HE REPORTS
from Northumberland indicate that a climate of suspicion had settled over much of northern England by the autumn of 1536, but it was in Lincolnshire, thirty-five miles from Katherine Parr’s former home, that opposition first erupted in full force. On Sunday 1 October, Thomas Kendall, vicar of Louth, preached an arousing sermon in his parish church of St James. An Oxford-educated theologian, he had no time for new religious ideas: ‘My desire’, he later said, ‘was never other but for the establishment of our faith and putting down the schismatic english books wherein the unlearned persons taketh many errors.’
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Kendall’s words were not, however, spoken merely to instil in his flock a devotion to the way they had always worshipped. They also put them in mind of the pride they felt in their church, with its high spire, only finished in 1515, and its impressive collection of plate, vestments, books and processional crosses, built up over many years. To the Louth faithful, as to many others, these were visible signs of the glory of God, not gaudy decorations that distracted them from true piety. But a visitation from the king’s commissioners, now systematically assessing the wealth of the Church throughout northern England, was expected the next day. Already there were rumours circulating in other parishes that the commissioners intended to confiscate church silver. One of Cromwell’s officials in Louth had even made ill-advised comments that one of their silver dishes was more appropriate for a king than for ordinary men such as they. Kendall advised his listeners ‘to get together and look well upon such things as should be required of them in the said visitation’. This they certainly did, keeping an overnight vigil at the church to ensure that its contents were safe.

The determination of the men of Louth to defend their
church proved a powerful catalyst. Lincolnshire was ripe with rumours that all parish churches were to be targeted by the king’s agents, and dismay was spreading. The next day, before the commissioners could begin their work, the bells were rung in Louth, an ancient call to rebellion, and crowds began to gather. Their leader was a shoemaker. Other men involved in the disturbances he began to orchestrate were also of humble origin, blacksmiths, weavers, sawyers and labourers. They were typical of those known as ‘the commons’, ordinary working people, viewed with suspicion by the local gentry and despised by the government. While their betters never believed that they could organize themselves or produce coherent demands, they were much feared.

The disorder soon spread to neighbouring towns. Lord Borough’s experience of the extent of the problem was direct and chilling, as he reported immediately to the king himself. He said he had been at the town of Caistor with a number of other gentlemen summoned by the king’s commissioners when

suddenly there came a great multitude of people from Louth and was within a mile of us. Thereupon the inhabitants made us direct answer that they would pay no more silver and caused the bells to be rung . . . There was no remedy but to return to our houses and the people so fast pursued that they have taken Sir Robert Tyrwhit, Sir William Askew [and others] . . . I hear the commonality increase to them and I fear will do more, because they have taken the gentlemen who have the governance in these parts under your Highness. I have sent to my Lord Steward [the earl of Shrewsbury] the Lord Darcy and others to be in readiness . . .
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Lord Borough omitted to mention that he had, in fact, ridden hell for leather to get away from the mob, abandoning his servant, who was so badly beaten up by the angry crowd that he later died of his injuries. Nor did he stay at Gainsborough Old Hall for long. After issuing orders to his tenants that they were not to
join the rebels, he escaped across the Trent to join Lord Shrewsbury at Newark.

On a personal level, Borough was unsympathetic to the rebels’ concerns about religion and his authoritarian nature was too uncompromising to consider any accommodation with them. He was always the king’s man. But his letter is interesting not just for what it reveals (and conceals) about his own part in the events at Caistor but because it touches on a number of common aspects of the rising as it spread beyond Lincolnshire: the determination and anger of the rebels, their resentment of the government’s demands on them and their tactic of taking hostages from among the local gentry and minor aristocracy – many of whom privately shared their misgivings. Some may not even have confronted their consciences until compelled to do so by force. One such man, indeed, eventually became their leader.

R
OBERT
A
SKE
was the third son of Sir Robert Aske, a landowner from south Yorkshire. On his mother’s side he was connected to the Clifford family (his cousin was the first earl of Cumberland) and he was evidently well educated. A fellow of Gray’s Inn, he had probably been working for some years as a lawyer in London, but there are only glimpses of him before the fateful day in early October 1536 when he left the family home at Aughton, near Selby, to cross the river Humber into Lincolnshire. It was the first stage of a long journey that would take him back to London for the start of the Michaelmas law term. If he had heard of the troubles, he was certainly not deterred by them. Perhaps his mind was fixed on his work. There was no reason to suppose that his journey would be interrupted by anything beyond the normal hazards of travel in those days. He took the ferry on 4 October unimpeded. But the next morning, at the little town of Sawcliffe, he was intercepted by a band of commons who gave him the stark choice of taking the oath to their cause, or dying. Thus menaced, Aske swore ‘to be true to god and the king and the commonwealth’. This was a minor variant of an oath used throughout Lincolnshire during the rising there. Others specifically mentioned the ‘holy church’ or ‘Christ’s catholic church’ and some substituted the word ‘commonalty’ for ‘commonwealth’, but their underlying meaning was the same. God, Henry VIII and the common people were spoken of in one breath. It was not a trinity that pleased the king.

In that one moment, as he sat on his horse surrounded by the angry men of north Lincolnshire, Robert Aske’s life was changed. It could be argued that an oath taken under duress is not binding, but the sixteenth-century mind believed that oaths were a moral force that could not be lightly abandoned, whatever the circumstances in which they had been administered. Not all men thought that way, of course. There were opportunists and timeservers then as now, and it was not, in the context of rebellion, a defence that the government acknowledged. Henry VIII and his supporters had no truck with such knavery, as they saw it. But Aske felt differently.

We do not know what went through his mind at Sawcliffe or why, instead of trying to fade quietly into the background, he stayed with this group of rebels and began to coordinate communications between them and others who had risen further south in Lincolnshire. Their concerns must have struck a chord in him and perhaps he felt, with his lawyer’s training, that he could give voice to them in an effective way. A younger son without, apparently, any great prospects, he may also have relished the opportunity for leadership that had accidentally come his way. His life was outwardly unremarkable. He was unmarried but close to his family, a good brother and uncle. Perhaps the loss of one of his eyes marked him out as physically different and he had felt the effect of this. But he led an ordered existence, if somewhat lacking in stimulation. Suddenly, here was an opportunity to play a part on a much larger stage, in pursuit of worthy ideals. He had been a counsel on cases in the court of Star Chamber. Now he could speak for the defence of the Church
and the commons, for the preservation of a way of life that was deemed to be under attack. Around him, he could see the smaller monasteries suppressed and traditional worship denigrated. His world was out of joint.

The Lincolnshire revolt subsided in the space of a fortnight. The men of Louth had sent written demands to Henry VIII which he rejected with furious contempt. From the outset of the troubles in the north, the king was uncompromising in tone. He would not be told what to do by the common people: ‘We take it as a great unkindness that our common and inferior subjects rise against us without any ground: for, first, as to the taking away of the goods of parish churches, it was never intended; Yet, if it had been, true subjects would not have treated with Us, their prince, in such violent sort, but would have humbly sued for their purpose.’ He would throw the might of a huge military force at them: ‘100,000 men, horse and foot, in harness, with munitions and artillery, which they cannot resist. We have also appointed another great army to invade their countries as soon as they come out of them, and to burn, spoil, and destroy their goods, wives and children with all extremity, to the fearful example of lewd subjects.’
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This was sufficient to break the spirit of the men of Lincolnshire. They had no wish to confront the duke of Suffolk and his approaching horde, which was much smaller in reality than the king claimed. But it was not enough to deter Robert Aske. Already he had raised Marshland and adjacent districts of Yorkshire on the other side of the Humber. Clearly Aske was not alone, but the risks he was running were high. When he came to Lincoln to hear the king’s pronouncement, he was warned that he was a marked man. He knew then that there was no point in hesitating. If it was rumoured in London that he was a leader of the commons, then that was what he would become. In Yorkshire, he believed, there would not be such easy capitulation.

His confidence and powers of organization proved formidable. On 16 October he entered the city of York with 10,000 followers
and heard Mass at the Minster. It must have been an emotional occasion. Honourably received and lodged with a local alderman, he spent two days in York, and it was here he composed the ‘Oath of the Honourable Men’ that was sworn by all those who massed under his banner:

Ye shall not enter into this our Pilgrimage of Grace for the common wealth but only for the love ye bear to God’s faith and church militant and the maintenance thereof, the preservation of the king’s person, his issue, and the purifying of the nobility and to expulse all villein blood and evil counsellors against the common wealth of the same. And that ye shall not enter into our said pilgrimage for no peculiar private profit to yourselves not to do no displeasure to no private person but by counsel of the common wealth nor slay nor murder for no envy but in your hearts to put away all fear for the common wealth. And to take before you the cross of Christ and your heart’s faith to the restitution of the church and to the suppression of heretics’ opinions by the holy contents of this book.
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The oath spelled out the agenda of Aske and the other leaders of the rebellion very clearly. For them, the commonwealth and religion were inextricably linked. The spread of new religious ideas – ‘heretics’ opinions’ – and the threat to the monastic way of life – required the ‘restitution of the church’. The king was not the pilgrims’ enemy; their real opponents were lowly-born ‘evil counsellors’, men, in other words, like Thomas Cromwell.

It would be easy to view this as simply a clash between the old and the new, to represent the pilgrims as reactionaries trying in vain to stop the tide of reform, conservatives living in the past who wanted to maintain silly superstitions and the elitism of a Church that kept the faithful at one remove from the word of God. The reformers, among whom Cromwell must surely be counted despite more modern interpretations that he was some sort of sixteenth-century totalitarian who did not really believe in
anything other than his own power and advancement, were determined to impose the king’s authority and to dismantle anything that smacked of devotion to Rome. Aske, forced by circumstances to articulate his beliefs, gave voice to the doubts of many ordinary people (not just in northern England) who believed themselves loyal subjects of Henry VIII. Religion was an integral part of their daily lives. It lay at the root of the very order of things. Now all was beset by uncertainty. The depth and extent of that insecurity lies at the heart of the Pilgrimage of Grace.