The Boleyns (20 page)

Lord Hunsdon was back in February 1569, when the Regent Moray asked for his support in a border clearing operation, but again it is not clear how long he stayed. It was to be several months before he made his way north again, and by then the circumstances had changed. 1569 was the year in which the politics of the court may well have outweighed the needs of the borders. It started with the Queen’s decision in December 1568 to borrow the money destined for the Duke of Alba’s troops in the Low Countries. The Genoese ships carrying this treasure had ended up in Southampton to escape a gale in the Channel, and Elizabeth impounded the cargo, announcing that she would take it up herself. This was technically permissible, because the money still belonged to the bankers, but Alba was understandably annoyed and embargoed English trade. This development in turn provoked Cecil’s opponents in the council, who blamed him for this outcome, to conspire against him, with the intention of undermining the Queen’s confidence.
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At the same time the court was equally, although rather differently, divided over the Duke of Norfolk’s plan to marry the Scottish queen. A number of traditional peers were in favour of this move, because the Duke was a conformist in his religion, and such a marriage might have neutralised the Catholic threat which Mary presented. Among his supporters were the Earl of Sussex, the President of the Council in the North, and the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, who were not at court. Elizabeth allowed both these plots to fester for a while, and then in the late summer, declared herself unequivocally. Cecil enjoyed her full confidence, and under no circumstances would she countenance a marriage between her premier peer and the Queen of Scots.
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How dare anyone suggest such a thing! She gave the Duke a piece of her mind, and he withdrew in a huff to his estates. During September there were rumours that he was plotting rebellion, but he seems to have been disorientated by the vehemence of the Queen’s reaction. At the beginning of October he set off to return to the court, but before he could reach it he was arrested and taken to the Tower. This left his supporters in an ambiguous situation, and most of them, like Cecil’s detractors, ran for cover. In the north, however, the reaction was rather more hostile. The Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, as well as being supporters of Norfolk, were also Catholics and sympathetic to the Queen of Scots. Rumours began to spread of an intended rebellion in County Durham, and the Earl of Sussex, not free from suspicion himself, was ordered to summon them to court to give an account of themselves.
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Interpreting this instruction freely, at the end of October he summoned the earls to York, and professed himself satisfied with their explanations. At the same time he wrote to Cecil, expressing his incredulity that the Duke of Norfolk should be suspected of treason: ‘I have always loved him above all others, her Majesty excepted …’, he declared. Nevertheless, the Secretary should be under no illusions as to where his primary allegiance lay, and the cloud of suspicion lifted.
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He had, however, been deceived by the northern earls, who, in a general mess of misunderstandings, and egged on by more aggressive inferiors, raised the standard of revolt and marched on Durham. On 13 November, Sussex proclaimed them both, and all their adherents, traitors.
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For the time being the royalist position in the north looked bleak, and Sussex reported that he was unable to raise a reliable army to encounter the rebels. The Yorkshire gentry were sitting on their hands, and the commons were religiously disaffected. He suggested that an army be raised in the south, and this was done. Lord Clinton was placed in command of the levies of Lincolnshire and the Earl of Warwick those of his own county. At the same time, on 16 November, Lord Hunsdon was ordered back to the north, with a general commission to support Sussex in any way that he could.
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It was assumed that the garrison of Berwick, being paid professionals, would remain loyal, and so it proved. Hunsdon met Sir Ralf Sadler at Hull on the way north, and they both joined Sussex at York on the 24th. Sadler was very experienced in the affairs of Scotland, and a staunch friend of Sir William Cecil, while Hunsdon represented the Queen’s confidence. Within a few days they were both writing to Cecil praising the loyalty and diligence of the Lord President, who, they reckoned, had turned the situation in Yorkshire around so that the rebels were now likely to find ‘scant comfort’ in the county.
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Sadler remained with Sussex at York, but Hunsdon proceeded to Berwick, with instructions to levy troops and to liaise with Sir John Forster, the Warden of the Middle March. On 2 December Cecil wrote that Lord Scrope, the Warden of the West March, was under similar orders, meanwhile Clinton and Warwick were advancing from the south. By that time the crisis was virtually over, because reluctant though the men of Yorkshire might have been to turn out for the Queen, they proved even more reluctant to join the rebels. That force, originally estimated at 4,000 foot and 1,000 horse, gradually diminished as they advanced south, and was not replenished. Their best chance of success would probably have been a cavalry raid on Tutbury, where Mary was being held, but on 25 November she was removed to the greater security of Coventry. On the 24th the rebels reached Bramham Moor, near Leeds, still about fifty miles from Tutbury, and their best chance was clearly gone. They would not have known of the move, but on the 25th they began to retreat.
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There had been no battle, but the momentum had gone out of their movement. By 30 November they were back at Brancepeth, County Durham whence they had set out full of hope less than a month before, and in spite of a late boost from the taking of Barnard Castle, they began to disperse what was left of their force. By the end of December they had taken refuge in Scotland, which no doubt prompted a mission to the Regent, undertaken by George Carey on 22 December.

Meanwhile, Sussex had advanced to Newcastle, and was sending joint reports with Hunsdon to the council in London. Neither was very happy with the scale of the operation being mounted from the south, considering the large numbers involved to be unnecessary.
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In spite of their dissatisfaction with the religious settlement, the gentlemen of Yorkshire were far too astute to want to be associated with a failed rebellion, and were now anxious to prove their loyalty to the Queen. Besides, Clinton and Warwick were behaving in a heavy handed fashion which was likely to cause more trouble than it solved. Sussex himself was by no means lenient, and on 4 January 1570 he reported that no fewer than 305 men had been executed in County Durham by the exercise of martial law, including 30 townsmen of Durham itself.
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The north would not quickly forget the consequences of arousing the Queen’s anger. However, the story was not quite concluded, because there was a rather curious aftermath in a remote corner of the borders. Leonard Dacre had lost what he considered to be his birthright in the family estates to the Duke of Norfolk in a lawsuit back in June. Norfolk was the guardian of the young Lord Dacre, who was the son of his late duchess by a previous husband, while Leonard was his uncle.
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When Lord Dacre died in May 1569, the succession and the lands were in dispute between them. Neither was in favour with the Queen, the Duke for the reasons already noticed and Leonard because he was an ardent supporter of Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the verdict had gone to the Duke and the pair were, apparently, reconciled. Leonard was thus still in the south when the northern rebellion erupted, and although he was strongly sympathetic to the earls, he was not in a position to be of much assistance to them. He returned to the borders during December, and belatedly attempted to rescue their enterprise, using the substantial Dacre affinity as his base and endeavouring to solicit assistance from the borderers on the Scottish side. From his base at Naworth he even seemed briefly to menace Carlisle. At first the seriousness of this did not appear. Sussex and Hunsdon advanced to Hexham in the last days of December, but finding nothing worthy of their attention returned to Berwick, from where Hunsdon reported on the 30th, greatly commending his colleague’s service. Being at Hexham, he declared, ‘did little service’, which suggests that Dacre’s mobilisation had not yet progressed very far.
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However, the threat quickly developed during January, and by the end of the month Lord Hunsdon had been ordered to apprehend him. Leading out his mixed force of borderers and garrison troops from Berwick, he confronted Dacre’s retainers and Scots, said to number 3,000, near Naworth on 20 February. The battle was sharp, but decisive, and the rebels fled, leaving some 300 dead on the field. Dacre joined the earls in Scotland, and Naworth fell to the royal army without a siege.
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The Queen, who had complained at one stage that she was not being kept properly informed, was vastly relieved by the news of this victory, and sent Hunsdon a personal letter of congratulation, in which she addressed him as her ‘dear kinsman’.
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For the next few months Carey remained in the north, negotiating with the Scottish council, which was (more or less) in control of the country after the assassination of the Earl of Moray on 27 January. The country was divided between the King’s men, who were Protestant and supported the young King James, and Queen’s men who were (mostly) Catholics, and who wanted her reinstated. The Earl of Westmorland had slipped through this net and ended up in the Low Countries, but the Earl of Northumberland was held in prison by the King’s party. Hunsdon busied himself about the business of his extradition. On 20 October 1571 he was briefed for another mission to the new regent, the Earl of Mar,
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but had for the time being no success, reporting on 16 November that there was no prospect of his being surrendered. Meanwhile, Mar was in urgent need of military support. In Hunsdon’s opinion, 4,000 men would be needed for the task, but Elizabeth did not respond. The Earl of Northumberland was eventually sold to the English for £2,000 in May 1572, but it was not until July, after the Earl of Lennox had replaced Mar as regent, that he was handed over. He was executed at York on 22 August. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was much exercised over how best to support the King’s men without stirring up the French to intervene on the other side, and briefly sent the Earl of Sussex against the Hamiltons, who were the chief of Mary’s supporters, drawing him back only when he threatened to be too successful. Hunsdon busied himself about his charge in Berwick, reporting on 27 April that he had ridden the borders in pursuit of Leonard Dacre, who was being protected by the reivers of Teviotdale, but without, apparently, any success. He also, rather mysteriously, intervened on behalf of the Countess of Northumberland, who, if the accounts are accurate, had been a great ‘setter on’ of the rebellion and was certainly a staunch Catholic. She wrote thanking him for his ‘comfortable letters’, and he was constrained to do some explaining to his mistress, who seems, understandably, to have taken his interest amiss.
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It may have been by his connivance that she escaped into Scotland later in 1570, and was not included in her husband’s extradition. She was, however, in great hardship, and was cared for by sympathisers both in Scotland and after she had made her way to the Netherlands. On reaching the Low Countries she prudently retired into a convent, and died at Namur in October 1596.
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The rank and file of the rebels, those who had not been executed under martial law, were tried by a special commission of Oyer and Terminer during the summer of 1570, and 199 of them were hanged. Lord Hunsdon sat on this commission ex officio, but his role is not distinguishable from that of the other justices.
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The more substantial of the offenders were dealt with by Act of Attainder in the spring parliament of 1571, and a wholesale confiscation of lands and other property followed. Henry Percy, Thomas’s brother, was allowed to succeed to a much reduced earldom of Northumberland in the following year, but the earldom of Westmorland and the barony of Dacre became extinct.
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The lands of these and the other attainted gentlemen passed first into the hands of the Crown, and then were redistributed to the loyal gentry of the north. On 30 May 1571, Lord Hunsdon received his share of the loot, a substantial proportion of the lands of Leonard Dacre, in Cumberland and Derbyshire, which were still extensive in spite of his failure to secure the main inheritance.
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Those lands were also possessed by the Crown, not as a result of Dacre’s attainder but by that of the Duke of Norfolk, which passed in the same session. Hunsdon had been well supported by his family during his action in the north. His son George was knighted at Berwick in May 1570, and the Edward Carey ‘Groom of the Privy Chamber’, who was deputed to take possession of the lands and goods of Sir John Neville on 11 January was almost certainly his third son. Presumably, both served alongside their father in his campaign, but whether they distinguished themselves in any way is not on record. In spite of the fact that Henry was re-appointed to the keepership of the East March in 1571, and reappears in Berwick from time to time over the next few years, the whole family seems to have moved its main base of operations back to the south once the fall-out from the rebellion had ceased. Lord Hunsdon was a witness to the creation of Sir William Cecil as Lord Burghley on 25 January 1572, and George sat as MP for Hertfordshire in the parliament of 1571.
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On 20 March 1573, Henry was appointed to the High Commission for the Northern Province, and that must have taken him at least as far as York from time to time. Unfortunately it is not known how often he sat. He was by this time considered to be something of an expert on Scottish and border affairs, a position which he seems not to have relished, and was determinedly, even violently, opposed to the pretensions of the Scottish queen, at a time when Elizabeth was trying to negotiate her way out of the trouble which that lady was causing her. Sir Francis Knollys appears to have aroused his ire at one stage by suggesting that his son George, then aged twenty-six, would be a suitable groom for Mary, but Hunsdon did not see the joke – if any was intended!
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He had a different destination in mind for George, and on 29 December 1574 the latter married Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorp, Northamptonshire, an ancestor of the present Earl Spencer. In spite of what seems to have been a somewhat prickly nature, he carefully steered a middle course in religious disputes and favours continued to be granted to him. On 31 July 1574 he got a couple of plums, neither particularly generous in financial terms, but both in recognition of his status as a courtier. First he was made Keeper of Hyde Park, with all the rights of herbage and pannage which were attached to that office, and the same day Keeper of Somerset House in the Strand, which had been the Queen’s London residence during her sister’s reign and must have carried many painful memories for her.
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He took up residence there, and used it as his London home until the time of his death. In November 1575 he was back in the north-east, where he was reported as hanging thieves with great enthusiasm, although how long he was present, and whether this characterisation was justified, is not known.
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