The Last White Rose (38 page)

Bishop Fisher’s plan was not unrealistic; it was potentially as great a threat as any faced by Henry VII. Nothing so menacing had ever emerged before, while it was supported by far more magnates than were to take part in the Pilgrimage of Grace: in 1533 a larger percentage of peers and gentry were ready to rise in revolt than had supported York against Lancaster in 1461 and brought down Henry VI.

Cromwell sensed something very dangerous was at foot without being able to identify what it was. This may have been the reason for a number of otherwise inexplicable attacks on several peers who were known to be friends of the Lady Mary. In 1534 Lord Dacre of the North was falsely accused of having had treason able dealings with the Scots, while in 1535 Lord Bray was charged with dabbling in alchemy (not even a crime) and Lord Darcy was forbidden to leave London. Although omitted from the charges listed in Fisher’s attainder, Cromwell claimed after his execution that the bishop had been trying to start a rebellion.
⁹

But however many people may have hated King Henry and wanted the rebellion to happen, it never took place. Threatened by the Lutheran princes in Germany, with his long-running struggle against France and his never-ending war on the Turkish front, the emperor simply could not afford to waste valuable troops on helping the Yorkists who, while they might be able to find a candidate for the throne, all too obviously lacked a military leader. Had they possessed someone such as Richard de la Pole, matters might have taken a very different turn. The only possible candidate, Lord Darcy, was too ill and too old for the role, and in any case he had never been an outstanding soldier.

The biggest deterrent was Henry himself, who cowed opponents by his terrifying personality and political skills. Visits to both Houses of Parliament, where he listened to debates for
hours on end, and their members’ readiness to pass the bills he wanted, gave him a misleading aura of popularity. Opponents were further demoralized by a fear that Cromwell’s agents were spying on them, knowing that the slightest hint of disloyalty would result in immediate arrest and probably ruin. Despite this, some Yorkists – especially Darcy – still persisted in hoping against hope for a rising.

Encouragingly, across the Irish Sea during the summer of 1534 the FitzGeralds rose after hearing a false rumour that the Earl of Kildare, currently imprisoned in the Tower, had been executed. The earl’s son, popularly known as ‘Silken Thomas’, sent an embassy to Charles V, offering to rule Ireland as a fief of the Holy See if the emperor would support him with troops to fight the ‘English schismatics’. Even though the rebels murdered the Archbishop of Dublin, the rising was welcomed in England with noticeable warmth, much to the alarm of Henry VIII and Cromwell, Chapuys commenting cheerfully that certainly ‘it made a very good beginning’.
¹⁰
However, despite for a moment threatening Dublin itself, the FitzGeralds were defeated. Silken Thomas and his five uncles were captured through treachery, to be hanged at Tyburn two years later.

‘A year ago I wrote to Your Majesty the same thing,’ Chapuys wrote on 3 November 1534, replying to a query from Charles about a letter from the Spanish consul at Venice, which he enclosed in cypher. (The consul was suggesting that Reginald Pole might be able to take over England, and save Queen Katherine and Princess Mary from King Henry.) Chapuys repeated that Katherine was most anxious for her daughter to marry Pole, insisting the English would at once show strong support for him, ‘especially as there are innumerable good personages who hold that the true title to this Kingdom belongs to the Duke of Clarence’s family’. He urged an immediate invasion. Affairs were in such a state, he said, that everyone in England would welcome an imperial army, ‘especially if the said Lord Reynold were in it’.

Chapuys then mentioned Reginald’s younger brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, who often came to see him – rather too often thought the ambassador, who had warned him to keep away for fear of attracting the attention of Cromwell’s spies. ‘He does not cease, like so many others, to beseech me to write to Your Majesty of the facility with which this King might be conquered, and that all the people look for nothing else.’ Chapuys had been careful to mention Reginald to Geoffrey on only one occasion: ‘long ago, I told him that Reginald would do better to beg for his bread than come back to all the trouble over here, where he might easily be given the same treatment as the Bishop of Rochester or worse.’ But he was shrewd enough to realize that Sir Geoffrey was a lightweight, dangerously unstable and indiscreet, if an extremely useful source of information.
¹¹

Two elderly but formidable peers, who had been young men when Richard III was king, became more influential with the White Rose party at this time. Steady supporters of Queen Katherine, both would have liked to see the deposition of the present monarch. One, already mentioned, was Lord Darcy de Darcy, KG.

Born in the 1460s, Darcy was a fierce old veteran of ancient family from Templehurst in Yorkshire, ennobled by Henry VIII. For many years the steward to the young Earl of Westmorland, whose widowed mother he married, as Warden of the East Marches he had seen plenty of fighting on the Scottish Border. A Northener to his fingertips, Darcy was called the ‘Key to the North’ because he understood its people so well.
¹²
Although he had signed a petition to the pope for Henry’s divorce, he was horrified by it, as well as by the king’s religious policies, which he attributed to his new minister Thomas Cromwell – the ‘vicegerent’. In 1532 at a private meeting of notables held by the Duke of Norfolk, Darcy insisted that the pope was the supreme judge in all spiritual matters, later telling the House of Lords that Parliament had no right to meddle with religion.

The second important recruit was John Hussey, whose father had been a judge in Edward IV’s day. Now in his sixties, he himself had first risen to prominence by helping to put down Lord Lovell’s rising in 1486. A former henchman of Messers Empson and Dudley, Hussey had then made himself so useful to Henry VIII that he had been rewarded with large grants of land and created a peer. He was sufficiently trusted to be appointed chamberlain to the recently bastardized Lady Mary in 1533, after which he and his wife had become indignant at the girl’s shabby treatment.
¹³

During the summer of 1534 Lord Darcy and Lord Hussey dined together at Hussey’s house in London, with Darcy’s friend, Sir Robert Constable of Flamborough – a wealthy Northern magnate who was a Knight of the Body to the king although his father had fought for Richard at Bosworth. The main topic discussed was their shared revulsion at a sermon given by the chaplain to an evangelical Yorkshire landowner, Sir Ralph Bigod, in which the priest – a keen follower of the New Learning – had attacked the cult of the Virgin Mary. All agreed that they could never be heretics but were going to live and die as Christian men.
¹⁴

On another occasion, in the garden of his house at Sleaford in Lincolnshire, when discussing the appearance of heresy in Yorkshire, Hussey confided to an acquaintance, that although the new doctrines did not appear to be making much progress there, ‘a few particular persons’ were nonetheless hoping to make the king bring them in, to such a point that one day it would clearly become necessary to take up arms in defence of the Catholic Faith, because the situation ‘will never mend without we fight’.
¹⁵

By autumn both Darcy and Hussey were in touch with Eustache Chapuys, urging him to persuade the emperor to invade England where his troops would be certain of an enthusiastic welcome, especially in the North Country where, so Darcy claimed, there were at least 600 lords and rich gentlemen who shared their
opinions. In September Darcy proposed to the ambassador that Charles should send a small expedition up the Thames to rescue the Lady Mary, who was then at Greenwich, while his own men would free Queen Katherine from Kimbolton. In addition, he asked to be given a small force of arquebusiers and money to pay them, so that he could start a rising as soon as he was able to obtain permission from the authorities to return to Yorkshire. The English were so discontented with Henry’s regime that they would rush to join the revolt. Even if both Darcy and Chapuys exaggerated, this was the first suggestion of armed action by the White Rose since the death of Richard de la Pole.

Lords Darcy and Hussey were far from alone among English peers in hoping for a revolt that would topple Henry VIII. The Earl of Northumberland’s doctor brought Chapuys a secret message from his master, saying the king was about to lose his throne. (Once betrothed to Anne Boleyn, the earl had fainted when she was condemned to death, while he had other reasons for hating Henry.) A similar message arrived from Darcy’s brother-in-law, Lord Sandys, the Lord Chamberlain and Deputy of Calais, who had a considerable reputation as a soldier. Other peers must have thought the same way without caring to inform Chapuys, for example the earls of Derby and Essex, and perhaps the Lords Dacre of the North and Bray. It was the same mood of discontented neo-feudalism that, in the previous century, had helped to bring about the Wars of the Roses.

At about this time, ‘the good old lord’ (Darcy’s name in the imperial code book) presented Chapuys with an enamelled gold pansy and, as that well-informed ambassador must have known, the pansy was the badge of the Pole family. At Christmas Darcy sent him a magnificent sword, which Chapuys interpreted as meaning the time had come for an armed rising. The old warrior was the sort of man who spoke to everyone in his neighbourhood, of every class, and he realized that the North was seething with indignation: if the commons rose in sufficient numbers, the gentry and clergy should be able to take command. But just
as Richard de la Pole, Perkin Warbeck and the Earl of Lincoln had known – and Henry Tudor in 1485 – Darcy realized that foreign troops and foreign money were needed if there was to be any chance of success.

The Emperor Charles was not convinced of the viability of Darcy’s plan, however. While he wanted his cousin Mary to inherit the throne and disapproved of Henry VIII, he was equally anxious to avoid the Anglo-French alliance that would almost certainly result if he meddled too much in English affairs. He therefore did nothing, although he told his ambassador to encourage ‘the good old lord’. But while the authorities had no inkling of Darcy’s intentions, they were suspicious of him because of his open opposition to the king’s policies and he was not allowed to return home until the summer of 1535.

23. 1533–4: Rebellion?

1
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, 1164.

2
.
CSP Ven
,
op. cit
., vol. V, 575.

3
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, 508.

4
. G.R. Elton,
Reform and Reformation
:
England 1509–1558
, London, Edward Arnold, 1977, p. 122.

5
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, 1164.

6
.
Ibid.
, 1164.

7
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. VII, 136.

8
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, 1540.

9
. J.J. Scarisbrick, ‘Fisher, Henry VIII and the Reformation Crisis’, in B. Bradshaw and E. Duffy (eds),
Humanism, Reform and
the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 163.

10
.
CSP Spain
, V (i), 86..

11
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. VII, 1095.

12
.
Oxford DNB
.

13
.
Oxford DNB
.

14
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. XII (i), 576.