The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (31 page)

Somerset saw himself as the champion of the oppressed, hearing complacently the benisons of the poor: ‘There was never man had the
hearts of the poor as you have. Oh, the commons pray for you, sir, they say, “God save your life”.’ Such paternalism may have seemed incompatible with Somerset’s military brutality, his cruel arrogance and his startling cupidity. As the soldier who had left the poor in the Borders to live like animals in their ruined homes; as rack-renter, sheep-master and encloser; as the ruler who presided over the Vagrancy Act which imposed slavery upon those who, willingly or not, left their homes, he was ostensibly an unlikely social reformer. Yet to that role he aspired. Here was a man as ambitious of virtue, the badge of nobility, as of riches. And there was more to it. Evangelicals harped upon the compelling Christian imperative to relieve the distress of the poor, ‘for those injuries we do unto the poor members of Christ we do unto Him, saith He’, and the Protector heard them. Somerset and his redoubtable duchess had long sustained the evangelical cause. In the dark days of 1539, after the repressive Act of Six Articles had inaugurated a new wave of persecution, they had welcomed leading evangelicals to their London house. The Duchess had supported the heretic Anne Askew in Newgate in 1546. Now ‘hotlings’ returned from exile to kneel at their feet and ‘devise commonwealths’. In power, Somerset listened to those who looked for the advent of a Christian commonwealth and told him how to achieve it, especially to those who blamed social distress not upon ruinous wars but upon the greed of landowners, and who laid the sins which were the Government’s at the door of the sheep-master.

As prices rose ever higher under the Protectorate, people looked for the cause and were puzzled. How was the dearth to be explained when the harvests between 1547 and 1549 had been so good? What could explain the disparity between the price of grain and other foodstuffs? Surely this was a ‘marvellous’ dearth, a ‘monstrous and portentous’ dearth, and man-made, the product of covetousness? Though there was uncertainty whether the raising of rents was the cause or the consequence of inflation, there was no doubt that the rentier gentry prospered while the poor suffered. Did the cause of dearth lie in failures and malpractices of the market? Certainly, the Council issued regulations to control prices; exports were restricted; and compulsory purveyance (the king’s right to buy provisions at fixed low prices) to provide goods for the army was abolished. The cause and the remedy came to be sought in the way in which the land was used. The agrarian problems to which solutions must be found were those that had exercised Wolsey and More
a generation before: the conversion of land from arable to pasture, the victory of sheep over plough, the eviction of labourers from their cottages, rural depopulation, vagrancy. These problems were not new, but they were now believed to be intractable. Whether arable had, in fact, employed more people than wool production is doubtful. The great rise in population undermined all old certainties. But there is no doubt that most Tudor thinkers blamed economic ills upon the sheep flocks. Who would bother to employ twelve people to keep cows and milk them, to make cheese and take it to market, when one shepherd could make a greater profit? Why raise pigs, poultry and beef when the money lay in sheep? While the rich made such judgements the poor could hardly have a living. Latimer foresaw the day when a pig would cost as much as a pound. Where would remedy be found?

Somerset, with the approval of some of the Council, set up a commission on 1 June 1548 to discover how much land had been turned from tillage to pasture, for ‘Christian people’ were ‘by the greedy covetousness of some men eaten up and devoured of brute beasts’. John Hales, to whom the commission was entrusted, presented their charges to the commissioners as a godly duty, ‘as acceptable sacrifice to God as may be’, but soon found his commission opposed by the landlords whose excesses the commission was meant to discover and into whose lands and private interests it trespassed. But, in spite of ‘the Devil, private profit, self-love, money and such like the Devil’s instruments’, Somerset insisted that it should go forward. While the gentry thought of the commission as a storm which would pass over, it had raised expectations among the commons which could hardly be fulfilled. Rumours spread that if the commons were not satisfied they would attempt reform themselves. Against the will of the whole Council, Somerset, on his own authority, issued a proclamation in April 1549 enforcing legislation against enclosure, and in July ordered a second enclosure commission, with novel and unconstitutional powers to hear and determine cases. The rest of the Council feared that the commissions were an incitement to riot. So it proved.

In the late spring and summer of 1549 there were commons’ risings in Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Kent, Essex, Sussex, Devon, Cornwall, Bedfordshire, Rutland, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and East Anglia. So
sudden and so widespread were the revolts that there was uncertainty about how and where they began. Not since 1381 had there been such widespread rebellion. So long were the delays in sending troops against the rebels and so profligate were Somerset’s pardons offering redress of grievances, that sinister suspicions of his populism were voiced: ‘that you have some greater enterprise in your head that lean so much to the multitude’. But the failure was not the Protector’s alone. The gentry, who by their pursuit of self-interest had abdicated their duty to the commons, seemed powerless to act, and ‘looked one upon another’. Unable to raise their tenants against the rebels, they fled. The commons seemed to hold their governors to ransom. ‘Commons is become a king’, appointing terms and conditions to their rulers. ‘Grant us this and that, and we will go home,’ they were said to demand. Somerset now wrote with patrician horror of ‘a plague and a fury among the vilest and worst sort of men’, who had all ‘conceived a marvellous hate against gentlemen, and take them all as their enemies’.

To the mortification of the evangelical establishment there were revolts both in the name of the ‘commonwealth’, which the commons had appropriated for themselves, and against it by conservatives determined to halt and to reverse reform. How should the governing orders react? All rebellion was sin. Archbishop Cranmer rebuked the rebels: even if their magistrates were ‘very tyrants against the commonwealth’, subjects must obey. The risings took many forms, as was likely ‘of people without head and rule’, and there was little cohesion in motive and organization between the different areas. Some cried ‘Pluck down enclosures and parks; some for the commons; others pretend religion’. Most of the riots were pacified easily enough, especially where the local lord acted expeditiously, as the Earl of Arundel did in Sussex, and deference prevailed. By 10 July the Council could assure Lord Russell in the West that everywhere was ‘thoroughly quieted’, except Buckinghamshire, but even as they wrote thousands of rebels were marching on Norwich. Far distant from each other in motive and action as in place, the rebels in the South-West and East Anglia held out and held out.

When the commons of Attleborough in Norfolk tore down hedges on 20 June it had seemed a spontaneous local protest, little different from many another. Yet at the celebration of the feast of St Thomas the Martyr at Wymondham a fortnight later many came prepared for more concerted action. Finding their leader in Robert Kett, on 10 July thousands marched upon Norwich in a protest against the exploitation and
venality of local governors who governed in no interests but their own. Leading figures in the city, including the mayor and perhaps the bishop, colluded with the rebels. Above Norwich on Mousehold Heath a rebel camp was set up, with its own laws, discipline and daily service. The rebels summoned captive gentlemen before a popular tribunal, at the Tree of Reformation, crying either ‘a good man’, or ‘hang him’, but this vigilante justice was prevented and a certain decorum prevailed. In the King’s name Kett ordered purveyance on a grand scale, seizing tens of thousands of the sheep which had dispossessed them in order to provision a camp 16,000 strong. Four times Kett was offered pardon, and four times he refused it: he denied any offence. The Norfolk men had mounted a grand demonstration, not against central government but in support of it, and they waited in their camp for the Council to fulfil its promises of reform and justice. And they waited. Kett’s Mousehold camp was one among many in the summer of 1549. In Kent and Sussex, Norfolk and Suffolk, the ‘camp men’ ‘enkennelled’ themselves; new words for new forms of alternative government by the commons, a form of self-assertion by the lower orders which bewildered and alarmed their social superiors. In their camps they dispensed justice themselves.

Kett’s rebels held out at Mousehold until the end of August, encouraged by a prophecy that

But, after a bloody confrontation with the Earl of Warwick’s troops, the slaughtered bodies which made Dussindale a graveyard were the rebels’ own. Later, there were those who regretted the quiescence of the camps, promising that next time they would have not a ‘lying camp but a running camp’. In the South-West the rebels had never believed that the government was for them, rather against them, and they had planned not to camp in protest but, as once before in 1497, to march upon London. Their actions were different from those rebels in East Anglia but so was their cause. They, too, harboured resentments against their gentry, but their animus was principally shown against the evangelical gentry in their midst. Religion was the cause which had first driven them to rise, and it was for religion that thousands died from the remote
counties of Devon and Cornwall. The Council had swept away ceremonies and practices which lay at the heart of the traditional religion to which they were devoted. Their rebellion was a direct challenge to the evangelical revolution which was beginning.

The accession of a new king and the rule of a Council known to contain evangelicals had occasioned high and urgent hopes of reform among reforming zealots. Under the new Josiah, they expected the temple of Baal would be cast down, idolatry overthrown, the primitive Church restored. Zealots rushed to effect reformation, without government sanction. This was a time of unprecedented freedom and prosperity for reformist printers. In evangelical strongholds, down went the roods, the images of saints; in their places were whitewashed walls, the royal arms and scriptural messages, including, ‘Thou shalt make no graven images, lest thou worship them’. ‘Hot gospellers’ preached a crusade against false worship. For some of the radicals the idolatry of worshipping images of wood and stone was as nothing compared to the idolatry of the Mass. Many hoped that the Mass was ‘yesterday’s bird’, and sang ballads against that ‘blasphemous monster’ which promised remission of sins by offering Christ’s body and blood: ‘Farewell to Mistress Missa’. But the sacrilege and zealotry of the iconoclasts appalled their Catholic neighbours, who threatened violence against them. The authorities insisted that it was not for the people ‘of their preposterous zeal’ to ‘run before they be sent’.

Yet every move of the Protector’s government signalled its intent to lead the infant Church of England under its juvenile king further towards reform. The homilies that were ordered to be read in every parish from July 1547 asserted justification by faith alone, leading Bishop Gardiner to prefer prison to compliance. The injunctions issued on the same day intended the ‘suppression of idolatry and superstition’. Not only were images themselves to be destroyed but even the ‘
memory
’ of them was to be obliterated. Could memories be erased as easily as walls could be whitewashed? Now praying upon rosaries was forbidden, and no candles were to be lit before images, but only upon the high altar, before the sacrament. It was an altercation between a Devon gentleman and an old woman whom he found praying still upon her rosary which provoked the rising of the parishioners in St Mary Clyst in Devon in June 1549. In December 1547 chantries and religious guilds had finally been
outlawed, not, as under Henry VIII’s legislation of 7 December 1545, upon grounds of economic exigency but through religious principle. If purgatory was not a place, if it was not found in scripture, if the dead were beyond the power of prayer, then what need was there for chantries? Yet the institutions were cast away before the belief that had sustained them was lost, and people lamented the loss of spiritual solace. The armies of morrow mass priests, Jesus mass priests and chantry priests, who had played a vital part in the life of the parishes, were now redundant. No one who suffered the trauma of the religious changes could doubt the reforming drive behind them.