by Frank McLynn
Once in control of Beverley, Aske and Stapulton identified York and Hull as their next targets. The rebel armies began to move out on 12 October but the final decision to attempt a twin-track advance against Hull and York was taken on the 15th.50 Aske issued a manifesto making it clear that his quarrel was with Cromwell, Cranmer and the rest of the ‘corrupt’ advisers, not the king himself. On the way to Hull Aske’s forces swarmed into the great Cistercian abbey of Jervaulx and forced the abbot, Adam Sedbergh, to take the oath of loyalty to the Pilgrimage; although forced to do so, he was later executed for treason. Henry VIII, with his obsession with the power of words, would never accept duress as an excuse for any form of defiance, disloyalty or dissent.51 The grandees of Hull were loyal to Henry, but he had not reciprocated their loyalty and had left them undefended and short of provisions. It was decided that Stapulton would advance on Hull while Aske aimed at the even more important target, York. Stapulton managed his part of the rebel strategy well and conducted a five-day siege, at the end of which Hull surrendered on 19 October, largely because the people had run out of food and there was no chance of reinforcement; additionally the rebels spread the rumour that Hull was trying their patience and they might have to resort to flame and arson, bombarding the town with Greek fire while their supporters within torched key buildings.52 Stapulton sensibly ordered the rebel army to refrain from looting; his main concern was to get the burghers to sign up for the Pilgrimage. But the surrender terms contained a disappointing clause that the loyalist gentlemen were submitting on the strict condition that they did not have to take the oath of the Pilgrimage or serve as its captains. Aske meanwhile enjoyed a similar success at York, then the sixth city of England with a population of 8,000. York was more ambivalent in its sympathies than Hull, and the mayor soon agreed to open the city gates provided Aske pledged that there would be no violence and looting and everything would be paid for.53 Aske entered in triumph on 16 October and set his men to administering the oath. Edward Lee, the Archbishop of York, a supporter of Cranmer and the Reformation but most of all a man in mortal dread of Henry, decided not to tarry, especially as he was likely to come face to face with the men of Beverley, who hated him for his manorial exactions – not to mention his endorsement of Henry’s detested statute, ordaining that all who took the sacraments had to pay the king a fee.54 He fled for safety to Pontefract Castle.
By now Aske had popularised the term ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ for the rebellion he headed. The nomenclature served two purposes. It made the Pilgrims representatives of Holy Mother Church and thus gave their movement the sanctity of a crusade. And it gave a collective brand-name and identity to the insurrection, transforming what was originally a commons’ rising in essence into a trans-class coalition which was dissociated and distinct from the failed Lincolnshire rising and clearly an altogether more serious matter.55 In line with his policy of always foregrounding religious issues, Aske devised a form of oath, to be sworn on the Bible, which he insisted all recruits, willing or unwilling, should take. It ran as follows:
Ye shall not enter into this our Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, but only for the love that ye do bear unto Almighty God, His faith and holy church militant and the maintenance thereof, to the preservation of the king’s person and his issue, to the purifying of the nobility, and to expulse all villein blood and evil councillors against the commonwealth from his Grace and his Privy Council of the same. And ye shall not enter into our said Pilgrimage for no particular profit to your self nor to do any displeasure to any private persons, but by counsel of the commonwealth, nor slay or murder for no envy, but in your hearts put away all fear and dread, and take afore you the Cross of Christ, and in your hearts His faith, the restitution of the Church, the suppression of these heretics and their opinions, by all the holy contents of this book.56
This seemed a fairly anodyne declaration – there was not even any mention of the hated Cromwell, which Aske felt might seem as though the main impetus for the Pilgrimage was political directed to factional ends. He aimed at solidarity in the north by persuading his fellow Pilgrims that there was universal enthusiasm there for the cause, though the truth was that, as in the German Peasants’ Revolt eleven years earlier, many of the gentry signed up willy-nilly under threat of death.57 Aske was also insistent that the clergy had to be in the forefront of the movement. As it was supposed to be a pilgrimage, he thought it best that high-ranking monks carrying crosses should be prominent. This would send a message to the king not only that his religious policy was wrong, but that its erroneous nature was perceived as such by all sections of the social order – for the clergy were not supposed to represent any one class.58
After taking York and Hull, Aske moved his host against Pontefract Castle. The castellan Thomas, Lord Darcy, was destined to be one of the key leaders of the Pilgrimage, but in the early days of the rising in Yorkshire he evinced a distinct lack of enthusiasm for it. Aged sixty-eight, Darcy had been a great favourite of Henry VII, but he had never cared for his son. Doubtless depressed and made circumspect by the poor showing of the Lincolnshire rebels, he nonetheless began by making fervent protestations of loyalty to Henry VIII. Yet the king never trusted him, unable to understand why Darcy could not deal as firmly with the rebels in his bailiwick as Suffolk and Shrewsbury had done in Lincolnshire. Darcy’s position was actually intolerable: the king had sent him no reinforcements; he felt that he could not command the loyalties of his own tenants, who were sympathetic to the rebellion; and he was impressed by the many instances where a minatory declaration, such as Shrewsbury’s in Lincolnshire, had brought insurgents to heel.59 On the other hand, in his secret heart Darcy sympathised with the Pilgims. He disapproved of the dissolution of the monasteries and loathed Thomas Cromwell.60 Moreover, his record of loyalty to Henry VIII was poor, he had often posited scenarios whereby the king could be removed by coup d’état, and in 1534–5 he had actively intrigued against him. On that occasion he had plotted with Eustace Chapuys, imperial ambassador to England, to get Emperor Charles V to invade the sceptred isle. Despite the emperor’s lack of interest on that occasion, Darcy absurdly claimed that at a nod from him Charles V would have invaded.61 Although Darcy always stated that he was forced into rebellion in 1536, no one took him seriously; his treachery towards Henry VIII was palpable. Some say he was the Yorkshire equivalent of his friend Sir John Hussey in Lincolnshire but, whereas Hussey never went beyond ambivalence (but was still executed), Darcy really was systematically disaffected.62 Even so, he dithered for a long time. Once he realised there was no chance of armed support from the king, he surrendered Pontefract Castle to Aske after a token resistance and took the Pilgrims’ oath. Darcy’s adherence to the rebels convinced many waverers. One of the most important was Sir Robert Constable, at fifty-eight a veteran of Flodden and, like Darcy, a devotee of the old religion. His hatred of Henry’s counsellors was notorious: on many occasions he was heard to wish that Cromwell was dead.63 Perhaps the shrewdest of all the Pilgrims, Constable was probably actuated more by personal pique than hatred of heresy. Locked in feuds with other prominent Pilgrim families, notably the Percys and the Ellerkers, he was always something of a loose cannon. Nonetheless, he quickly took his place as the third man in a governing Pilgrim triumvirate, ranking just below Aske and Darcy.64
The fall of Pontefract Castle marked a decisive moment in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Almost simultaneously with the rising at Beverley headed by Aske, in Richmondshire Robert Bowes added another wheel, as it were, to the wagon of revolt by raising the Yorkshire dales in a much more clearly popular rebellion. The ancient county of Richmondshire took in the country between Ripon and Richmond, embracing the dales of Nidderdale, Wensleydale and Swaledale. In his famous ‘Captain Poverty’ letter, Bowes outlined a series of economic grievances, including the raising of rents on demesne households, deliberate depopulation through the destruction of townships and farmsteads, the enclosure of commons and the nefarious policies of the gentry, both deprivi
ng the peasantry of land through leasing farms and the ubiquitous nepotism and presence of placemen in the lower reaches of local government.65 The ‘Captain Poverty’ letter created a sensation in the north and triggered risings in the Upper Eden Valley, the Durham Palatinate, the North Riding and northern parts of the West Riding, Penrith, Cumberland and Westmorland, north and east Lancashire and Northumberland. Although a popular element had always been present in the Aske revolt – as witness the number of drapers, glovers and innkeepers who can be identified in his ranks – and even predominated until he took control, the ‘Captain Poverty’ ideology threatened to split the rebel movement, underlining issues of taxation and landlordism rather than the religious grievances Aske wanted to be at the core.66 Yorkshire, then, was divided in its motivation and heterogeneous impulses were always thereafter a divisive force. Cumberland and Westmorland, which joined the revolt with gusto, were even more out on a limb. There the rebel leaders did not speak of government exploitation, the robbery of the Church or fiscal reform but concentrated on the inadequacies of tenant rights, the raising of entry fines and officialdom’s incompetence in not proving adequate defence against raiding Scots or patrolling the no-man’s land on the frontier – as well as alleged breaches of the system of border service tenant right; the dissolution of the monasteries scarcely featured, except in the utterances of the devoutly Catholic leader John Atkinson.67 This is why some writers underline the parallels between Cumberland in 1536 and the German Peasants’ Revolt eleven years earlier.68 Even within Yorkshire there were marked contrasts. Beverley was preoccupied with its battle over manorial rights with Archbishop Lee and paid little attention to taxation, but in Richmondshire that was the burning issue – and why the rebels there constantly harped on the necessity of having a national parliament somewhere more accessible than London. The heterogeneity of the 1536 rebellion has provided academic historians with a field day. Some say that only Aske’s movement should be regarded as the Pilgrimage of Grace, with the Cumberland/Westmorland risings and Bowes’s ‘Captain Poverty’ movement as things apart. Cherrypicking the evidence, some claim that the Pilgrimage was always essentially an aristocratic rebellion, but the overwhelming weight of the evidence reveals it as a genuinely popular affair.69
Anxious always to retain control of the rebellion by the gentry and aristocracy, Aske called a general muster and council at Pontefract. The convocation of various hosts in the town on 22 October brought together between 28,000 and 35,000 armed men, in no way militarily inferior to any army Henry VIII could bring against them as most were veterans of wars against the Scots. In addition there were 15,000 armed rebels in Cumberland, another 12,000–20,000 besieging the Earl of Cumberland in Skipton Castle and another 6,000 operating against the Earl of Derby in Lancashire.70 The two last operations call for some explanation. In a telling instance of local grievances trumping the general cause of the Pilgrimage, a sizeable body of rebels attacked Skipton Castle without bothering to inform Aske. This caused a rift in the Aske family, for Cumberland’s eldest son Henry was Aske’s cousin and Aske’s brother Christopher put loyalty to the earl before solidarity with his brother. The Earl of Cumberland was loyal to the king but in no position to put down the rebellion and was hard pressed. Although the rebels did not take Skipton Castle, they eliminated Cumberland as a military threat in the rear, despoiled his parks and uplifted his cattle, sacked his houses at Barden and Carleton and destroyed some of his estate records.71 Apart from him, the only significant opposition to the Pilgrims in the entire north came from the Earl of Derby. An unimpressive figure, Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of Derby, was Cromwell’s creature and had been made Henry’s plenipotentiary in the north-west and ordered out against the rebels. Even while Aske held his grand muster in Pontefract, Derby was making significant progress against the rebels in south Lancashire, mainly because the pro-Pilgrimage gentry there had lost their nerve. The power of the Pilgrimage can be gauged from one simple fact: although Derby owed everything to Cromwell, he still wavered before coming down on the king’s side. Cynics have commented that this was just as well since, without any great talent himself, in his overweening pride he would still have insisted on being the Pilgrims’ captain-general.72
With most of his army and most of the significant Pilgrims present, Aske hoped to form the movement into a cohesive whole. Among the luminaries at the conclave were Sir Robert Constable, Sir Thomas Percy, Sir Ralph Ellerker, Robert Bowes, Sir John Dawnye, Sir William Fairfax, Sir Oswald Wilstrop, Sir Marmaduke Neville, Robert Challoner, Thomas Grice, William Babthorpe and Roger Cassels – most of the great names of the Catholic north of England.73 Altogether Aske could count on the support of at least 50,000 commoners, six nobles, twenty knights and thirty-five scions of the lesser gentry. Perhaps the most significant new recruit was Sir Thomas Percy, for the Percys were the great territorial magnates of Northumberland – an ancestral house that had made kings tremble as far back as Henry IV. Virtually an independent power in the north-east of England, the Percys posed a perennial problem for English monarchs: they were needed as a bulwark against invasion by the Scots, but were dangerous since they could turn against the Crown. Henry Algernon Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland (1502–37), was famous as an admirer of Anne Boleyn, though he was married (without issue) to the daughter of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Chapuys regarded him as disaffected, and there were frequent rumours that he had joined the rebellion. As Lord President of the Council of the North (he had been given the post earlier in the year), his adherence to the rebels would have been catastrophic for Henry VIII. Over his head in debt, he refused to join Aske on the grounds that he was ill – he actually did suffer acutely from ague – which so infuriated some of the commoner Pilgrims that they wanted to behead him.74 His brothers Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram were made of sterner stuff. They had particular grievances, for Henry VIII had denied them the succession to the Northumberland earldom in the event of their brother’s death; in exchange for liquidating Henry Algernon’s debts, Henry VIII had been named as Northumberland’s heir.75 When Sir Thomas Percy arrived at Pontefract on 22 October with 10,000 stalwarts from the north-east and the promise of 20,000 more, this was very bad news for the king. As has been well remarked: ‘The Pilgrimage generally took on the appearance of a Percy uprising because so many of its captains were attached to the family by present or former services, e.g. Aske, Monkton, Stapleton, Lascelles, Hamerton, Robert Constable, Norton and Gilbert Wedell.’76 The gentry of Northumberland resented both the Statute of Uses and Henry’s imminent annexation of the Percy lands, since both seemed to condemn Northumberland to poverty or at least to the status of appanage. Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram Percy were hawks where Aske was a dove, and were particularly sympathetic to Robert Bowes and his men.77
At the council at Pontefract Aske was ratified as the overall leader of the Pilgrimage. At first sight this seems surprising, as several of the Pilgrims would have been deemed superior in rank. Aske was initially reluctant to assume supreme command and did so only when no other option seemed possible. It seems two main factors were in play. The Pilgrims needed a personage of gravitas to treat with the king and possibly meet him in tête-à-tête conclave. The obvious choice was Archbishop Lee, but he continued to evade commitment and found reason after reason not to take the oath.78 Darcy was an obvious choice, but he could not satisfy the commons that he was 100 per cent committed to their aims. Darcy indeed continued to agonise privately about whether he had made the right decision, whether he was not simply a soldier who had deserted his post or even a traitor who had failed his king. He rationalised his position in a twofold way: the king had sent him no ammunition or reinforcements and therefore had left him no choice; and he was not actually rebelling against the king but merely against his evil counsellors. After all, had not Henry VIII done well in the first twenty years of his reign, only to fall under the malign influence of Cromwell? Darcy still hoped that he would be the great peacemaker and that he could act as go-between to the
king. When Aske asked him to head the Pilgrimage, Darcy replied that if he was to fulfil the role of intermediary, he could not also head the rebellion; it had to be one or the other.79 So Aske was the leader of the Pilgrimage. He was the only member of the gentry the commoners would trust, and his supposed position as tribune of the people made him hated by some of the aristocratic Pilgrims, most unfairly, since his aim was always to channel the grievances of the commoners into purely religious objectives. At the same time, some of the Richmondshire host suspected, rightly, that at a pinch Aske would sell them out. He was thus the classic man in the middle, but to play this role successfully, he needed to be far more talented than he was. It would be a mistake to discount Aske as totally negligible. As has been well said: ‘He, singlehandedly, was responsible for transforming a revolt of the commons over fears of confiscation into a rebellion against the king and the Cromwellian ascendancy.’80 Ambitious certainly, charismatic and energetic, and in his own mind a man of destiny, Aske suffered from the crippling disability that he was not actually very bright, was a poor politician, a lacklustre leader and an unimaginative chess player. Boastful and blustering, he was also naive and credulous. Many commentators have seen his duplicitous brother Christopher as the more intelligent and impressive figure. ‘It was he (Christopher), rather than the timid and colourless John (Aske), rather than Robert, who was too ardent and too honourable for success, who seems to embody the very spirit of the age.’81 Robert Aske’s naivety is nowhere more evident than in his bizarre decision to allow Christopher to attend Pilgrim councils, even though Christopher had already shown his hand by his backing of the Duke of Northumberland. Hardly able to believe his luck, Christopher sent detailed reports of Pilgrim thinking and strategy to the king; in a real sense Henry had his very own ‘spy in the cab’.
