by Frank McLynn
A surprise development at the Pontefract meeting was the sudden arrival of the royal messenger, codenamed Lancaster Herald, to plead the king’s case. It seems that he did not address the full council, but conferred with Darcy and Aske and assured them that the king would certainly grant their demands.82 This was a rash promise: not only did it commit Henry to something he would never have consented to, but he especially hated it if any of his underlings took any action without clearing it with him first. The eventual upshot was predictable: Lancaster Herald was executed. At the full council Aske was able to report generally very satisfactory progress, with most of the north of England under the Pilgrims’ heel. Particularly vehement in their animus against Cromwell were the Ellerkers, one of the great Yorkshire land-owning families.83 Money was no problem, since there were many different sources of finance available to the Pilgrims: individual subscriptions from the nobles and gentry; money raised from the sale of the estates of the loyalist gentry who had fled; the public moneys and local taxes, especially the cess; and the lavish contributions made by the clergy to preserve the Church in danger.84 Here again Aske was being naive. He always intended the Pilgrimage to be a mildly reformist movement which would get the king to reverse the deeds of the Reformation Parliament since 1529, but levying the public moneys was regarded in early modern England as an express act of treason and thus a truly revolutionary act. The council then voted for a general advance on London with 30,000 men. Despite the assurances of Lancaster Herald, it was generally expected that the Pilgrims would have to fight a battle on the way, but they were confident of prevailing. The battle plan was that Sir Thomas Percy would command the vanguard, with Sir Ralph Ellerker, Sir Robert Constable, Bowes and Stapleton as his lieutenants, in command of contingents mostly from Northumberland and the East Riding. The middle section of the army, comprising mainly troops from the West Riding, would be under Darcy and Sir Richard Tempest, while Aske himself would bring up the rear.85 The Richmondshire men still labouring ineffectually at Skipton Castle were ordered to break off the siege and proceed south. To ease the strain on victualling, each division of the army would be taken to a different bivouac at night.
The Pilgrims set off in good heart, chanting hymns specially composed for the occasion. One of them ran as follows:
Christ crucified
For thy wounds wide
Us commons guide
That pilgrims be.
Another had these words:
God that rights all
Redress now shall
And what is thrall
Again make free
By this voyage
And Pilgrimage
Of young and sage
In this country
Whom grant grace.86
Meanwhile the royal forces were in disarray. Despite Henry VIII’s knee-jerk reflex to solve all problems by violence or force of arms, his troops were in no condition to face the rebels, being outnumbered underpaid or unpaid, demoralised and scattered around the kingdom. Henry’s problem was that of all English kings: there was no standing army and most troops had to be raised by individual noblemen and gentry. A standing army would have been too expensive for the English State, even if the notorious stinginess of the Tudors had not also been in play. It was another of Henry’s reflex actions that when asked to pay an account of £x he would automatically offer £x-y. So, in this instance, he was reluctant to pay his soldiers anything at all – he seemed to think that they should be happy to risk their lives for his ‘glory’ – and certainly not the 8d a day the Pilgrims paid their levies.87 The royal commanders were currently sited in different locations, sitting ducks for a skilful enemy commander, who could have picked them off one by one. They were lucky that Aske was as inept a captain as a politician. Shrewsbury had 6,000 men under his command, Norfolk 3,000, Suffolk 4,000 and Exeter 2,000. Nationwide the royalists were outnumbered four to one and in the battle zone five to one.88 Shrewsbury, commanding the king’s vanguard, had initially made his dispositions to deal with the Lincolnshire rebellion and had been caught offbalance by the outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace proper. The dreadful autumnal torrential rains made it impossible for Henry’s forces to unite at short notice, and the weather and poor state of the roads meant they could not march more than twenty miles a day, and even that was a tiresome labour through thick mud.89 Shrewsbury assured Norfolk that he would not give battle before he and Suffolk joined him, but Norfolk was fearful that the impetuous, glory-hunting Talbot would seek to engage the rebels before that. Norfolk thought that once he arrived on the scene, his reputation as the victor of Flodden (which had won him great renown in the north) would give him a psychological advantage; he even suspected, rightly, that the reason he had not been given supreme command was that Henry was jealous of his martial prowess.90 Norfolk was right to fear Shrewsbury’s impulsiveness. On 22–3 October Shrewsbury seized the bridges over the Don at Doncaster, but the following day his troops were sucked into a skirmish with the Pilgrim vanguard under Stapleton. After scattering the royal troops, Stapleton in a state of high euphoria requested permission to press his advantage and take Doncaster, which he might well have been able to achieve. Aske said no.91 Stalling desperately until Norfolk could arrive, Shrewsbury sent a message to the enemy suggesting that, to avoid bloodshed, the Pilgrims should send four plenipotentiaries to discuss a truce; hostages would be given as pledges for their safety. The Pilgrims immediately countered by suggesting a conference of gentlemen on either side, to be held on neutral ground.92
Norfolk arrived on 26 October, but the combination of his forces and Shrewsbury’s still left the royalists outnumbered five to one. The Pilgrims meanwhile arrived in force, occupied Doncaster and forced the leading citizens to swear the oath. Norfolk’s scouts told him the Don was fordable and this, combined with the Pilgrims’ placing of their most formidable troops in their van, alerted him that his situation was desperate.93 Short of horsemen, he could neither harry the enemy nor prevent the Pilgrims from harrying him. Morale and motivation in his army were rock bottom, with men grumbling about being underpaid and many of them sympathetic to the Pilgrims. He decided on an outrageous bluff. He demanded that the Pilgrims surrender or accept the immediate ordeal of battle.94 When this message was received in the Pilgrim camp, it caused indignation. Aske called a council of war and an impassioned debate ensued. The commoners and the Richmondshire men were adamant that Norfolk’s preposterous demand was an obvious bluff, but Aske urged caution. He made several points. First, the result of a battle could never be predicted with certainty, and the odds against Norfolk were no greater than those faced by Henry V at Agincourt. If the Pilgrims lost the battle, their cause would be destroyed forever. Secondly, even a victory would certainly plunge the nation into civil war. The only conceivable beneficiaries of this would be the Scots, who would pour across the border to pillage, or the emperor, who would seize his chance to invade.95 In these circumstances, surely it would be best to see if negotiation could secure their ends. Darcy weighed in with the argument that the heavy rain around Doncaster Bridge on the night of the 25th and the obvious onset of winter made this an inopportune moment to campaign; even if victorious, they would be advancing on London in the snow.96 To which the obvious answer – the sources do not reveal if it was given – was that Aske and Darcy should have thought of this obvious fact at Pontefract when they gave the order to march south. The truth, of course, was that both Aske and Darcy feared that a victory would make the commons the dominant force in the Pilgrimage and they would no longer be able to control the movement in the way they desired, nudging it towards purely religious and conservative ends. Aske’s failure of leadership at this point was egregious. For all the reasons mentioned, the Pilgrimage of Grace was already a revolutionary movement, and revolutions cannot be resolved by talks and negotiation.97 The Pilgrims should have struck decisively while they held all the cards. A Caesar or a Cromwell would have done so, but there was no one remotely of that calibre among the r
ebels. There was always in their ranks a fatal division between a peace party and a war party, roughly though not invariably following the gentry/commoner divide. It was the misfortune of the peace party that many of their most vocal and vociferous members were absent, still at Skipton Castle or making their way slowly southwards from there.98
It was at this point that Norfolk played his trump card. He offered the rebels a truce. This was yet another bluff, since he later admitted that he doubted his troops would have fought the Pilgrims even if ordered to do so. When he had later to justify his pacific actions at Doncaster to the king (who hated any form of compromise, even temporary), he pointed out that three factors made a military defeat of the rebels impossible: the enemy numbers, the foul, rainy weather and an outbreak of plague in his camp.99 His main concern, once he had decided on the futility of battle, was to stall and sow dissension in the Pilgrim ranks, but he was under pressure for this ‘softly, softly’ approach from Shrewsbury, who always played the hawk to Norfolk’s dove. There were effectively a war party and a peace party in the royalist camp as well as among the Pilgrims, and during the tense days at Doncaster it was Norfolk’s abiding fear that the impetuous Shrewsbury might ruin everything.100 His twofold strategy – stalling and sowing divisions – was based both on intelligence from his spies, including Christopher Aske, and his conviction that the coming of winter and shortage of victuals would force the Pilgrims to disperse if only he could blunt their triumphant momentum. In his letter to the Pilgrims he suggested the exchange of ‘gentlemen’, with proper securities given and hostages taken, so that a lucid account of rebel grievances could be hammered out and sent to the king. It is worth emphasising that Norfolk was being totally duplicitous. He knew Henry well and did not expect him to be bound by anything he might promise. He himself was prepared to say anything, do anything, even at the limit take the Pilgrims’ oath – anything to buy time. But he was careful to put the king in the picture at every stage of his devious and Machiavellian plotting, so that the monarch would not think he was ‘soft on rebellion’.101 With his known hatred of Cromwell and his reputation as a devout Catholic, Norfolk posed to the Pilgrims as a man who understood their actions and motivations, who was secretly sympathetic to them and thus would be an invaluable intermediary to the king or an honest broker. He was also gambling that the aristocratic leaders of the Pilgrimage would draw back once they became apprehensive about the growing power of the commons. After all, if the Pilgrims won a great battle and swept on to London, causing the king to abdicate or flee abroad, what was to prevent them from becoming the masters of England, for then they would have no need of the ‘gentlemen’. Norfolk shrewdly saw that the split between the commons and the aristocracy among the Pilgrims was their Achilles heel, and that he could appeal to class solidarity across the seemingly insuperable barrier of Catholicism ranged against the Reformation.102
He was right. Aske, Darcy, Constable and the other ‘gentlemen’ jumped at the chance of gaining their ends peacefully. But first they had to weather the storm of another acrimonious debate. On the council there was virtually a straight split between the leaders of the vanguard, who wanted to give battle at once, and Aske and the middle section of the Pilgrim army. Bowes and his followers argued that they had the royalists by the jugular and that it was madness not to press their advantage. They also alleged that Aske was trying to ‘bounce’ them, taking advantage of the temporary majority of the peace party on the council – because about one-third of the war party was still absent, on its way down from Skipton Castle. For the first time the overt fear was expressed by the commoners that the ‘gentlemen’ might try to sell them out.103 Aske, however, insisted the council had to make an immediate response to Norfolk. He ingeniously turned one of the war party’s arguments on its head by declaring that it would be folly to join battle when one-third of their own troops were still absent. Once again he mentioned the heavy casualties likely from the royalist artillery, the problems caused by the advent of winter and the fact that the heavy rains were making the Don unfordable. He also introduced a novel argument: that victory for either side in battle would destroy the realm, but did not explain how this would occur if Norfolk was triumphant; as with so many of Aske’s utterances, it was a mere assertion.104 Eventually Aske and Darcy won the argument more by attrition than logic; it was decided to accept Norfolk’s offer of four gentleman envoys. The four pilgrims chosen to treat with Norfolk were Robert Bowes, Robert Challoner, Sir Ralph Ellerker and Sir Thomas Hilton.105 Some have expressed surprise that Aske was not one of them, but three considerations seem salient. Since Aske was regarded as the fountainhead of the rebellion, Norfolk might be tempted to seize him even if this meant consigning the hostages to their original fate. From Aske’s point of view, he wanted Norfolk to see that the Pilgrimage was no mere ‘one man band’, but had support in depth among gentry and noblemen. He also wanted to keep a low profile in case things went wrong at the conclave and he then incurred the wrath of the disgruntled war party.106 The hostages were delivered, and the four envoys sat down with Norfolk and his council, including the Lords Shrewsbury, Rutland, Huntingdon and Surrey. Norfolk asked the envoys to write down their demands. They replied with a rough sketch of their grievances, setting out their basic and minimum demands: the restoration of Catholicism and the rights of the Church, the repeal of the statutes of the Reform Parliament, and the expulsion of all traitors, especially Cromwell and Sir Richard Rich. The lack of fine detail was deliberate: the initial articles were couched in general terms to which both the war and peace party among the Pilgrims could agree. The upshot of this meeting was another classic bit of committee fudge: an agreement that ‘further talks’ and a meeting of thirty representatives on either side were needed. No evasive lawyer with talk of ‘further and better particulars’ could have improved on Norfolk’s doubletalk.107
The meeting at Doncaster Bridge with the thirty Pilgrim representatives, all gentlemen, at first dragged on inconclusively, increasing the suspicion of the commons that the gentry were stitching up a deal that would, in effect, sell them out to the king. Their suspicions were well justified. Norfolk told the envoys that he was quite aware they had all been dragooned into joining the rising and urged them to desert now en masse, thus winning them the king’s mercy. When this ploy failed, Norfolk changed tack and pretended to be on the Pilgrims’ side.108 This naked duplicity should have convinced all present that Norfolk was not to be trusted and that the entire offer of meaningful talks was an elaborate charade. But he coaxed the Pilgrims into setting down their grievances in five articles, to be couched in general terms with the details to be settled later. The articles proposed a threefold remedy for the realm’s ailments: a return to the situation at 1529, severe (preferably capital) punishment for Cromwell and Cranmer, and a general pardon by acts of Parliament or letters patent. Norfolk assured his interlocutors that there would be no difficulty in granting any of this and additionally promised a parliament in York to thrash out the grievances in detail. Finally, it was agreed that Bowes and Ellerker would go south with Norfolk and Shrewsbury’s son to meet the king and present the articles as a united front.109 Norfolk wrote immediately to the king to say that he had not committed him to anything that he could not revoke, but it was quite clear to any impartial observer that he had made binding concessions.110 The hapless thirty envoys went back to Aske and Darcy and sold their useless and inconclusive talks with Norfolk as a great victory. A handful of the Pilgrims demanded stronger and more solid assurances, but the leadership accepted the Norfolk/Aske argument that the royalist lords could not bind the king to promises he had not consented to. Besides, Aske argued, stalling cuts both ways: the truce gave the Pilgrims the opportunity to explore other avenues, such as enlisting the help of the pope and the emperor.111 Once again the Pilgrims’ council accepted Norfolk’s word and agreed a truce to last until their envoys returned from London. When the men of the Yorkshire dales arrived after their trek from Skipton Castle, they were
stupefied to learn that a truce had been agreed in their absence. Aske called on them to disperse, in effect telling them to go home empty-handed after talks at a conference at which they had not been represented. Sullenly, the ‘Captain Poverty’ men set off home.112 It needs to be stressed what a calamitous error the Pilgrims made with this decision. The truce was a disaster for the Pilgrims, who were unlikely ever again to have such a great chance to deliver Henry a crushing blow. They had been handed all the best cards and simply thrown them away. Henry, when he heard of the truce, was predictably angry yet shrewd enough to see that this was the beginning of the end for his enemies. With his cynical understanding of human nature, he knew that men will always band together for a great cause but that, if stalled, they will gradually lose heart and lack the impetus to reform for a second attempt. The behaviour of the Pilgrim leaders can be regarded either as arrant betrayal of their commoner allies or the most fatuous and egregious misguided optimism. Aske and his entourage seem genuinely to have believed that they could trust Henry and get him to dismiss Cromwell and the other hated agents of the Reformation.113
