by Frank McLynn
It seemed almost an omen for the Bowes/Ellerker mission’s slim chances of success that on 29 October Latimer preached a sermon comparing the Pilgrims to Satan; both were deceivers. Cranmer meanwhile in his preachings portrayed the Pilgrimage as the result of northern barbarism and ignorance.114 It was the familiar either/or used by propagandists against foes in all eras: either the opposition is stupid or it is evil. On arrival in Windsor on 2 November Norfolk had a ‘debriefing’ session with the king. Still thirsting for blood, Henry raged at Norfolk that he had not provided a military solution. Calmly Norfolk explained that this was impossible: more time would be needed to concentrate the scattered royal forces, they would need to be paid properly, and it would be best to wait until the rebel forces began to disperse. The most judicious course was still to stall. Henry was particularly incandescent at the demand the Pilgrims had made (and Norfolk granted) for a neutral venue for the talks at Doncaster, the safe conducts and hostages and the truce itself – all things, he averred, which could be granted only in a war between princes, not in a detestable rebellion of subjects against their sovereign.115 Finally Norfolk calmed the king down, and the Pilgrim envoys were introduced. Henry glowered at Bowes and Ellerker and treated them to one of his spectacular bursts of temper, before finally stating that he would answer the grievances in his own hand.116 He had further meetings with Bowes and Ellerker over the next couple of days, during which he appeared to soften his stance. He made no overt concessions but said he was willing to listen, subtly trying to throw the ball back into the rebels’ court by asking them to ‘prove’ their allegations against Cromwell, Cranmer and Latimer. While Cromwell himself wisely kept his head down during the entire rebellion, Henry was at pains to defend his favourite. To the Pilgrims’ taunts that Cromwell was a low-bred commoner, he claimed in response that Aske was no more than a serf; could the gentry not see that it was dishonourable to follow such a man?117 As a refined stalling tactic he told the envoys to return north with the promise that he would do all he could to compose the quarrel, assuring them that Norfolk would follow in a few days with his written answer. Bowes and Ellerker accordingly set off north on 5 November but had not travelled many hours before they were arrested and brought back to court. Henry raged at them that Aske had already broken the truce, but all that had happened was that Aske had publicised it so that it would be harder for the king to renege or double-cross. Henry’s instinct was now to detain the envoys indefinitely, but Norfolk talked him out of it. Norfolk stressed that Henry’s actions would themselves be seen as a flagrant breach of the truce so that the enemy would have gained the propaganda advantage. He also plugged away at the theme that the gentry had all been coerced into the rebellion, but that detaining Bowes and Ellerker would harden their attitudes. The most likely upshot was the reappearance in the field of a powerful Pilgrim army, and this time it would be impossible to work the same confidence trick on them.118
Henry took the force of the argument and grudgingly released Bowes and Ellerker on 14 November to resume their journey north.119 He discharged his homicidal energies in an epic memorandum which Norfolk was to take back to the rebels. He always fancied himself as a great lawyer manqué and master theologian – he came close to executing his sixth wife Catherine Parr for disagreeing with him on theological minutiae – so set about demonstrating his contempt for the intellectual level of the Pilgrims. Basically the long document he composed was dedicated to the proposition that he was always right and his enemies always wrong, but it was enlivened by the captious point-scoring Henry so relished. This had been apparent in the early days of the Lincolnshire rising when he rebuked the rebels for daring to raise the issue of the Statute of Uses: ‘As touching the Act of Uses, we marvel what madness is in your brain, or upon what ground ye take authority upon you, to cause us to break those laws and statutes, which, by all the nobles, knights and gentlemen of this realm, whom the same chiefly toucheth, hath been granted and assented to; seeing in no manner of thing it toucheth you, the base commons of our realm.’120 The same mentality was evinced in the declaration to the Pilgrimage of Grace proper. Typical was his remark that it was ‘a double iniquity to fall into rebellion and also after to procure matters to be set forth to justify that rebellion’.121 Henry conceded nothing and demanded unconditional surrender before he would discuss the Pilgrims’ demands. He reiterated the message he had given orally to Bowes and Ellerker that the rebels’ grievances were ‘too vague … general, dark and obscure’ and would have to be fleshed out (another obvious stalling tactic). He even had the gall to sign off with ‘Now note the benignity of your prince’.122 This was clearly a declaration of war but the king muddied it with the kind of confusion he liked to poke fun at when (allegedly) detected in the writings of the Pilgrims. On the one hand he claimed the Pilgrims’ demands were vague and obscure, but on the other he said he would send a full answer via Norfolk which would give entire satisfaction. How was this possible? It was not. It was a flat contradiction. He showed the real contents of his hand by attempting, pari passu to detach important Pilgrims from the leadership by promising rich rewards and lavish grants of land if they would defect.123 In public he continued to claim that the entire rebellion was just an unfortunate chain of events caused by a handful of troublemakers, principally Aske, but his secret military preparations showed that he knew it was far more than this and was a genuine mass rebellion. The verbal message passed on to the Pilgrims’ council when Bowes and Ellerker arrived back in the north on 18 November spoke merely of ‘obscurity’ in the demands, but the troika of Aske, Darcy and Constable should have been able to read the runes from this alone. Instead, they continued to place faith in the coming meeting with Norfolk at Doncaster.124
5
Treachery and Debacle
THERE WERE CLEAR signs in early November that Henry’s strategy of prevarication and dissimulation was paying off. Once again the Pilgrim triumvirate provided weak or non-existent leadership. Aske was preoccupied with trying to nail down the slippery Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, whose dispute with Beverley over his manorial transactions had been one of the triggers for the revolt in Yorkshire.1 Lee had still not taken the Pilgrims’ oath or signed up to the rebellion, and the tolerance of the Pilgrims’ leaders towards him was singular. One of the factors staying their hand was that they had heard nothing from the pope. The rebellion was now into its second month and still there had been no words of commendation from Rome nor any other form of official encouragement by the Holy See. It was therefore important to line up a solid Catholic Church in England against Henry and the Reformation. Lee, however, continued slippery and evasive, not surprisingly in light of his career hitherto. Aged fifty-four when the rebellion broke out, he had always been fawning and sycophantic towards the king, who, however, suspected him of ambivalence towards the Reformation. Nonetheless Henry had a high opinion of his abilities and used him on many foreign missions in the 1520s.2 The king had smiled tolerantly when Lee conducted a famous (and rancorous) theological dispute with Erasmus in the same era. This was why Aske wanted his help in the coming debate with the king on fine points of theology, but the prelate continued evasive and obfuscatory.3 In the end Lee threw off the mask by preaching against the Pilgrimage, which confirmed the commoners in their view that the coming terms would be simply an aristocratic ‘stitch-up’ in which Aske and Darcy would do a deal with Norfolk to sell them out. Aske had to hurry Lee away to a safe house so that the divine could escape the fury of the commons.4 The incorrigible Lee even then concocted a plan for collecting the treasonable opinions of the Pilgrims under the guise of doing theological ‘research’, but Darcy, another clever politician albeit no leader, spotted the dodge and prevented him.5 Darcy and Constable were always disgusted with the archbishop but Aske, incredibly, continued to hope he could be won round. When the prospect of another council at Pontefract loomed, to which Lee was summoned, the archbishop asked Constable if he could stay at home. Constable replied that in that case he must
send his opinions in writing. Lee spotted the trap and went to Pontefract; he reasoned, correctly, that it was easy to obfuscate later about an oral opinion, but there was no escape from tenets set down in writing. In this, as in so many other ways, Constable revealed himself as the most able of the triumvirate.6
While Bowes and Ellerker were at court with the king, Darcy seems to have decided to take out an insurance policy and, to an extent, to backpedal. He began with friendly correspondence with Shrewsbury and Norfolk, testing the water, as it were. Appealing to Shrewsbury as an old friend, he asked him frankly on 12 November whether Norfolk could be trusted, or whether the Pilgrims should be on their guard against sudden surprise attacks or assassination attempts.7 There had already been some worrying incidents that did not exactly underline the king’s good faith. Shrewsbury sent an emollient reply, expressing confidence that the crisis would soon be resolved and that the Pilgrims’ grievances rested on misunderstandings.8 Encouraged by this, Darcy opened a correspondence with Norfolk and other royalist grandees.9 Correctly construing this as a sign that Darcy was wavering, Norfolk answered in a way that made Henry’s bad faith and treachery obvious and undeniable. The king had decided that the best way forward was to assassinate Aske: this would provoke another rising which he was confident he could put down. Norfolk accordingly contacted Darcy, making it clear that his restoration to royal favour depended on his delivering up Aske, dead or alive. The devious psychopath on the throne wanted no paper trail that could later establish his treachery, so this message was conveyed to Darcy by Percival Creswell, a servant of Lord Hussey’s. Darcy refused the proposition indignantly, on the grounds that it was inconsistent with his honour.10 Norfolk followed up with a letter, hinting at the Creswell proposition and asking Darcy to comment on the widespread canard at court that the Pilgrimage was really an elaborate form of aristocratic conspiracy, aimed at unseating Cromwell. Darcy replied with a dignified apologia. He denied that there was any conspiracy, rehearsed the events since the beginning of October and asserted that he had been placed in an impossible position when the rebellion broke out and the king would not support him. He reiterated his refusal to betray Aske and declared that he would happily live and work as a kitchen porter if the entire Pilgrimage could be resolved peacefully and satisfactorily. But he stressed that this would be possible only when Bowes and Ellerker returned safely with firm commitments from the king, including a pledge to hold a parliament in the north.11 Some see this letter as Darcy’s death warrant for, as has been said: ‘No past service, no future pardon, could protect a man who so boldly exalted his own honour above the king’s pleasure.’12 Darcy was justifiably indignant at Norfolk’s intrigue, regarding it (rightly) as a de facto breach of the truce. The (temporary) detention of Bowes and Ellerker was another manifest infraction of the truce, and Darcy denounced it vociferously to the Pilgrims’ council.13 Opinions about Darcy and his real motivations continue to be divided to this day. Those dubious of his status as an honourable man are apt to emphasise that in any case Darcy had no one he could trust to kidnap or murder Aske, even if he had been so minded.14
Aske meanwhile laid contingency plans to guard against any surprise attack. Hull was put in readinesss to repel a seaborne assault. The Pilgrims’ front line at the Trent was heavily fortified, and a second line of defence, thought impregnable, was prepared on the Humber in case the royalists managed to breach the first position on the Trent.15 But in the period of ‘phoney war’ during the first three weeks of November, the Pilgrims’ main efforts were concerned with securing foreign assistance. There were two main obstacles to this. In the first place putative foreign invaders were confused and bewildered as between the grandiose claims of the Pilgrims and the complacent aplomb of Henry VIII, who habitually referred to the rebellion as a flea bite and claimed that the rebels were merely beggars, callow apprentices and journeymen or peevish, unemployed youths.16 Secondly, the general policies of powers potentially hostile to Henry militated against intervention. Francis I of France would dearly have liked to strike against Henry but was constrained in a threefold way. He feared that the only result of an invasion attempt was that his other great enemy, the emperor, would then make common cause with Henry; he realised that for an effective invasion of England he would have to collaborate with the Scots, whom he found tiresome and unreliable; and he still vaguely hankered after making a dynastic match between Mary Tudor and the Duc d’Orléans.17 Emperor Charles V, likewise, with no cause to love Henry, was not keen to intervene, even though his ambassador in England, Chapuys, told him that most of the country was disaffected. He feared that to do so would precipitate the Orléans/Mary Tudor dynastic match he wished to avoid and he also had to face the fact that his best troops were exhausted after the disastrous campaign in Italy.18 Henry, always a lucky tyrant, was fortunate on this occasion that the two putative champions of Catholicism and the papacy were at each other’s throats. Neither Charles V nor Francis I could grasp that England was potentially a greater prize than any of the picayune issues that detained them on the continent. Had they concerted plans or had one of them been given a free hand, Henry would have faced the nightmare scenario later faced by the British government in 1745, caught between a threatened invasion on the south coast and a victorious rebel army in the north. It was the abiding ambition of so many insurgents to repeat the doomsday script of 1066, when Harold Godwinsson faced Harald Hardrada in the north and William of Normandy in the south.19
With Francis and the emperor out of the reckoning, that left only the papacy. Pope Paul III wanted a genuine crusade against the heretic Henry, but he was hobbled by his own weakness and that of his chief lieutenant. The pope prepared a bull of deposition and excommunication against Henry but then seemed to lack the courage to publish it. Moreover, he placed too much confidence in Reginald Pole, the greatest English theologian of the age but emphatically not a man of action. In exile and in fear of his life from Henry’s secret agents after he refused to back the king over the divorce of Catherine of Aragon, Pole skulked in Rome awaiting developments, hoping that he would be invited back as the new Archbishop of Canterbury once the Pilgrims unseated Henry.20 Paul III constantly pressed Pole to accept a cardinal’s hat, but Pole was unwilling. His mother and the rest of his family were in Henry’s power, under close guard, and he did not want to provoke the tyrant further. Having expressly declined the pope’s offer of a cardinalate, Pole was astonished to learn that he had been elevated to the purple anyway.21 Henry predictably took his revenge and executed Pole’s entire family for no other crime than that they were his kin, but they were doomed anyway, whatever happened about the cardinal’s hat. The magma of the king’s volcanic wrath had already been stirred by Pole’s ‘treason’ in refusing to fall into line with Henry’s dubious theological arguments.22 Henry placed an enormous bounty on Pole’s head – 100,000 crowns (£66,000), dead or alive. The last gasp of the movement to foment a foreign invasion came when Pole was sent to the Netherlands, ready to cross over into England if the emperor ventured an invasion. Charles V’s regent in the Netherlands was the target for frenzied lobbying, but in the end he decided to aid Henry VIII instead. The Pilgrims’ cause was not helped by Aske’s half-heartedness. An envoy was equipped for the journey to the Low Countries and instructed to ask the regent for money, 2,000 arquebuses and 2,000 horsemen, pending the arrival of the main imperial invasion force. This overture was endorsed by the full Pilgrim council, but Aske foolishly countermanded it behind their back, so the envoy never even set out.23
On 21 November the Great Council of the Pilgrims met in York to hear the verbal report from Bowes and Ellerker and to decide future tactics. Aske was not present, though the other leaders were.24 Once again, unaccountably, Christopher Aske was present. Not only was he thus privy to all the Pilgrims’ thinking but he even had access to his brother’s papers, enabling him to report to the king all the rebels’ secret plans and strategies. How any rebellion with extensive aims could hope to succeed when a
spy was reporting its every twist, turn and nuance was inconceivable, but it was just one of the many ways the aristocrats on the Pilgrim council flouted reason.25 Bowes and Ellerker seemed to have been mesmerised (or were they traumatised?) by their time at court and gave the most vehement assurances that Henry VIII was sincere and could be trusted. At this Constable asked them to leave the room to allow the council to go into secret session. He then stunned his colleagues by producing an intercepted letter from Cromwell to the keeper of Scarborough Castle.26 This missive let the cat out of the bag in a major way. It revealed that Henry was determined on a military solution to the rebellion, but had been persuaded by his advisers that he would have to bide his time before slaking his thirst for bloody vengeance. It made it very clear that the negotiations with the Pilgrims were simply a convoluted stalling device, designed to obfuscate and camouflage. There could be no clearer evidence of the king’s perfidy and treachery. Yet, incredibly, the Pilgrim leadership chose to ignore it and to construe the letter as a personal interpretation by Cromwell; the myth of a gulf between king and chief minister was as vigorous as ever.27 Darcy indeed ventured the bizarre judgement that all the points pointed to Norfolk’s imminent displacement of Cromwell as the king’s favourite. In vain did Constable and his advisers urge the council to accept the evidence of their senses and resume the march on London; in the circumstances, they urged, there was no point in meeting Norfolk. Darcy and the peace party outnumbered them and by this stage seemed a priori determined to accept the king’s word, whatever damning evidence appeared. Never has there been a clearer example of a ‘will to believe’. They clung for consolation to the offer Henry had made on 11 November that all but ten Pilgrims (one of them Aske) would receive a full pardon. They did not know that this offer had been made only after Suffolk advised the king that his forces were too weak to defeat the rebels at present and that all hopes of kidnapping Aske and Constable were vain.28 Henry might disregard the very similar advice from Norfolk, whom he still did not trust, but he could not ignore it when it came from Suffolk, in whom he had full confidence.29
