The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  The Pilgrims continued their deliberations at York until 24 November. Their next task was to make a detailed reply to Norfolk, who had requested a meeting with 300 Pilgrim delegates at Doncaster in December to settle all outstanding issues. It was agreed that the 300 delegates, carefully selected to represent the peace party, would confer with Norfolk on the banks of the Don, on neutral ground, that safe conducts for all the delegates would be demanded, plus hostages to guard against any attempted seizure of Aske. The council members salved what in their own hearts they must have known was a humiliating climbdown by some routine and formal protests against breaches of the truth by the royalists.30 Norfolk meanwhile had a tightrope act to perform, not committing his master to anything or infuriating him by overt conciliation but holding out tempting inducements to the Pilgrims to make peace. In his correspondence to Norfolk Henry had bellowed that he would offer no terms at all until the rebels handed over their ‘traitorous’ leaders and that the pardon was conditional on this; moreover he wanted unconditional surrender before he answered the detailed articles.31 Norfolk suppressed this and consistently made encouraging noises to Aske and Darcy. He realised, as the king did not, that even a cherry-picked delegation of 300 nobles and gentlemen could not control or dictate terms to an angry host of 30,000 men. Henry’s strategy was entirely directed to making over the 300, but he did not realise, as Norfolk did, that their agreement to a de facto surrender was not the end of the matter, that there would still have to be a ‘hard sell’ to the commoners.32 But at least the king finally realised that there was a rift between the commons and the aristocracy that he could exploit; his apparent ‘concessions’ were solely aimed at widening this. To maintain the fiction that he was not dealing with rebels, Henry wrote about his wishes on 27 November not to the full Pilgrim council but to Bowes and Ellerker; even then he upbraided them for not having influenced the council to unconditional surrender.33 The one mistake Norfolk did make was to let the enemy see the king’s full reply to their grievances, which should have alerted all but the most purblind and obtuse to his real state of mind. The utterances were so bombastic and suffused with infallibility that they would have come better from a god than a king. It has been well remarked that his long letter ‘displayed amazement, deeply injured innocence, self-justification, vanity, reproachfulness, truculence and contempt before a final spasm of anger against “your shameful insurrection and unnatural rebellion” and a pompous gesture of regal paternity’.34

  Under massive strain from his precarious balancing act and the necessity permanently to employ doubletalk, by the beginning of December Norfolk was showing signs of cracking. His correspondence evinces signs of a despairing realisation that his task was sisyphean. It was clear to him that if Henry raised troops for a punitive expedition, the north would certainly rise again; moreover, there was no guarantee that the newly raised troops would not go over to the rebels.35 He wrote to Cromwell that he had the worst of cards to play, that the Pilgrims were not content merely to be ranted at by Henry; they wanted a genuine settlement and, if they did not get it, they would continue with their military campaign; moreover, they would not surrender Aske, whatever threats or inducements were offered. There must be a limit to how often the rebels could be bluffed or how long they could be stalled; and what then? Norfolk decided that the only way to blunt the king’s intransigence was to scare him. In early December he told him that he would have to throw the rebels a sop or rather several juicy bones, for it was idle to think they could be defeated militarily. The real danger, according to Norfolk – and he was probably right – was that the longer inconclusive negotiations dragged on, the more the aggressive and belligerent commoners would wrest control of the rebel movement from the gentry – not surprisingly, since the king’s intransigence left the gentry nothing with which to buy off the commons.36 To make matters worse and complete Norfolk’s despair, in an unwonted spurt of energy and elan the Pilgrims suddenly informed him they wanted a free pardon before they sat down to write out their detailed demands, they wanted the pardon confirmed by Parliament and they wanted the said Parliament to meet in the north.37 Norfolk decided to break the logjam by daringly utilising his discretionary powers (though still subject to the king’s overall instructions). He went out on a limb by offering a general pardon and the promise of a parliament, to be convened at York. This was advancing considerably beyond what the king wanted or had authorised. Henry was still insisting on the pardon with ten exceptions (six named persons and four unnamed) and a total rejection of the original five articles submitted by the Pilgrims. He had explicitly stated that if the rebels asked for a general pardon or a parliament, Norfolk was to stall.38 Once the Pilgrims received Norfolk’s ‘generous’ proposals, they announced that they would meet him at Doncaster on 5 December; on 2–4 December, immediately beforehand, they would hold a separate conference at Pontefract to hammer out their demands in a shape lucid enough even for Henry’s fastidious sensibilities.

  Henry VIII continued to insist that he would make no concessions and that if his ‘generous’ offer of a conditional pardon was not taken up, he would revert to military action. Norfolk as consistently warned him that this policy would lead to disaster, which elicited the predictable gibe of ‘cowardice’ from the king. But Henry welcomed the interlude while the Pilgrims prepared a more detailed statement of their demands. All the time he was hoping for a breathing space in which he could assemble a new army, so he instructed Norfolk to use the Pontefract articles as a further excuse to stall. When the detailed articles were prepared, Norfolk was to ask for a further twenty-day truce while king and nobles considered the demands. Meanwhile Henry wrote to Shrewsbury, asking him to try to suborn Darcy and Aske. The new wheeze would be to offer them a pardon on a document bearing Shrewsbury’s signature; if the pair were gullible enough to fall for this, Henry intended later to repudiate the document as a unilateral and unauthorised venture by Shrewsbury.39 With attitudes like this in play, it is not surprising that relations between Pilgrims and royalists continued tense. Darcy felt it necessary to reassure Shrewsbury that the Pontefract meeting was a genuine policy-making convention, not a war council held as a prelude to an armed attack.40 And so at last the Great Council convened from 2 to 4 December. Aske, Darcy and Constable were there, with 5 lords, 22 knights, 25 members of the gentry and 16 representatives of the commons. The main business was to refine and elucidate the original five articles presented to the king, which he had found too vague. A separate, much smaller committee of the council was to prepare for the meeting with Norfolk at Doncaster on 5 December.41 This committee at once voted to exclude Cromwell’s relation Richard from attending the Doncaster meeting; this was to be an overt sign that the Pilgrims’ real enemy was Cromwell. The committee further decided it would not accept any exceptions to a general amnesty and royal pardon. The clergy also came into its own with the Pilgrims’ decision that they should review the Act of Supremacy in a mass meeting. Once again Archbishop Lee caused consternation. Finally flushed out and unable to equivocate any longer, he caused uproar by preaching a sermon arguing that no man could ever take up arms without his sovereign’s permission. Again he was nearly lynched, but the fact that Aske once more intervened to save him made the commons even more suspicious that the ruling classes were simply closing ranks against them and that a deal was about to be stitched together to betray them. It seemed to the commons that from the very earliest days Aske had shown no sensitivity to the commons’ anger towards Lee, and the intense animus between him and the people of Beverley over manorial rights.42

  The Pontefract conference dealt with three main issues: religious, legal and constitutional, and economic. It was universally agreed that there could be no compromise on the dissolution of the monasteries, for the cause of the Church had to be upheld. Yet even here Aske and Darcy were prepared to sugar the pill by offering the king an annual rent from abbeys and monasteries. On the other hand, the Pilgrims insisted on a death sentence (‘condign punishmen
t’) for Thomas Legh and Richard Layton for their role as commissioners in the dissolutions achieved so far. The issue of the Royal Supremacy was more thorny. In the form accepted and advocated by Cranmer and Latimer this was mere heresy, but Aske proposed a diplomatic settlement, whereby Henry would be allowed what he called ‘temporal supremacy’ over the Church, but with the papacy still having the supreme authority over the care of souls.43 Ecclesiastical legislation was to be decided in future by the nation’s chosen representatives, not by royal whim. The Act of Annates, whereby Henry VIII took the first fruits whenever a benefice changed hands, was to be rescinded on the grounds that no English king had received these tithes before or, at the very least, an annual fixed charge was to be agreed.44 The legal and constitutional articles began with a demand for the execution of Cromwell; curiously, those other two hate figures, Sir Richard Rich, Speaker of the House of Commons, and Chancellor Audley were barely discussed, possibly because they were considered mere creatures of Cromwell.45 The delegates to the conference expressed their suspicion that the Act of Succession, allowing the king to nominate his successor, was simply a device to allow Cromwell to inherit the succession. Then the articles proceeded with a demand for the legitimation of Mary Tudor by special act of Parliament.46 The twelfth article of the long manifesto required the king to refrain from interfering in parliamentary elections or in the transactions of the Houses of Commons and Lords. There was to be complete freedom of speech in Parliament, more parliamentary representation for the north of England, especially Yorkshire, and a parliament to be summoned early in 1537 either at Nottingham or York. The powers of the lord chancellor were to be curbed, and anyone issued with a subpoena north of the Trent had to be tried in York.47 Two points are salient about the Pilgrims’ religious and political demands. First, there was the insistence that all issues between the king and the rebels, including the pardon, had to be secured by an act of Parliament, not a royal fiat which could be withdrawn at any time. Second, the demand for greater parliamentary representation for the north and for a parliament accessible to northcountrymen, preferably at York, is a clear sign of the historical division between north and south that has always bedevilled English society, and is also a primitive version of the Court versus Country political struggle that was to be so marked a feature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, overall, it is quite clear that the dissolution of the monasteries rather than the Royal Supremacy was the core issue.48

  In some ways the most interesting part of the detailed manifesto drawn up by the Pilgrims was the list of economic grievances, for this gives us a singular insight into social structure at the time. We can also discern the fissiparous forces at work in the rebel ranks. Whereas there was close to unanimity on the religious and political issues, the financial and economic grievances tend to underline local concerns most of all. The Percys and their host were most concerned with the Statute of Uses and the laws on inheritance, whereas Halifax and the West Riding concentrated on government attempts to eradicate ‘flocking’ – adulterating cloth with other fibres – which the rebels considered part of traditional Yorkshire folkways.49 Wensleydale and Swaledale, the Richmondshire host, were most exercised by gressoms – the tithes payable to a feudal lord when a tenant first took possession of holdings. Gressoms, indeed, were the most widespread of all the economic grievances, affecting Lancashire and Cumberland as well.50 In Westmorland the focus of grievance was on enclosure, which restricted grazing on common land. In the early sixteenth century more and more common land was being taken over by big farmers to maximise profits from sheep and the wool industry, and there arose the new levy of agistement – a charge exacted by the landlord to graze cattle and sheep on enclosed land.51 Then there was the major irritant of nutgeld – a cash payment to the Crown imposed on freeholders; in Westmorland insult was added to injury because nutgeld could be transferred from the Crown to a feudal lord. Yet another incubus was sergeant corn, a payment in kind, usually oats, made to the sheriff by the tenantry for feeding the horses of his staff when he was on tour.52 In Cumberland the issue of tenant right was paramount. This involved a form of tenure found there, in the palatinate of Durham, north Lancashire and the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire. It meant that tenants had to provide free military service when called upon by the warden of the marches. In law it was a customary tenancy held at the will of the lord but, in fact and by custom, it was a hereditary tenancy thought by the peasantry to deserve lenient landlordship, which it rarely received. Tenants in Cumberland and Northumberland were particularly affected because of the frequent wars with the Scots. In some areas there was a refinement known as cornage, where the tenant of a freehold owed military service specifically for the defence of the northern border; this was a tax based on the number of horned cattle owned.53

  In addition to these particular taxes there was the permanent burden of the Fifteenth and Tenth, a direct government tax with a fixed yield, assessed by a community’s own officials rather than Crown commissioners and thus distinguished from Subsidy, an open yield directly assessed by government officials who assessed the wealth of subjects each time the tax was granted; a variable rate of tax was set by Parliament. Both Subsidy and Fifteenth and Tenth were supposed to be levied only in wartime and were expressly not to finance everyday government, though this stipulation was widely disregarded. Henry VIII was a prime offender: he breached the custom here and elsewhere that taxes should not fall primarily on the poor and also the convention that if there was use of these taxes in peacetime, there should be exemptions for poverty.54 A particularly iniquitous recent tax was that imposed on those whose chattels were worth less than £20. In a classic illustration of punishing the poor for being poor, the government mulcted all such people if they had the ‘impertinence’ to eat wheaten bread, goose or pork.55 In addition to anger at the levies imposed on them, the commons deeply resented the perks and privileges granted to the already well-off classes. There were the tithe-farmers – leaseholders who paid a fixed rent to a patron, usually the Church, in return for being allowed to profiteer – and their habit of requiring payment in kind. There were the rapacious ‘escheators’ – men who administered forfeited property. There were the benefices held by absentees, laymen and even some who had been condemned by the Church as heretics. And there was the ubiquitous corruption of officialdom.56 All this was compounded by particular nuances in the socio-economic byways of the north, such as the complaints about lazy and corrupt priests in Lancashire or the complication introduced by the great feud between the two leading aristocratic families in Cumberland, those of Lord Dacre and the Earl of Cumberland.57 The dizzying complexity of England’s taxation system and the turgid bouillabaisse it produced were all set against a background of general economic crisis in the 1530s, caused by a series of crop failures ever since 1527, with wheat prices 80 per cent higher in 1535–6 than they had been twelve months before.58 Furthermore, the general perception among commoners was that the high levels of tax, both direct and indirect, were mainly to finance unnecessary and extravagant nonsense: Henry’s taste for luxury, his palace building, the meaningless ostentation of the Field of Cloth of Gold, and much else. Every single one of the above issues received incisive treatment in the twenty-five articles the Pilgrims produced at Pontefract. Henry had disingenuously complained about the vagueness and obscurity of the original five articles. He would not be able to complain about lack of clarity in the Pontefract manifesto.

  Norfolk and the peace party were now in the ascendancy among the royalists, but this very fact infuriated Henry. Never one to compromise even over the smallest detail and with a conditioned reflex towards solving any and all questioning of his authority or will with violence, Henry muttered to his confidants that Norfolk’s pessimistic reports were simply a trick to get him to come to terms. Whereas Henry suspected secret sympathies for the rebels, the more likely reason for Norfolk’s dovelike stance (quite apart from his judgement that he could not win a pitched battle) was his f
eeling that the upshot of any victory he won would simply be to enhance the power of the hated Cromwell.59 To assuage his anger Henry indulged in one of his favourite pastimes: lawyerlike nitpicking, this time designed to show that Norfolk’s ‘defeatism’ was self-contradictory. Like an inveterate pedant, the king quoted some of Norfolk’s letters against others, juxtaposing them to show they had no intellectual coherence. Besides, he declared, Norfolk’s estimates did not accord with the intelligence received from his spies.60 Whoever these spies were, at this juncture (early December) they must have been mere sycophants, willing to tell Henry what he wanted to hear, at the expense of the facts. To any judicious observer it was clear that the Pilgrims held all the cards. Blustering profusely, the king partially backtracked and instructed Norfolk that, at the limit, he could offer a full and unqualified pardon and the promise of a parliament, provided he did it on his own recognisance and did not commit the monarch irrevocably. He made it clear that Constable was now the ‘most wanted’ of his enemies, probably because Constable had openly (and rightly) accused the king of breaking the truce.61 Henry’s antennae for his enemies was as sharp as Stalin’s would later be, for Constable was by this time the leading light in the war party among the Pilgrims. It is not possible to trace his activities or influence day by day, but he seems to have been the driving force behind the gentry at the first of two meetings with Norfolk in Doncaster. Aske was not present, since the royalists refused to give hostages as a pledge of his safety.62 At this first meeting Norfolk coaxed the rebels into considering a draft plan for disbanding the Pilgrim army. Possibly because of Constable’s presence and Aske’s absence this offer was not taken up, and the meeting broke up with both sides conceding failure. Looking for scapegoats, the angry Pilgrims once more targeted Lee, whose survival after the amount of provocation he offered was well-nigh miraculous. Possibly because Norfolk saw that there no point in making a national issue over Aske’s security, this point was cleared up and the way cleared for a second meeting.63