The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  The 300 delegates, including Aske, Darcy and Lords Scrope and Latimer, readied themselves for the vital second meeting with Norfolk. They rendezvoused at the house of the Grey Friars in Doncaster, whence the 40 members of the subcommittee proceeded to the house of the White Friars, where Norfolk awaited them; 10 knights, 10 esquires and 20 commoners made up the party, deliberately weighted so that the commons could not afterwards complain about a ‘sell-out’. At the last minute on 6 December, a letter from Henry arrived, permitting Norfolk to offer a parliament in the north and an unconditional pardon.64 Norfolk at last thought he saw the glimmerings of a realistic chance of an accord. He was originally supposed to have revealed to the rebels Henry’s interim reply to the original five articles before considering their expanded form in the twenty-four articles now produced as a result of the Pontefract conference. He took the prudent decision to suppress this uncompromising and fire-eating document. His hope now was that he could bluff and talk his way round the amended articles, using the promise of the parliament as bait. His performance at the second Doncaster conference in December 1536 was a tour de force of diplomacy. He made the most soothing and emollient noises, assuring the delegates that he hated Cromwell as much as they did; at least there was nothing mendacious about this part of his package. When the names of Audley and Rich were mentioned he likewise revealed his contempt. He then offered a full and unconditional pardon and a parliament in the north. When the issue of the abbeys was raised, he suggested in the most conciliatory way that everything be frozen on an ‘as is’ basis until the convening of the parliament. Whenever ‘dangerous’ topics such as the treason laws of Mary Tudor’s illegitimacy were touched on, he waved them away airily, saying all this too would be settled at the parliament.65 All in all, Norfolk was long on bromides and hot air but very short on concrete proposals concerning the abbeys and the larger religious questions. At no time did he reveal the essence of Henry VIII’s thinking: that the monarch was still bent on bloody revenge and had marked all the leading Pilgrims down for eventual destruction, nor that he would never rescind the policy of abolishing the abbeys and stealing their wealth. Norfolk brilliantly exemplified the old adage that the best way to tell a lie is to tell the truth. He truthfully conveyed to the rebels all Henry’s honeyed words, but did not divulge, as he knew full well, that Henry had encouraged him to promise anything both to gain a breathing space and to exploit the gap between commons and gentry; still less did he drop any hint that Henry intended to repudiate all his promises later.66

  The jubilant forty envoys returned to their 260 colleagues with news that they had gained all they wanted: a free pardon, promise of a parliament and a blanket assurance on the monasteries. The entire company returned to Pontefract to spread the good tidings, but their reception was not what they had hoped for. The commoners were not satisfied with the deal and demanded, as a minimum, that any pardon must be issued under the king’s seal and that absolute and irreversible guarantees be given by the king concerning the abbeys and the parliament in York. In this they were vociferously supported by Constable, who stressed that Henry was treacherous and not to be trusted. Four days of acrimonious wrangling ensued. Aske tried to ‘bounce’ the commons once he realised the vast majority of the gentry were in favour of accepting the deal, and rode off blithely to agree the terms formally with Norfolk. But such was the uproar that he was recalled on the road and asked to return to Pontefract to sell the accord. Amazingly, he managed to do so, possibly because the commons still regarded Aske as essentially ‘their’ man, unlike Darcy, who was suspected of ambivalence.67 To cut loose from Aske as leader was probably a bridge too far for the commoners, whatever their general misgivings. And so, to Norfolk’s unconcealed delight, Aske was able to tell him that he had sold the deal to the Pilgrims.68 What the rebels had agreed to was so astonishing that at this remove it seems incredible. In return for some vague promises, the Pilgrims had agreed to dissolve their army, return home, and maintain a truce until Norfolk returned from London with more details about the promised parliament and the abrogation of the theft of the abbeys. They had thrown away the only card that gave Henry pause: their armed forces. All it meant was that the bloodthirsty monarch had to wait patiently before taking his vengeance. Nothing significant (except the pardon) had been put in writing, nothing had been issued under the royal seal, nothing had been ratified by Parliament. It was utter folly for people who had already ‘insulted’ Henry by raising the banner of revolt (and if they knew anything of his mentality, they would have known that that was how he would perceive it) to put themselves at his mercy and to trust the word of a professional politician like Norfolk. On a cold analysis, all Henry had done was to announce that a pardon was in principle available. In their euphoria and relief that they would not have to fight a battle, the gentry did not even notice Norfolk’s ominous wording: that each individual rebel would have to sue for the supposed pardon.69 The Pilgrims seem to have believed that, far from revolution, a mere demonstration could change government policy and decide mighty events, even though throughout history it is axiomatic that governments always ignore peaceful manifestations and sit up only when armed force is on offer. A distinguished historian of these events sums up the Pilgrims’ basic error: ‘They had allowed the issue to be changed from a trial of strength to a trial of diplomacy, and though Henry might have been overcome by force, he had not his match as a diplomat.’70

  What was in the minds of these ‘rebels without tears’ when they made this calamitous mistake? Many answers are possible but none seems entirely satisfactory. Was there a collective failure of nerve by the leaders when they were on the brink of success? Did they really trust Henry VIII and Norfolk or, alarmed by the growing power of their own commoners, did they cynically detach themselves and seek to make peace over their heads? Certainly the leadership in the Pilgrimage of Grace was probably the worst in the entire history of major English rebellions. Both Wat Tyler and Jack Cade had made mistakes, but they never shrank from armed conflict as the Pilgrims did. Aske was a singularly bad leader. He was a poor politician – at this level almost a naive idiot – he dithered and vacillated and seemed almost to make it a point of principle to hand the initiative to Shrewsbury and Norfolk. He consistently allowed himself to be gulled, bluffed and out-thought. In retrospect it can seem that Henry out-thought the Pilgrims at every turn, but he was far from infallible and made some bad mistakes. Darcy and Aske were poles apart initially, but when Henry delayed returning Ellerker and Bowes in November 1536, he drove them together.71 In common with other Pilgrim leaders, Aske made much of his gifts of compromise and patriotism and his unwillingness to plunge the country into civil war. Yet if the choice was civil war or execution – as it was – why would anyone have shrunk from warfare? The supine attitude of the Church – both in England and abroad – scarcely helped the cause.72 The Pilgrims were also hopelessly split, not just on strategy and tactics but on basic ideology; on one view the Richmondshire rebels and the Cumbrian insurgents had very little in common with the Pilgrimage proper.73 Worst of all was the divergence of commoners and gentry, each pursuing a separate agenda. Economic issues were paramount with the commons, religious and political ones with the gentry. Essentially, the gentry joined a popular rising so as to be able to control it, and it often seems as though fear of their own proletariat weighed more with the leadership than fear of a tyrant. Normally a rising on the basis of the socio-economic grievances outlined above would have seen aristocracy and gentry make common cause with the Court. On this occasion, taken by surprise, they had hurried to join in in order to contain events.74 Aske, supposedly the friend of the commoners, had often pointed out to his gentry friends that, in the wake of a military victory over Norfolk, the commons might decide that their ‘betters’ were dispensable and move the country towards genuine revolution. There can be little serious doubt but that the gentry sold the commons down the river at Doncaster. Even within the gentry there were profound differences of viewpoint. S
ome saw the dissolution of the monasteries as a step too far, but could stomach the Royal Supremacy. Others again could have tolerated even these had not Henry enacted the Statute of Uses. Perhaps the most egregious failure of the leadership was to think through their demands and construct a doomsday scenario. Did it really make sense to call for the removal and execution of Cromwell, Latimer, Cranmer, Rich and Audley and the others and see the king as a mere dupe of ambititious grandees?75 Extirpating these men did not go to the root of the problem: the problem was Henry VIII himself. While the Pilgrims were mired in confusion, turbidity, lack of focus, internal dissension and even treachery, they were faced by a ruthless, single-minded, vengeful and terrifying tyrant who regarded any objection to his will as a perversion of the laws of the universe. Such was the king’s egomania that he was angry with Norfolk for having been evasive with the rebels about his evasions concerning the monasteries and also, irrationally, about the pardon and parliament he had authorised Norfolk to allow.76

  Now that the gentry had made their disastrous decision to trust the king and throw away all the advantages they had accumulated, the only sensible course was for the erstwhile rebel leaders to make their peace with the sovereign. From mid-December a stream of gentlemen – Sir Ralph Ellerker, Robert Bowes, Sir George Darcy, Sir Oswald Wilstrop, Marmaduke Neville, the Earl of Westmorland and many others trooped south to London and Windsor to make obeisance. They found that there was still a surprising measure of latent support for the Pilgrims in southern England, though inevitably there was some surliness. The gentlemen took to adopting what was virtually a catch phrase when anyone shouted, ‘Traitor!’ at them: ‘No traitors, for if ye call us traitors we will call you heretics.’77 The pell-mell scurrying to court to kowtow to Henry seemed particularly despicable since the Pilgrims overtly abandoned their colleagues under sentence of death in Lincolnshire. It will be remembered that Henry had not dared carry out these capital sentences while a powerful rebel army was still in the field lest it trigger a nationwide uprising. Now that the Pilgrims had unilaterally disarmed, he proceeded to implement the first stage of his bloody revenge. The Yorkshire men had not pressed to have their Lincolnshire confrères included in the general pardon possibly, it has been suggested, out of pique that these ‘cowards’ had surrendered prematurely to Shrewsbury.78 Possibly most cynical of all – or was it simply stupendous naivety? – was Aske. After formally resigning as the leader of the Pilgrimage, he accepted with alacrity an offer from Henry to be his guest at Christmas court; the king also sent a safe-conduct, valid until Twelfth Night. Aske set off at once, notifying Darcy once he was on the road so that any discouraging answer would be meaningless.79 Henry VIII was being supremely Machiavellian. By now he had got the measure of the gentry, and aimed to win them over by charm and cajolery, hoping thereby to trigger a rising by the commons alone, which he was confident he could suppress. It might be thought that for Aske to enter the lion’s den was dangerous folly, since Henry could repudiate the safe-conduct and execute his arch-tormentor. Other invited gentlemen had turned down the invitation as they did not find the king to be trustworthy.80 Yet on this occasion Aske had nothing to fear. Henry was prepared to be patient. He would not reveal his bloody hand until the rebel arms had completely dispersed and could not be reconvened at short notice. To this end he was prepared to connive at Aske’s lavish treatment as his guest; it would make the eventual retribution he planned all the more piquant. Meanwhile he pursued a threefold trajectory. First, he sent his officials north to collect taxes, though all tax-collecting was supposed to be in abeyance until the promised parliament met. Then he spread disinformation, insinuating that the Pilgrims had surrendered unconditionally.81 Finally he massaged northern sensibilities by announcing that not only would there be a parliament in York, but he would be touring the area in person and his new queen would be crowned there; this of course would give him the pretext of moving a large body of men north without arousing suspicion. If push came to shove, he was even prepared to hold a parliament, confident that he could bully it to do his will.

  In London Henry received Aske in a friendly and even effusive way. The Spanish ambassador was an eyewitness to this odd meeting and reported Henry cajoling Aske with ‘my good Aske’ and other expressions of friendship.82 The ingenuous lawyer could not penetrate the depth of Henry’s serpentine wiles. The king meanwhile was bruiting it about that Aske had gone south to turn king’s evidence, thus further widening the split between gentry and commoners, who, seeing the mass exodus south of the nobility who were supposed to be their protectors, naturally concluded that this was the coda to the Doncaster sell-out.83 As the pièce de résistance of his systematic duplicity, during the Christmas festivities Henry asked Aske to compose a narrative of the Pilgrimage from day one, so that he might better understand the grievances that had convulsed his subjects. Aske set to work with gusto and pulled no punches. He tightened the noose around his own neck by a splenetic attack on Cromwell, which revealed his naivety at its apogee. As Geoffrey Moorhouse has remarked, ‘Aske could not have been more offensive without bluntly calling Henry a heretic too.’84 Grimly satisfied with Aske’s self-indictment, Henry bade an affable farewell to Aske when he departed on the morning of 6 January 1537 (the safe-conduct expired at midnight that evening). The king’s parting message was that he relied on ‘my good Aske’ to pacify the disturbances increasingly reported to him from the north: in other words, he was asking him to pacify the tumult among the commons he himself (the king) had caused. Aske made all speed to Yorkshire, where he found that the reports of disaffection were not exaggerated. He found the commoners restive, bitter, cynical and angry. Trying to pour oil on troubled waters, he found that his star no longer shone brightly among the common people. At a meeting in Beverley, when he was trying to reassure the crowd that Henry would keep his word, John Hallam pointedly asked why, if everything was so satisfactory, the king’s commissioners were even then scouring the county, collecting the Tenth, when it had been expressly agreed at Doncaster that there would be no more tax collection until the parliament met; surely this revealed the true, contemptuous attitude of the king (Hallam was right – it did).85 Other radicals and Hallam sympathisers weighed in with further points: it was clear that the opening of the new parliament would be delayed, for Henry was using the excuse of his new queen’s coronation to stall; all the leading gentry had decamped to London; Hull, which had been handed over to the royalists after the truce, was now being fortified; Cromwell was still in favour; and by now the king’s uncompromising answer to the original five articles was widely known. Moreover, so far from conciliating the Catholic north, Henry had sent up ultra-Protestant preachers to plug the Henrician orthodoxy.86 All that remained was a rather touching faith that Norfolk would do something for them. Yet even he looked likely to disappoint. He was supposed to have returned north with official documentation ratifying the Doncaster accord once he had debriefed the king, but here it was, now already mid-January, and there was no sign of him.

  In something like desperation, Darcy wrote to the king that unless Norfolk came north immediately with some concrete offers, he and the gentry would not be able to hold the line against the commons, and the rebellion would break out again. The grievances he instanced were the collection of taxes in defiance of the Doncaster truce, the execution of the Lincolnshire rebels, the fact that nothing had been done to rescind the dissolution of the monasteries thus far expropriated, and the provocative fortification of Hull and Scarborough.87 Henry had delayed sending Norfolk back deliberately, hoping both to rack up class tensions among the Pilgrims and to gain further time while the rebel armies dispersed around the north. The ominous delay alarmed Darcy, one of the few leaders left who had not abandoned all hope in a sauve qui peut scramble. When Norfolk came, would it be as a benefactor and conciliator or with avenging fire and sword? The portents from Lincolnshire did not seem propitious. The only sign of conciliation there was that Henry had executed ‘only’ forty-six rebels
instead of the 100 he had originally demanded.88 At last, on 16 January, Henry sent Norfolk back north but in such a way as to make clear that the worst forebodings of all the Pilgrim pessimists were justified. Norfolk’s instructions were to proceed through rebel territory methodically, administering a new oath of loyalty. Before taking this, subjects had to submit themselves to the king’s mercy, reveal all they knew about the rebels including the naming of names, surrender all arms, renounce all previous oaths and bind themselves to be true and loyal vassals of Henry thereafter. All who refused to take the oath were to be summarily executed. This made clear that Henry wanted revenge on all who had ever been Pilgrims no matter how faithfully they had abided by the Doncaster truce. The oath-taking was also quite clearly an opportunity for private score settling, since anyone could denounce anyone else as a Pilgrim and the assertion would not be tested in a court of law. What was flabbergasting about the new oath was that it insisted those swearing it accept explicitly the Acts of Succession, Dissolution and Supremacy – precisely the issues on which the campaign of the Pilgrimage had been waged.89 While all leading rebels were to be executed, their very movement, it seemed, was to be airbrushed out of history. Henry intended his revenge to be so total that, by the time he had finished, future historians would be uncertain whether there had ever been a Pilgrimage of Grace. Even as all this was going on, the king continued to smooth-talk the leading rebels. A pardon for Darcy was made out on 18 January and Henry wrote to him to thank him for his services and ordered him to victual Pontefract Castle secretly. On 24 January the monarch continued his charm offensive against Aske by thanking him for his services.90 It took until the end of the month for Aske and Darcy to realise that Henry had completely duped them but by then it was too late for the luckless duo to do anything about it. The commons had utterly lost confidence in them. Once he had driven a wedge between commons and gentry that could not be taken out, Henry moved on to phase two of his operation, which was to get the aristocratic Pilgrims to denounce each other. One who took up the invitation avidly was Sir Ralph Ellerker, who spent January and February assiduously trying to trap into self-incrimination both Aske and Constable, especially the latter, with whom he had an ancient feud.91