The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  Meanwhile John Hallam had taken over leadership of the marginalised and disgruntled commoners. He enlisted Sir Francis Bigod as partner in an attempt to revive the Pilgrimage and restore the position as it was before the ill-fated Doncaster agreement. The two planned to assemble another army of 30,000 men, this time cutting the treacherous gentlemen out of the loop, and then marching on London; they saw clearly enough what Henry’s game was. Bigod was a member of an ancient gentry family from Mulgrave near Whitby, and his later plea that he had been forced into the rebellion – the usual defence against treason charges – was actually true in his case. When the rebellion broke out, he fled to the east coast and took ship for London, only to be driven back into Hartlepool by contrary winds.92 Bigod was something of a religious fanatic of a conservative stripe, and once he realised the Pilgrimage would give him the scope actually to undertake his fantasy ambition – reforming the monasteries in a more traditional manner – he joined in with gusto. He and Hallam enjoyed lording it over underlings and putting abbots and priors to rights and to this extent might appear risible characters, but they saw more clearly into the mind of a tyrant than Darcy, Aske or Constable did. Bigod rightly pointed out that even the draft pardon they had seen evinced Henry VIII’s bad faith, since a king would not couch a genuine pardon in the third person, nor would a genuinely conciliatory ruler continue to insist that he had absolute charge of his subjects, both body and soul.93 The irony of Bigod’s position in the Pilgrim movement was that he had a rough time at the Pontefract conference on 2–4 December, with the commons suspecting him of being Cromwell’s agent and wanting to kill him.94 Yet if they were sound political analysts, Bigod and Hallam were woeful strategists and planners. They aimed first to knock out Henry’s two key strongholds in the north-east, Hull and Scarborough. Hull, which had capitulated once before, was considered the softer target and assigned to Hallam; Bigod meanwhile was to assail Scarborough, which had remained loyal to the king throughout the rebellion.95 However, things went badly wrong almost from the beginning of the new revolt. Hallam underestimated the depth of opposition he was likely to meet in Hull. The burghers there had been forgiven by Henry for not opposing the rebels more strenuously, and in gratitude they petitioned him to fortify the town. When Hallam entered the town with a small band of followers, the townsmen quickly disarmed him and made him prisoner.96 Bigod meanwhile proceeded to Beverley, hoping to raise Aske’s stronghold as a prelude to the march on Scarborough. He did not make Hallam’s mistake, and entered with a force estimated at between 400 and 800. He too was rebuffed and found no support, so fled in alarm. He was not to know that his correspondence with Hallam had been found on the person of that unfortunate Yorkshireman, so that his plans to attack Scarborough were known. His forces soon dispersed and he found himself a fugitive sought by two distinct parties: by the royalists as a traitor and by the Yorkshire commons, who had never overcome their distrust of Bigod and construed the fiasco at Beverley as a ‘set-up’ staged to allow the king to say that the truce had been broken. After three weeks on the run he was apprehended and sent south to Henry’s tender mercies.97

  The Hallam–Bigod conspiracy and the renewed violence placed Aske and Constable in a quandary. If they disowned the new rising, they would lose any remaining influence over the commons, but if they condoned it, Henry would use their compliance as proof that they were traitors and had broken the truce – exactly as ultimately transpired, since the king was far too cunning to let such an opportunity slip.98 Bigod and Hallam appealed to Constable and Aske to join them, but they were rebuffed; their erstwhile leaders assured them that the king could be trusted and that precipitate action now could ruin everything. They were correct in that, unless the entire Pilgrimage was revived, the new outbreak was counterproductive and played into Henry’s hands. As has been well said, ‘The king was determined to have his executions, even if they provoked a new rising; but he was to be more fortunate than he as yet dared to hope.’99 The only useful thing Aske did on behalf of the failed rebels was to ask his gentleman colleagues not to execute Hallam lest it provoke all Northumberland to rise, but they did not heed him and dispatched Hallam even before Norfolk came on the scene. Darcy seems to have kept the entire Hallam–Bigod fiasco at arm’s length, but his ostentatious loyalty to the king did not stop Henry identifying the quondam keeper of Pontefract Castle as his main target. He sent Darcy orders to provision Pontefract Castle against the prospective royal visit to the north for the queen’s coronation. His aim was to catch Darcy in a fork. If Darcy provisioned the castle, Henry could use that as evidence that he was preparing for a fresh rebellion. If he did nothing, he could then be accused of lukewarm action in the king’s service, an obvious sign of treason.100 As the days wore on, Darcy and his confrères became more and more concerned that they had been foolish to trust the king. They ‘felt that, like the knight of the legend, they had blown the horn without drawing the sword, and they were now at the mercy of an opponent whose next move was incalculable’.101 Henry, meanwhile, like a master chess player or gifted conductor of an orchestra, planned all his moves to perfection. He instructed Norfolk to proceed north slowly, taking care that he did not arrive at Doncaster before Candlemas Eve, and providing detailed notes on who was to be summoned to his presence, when and where. The main body of the gentry were to join him at Doncaster, Darcy at Pontefract, but Aske and Constable were not to be admitted to his presence until York. As a parallel operation the Earl of Sussex was sent to the north-west to link up with his brother-in-law Lord Derby and complete the pacification of Lancashire.102

  True to his precise instructions, Norfolk arrived in Doncaster on 1 February. He found a very different atmosphere from the one that had obtained when he faced the Pilgrims there two months before. The gentry raised no objections to taking the new oath and seemed prepared to forget all those grievances that had loomed so large just eight weeks before. Fear of the commons, paranoia about the mob and concern for possible loss of their property were now uppermost. On 4 February Norfolk proceeded to York. Once again following Henry’s devious instructions, he tried to ensnare Darcy. When Darcy attempted to underline his loyalty by pointing out that the countryside all around Pontefract was now peaceful not rebellious, Norfolk pointedly enquired why Dacre had not managed to encompass a similar situation in October.103 Yorkshire still had fearful collective memories of the dreadful ‘harrying of the north’ by William the Conqueror after his victory at Hastings, and now Norfolk began to play on those ancient fears, acting with marked harshness and brutality. He repossessed the abbeys, turned out the monks and executed abbots with gusto. Henry VIII, always a master manipulator, had pressed the right buttons with Norfolk by jibing that he was too good a papist to deal firmly with the monasteries, and Norfolk was determined to prove him wrong.104 Henry was not now content with the mere dissolution of the monasteries and took an exquisite delight in executing priors and abbots: ‘he wanted blood above all things, and monastic blood would be an important and satisfying part of the ritual sacrifice he required’.105 If ever Norfolk and his furies were inclined to show mercy, the king would immediately overrule them. The only thing to be said in Norfolk’s defence was that the behaviour of Sussex and Derby in Lancashire was even more brutal and barbaric.106 After meeting Aske, Norfolk commanded him to accompany his forces to the north-east; the two remaining trouble spots were Northumberland and Cumbria. Even as Norfolk departed for Northumberland, news came in of a great triumph by the royal forces at Carlisle. In the only significant hard fighting of the entire Pilgrimage, 6,000 rebels attempted to take Carlisle but were heavily defeated by Sir Christopher Dacre and Sir Thomas Clifford;107 700 rebels were said to have been slaughtered in a one-sided battle that turned into a slaughter, and seventy-four rebel prisoners were executed afterwards. Norfolk mopped up the remaining rebels in Northumberland by the end of February, again ordering mass executions. By the beginning of March the whole of the north of England once more lay under the harsh Henrician yoke
. Norfolk rode in triumph through Newcastle and Durham.108

  Only one thing marred an almost total triumph for Henry. Sixty-two of the rebels taken in Beverley after Bigod’s botched rising were marked down for execution but found not guilty by local magistrates. On hearing this Henry flew into one of his spectacular rages, overruled the ‘not guilty’ verdict by royal warrant and had the men rearrested. When a new, handpicked jury at a second trial still found one of the men, William Levening, not guilty, Henry exploded in a fresh spasm of rage and demanded to know the names of the jurors, doubtless intending to execute them also.109 For once Norfolk did not accede to his royal master’s whims. Rightly fearing that such a grotesque travesty of justice finally would reignite the painfully reconquered north, Norfolk released Levening and found other victims to hang in chains. Obfuscating his action while dwelling on the torments of those he had executed, Norfolk managed to divert the king’s attention. Henry could now move on to the final stage of his vengeance: dealing with the ruling troika of the Pilgrimage of Grace and all its other leaders. A long list of nobility and gentry was invited to come south to the king’s presence.110 The invitees had three choices: to comply, which meant putting themselves in the king’s power; to flee abroad if they could find the shipping and they were prepared to forfeit their property and face a life of poverty; or to raise the standard of revolt. Their own folly and incompetence meant that by this stage the third option was no longer a practical possibility; besides, plague was already sweeping through northern England, adding a fresh layer of devastation to that wreaked by Norfolk and his men.111 Since obeying the summons often seemed the only realistic choice, yet it was tantamount to signing their own death sentences, some of the gentry tried to avoid the inevitable by claiming that they were too ill to make the journey south, but Henry was implacable. By the end of March, with executions being carried out at Carlisle, York and Lincolnshire – there were even a dozen grisly hangings in London – it must have seemed obvious what was going to happen to all ex-Pilgrims. Yet Aske, Constable, Darcy and many others all trooped down meekly to London in late March and early April. Did they think the game was up and that further resistance was useless? Or did they imagine that, as they had done nothing rebellious since the truce was agreed since early December and had received a royal pardon, they were safe?112

  Towards the end of March 1537 Darcy set out for London; on 7 April he was committed to the Tower. Henry VIII now let it be known that he and the other Pilgrims would be tried for treason as they had secretly abetted the Bigod–Hallam rising. Virtually everyone in the kingdom, including the king, knew that this was a grotesque falsehood, but Henry had always been determined, since day one, that all Pilgrim leaders would end up on the scaffold. He now falsely and treacherously used the Bigod–Hallam fiasco as a pretext for abrogating his own pardon. Even some of his own most craven courtiers thought such duplicity set a dangerous precedent, for if the commons ever rose again they would certainly never trust the words of the king or his nobles. The utterly unscrupulous bad faith of the king found its predictable coda in the failure to summon the promised parliament.113 Darcy came to trial before a jury of his peers on 15 May 1537 in Westminster Hall and was found guilty; there could be no other verdict unless the peers themselves wished to taste the headsman’s axe. Henry delayed Darcy’s execution for a while as he dithered about whether to execute him in London or Yorkshire, but finally ordered him to be beheaded on Tower Hill on 30 June.114 On 7 April Aske was arrested – there was no further spurious nonsense about ‘my good Aske’ – and tried by a specially picked jury of nine knights and three gentlemen, charged with meting out ‘justice’ to all the Pilgrim leaders. Henry treated Sir John Bulmer and his wife with egregious cruelty. Bulmer knew the fate that awaited him and tried to put off obeying the summons, but soon enough he was forced down to London; executed on 25 May, he at least was spared the hideous spectacle of seeing his wife burned at the stake. Bigod and Hussey met their fate on 16 May, as did Adam Sedbergh, Abbot of Jervaulx.115 Constable, the one Pilgrim leader who had seen through Henry VIII from the very beginning, was executed on 6 July at Hull, after Henry decided that Constable and Aske would be best disposed off in the north for exemplary purposes; Aske was turned off in York. Whereas Aske virtually gave up and even confessed to treason, Constable was made of sterner stuff. The quatrain he composed on the date of his execution displays his sustained contempt for the king:

  Let the long contention cease

  Geese are swans and swans are geese

  Let them have it as they will,

  Thou art tired, best be still.116

  Henry took particular pleasure in extirpating the entire clan of the Duke of Northumberland and breaking the power of the house of Percy for ever; never again could they threaten the throne. Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram Percy were lodged in the Tower and quickly executed. Their brother, the Earl of Northumberland, who had taken no part in the Pilgrimage and had even opposed it, would certainly have been beheaded had his fatal illness not swept him away first. Such was Henry’s maniacal thirst for blood that he even found an excuse to murder the guiltless Thomas Miller, the Lancaster Herald. For the ‘crime’ of having been present at the early Pilgrim deliberations, Miller was tried in the summer of 1538 and hanged in chains in York.117 Henry VIII’s apologists like to point out that he executed ‘only’ 216 people as a result of the Pilgrimage, as contrasted with the 100,000 who were slaughtered in Germany after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525. They omit to mention that the tens of thousands who died in Germany were the victims of bloodthirsty armies that were unleashed on them; they were not put to death by a judicial process sanctioned by a parliament.118

  Elated by his almost miraculous success against the Pilgrims, Henry went on to eliminate the entire Pole family in revenge for the cardinal’s ‘treason’.119 He then decided to settle once and for all with the White Rose faction. The Marquis of Exeter, leader of the Yorkists, had not lifted a finger to help the rebels during the Pilgrimage. If he had raised the West Country for the rebels, as he could easily have done, the tide of rebellion in England would have become a tsunami that would have swept away Henry VIII and the Tudors for ever. Yet Exeter’s loyalty availed him nothing. In 1538 he and his associates were arrested on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy. The sequel was predictable. Exter was tried and found guilty of supporting the Poles on 3 December 1538, and was beheaded six days later; the rest of his Yorkist party were also executed.120 Henry, grotesquely fat and suffering from an ulcerous and suppurating leg, survived another ten years – a decade in which his homicidal fury reached new heights. The architect of his victory over the Pilgrims, the Duke of Norfolk, nearly became one of his victims when his son, the courtier-poet Earl of Surrey, offended the king in a trivial matter over a coat of arms. Both Surrey and Norfolk were found guilty of treason, and Surrey was executed, Henry VIII’s last major victim. Norfolk was gazetted to die shortly afterwards, but the day before his execution the king expired, and the interim shepherds of his successor Edward VI decided not to inaugurate his reign with a decapitation. Norfolk was kept in the Tower but was reinstated under Mary Tudor in 1553 and spent the last year of his life in something like his former glory.121

  The main consequence of the failure of the Pilgrimage was that the dissolution of the monasteries continued unimpeded, making the Crown richer by around £150,000 a year from the revenue of abbey lands and, incidentally, giving the same kind of inflationary push to the English economy the precious metals of the Americas had given to Spain in the same period.122 It is generally considered that the Pilgrimage of Grace was a total and lamentable failure, but a more nuanced view is possible. In the first place, the rebellion set Henry thinking about Thomas Cromwell, and was one factor in the multi-causal downfall of the Catholics’ mortal enemy. At the economic and financial level the rebellion occasioned second thoughts in many areas. The Statute of Uses was negated by a Statute of Wills. Customary rights of tenure were largely secured as landlords aba
ndoned the manorial system and switched to demesne leaseholds. By the end of the sixteenth century gressums were no longer arbitrary but fixed. In general the protest against Henry’s fiscal reforms was successful, possibly thereby stopping a major overhaul in Tudor government.123 Even at the religious level something was achieved. The pace of the Reformation was slowed down, so that it is generally considered that the real parting of the ways between Catholicism and Protestantism in England came in the reign of Elizabeth I. It is perhaps significant that four of the seven sacraments that Henry had omitted from his Ten Articles were restored in the Bishop’s Book in 1537.124 More controversially, some historians suggest the defeat of the Pilgrimage was overall a ‘good thing’ as England could scarcely have survived a protracted civil conflict so soon after the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses.