This book is, therefore, not primarily a narrative account of the Pilgrimage as, by common consensus, the Dodds’ account remains the standard in this respect.41 Nor does it concentrate on the minutiae of military detail and day-to-day accounts of manoeuvres – Bush has provided an in-depth study in his The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (1996). This book explores the methods used to secure compliance with the Henrician religious innovations of the 1530s, particularly in the North. Broadly speaking, these can be identified as the promulgation of the Royal Supremacy, rhetoric, retribution and reward.
The primary sources, notably the State Papers, have been thoroughly read and scrutinised for evidence of both regime and anti-regime rhetoric and propaganda. The same method was adopted in relation to evidence for reward and patronage, as well as reports of sedition, disloyalty and retribution. Interrogations and depositions of the rebel Pilgrims have been examined to illuminate the areas of concern for the Crown and the views of the disaffected. Many of these papers have survived, as they were retained by the Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell.
As is obviously the case at this stage, the domestic State Papers have been well mined. However, the Spanish State Papers have provided useful alternative documents and other original manuscripts at the National Archives, Kew and the British Library have been examined, where appropriate. These include the Inquisitions Post Mortem. Copies of wills and inventories have also been obtained from the Archbishop’s Register in York and the collections of the Surtees Society. Contemporary chronicles, such as those of Edward Hall and Robert Parkyn, have also been analysed, as they provide differing accounts of the religious innovations.
The regime’s rhetoric and propaganda will be discussed from the period 1536 onwards, in the aftermath of the high-profile executions of Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher and the survey of the monasteries, the Valor Ecclesiasticus of the previous year. Such rhetoric sought to promote the Royal Supremacy and reiterate the duty of obedience that subjects owed to the sovereign. The Royal Supremacy was indeed a ground-breaking innovation and imposed on Henry’s subject a dual requirement of political and religious loyalty. Indeed the years surrounding the Pilgrimage have sometimes been described as the ‘Henrician tyranny’.42
What can the Pilgrimage of Grace reveal to us about the themes of religiosity, reward and rhetoric? The Pilgrims’ Ballad and the Pontefract Articles are two examples of hostility to the Crown’s religious innovations during this period. The Pilgrimage in the North will form a central part of the book, but will be placed in a wider English context; examples of dissent, propaganda, reward and retribution existed in all parts of the realm. Was the North of England so very different from the rest of the realm?
Before turning attention specifically to the Pilgrimage of Grace, it is necessary to provide a brief description and summary of the North of England and seek to highlight the state of affairs there on the eve of the Pilgrimage. Writing in 1921, Rachel Reid addressed what she called the ‘problem of the North’. In Reid’s view, the country north of the Trent was mainly mountain, forest, high pasture and moorland waste – an area constantly menaced by Scottish raiders. It was, she argued, the ‘home of feudalism’ and a centre of resistance to royal authority. She even went so far as to label it ‘the natural refuge of lost causes’.43 Perhaps Reid was influenced by the fact that the North, and in particular the north-east, had been the power base of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later, Richard III. According to A.J. Pollard, Richard had achieved unquestioned supremacy over the region – he reunited north-eastern society and created a following of ‘awesome’ proportions personally committed to him.44 As W.G. Zeeveld has pointed out, the ‘presence of an armed force in the northern counties led by disgruntled Yorkists with the avowed purpose of changing basic policy by coercion was a potent reminder that the wounds of civil war were still green’.45
Professor Steven Ellis has described the far north as a region of compact lordships. Its patterns of landholding and its political, social and governmental structures were unmistakably English. However, the region exhibited marked differences from those in lowland England. According to Ellis, the overriding concern of this marcher society was security and defence rather than peace and effective government.46 Pollard, however, has concluded that ‘by no stretch of the imagination … was north-eastern England a remote, poor and backward corner of the land’.47
It is also worth highlighting the insecurity many in the region (and indeed the whole realm) must have felt in the period prior to the outbreak of the northern risings. Not only was religious belief and practice being altered by the king, there was no indication of who his heir might be. Henry, by this time, had been married three times and his only issue were Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom had been declared illegitimate. Even his acknowledged illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, had recently died.48 There was a real concern in the North that the Crown might pass to Scotland, by way of Henry’s sister, Margaret, who was queen there. The Scots were, after all, the perennial enemies of the English and the people in the North were acutely aware of the raids and ongoing enmity.
Whatever the situation with regard to the topography and landholding in the North, what can be said as to the predominant characteristics of its society and people? Richard Rex has described the North as the most religiously conservative region of the country. R.B. Merriman has also maintained that devotion and loyalty to the ‘old faith’ was far stronger in the North. Merriman was also of the opinion that ‘Cromwell’s spy system operated less perfectly there’.49 It will be revealed that the North, though undoubtedly conservative, was by no means alone in opposing the changes Henry sought to make in religious policy and practice.
Notes
1 Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, Oxford, 2000, p.50.
2 Felicity Heal, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland, Oxford, 2003, p.133.
3 Ibid. – Heal cites Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reign of Henry VII, p.178.
4 Susan Wabuda, ‘The Reformation Revised: The English Reformation Beyond Revisionism’, History Compass, Vol. 1 (2003), p.3.
5 Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, Cambridge, 2003, p.7.
6 As Peter Marshall has stated, the study of the Reformation is often a personal engagement or debate about the meaning of religion. See Peter Marshall, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 48 (2009), pp.564–86, particularly p.574.
7 Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 5th edition, Harlow, 2004, p.45.
8 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, Cambridge, 2003, p.89.
9 R.H. Hoyle, ‘Thomas Master’s Narrative of the Pilgrimage of Grace’, Northern History, Vol. 21 (1985), p.53.
10 Peter Marshall, The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2009, pp.65–66.
11 Claire Cross, Church and People: England 1450–1660, Glasgow, 1976.
12 G.R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509–1558, London, 1977; A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation, London, 1964; Cross, Church and People, 1450–1660.
13 Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, Cambridge, 1987, pp.19, 20, 23, 30 & 32.
14 Eamon Duffy, ‘The English Reformation after Revisionism’, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2006), p.3.
15 In this respect, this work would appear to fit the post-revisionist/post-confessional paradigm as discussed by Ethan Shagan in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Policy and Identity in Early Modern England, Manchester, 2005, p.1, and Marshall, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’. Marshall makes the point that both Haigh and Duffy have been willing to embrace the post-revisionist label in recent years (p.566) and also draws attention to Diarmaid MacCulloch’s concerns with regard to ‘ancestor worship’ – the temptation to focus attention of the perceived progenitors of one’s own denomination (p.571), of which I
am mindful.
16 P. Marshall, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, p.584. For other proponents of this perspective, see Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, Basingstoke, 1993, pp.171–73. Rex discusses the ‘idiosyncratic nature of Henry’s religious settlement’, a view shared by Paul O’Grady, who was of the opinion that Henry’s ‘Reformation’ reflected a ‘melange of incoherent prejudices’. Paul O’Grady, Henry VIII and the Conforming Catholics, Minn., 1990, p.10.
17 Gerald Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation, Cambridge, 1994, pp.162–74.
18 Michael Bush and David Bownes, The Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Hull, 1999, p.406. This book aims to avoid the label ‘Protestant’ for, as Marshall has highlighted, this is somewhat anachronistic in this context. See ‘Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation, p.23. For the purposes of this work, ‘reformers’ or ‘evangelicals’ will denote those in favour of a reformed theology.
19 Bray, Documents of the English Reformation, pp.175–78.
20 The National Archives (TNA), Kew – SP1/108, f.106; SP1/108, f.212; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII (L&P), arranged and catalogued by Gairdner & Brodie, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1905; (L&P, Vol. XI: 739, 807, 698 and 848). All provide evidence of the numbers involved.
21 G.R. Elton, ‘Politics & the Pilgrimage of Grace’ in After the Reformation, B.C. Malament (ed.), Manchester, 1980, p.30.
22 See, for example, TNA, SP1/107, f.154; TNA, SP1/108, f.3; L&P, Vol. XI: 663, 672 & 698.
23 L&P, Vol. XI: 712.
24 Elton, Reform and Reformation, p.261.
25 M. Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536, Manchester, 1996, p.407.
26 Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s, Oxford, 2001, p.9; Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, p.89.
27 Elton, Reform and Reformation, p.264; Elton, ‘Politics & the Pilgrimage of Grace’, p.43; A.G. Dickens in ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace’ in his Reformation Studies, London, 1982, p.58.
28 Dickens, ‘Secular & Religious Motivation’, p.81; Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s, p.453; Peter Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England, Aldershot, 2006, p.10; Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, p.127; J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, Yale, 1997, p.341.
29 Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of 1536, pp. 415–16; Scott Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536–37, London, 1981, p.87; Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s, p.423.
30 Elton, ‘Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, p.33.
31 Elton, Reform and Reformation, p.252; ‘Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, pp. 40, 41, 45, 47 & 52.
32 Elton, Reform and Reformation, p.259.
33 Elton, ‘Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, p.31.
34 Dickens, ‘Secular & Religious Motivation’, p.64.
35 C.S.L. Davies, ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace Reconsidered’, Past and Present, No. 41 (Dec 1968), p.76.
36 Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge, 2007, pp.4 & 12.
37 Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, Basingstoke, 2002, pp.49 & 54.
38 Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 2004, p.15.
39 Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, p.24.
40 Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536, p.409.
41 Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536–37, and the Exeter Conspiracy, Cambridge, 1915.
42 W. Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy, London, 1969, p.200.
43 Rachel Reid, The King’s Council in the North, London, 1921, p.1.
44 A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Oxford, 1990, p.316.
45 Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy, p.171.
46 S.G. Ellis, ‘Civilizing Northumberland: Representations of Englishness in the Tudor State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. XII (1999), pp.103–27. This assessment is reiterated by Steve Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools in War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1447–1559, Oxford, 2007, p.318. The North was a more militarised region than the South and the extreme borders were ‘thoroughly attuned to war’.
47 Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, p.397.
48 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 1997, pp.351.
49 Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, p.46; Roger Bigelow Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, Vol. I, Oxford, 1968, pp.182–83.
1
Background: Government and Religion in 1536
When looking back at the year 1536, Thomas Cromwell must have questioned the merits of astrology. In January, one astrologer, John Robyns, advised him that ‘nothing noteworthy is to be expected’.1 Robyns clearly did not predict the imminent death of Katherine of Aragon, the fall of Anne Boleyn or the outbreak of an insurrection so large that it had the potential to threaten Henry VIII’s grasp on the throne – the largest popular revolt in English history.2 The Pilgrimage of Grace was indeed a massive rebellion against the policies of the Crown and those closely identified with Thomas Cromwell. The underlying causes of the insurrection and the motivation of the participants has been the subject of much debate and controversy among historians and a consensus has not been achieved.
At the start of the New Year 1536, it is probable that Henry VIII thought that the worst of his tribulations in matters of religion had passed. Rome had been repudiated and Parliament had acquiesced in the king’s desire to be recognised as the Supreme Head of the Church within his own realm. His treatment of Katherine of Aragon may have aroused condemnation and censure but Henry had escaped any meaningful retribution by her nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Anne Boleyn had borne him (another) daughter and was pregnant again, undoubtedly desperate for the chance to present Henry with his longed-for son and heir. The queen and her evangelical adherents must have had grounds for optimism – the Succession Act of 1534, which named Henry and Anne’s issue as heirs, and the executions of Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher all pointed towards a new era.
What, then, did happen to bring about the Pilgrimage of Grace? And to what extent was it religiously motivated? How did a situation arise where such a vast uprising in the region was made possible? What was the perception of Henry’s behaviour abroad? Northern power structures will be examined in due course but initially the religious flux in the realm needs to be addressed. To explore the religious motivation, the events preceding the rebellion and the use of rhetoric (from both sides) in harnessing religious sympathy will be identified.
The Act of Supremacy of 1534 is crucial to the Henrician Reformation/experiment. Clearly the king could not have legally pursued his policies and reformation without it. It is therefore fundamental to an appreciation of the context in which the Reformation was enforced. The king had annexed the power of visitation, the power to discipline the clergy, the right to correct opinion, supervision of canon law and doctrine and the right to try heretics.3 However, in 1535, Henry delegated his ecclesiastical powers to the Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell, when he appointed him vicegerent, or vicar general, and Cromwell has become synonymous with the ‘policy and police’4 or the enforcement of the Reformation in the 1530s. According to Bush, ‘Cromwell’s vicegerency arose from the government’s urgent need to conduct a survey of the English Church following the break with Rome’.5 Whilst this might well be true, it also was typical of Henry to delegate power to a favoured minister, as he himself had such distaste for everyday administration and the minutiae of detail this concerned. As might be expected, Thomas Cranmer, as Archbishop of Canterbury, also had a role to play in the Henrician Reformation, but it is interesting to note that the experiment became sy
nonymous with Cromwell, a layman.
Before examining any evidence for resistance to the Henrician Reformation in these years, it is necessary to highlight the significance of An Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome6 and both the First and Second Henrician Injunctions. The 1536 act, extinguishing the ‘pretended power and usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, by some called the Pope’, was the final piece of legislation severing England’s ties with Rome. The act made it illegal to ‘extol, set forth, maintain or defend the authority, jurisdiction or power of the Bishop of Rome’ with effect from the first day of August 1536. Anyone guilty of so doing and ‘being thereof lawfully convicted according to the laws of this realm … shall incur … penalties, pains and forfeitures’. Clearly this statute is absolutely central to the enforcement of the Royal Supremacy and any changes, doctrinal or otherwise, resulting from it. These statutes and the promulgation of the Ten Articles of the Faith of the Church of England and the dissemination of the First Henrician Injunctions underpinned the king’s religious policy prior to the autumn of 1536.
In early January 1536, the Imperial Ambassador to Rome, Dr Pedro Ortiz, wrote to Katherine of Aragon that the ‘intention of the pope is that … prayers shall be offered for the Queen and Princess, and the Saints who are fighting for the faith in England’.7 Dr Ortiz’s communications throughout 1536 do appear to be both lively and dogmatic but they are also prone to exaggeration and a scant regard for detail. However, his letter to Katherine as she lay dying at Kimbolton (exiled by Henry and forbidden from seeing her daughter, Princess Mary) does illustrate that the English Reformation was by no means perceived abroad as the abject capitulation of Henry’s subjects. This can also be seen in the writings of Johannes Cochlaeus. On 6 January, he wrote to Henry that he was encouraged by the constancy of Fisher and More, whom Henry had put to death, and enlarged on the crimes into which the king has been led by his ‘lawless passion’.8
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