Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

by Ackroyd, Peter

  A truce was then agreed, whereby the pilgrims agreed to disperse on condition that all their complaints were put before the king. Henry himself was furious that Norfolk had come to terms with what he considered to be pernicious rebels; he had wanted them to be destroyed by the royal army. Yet the advantage now lay on his side. The pilgrims were hardly likely to rise again. He now had the indisputable benefit of time to wear down any opposition. Aske and his men continued to believe that the king would gratefully accept their proposals; once the evil counsels of Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer were removed he would see the light once more.

  On 2 November general pardons were issued for all rebels dwelling north of Doncaster, with the exception of Robert Aske and nine other instigators of the revolt. In a sermon at St Paul’s Cross, on the previous Sunday, Hugh Latimer had preached about those who wore ‘the Cross and the Wounds before and behind’ in order to ‘deceive the poor ignorant people and bring them to fight against both the King, the Church and the Commonwealth’.

  When Norfolk and the other negotiators came into the king’s presence at Windsor he was at first in a furious rage against them for sparing the blood of traitors; eventually he had calmed himself enough to write down his responses to the complaints of the pilgrims. ‘First,’ he wrote, ‘as touching the maintenance of the Faith, the terms be so general, that hard they be to be answered.’ Yet he took advantage of their generality to protest that he, more than any other king, had preserved the purity of the true faith. He defied them and offered no hint of retreat. ‘Wherefore,’ he warned them, ‘henceforth remember better the duties of subjects to your king and sovereign lord, and meddle no more of those nor such like things as you have nothing to do in.’ Yet a day’s reflection convinced him that it was better to temporize with, rather than to confront, the men of Yorkshire. They were still in arms, and the ‘wild men’ of the far north were ready to join them.

  The king sent a message to Lord Darcy, suggesting that by some stratagem he should kidnap or kill Aske; Darcy refused on the grounds that it was against his honour to ‘betray or disserve any living man’. It was a bold reply, but a foolish one. His loyalties were already highly suspect and he was believed to side with those of the old faith. It was alleged that he had surrendered Pontefract Castle too easily. The king suspected that many of the northern gentry were covertly engaged in rebellion, and he reacted accordingly. It was reported by two witnesses that Darcy, on hearing the news of the Lincolnshire rebellion, had said: ‘Ah, they are up in Lincolnshire. God speed them well. I would they had done this three years past, for the world should have been better than it is.’ His reckoning would soon come.

  Rumours of disturbances and meetings were still coming from the northern counties; more alarming, from the court’s perspective, was the news that copies of the pilgrims’ petition were circulating in London. Aske and his men met at York and at Pontefract. Henry ordered Norfolk to return to the north where he was to demand the outright submission of the rebels; when the duke informed him that such a favourable resolution was impossible, the king grew very angry. His wrath was directed at Norfolk as much as the rebels themselves; he believed the duke to be weak and vacillating, and even half suspected him of siding with the men of the north. Yet he knew that their threat remained. He promised a free pardon, and even a meeting of parliament at York to consider their demands; he was playing for time, secretly preparing an army to defeat them in the field.

  Norfolk met Aske and his colleagues once more. He agreed that the king had been misled by Cromwell and the witch, Boleyn; the ‘pilgrimage’ had shown him the right path after their crooked dealings; but the monarch could not be seen to grant petitions that were exerted by force. If the pilgrims dispersed peacefully, he would consider all their requests sympathetically. On the question of the suppressed monasteries, Norfolk stated that they would be restored until the meeting of the next parliament, where their fate would be decided. This was in fact a lie, but Henry had already made it clear that he could promise anything. The rebels were also offered a free pardon. This was enough. Aske rode to Pontefract and convinced the assembled commons that they had achieved their aims. He tore off the badge of the Five Wounds he was wearing and declared that he was no longer a captain of rebels. The revolt was at an end.

  Yet deceit and dissembling were still the customs of the day. On Friday 15 December the king sent a message to Robert Aske by means of one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber. He wrote that he had a great desire to meet Aske, to whom he had just offered a free pardon, and to speak frankly about the cause and course of the rebellion. Aske welcomed the opportunity of exonerating himself. As soon as Aske entered the royal presence the king rose up and threw his arms around him. ‘Be you welcome, my good Aske; it is my wish that here, before my council, you ask what you desire and I will grant it.’

  ‘Sir, your majesty allows yourself to be governed by a tyrant named Cromwell. Everyone knows that if it had not been for him the 7,000 poor priests I have in my company would not be ruined wanderers as they are now.’

  The king then gave the rebel a jacket of crimson satin and asked him to prepare a history of the previous few months. It must have seemed to Aske that the king was in implicit agreement with him on the important matters of religion. But Henry was deceiving him. He had no intention of halting or reversing the suppression of the monasteries; he had no intention of repealing any of the religious statutes in force; and he would never hold a parliament in York. Yet Aske could still prove useful. Rumours of more disturbances in the north had reached the council; the king asked Aske to confirm his new-found loyalty by helping to suppress them. Henry had indeed cause for alarm. Reports of new risings in Northumberland had been received. Bills had been set up on the doors of churches. ‘Commons, keep well your harness. Trust you no gentleman. Rise all at once. God shall be your governor and I shall be your captain.’

  One of these captains now rode out. Sir Francis Bigod came from a great northern family, whose castle was 3 miles north of Whitby. But he was also a debt-ridden scholar who protested that he was ‘held in great suspect and jealousy because of his learning’. He had witnessed the events of the ‘pilgrimage’ and did not trust the promises of the king. He is perhaps best considered as an old-fashioned Lollard, and in particular he detested the monastic system; yet he feared for the northern lands and wished to protect them. He may also have had rebellion in his blood; his ancestors had formerly fought Henry I and Edward III.

  Bigod addressed a crowd on the grievances of the north, and many of them called back to him: ‘Forward now or else never!’ It was determined that Hull and Scarborough should he held by the rebels until a parliament was assembled at York, but Bigod’s followers were repulsed in both places. Thomas Cromwell sent an observer to the north who wrote back to him: ‘I assure your lordship the people be very fickle, and methinks in a marvellous strange case and perplexity; for they stare and look for things, and fain would have what they cannot tell what.’

  So this belated wave of rebellions failed in its purpose. The local gentry, keen to display their loyalty to the king, mustered their troops of followers. The duke of Norfolk raised an army of 4,000 men, most of whom had previously ridden with Robert Aske; they were eager now to atone for their previous faults. The rebels were hunted down, ambushed and slain. A group of them attempted an assault on Carlisle, but they were beaten back and captured. Norfolk also issued a proclamation that commanded all rebels to come to Carlisle where they must submit to the royal mercy. So the ‘poor caitiffs’, as they were called, duly made their pleas. ‘I came out for fear of my life.’ ‘I came forth for fear of loss of all my goods.’ ‘I came forth for fear of burning of my house and destroying of my wife and children.’

  Yet there was no way of mitigating the wrath of the king. He ordered the duke of Norfolk to ‘cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of the inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet . . . as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others
hereafter that would practise any like matter; which we require you to do, without any pity or respect’. In a further twist of malign fate it was decreed that certain prisoners should be tried by juries made up of their own relations; the uncle might agree to a sentence of death upon a nephew and then see his head impaled upon a stake. Many of the rebels were hanged in their home villages, from the trees in their own gardens, as a memorial of their treason. Others were hanged in chains. The king had demanded the most severe retribution as a warning to future generations.

  The brutality, and the subsequent terror, worked. There were no more rumours and whispers of revolt. There were no more complaints about the suppression of the monasteries. The people had fallen silent. The leaders of the revolt had already been dispatched to London and were lodged in the Tower. Lord Darcy was brought to trial in Westminster Hall for treason, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. Robert Aske, despite the king’s previous hospitality, was tried and found guilty. He was hanged at York.

  If the rebels had held together more tightly, and seized the initiative, they might have reached London and the court. They had failed to do so but, in the process, they had revealed a strong current of popular protest against the religious policies of the king and Cromwell. The majority of the people wished to maintain their parish churches in good order and were opposed to any innovation. They argued, for example, that the cura animarum or ‘care of souls’ should be returned to the pope. They denounced Luther and others whom they called heretics. Yet Henry had faced them down; by duplicity and cunning he had defeated their leaders. He had broken the promises made on his behalf by the duke of Norfolk. But he might have said with some justification – what other way to deal with traitors? And he had won. Cranmer wrote that the enemies of reform ‘now look humbled to the ground and oppose us less’. Henry could move forward with impunity.

  10

  The confiscation

  Any monks or abbots complicit in the late rebellion were seized and executed, their houses surrendered to the king. The abbots of Kirkstead and Barlings, of Fountains and Jervaulx and Whalley, were all hanged; they were followed a year later by the abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester and Reading. This was merely the prelude to a more general confiscation. The fact that the king had prevailed over the Pilgrimage of Grace meant that he and Cromwell felt emboldened to continue, and to widen, their policy of suppression. Within three years the monasteries, the friaries, the priories and the nunneries would be gone.

  Yet Henry still feared popular discontent. He described his method to the rulers of Scotland as they began their own policy of dissolution. He advised them to keep their intentions ‘very close and secret’ in order to thwart any delays from the clergy. He then suggested that commissioners be dispatched ‘as it were to put good order in the same’ but really ‘to get knowledge of all their abominations’. The Scottish leaders should consult among themselves on the distribution of the monastic lands ‘to their great profit and honour’. The monks and abbots should then be offered some financial settlement. This was indeed the policy he followed.

  Some of the great abbots were first obliged to surrender their houses, signing a declaration that ‘they did profoundly consider that the manner and trade of living, which they and others of their pretended religion, had for a long time followed, consisted in some dumb ceremonies . . . by which they were blindly led, having no true knowledge of God’s laws’. This might charitably be called a voluntary surrender, although the threat of death or imprisonment lay behind it. These submissions were then followed by induced surrenders as one by one the greater monasteries fell. In the first eight months of 1538, for example, thirty-eight of them were appropriated by the Crown.

  Cromwell’s agent at the priory of Lewes described ‘how we had to pull the whole down to the ground’. The vault on the right side of the high altar was the first to be destroyed, followed by the groined roof, walls and pillars of the church. ‘We brought from London,’ he wrote, ‘seventeen persons, three carpenters, two smiths, two plumbers, and one that keepeth the furnace.’ The furnace was used to melt down the lead stripped from the roof. Nothing went to waste. The pages of the books from the monastic libraries, once one of the glories of England, were employed to scour candlesticks or clean shoes; they also had another use since the pages could become ‘a common servant to every man, fast nailed up upon posts in all common houses of easement’. A house of easement was a latrine.

  A young man who lived in the neighbourhood of Roche Abbey, in south Yorkshire, spoke to one of the workmen who were destroying the abbey church.

  ‘Did you,’ he asked, ‘think well of the religious persons and of the religion then used?’

  ‘Yes,’ the man replied, ‘for I saw no cause to the contrary.’

  ‘Well, then how comes it to pass that you are so ready to destroy and spoil what you thought so well of?’

  ‘Might I not as well as others have some profit from the spoil of the abbey? For I saw all would away, and therefore I did as others did.’

  There speaks the representative voice of the Englishman at a time of reformation.

  The Carthusians were the most roughly handled, and in the summer of 1537 a list was drawn up detailing their fates under the headings of ‘there are departed’, ‘there are even at the point of death’ and ‘there are sick’. The Charterhouse at Smithfield was turned into a venue for wrestling matches, and the church became a warehouse for the king’s tents; the altars were turned into gaming tables.

  As the certainty of suppression became more evident, the monasteries were eager to sell or to lease whatever property they possessed. At Bisham the monks sold their vestments in the chapter house while at a market set up in the cloister they brought their own cowls to sell.

  Yet some provision was made for the lives of the monks themselves. At the priory of Castle Acre, for example, the religious were given a payment of £2 together with a small quarterly pension; this became general practice. As a result some monks were willing and even eager to go. ‘Thank God,’ said the former abbot of Beaulieu, ‘I am rid of my lewd monks.’ The former abbot of Sawtry revealed that ‘I was never out of debt when I was abbot’. Certain abbots became diocesan bishops and were more prosperous than ever; the prior of Sempringham became bishop of Lincoln, for example, and the abbot of Peterborough became the see’s bishop. The monks themselves often became the canons or prebendaries of the cathedrals.

  Resistance was maintained by the brave or the foolish. When one monk at the Carthusian house of Hinton denied the royal supremacy, the others explained that he was a lunatic. The royal commissioners sometimes moved on from recalcitrant houses, leaving them isolated and unprotected until the commissioners returned on a future occasion. Yet sometimes the seizures were sudden and immediate. The monks at Evesham were at evensong in the choir when they were told to ‘make an end’.

  Where did the spoils go? It had previously been proposed that the dissolution of the monasteries was for the higher good of the nation. The incomes of the various priories would be spent on colleges and hospitals and schools ‘whereby God’s work might the better be set forth, children brought up in learning, clerks nourished in the universities, old servants decayed to have livings, almshouses for poor folk to be sustained in, readers of Greek, Hebrew and Latin to have good stipends, daily alms to be ministered, mending of highways . . .’ It never happened. The only deity worshipped was that of Mammon.

  It is difficult to estimate the size of monastic occupation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land, but it may be safe to presume that the monks controlled one sixth of English territory. This was of immense benefit to the Crown, and represents the largest transfer of land ownership since the time of the Norman conquest.

  The greater parts of the monastic lands were sold to the highest bidder or the highest briber; many went to the local gentry or to newly rich merchants who were eager to secure their status in a society based solidly on land ownership. It was a way of
binding the rising families both to the cause of the reformation and to the Tudor dynasty. City corporations sometimes made purchases, as did syndicates of investors that included doctors and lawyers. The parlours of successful men were hung with altar-cloths, their tables and beds covered with copes instead of carpets. The once sacred chalices and patens were now in secular use. It is reported that, in Berwick, a baptismal font was used as a basin ‘in which they did steep their beef and salt fish’.

  Many of the monasteries and priories fell into the pockets of the courtiers. Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, for example, shared between them the lands and revenues of the wealthy Cluniac priories at Lewes in Sussex and at Castle Acre in Norfolk. Cromwell eventually appropriated the land and revenue of six religious houses, and was widely reputed to be (after the king) the richest man in England. The duke of Northumberland secured eighteen monastic properties, while the duke of Suffolk became master of thirty foundations. Cartloads of plate and jewels were taken to the royal treasury.

  From the ruins of the plundered monasteries and abbeys arose new buildings. Sir William Paulet purchased Netley Abbey and built a fine residence from the remains of the church and cloisters; Sir Thomas Wriothesley fashioned a gatehouse in the nave of Titchfield Abbey, and Sir Edward Sharington turned a nunnery into a family house. It was reported at the time that a Lancashire gentleman, having purchased an abbey, ‘made a parlour of the chancel, a hall of the church and a kitchen of the steeple’. The steeple of Austin Friars, in London, was used to store coal. The Minories, an abbey of nuns of the order of St Clare, was turned into an armoury and St Mary Graces became a naval depot where great ovens were introduced for baking bread. The house of the Crutched Friars, in the street near Tower Hill which still bears the name, was changed into a glass manufactory. Other churches were converted into stables, cook-houses and taverns. The abbeys of Malmesbury and Osney became clothing factories.