The other test is provided by wills. In the sixteenth century, the last will and testament made by an English person normally commenced by bequeathing her or his soul to heavenly powers. The formulae used for this could be highly significant, as by the mid-sixteenth century there were some forms of words which would only be used by Catholics, and others which were distinctively Protestant. It is also true that yet other forms could be employed by both and that some wills mixed aspects from both kinds of religion. In addition, many wills reflected the beliefs of those who drew them up – friends, relatives, priests or clerks – rather than those of the people whom they represented. None the less, they show clear and very significant patterns over time. By the end of the reign of Edward, use of Catholic formulae was in a minority almost everywhere in the kingdom, and was reduced to a mere 6–8 per cent in the south-east. Clearly Protestant wills, however, never made up more than a quarter of the total, even in London, so that most had adopted mixed or neutral forms. The fact that many of these wills were left by Catholics in disguise is suggested by the change that occurred with the accession of Mary, when Catholic formulae reappeared in large quantities. On the other hand, they only rose to a clear majority in the north of England, running at about half of the total in the south-east and so still leaving plenty of ground to the neutral kind. Under Elizabeth, Catholic forms dwindled rapidly again, reaching their Edwardian low point by the late 1560s, but clearly Protestant formulae only became a majority in most regions in the 1570s and 1580s. The total import of the evidence of both rebellion and will-making is that Mary’s Catholicism attracted more spontaneous support from the English than Edwardian Protestantism or that of the early reign of Elizabeth.
To say this, however, is to skirt the central issue which has damned Mary’s reputation, that of persecution. In just three years her regime probably burned 285 Protestants, an intensity of religious repression unique in English history. Some extenuations can be made for her action. The regimes of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth and James I all put Protestants to death as well, for beliefs that were more radical than those permitted by the established Church of the time. In addition, Elizabeth executed almost 200 Catholics, in theory for treason but actually just for attempting to practise their religion. The executions that followed the rebellion of the northern earls add another couple of hundred to that figure. In the following century, the government of Charles II engaged in spurts of persecution in which anybody who met to worship outside the Church of England could be imprisoned. Over 400 Quakers, let alone Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents and other kinds of Protestant dissenter died in confinement, most because of the conditions in which they were held. It is a matter for personal taste whether readers would prefer this squalid and lingering end to a few minutes of agony in the middle of a bonfire; to those who do, it is Charles, the so-called Merry Monarch, who should perhaps be remembered as the greatest religious persecutor in English history.
On first seizing the throne, Mary declared a genuine freedom of worship, of a kind unique in Tudor history. This was a legal necessity, to enable Catholics to practise their religion again immediately while she set in train the legal measures to reestablish it officially. The measure did, however, also allow English Protestants an opportunity to display their own readiness to tolerate other beliefs, and some clearly had none. In London alone during this interim period, a cat was hanged in one church where Catholic worship had been restored, and ornaments wrecked in another. A priest was stabbed while celebrating mass, a Catholic procession attacked in the street and (most imaginatively) a Protestant ventriloquist counterfeited heavenly voices, denouncing the evils of Catholicism. Such incidents, given wide publicity, certainly strengthened Mary’s case for persecution. To become a victim of it required some effort. Protestants who wished to leave the realm to live with co-religionists abroad were given ample time to do so. No inquisition was ever instigated in England, so that people were only troubled by the authorities if they identified themselves noisily as Protestants or were denounced as such. Those who had made no enemies amongst their neighbours, and kept their heads down, were safe; the ruling class closed ranks to protect its members, and there were no gentry among the martyrs. Once arrested and convicted of heretical opinions, people could save their lives by recanting those beliefs. There is no overall evidence that the burnings were unpopular. Some sympathy was displayed for victims who were unusually young, or were women, or suffered a prolonged death; but not in general.
Alongside its suppression of heresy, Mary’s Church also had an impressive positive programme. Its bishops were mostly of academic distinction, and often of international status, and notably energetic. Most were good preachers, and put in three visitations of their dioceses, a level of performance only reached under Edward by one. Their integrity was shown at Mary’s death, when, in sharp contrast to the large-scale changes of allegiance shown by bishops during every previous alteration of religious policy, only one was willing to accept the Protestant church of Elizabeth. Plans were drawn up for a seminary for priests to be founded in each diocese, three new Oxford colleges were founded, and the university course was streamlined to produce graduates more rapidly. Preachers were sent to tour dioceses and model sermons were printed for clergy who could not compose their own. The sale of ecclesiastical offices was discouraged, and land worth £29,000 restored to the Church by the Crown. All this was achieved despite the great blow – to add to Mary’s other experiences of misfortune – that a Pope was elected, Paul IV, who was bitterly hostile to Spain, and therefore to England because Mary had married its ruler.
None of this quite diminishes the horror of what Mary’s government did. This was an exceptionally brutal religious persecution even by the standards of early modern Europe. The Marian regime burned more people for heresy than the Spanish Inquisition and the French government put together, in any comparable period. All recent research has compelled the conclusions that ultimately it was Mary herself who drove it on, and that it was her own devotion to the mass that caused the questioning of suspects to focus on this particularly lethal issue; otherwise investigations might have concentrated on less sensitive areas of dogma incurring lesser penalties. The essential tragedy of the slaughter was its lack of effect: there is no evidence that it either damaged English Protestantism significantly or encouraged observers to convert to it. What it did do was to hand a powerful propaganda weapon to the Protestants who took over as soon as Mary died and Elizabeth succeeded. If it has functioned, ever since, as the great stain upon Mary’s reputation, then she must incur most of the blame for that. In her own way, she was as impressive and as unpleasant as her father.
None the less, the overall conclusion must still be that it was Mary’s Catholic Church that was the most popular among the English as a whole, and that had she reigned for even half as long as Elizabeth did – let alone had she ruled for as long, and produced a Catholic heir – then England would have been a Roman Catholic nation ever since. The strongly Protestant identity that it achieved instead really was the product of amazing luck; or, as some would say, of providence.
What emerges overall from a consideration of England between 1546 and 1570 is how limited the amount of instability that it experienced was, in view of the military, religious and dynastic strains to which it was subjected. It avoided any loss of its core territories, bankruptcy and outright civil war. This achievement can be put down to three main factors: to the lack of intervention by any foreign powers; to the inherent strength of the system of government inherited from the Middle Ages and nurtured by the first two Tudors; and to the royal personalities concerned. Of those who ruled during this period, only Somerset possessed the potential to wreck the nation completely, and as he was not a monarch he could be removed with the minimum of disruption. Among the monarchs themselves, Edward at least displayed real potential as a king, while both Mary and Elizabeth faced up to the challenges of introducing the English to female rule and proved to be sovereigns with
abilities far above the average for early modern Europe. Once again, the Tudors had proved themselves – although always so different in personality and policy – to be a remarkably talented family.
INTERLUDE:
REBELLION IN TUDOR ENGLAND
Some aspects of the past, such as reigns or great events, form historical topics in themselves; others are the creation of historians. This second feature is certainly true of Tudor rebellions, which were turned into a ‘subject’ by a textbook published by Anthony Fletcher in 1968 – not coincidentally the year of uprisings across the Western world – which has been through four more editions since. What was so remarkable about the series of revolts discussed in the book was their apparent futility; all were crushed by the central government. Since the book first appeared, historians have added two major risings which were clear successes – one against taxation in 1525 and the one which put Mary on the throne – but these still left rebels against the Tudor state with an apparent one in six chance of achieving their aims. As well as being generally ineffectual, those who rebelled seem to have possessed a touching faith in the same government which ruthlessly suppressed and punished them. Only under Mary did an uprising set out with the professed aim of toppling the current monarch. Most displayed a genuine loyalty to the regime currently in power and expected it to pay attention to their grievances. In having this touching faith in hostile central powers, as in rebelling at all, they appear doubly misguided.
Since 1968 a large body of research has deepened understanding of the context of Tudor rebellions. It has reinforced the point that Tudor England was better organized than most states of the age to render direct political action by commoners unnecessary. The nation possessed, by sixteenth-century standards, an unusually uniform system of government and language, and an unusually representative central legislative body, Parliament. The realm had no major internal barriers, and was protected on the three sides by sea, with a weaker and less aggressive neighbour, Scotland, across its only land frontier. It was remarkable in retaining a system of taxation in which the rich (in theory) paid most, the poor none, and those between in proportion to their wealth, as assessed by their neighbours. Another of its archaic features, which likewise took some sting out of social and political inequalities, was the jury system, whereby the question of guilt in serious criminal cases was decided not by the judge but by a panel of amateurs chosen from the middle ranks of county society. Overwhelmingly, the Tudor English sought law rather than feared it, and showed a great and growing faith in the power of government to control crime, poverty and disease. Their common enemies, at local level, were not magistrates or tax-gatherers, but thieves, vagrants, hoarders of grain and sellers of adulterated goods. Their faith in the virtues of being governed would have been strengthened by the occasions on which, as in the case of Cardinal Wolsey’s campaign against harmful enclosure, the royal administration actually seemed to punish the rich for oppressing the poor. The leaders of rebellions were indeed usually the men who normally functioned as government themselves at county or parish level: if not actually nobles or gentry, they were constables, churchwardens and the tithing men who assessed taxes. Despite all this, rebellion was not only relatively frequent, for most of the Tudor period, but very widespread in both geography and society. Far from being a marginal phenomenon, it involved towns, seaports and the countryside alike.
All this poses yet more starkly the question of why such a comparatively well-governed society rebelled with such apparent enthusiasm. The great turning point in the solution of it came in 1979, with the publication of an article by Diarmaid MacCulloch on Robert Kett’s rebellion, which had occurred in Norfolk in 1549. This had been viewed as a classic, tragic and futile, Tudor uprising, in which commoners had taken up arms against their mistreatment by their landlords, and been bloodily crushed by the central government. What MacCulloch proved was that Kett’s rising had been just one corner of a whole series which had covered the south-eastern quarter of England during the same summer. Each had followed the form taken by Kett’s followers, of getting together in an armed camp and opening negotiations with the central government of the Duke of Somerset. All the other risings, however, had succeeded, to the extent that the government had sent out negotiators who had persuaded the rebels to disband, with assurances that their grievances would be dealt with or action taken to deal with them. An excellent snapshot of this process at its most effective survives from Sussex, where it was in the hands of the county’s most powerful aristocrat, who was also a member of the royal government: the Earl of Arundel. He set up headquarters at Arundel Castle and summoned both the rebels and the gentry there. Having dispensed lavish hospitality to both, he heard the rebels’ complaints about economic mistreatment case by case. As he proceeded, he punished both gentry who were proved to have mistreated the commoners and the agitators who had used the most extreme language against the existing social system when stirring up rebellion. Everybody accepted his judgements as fair and final. What went wrong in Norfolk was that there the government lacked a trusted negotiator, because the traditional one, the Duke of Norfolk, had been thrown from power by Henry VIII and was locked up in the Tower of London. Instead, it sent the Marquis of Northampton, who was both unfamiliar to the locals and bungled the job. Kett’s men lost patience and stormed the city of Norwich, in doing so crossing the line into outright warfare and provoking a savage military retaliation from Somerset’s regime. All the other risings, covering at least eight other counties, had not been noticed by historians because they had apparently succeeded in their objectives.
It is now necessary, therefore, to ask why Tudor rebellions did not break out, at particular times and places, as well as why they did. The sequence of the rebellions between 1525 and 1549 is particularly instructive in this regard. In 1525, Henry VIII’s government needed a large sum of money in a hurry, to attack France during a spectacularly opportune moment when its king had just been captured by Charles V. It attempted to raise it by levying what was effectively a non-parliamentary tax from the kingdom, called the Amicable Grant, which saved the time needed to obtain a parliamentary one. This was, of course, of doubtful legality and came on the heels of heavy regular taxation, and East Anglia rose in rebellion against it. Henry sent nobles who knew the region best, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, to report on the situation, and they declared that the rebels were too numerous to crush and could not be persuaded to submit. As a result, the government scrapped both the plan for the Amicable Grant and the war that it was to fund, but saved its face by having the leaders of the revolt beg for royal mercy before they were pardoned for their actions. In view of this it is not surprising that the Pilgrimage of Grace, eleven years later, should have been similarly prepared to bargain, and that its leaders disbanded their armies when the king promised a series of measures to oblige their requests. What they did not realize was that religious policy was not as negotiable as fiscal, and that the king was far more deeply offended by their opposition. As a result, the most prominent were arrested after placing their trust in Henry, who used the excuse of further local unrest to declare that they had broken the terms of their pardon. The Henrician Reformation rolled forward; but on the other hand, a package of government measures was implemented to satisfy the rebels’ economic and political demands, and to safeguard explicitly the core aspects of traditional religion.
Formidable as the Pilgrimage was, it covered only the northern third of the nation, while the Midlands and the south remained quiet. Almost certainly this was because the king had his trusted magnates busy in these areas, pre-eminently the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk in East Anglia, and the Courtenay family, led by his second cousin the Marquis of Exeter, in the West Country. These and their clients would have acted to reassure local people that royal policy was both more limited and more benevolent in its nature than rumour was making it seem to be. Why, then, did the same mechanism fail in the north? In Lincolnshire, where the first revolt broke out, there was no resi
dent noble to do the work. In the northeast, the dominant local family, the Percies, was led by the current Earl of Northumberland. He was, however, incompetent and chronically ill, and the government had pushed him aside in favour of new men, and with him his younger brothers who, resenting this exclusion, were willing to join the Pilgrimage. In the north-west, the common people had unusually bitter economic grievances against the nobility, and were less disposed to listen to them, while in Yorkshire the local barons, Hussey and Darcy, belonged to the court faction which had supported Catherine of Aragon. They were now completely out of power and willing to gamble on joining the rebels as a way of forcing a passage back into it. After the suppression of the rebellion, the royal government installed a new regional council to run the North, on which local lay and clerical leaders joined forces to monitor and address popular concerns. The vacuum in Lincolnshire was ruthlessly filled when the king transplanted the Duke of Suffolk there from East Anglia, where he had a capable negotiator already in the form of the Duke of Norfolk.
Over ten years later, in 1549, another wave of sustained religious reformation was launched. In the south-eastern counties, where reformed religion had made the greatest impact, the rebels of that summer concentrated on economic problems, and seemed supportive of the religious reforms. Most of the North remained quiet, cowed by the executions in 1537 and also well managed by its Council. It was the West Country which rebelled now, in the name of traditional religion, because there circumstances had altered dramatically. In 1538 Henry had turned savagely against the Courtenays and destroyed their power, beheading the Marquis of Exeter. The key government man in the region in 1549 was a newcomer, Lord Russell, who did not command local respect and trust; and former retainers of the dead marquis were among the local leaders who led the people in arms. These western rebels seemed to have learned, furthermore, from the fate of the Pilgrims of Grace, and realized that their religious demands were not likely to be negotiable. Their statement of grievances, submitted to the royal government, was far more peremptory and forceful than those formulated by the Pilgrims. Instead of sitting still and talking, as the Pilgrims had done and the south-eastern rebels did, they laid siege to Exeter as a first step to clearing the road to London, and three pitched battles, which the government only won because of its superiority in cavalry and firepower, were needed to put the western rising down.
A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Page 8
