Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  The second northern incident, in early 1536, was a complete contrast. It centred on the murder of a prominent merchant and indeed former Mayor of Newcastle, Ralph Carr, at Malton in Yorkshire. This was the fallout of a prolonged family dispute whose epicentre was 60 miles north of Malton, in the village of Wycliffe on the Yorkshire/County Durham border. The supposed murderer was William Wycliffe of Wycliffe, arrested and brought to trial before the assize judges at York, where a jury acquitted him, to the horror of Mistress Carr (née Wycliffe) and to the judges’ strong disapproval. While the case was rescheduled for a second hearing, Cromwell summoned the entire jury to London to face the Council in Star Chamber, and in May the jurors were punished with a crushing fine, to be paid in instalments over years.4

  This uncorked a toxic mix of furies. The victim was an outsider to Yorkshire, the accused a local gentleman of ancient lineage; the jury as was normal in such serious cases included a wide spectrum of local worthies from knights to yeomen, now all humiliated by southerners.* Sir Thomas Tempest, a Yorkshire knight who became deeply involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, bitterly referred back to the jurors’ treatment in a memorandum that he offered the rebels’ assembly at Pontefract in October 1536, specifically laying the blame on ‘the Lollard and traitor Thomas Cromwell’, but also on ‘his servants and eke [also] his servants’ servants’.5 The Wycliffe case meant that Cromwell’s local agents in the North were perceived as interfering in the processes of justice as they had not been during the Craven disorders.

  One of those agents, James Rokeby, happened to be a perfect symbol of these betrayers of northern values, all the worse because he hailed from a prominent north Yorkshire gentry family of antique genealogy, immediate neighbours of the Wycliffes.6 Rokeby’s public activities could not have been more obnoxious to partisans of William Wycliffe. He was one of the financial officials promoting the recent series of government moves in the North, such as the Valor ecclesiasticus and the monastic dissolutions, and he was soon on the payroll of the new body administering the results, the Court of Augmentations. Another northern gentleman gone to the bad, Dr Thomas Lee, reckoned James’s brother Dr John Rokeby among his closest childhood friends, and strongly recommended him to Cromwell in autumn 1535 for the work of monastic dissolution. To cap it all, Dr Rokeby, a civil lawyer, was already a senior member of Archbishop Cranmer’s staff in the archiepiscopal Court of Arches, as well as a contemporary of Dr Ellis ap Rhys at the same university hostel in Cambridge. An uncle of his, William Rokeby, was one of the surveyors of the monasteries being dissolved that summer.7

  James Rokeby was drawn into the feud because William Wycliffe had granted him the right of presentation to the vacant parish of Wycliffe, 2 miles down-river from the Rokebys’ childhood home at Mortham Tower; it may be that James already intended to appoint his almost clerical brother John to this familiar church.8 William Wycliffe’s peril presented James with a problem: worried about his legal position if the patron of the living was convicted, he made what would then have seemed a sensible move by going direct to Cromwell, and getting letters of appointment to the parish directly from the Lord Privy Seal, before heading back to plunge himself into the work of dissolving monasteries. It was a bad mistake: his arrival in August 1536 with these obnoxiously southern credentials not only exacerbated local anger but catapulted him into disputes about the parish appointment which detained him in the North until he was trapped by the violence of the autumn. In those dire circumstances, he became a ready-made figure of hatred, an unfortunate reminder of the summer’s cause célèbre. As he later testified, at a particular moment of peril in the autumn an angry crowd yelled at him that he was ‘a Lollard, and a puller-down of abbeys’. The latter was certainly true.9

  In the background of this immediate unpleasantness was Westminster’s decades-long neglect of northern interests, symbolized by the lack of a resident Archbishop of York between Thomas Savage’s death in 1507 and Wolsey’s belated arrival in 1529, but above all by Henry VIII’s laziness in never having visited his northern shires. That was in sharp contrast to his father, who went to York three times. In the fickle memory of northerners, who had once given Richard III his only taste of popularity, Henry VII was now the focus for nostalgia.10 James Rokeby, terrified at the sound of a roar from the Pilgrims’ assembly at Pontefract that October, was told they were shouting ‘that they would have all the governance of the realm in like estate as it was in the latter end of King Henry the Seventh’s days’. That sentiment, on which Sir Thomas Tempest’s contemporary memorandum enlarged at length (maybe Tempest sparked the thought), was remarkably precise in its chronology and referred directly to the good old days before the death of the popular and flamboyant Archbishop Savage.11 What an archbishop could achieve simply by being resident was shown in the impact that the equally flamboyant Wolsey made in a short time when he at last came north – too effective for his King’s liking, in fact.

  Then had followed the rapid changes of the Cromwell era, particularly and overwhelmingly the dissolution of monasteries, but also the vague threat of much more, the possibility of new taxation adding injury to insult. Such challenges to old certainties needed explanation or at the least forceful personal statement. For western England, the King’s presence, unusually extended on the 1535 progress as far as Bristol and the Severn valley, provided just such messages. The Welsh borders had the powerful personality of Bishop Roland Lee, brutally willing to enforce anything the government wanted and not brook contradiction. West Cornwall, which was extremely troublesome to Henry VII and would be so again to Henry VIII’s son, was currently under the sway of a good friend of Cromwell’s, Sir William Godolphin, greatest entrepreneur of the Cornish tin industry, who notably lobbied Cromwell in 1537 to restore individual patronal festivals to Cornish churches; Cromwell listened and agreed. The amalgamation of patronal days into a national feast on a single day in the year was one of the grievances that provoked Lincolnshire and the northern Pilgrims in 1536, and the concession delighted Cornwall, with its especial profusion of local sanctities.12

  Contrast northern England in the 1530s, where three bishops led the Church in the Province of York. Archbishop Edward Lee and Bishop Tunstall of Durham were both patently unhappy with the direction of change, even though they went through the motions of implementing and promoting it. Bishop Kite of Carlisle was cut from the same cloth, but in any case was hardly visible. There were virtually no well-motivated and well-informed evangelical preachers in the North to counterbalance this underwhelming endorsement of government changes or maybe even enthuse people. Two exceptions were imported by an evangelical Yorkshire gentleman in Cromwell’s circle, Sir Francis Bigod, friends from Bigod’s Oxford days as a protégé of Cardinal Wolsey. One was a former senior monk of Canterbury Cathedral and Canterbury College Oxford, William Jerome, who decided around 1534 to leave the monastic life; the other was that firebrand whom we met long before at Boston and Oxford, Thomas Garrett. Now in high favour with Hugh Latimer and armed with a general preaching licence from Archbishop Cranmer plus the title of chaplain to Bigod, during 1534 and 1535 Garrett preached a message of religious revolution so exotic in the North that it sparked widespread offence and open contradiction.13

  Bigod was not the best person to introduce Jerome and Garrett to suspicious Yorkshire folk, being extravagant, debt-ridden and unstable. His conflicted personality, first a sycophantic client of Cromwell and then belated rebel leader, highlights a neglected aspect of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Much recent research has emphasized its wide reach across social divides: it was a movement of anger from the commons which the gentry and nobility actively failed to resist, since they were equally unconvinced of the government’s good intentions. Commons and rulers united to defend the traditional religious culture and social relationships of northern England. Yet the Pilgrimage also needs to be recognized as a northern civil war: a confrontation first perceptible in the Wycliffe affair, between northerners who were benefiting f
rom and helping to implement southern policies, and those who failed to see either profit or reason in the changes. The latter group blamed Cromwell for perverting their fellows in the North, and in the disturbances to come sought forcibly to reintegrate the strays back into northern society.

  Anger thus festered among northerners. It was bad enough when there was no obvious religious component. So in a malign coincidence, the same week that Rokeby set out on his ill-starred journey north, far away in Limerick on 10 August Lord Leonard Grey wrote in a mood of deep despondency to Cromwell of chaos and plummeting morale among his English levies, sparked when ‘the northern men about their wages began a sore mutiny and insurrection’; they encouraged others in what was turning into a general mutiny over pay in the Irish expeditionary force, crippling the war effort in the south and west.14 Probably the troubles in England had already broken out by the time his letter limped its way through Ireland’s uncertain communications towards Westminster. Meanwhile, Cromwell’s attention was turned away from the imminent catastrophe towards other challenges to the King’s policies. In fact the expression of dissent most worrying the Lord Privy Seal in August and September was a set of wild words from a parish priest in Worcestershire.

  On 20 August, the parson of the village of Crowle outside Worcester, James Pratt, relaxed at the end of his round of Sunday services ‘amongst many wives and men in the hall’ of the village alehouse. Thus inspired, he ranted furiously about the arrival that week of Augmentations commissioners to survey the Augustinian priory at Studley, 13 miles away over the Warwickshire border. The ale did not improve the clarity of his remarks, but they were forceful enough: ‘the Church went down and would be worse until there be a shrap [cock-fighting pit] made, and said that he reckoned there were 20,000 nigh of flote [armed company], and wished there were 20,000 mo[re], so that he were one, and the rather tomorrow than the next day, for there shall never be good world until there be a shrap.’ His audience got the point; the landlord’s sister-in-law tartly observed that Pratt ‘spake there many words of war that might be spared’.15 There are no prizes for guessing whom those thousands in Pratt’s imagination might take on in the cockpit.

  A fortnight later, two local JPs rounded up depositions on Pratt’s fighting talk for Cromwell’s perusal. By return of post on 7 September, after consulting the King, he authorized them to interrogate Pratt under torture in Worcester Castle (‘pinch him with pains,’ he wrote). Torture was a most unusual procedure in the English provinces, but one of the two justices was a member of the Council in the Marches of Wales, so this extreme measure was in line with the King’s Council in London signing off similar procedures there. In fact Pratt fairly effectively withstood the ‘pinching’ they administered, admitting very little, and in the meantime he was visited in his prison by an alarming number of well-wishers topping up his intake of wine and ale. By the time Cromwell received the justices’ further findings on Pratt at the end of September, troubles were stirring elsewhere. It was a sign of the rapid shift in priorities that an immediate dissolution of Studley Priory did not follow the Augmentations commissioners’ survey on 18 August; it waited till the following February.16

  Worcestershire was not the direction in which Cromwell should have been looking, but the only report he received during September suggesting unrest in Lincolnshire or Yorkshire sounded relatively innocuous and already satisfactorily sorted. A trio of south Lincolnshire villagers sat miserably in the stocks on 7 September while four local gentlemen cross-questioned them on a rumour they had spread the previous day: that the King was dead ‘and that it must be in secret kept till such time as my Lord Privy Seal had levied the tax’ – that is, an imminent collection of the latest instalment of the Parliamentary subsidy granted back in 1534. The main examiner, John Freeman, was close to Cromwell and one of the receivers of the Court of Augmentations. This was a break from his current campaign of closing the smaller Lincolnshire monasteries, heading a substantial force of labourers to strip them immediately of bells, lead and valuable building materials. The men sitting in the stocks at Donington would be perfectly aware of these outrages; and so, 40 miles to the north in the Lincolnshire Wolds, were the people of Louth.17 Elsewhere in Lincolnshire, the Abbot of Barlings heard the widespread rumour that, after Michaelmas, Freeman and his fellows would be back from London to make a start on greater monasteries. One of the first houses to go was to be Barlings.18

  Michaelmas, 29 September, was a resonant feast in the Tudor calendar. Its only rival in the rhythm of everyday life was Lady Day (25 March), but Michaelmas had much more heft, for the harvest was in and folk could afford to relax a little and find time for matters both solemn and festive. It was the main season at which leases were renewed and rents paid, so money (or its absence) was much on people’s minds. All sorts of administrative decisions were taken at Michaelmas: most cycles of local elections took place then, together with all sorts of regular courts, borough, manorial and diocesan, and one of the quarterly meetings of justices of the peace. Folk gathered to exchange gossip, opinions, grievances, drink too much. This year there were many surprising and distressing novelties to announce in the regular Michaelmas meetings of bishops, archdeacons and their officials with diocesan clergy: all the measures from the summer Convocation and Cromwell’s pioneering vice-gerential injunctions.

  The most immediately offensive new injunction was a drastic simplification of saints’ days, so that all parochial dedication festivals from now on must be celebrated on 1 October, regardless of the local saint. Following immediately after Michaelmas itself, this was a bolt from the blue to offend the most compliant church official, not least for its insensitive indifference to the preparation time needed for such an important local festival. Among other new provisions, the threat that clergy would be examined to assess their learning hugely offended parsons and curates satisfied with their own estimate of their pastoral abilities: a common clerical reaction in every age to such demands.19 Small wonder that all over the country Michaelmas 1536 invited trouble. As tax officials gathered their files and as monasteries shut their doors in Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire and all points north, not only Lincolnshire was poised on the edge of explosion.

  The first outbreak was in Dentdale, an area of the western Pennines in the vast parish of Sedbergh, rather similar territory to Craven 30 miles to its south where trouble had erupted the previous summer. At the end of September, an outsider stumbled innocently into a ferment of furious posturing at Dent, including the swearing of oaths to defend local churches and abbeys from royal confiscations. William Breyar was a restless individual who at one stage in wandering round the kingdom picked up work transporting baggage for the Queen’s household. From that, he acquired royal livery clothing, which proved less than an asset when he rode into Dent. His distinctive outfit attracted unwelcome attention from a trio of street idlers, who began a vigorous argument when they realized this was the royal livery. Who was responsible for closing monastery churches in their area? Not the King, they eventually decided, ‘but the deed of Crumwell, and if we had him here we would Crum him and Crum him that he was never so Crumwed, and’ (an afterthought of distinctly ambivalent deference to the King) ‘if thy [royal] Master were here, we would new crown him.’

  Thus the very first public expression of the great stirs in this chaotic autumn named the hated Lord Privy Seal. The crowd around William Breyar grew, and turned violent. He managed to scramble to his horse and did not feel safe till he had ridden the 10 miles to Kirkby Lonsdale. The Kirkby folk reproached him for having blundered into the hornets’ nest at Dent; they told him the oath-taking had started the previous Monday, 25 September, and that it had already spread over three other neighbouring parishes. These were not the small neat compact units of lowland England: parishes in the thinly populated Pennine uplands could rival the size of an Italian diocese, and the comfortably endowed rectory of Sedbergh was no exception.20

  Dentdale was the first out
break of real English resistance to the Reformation of Cromwell and Henry VIII to resemble the Irish rebellion of summer 1534.21 For almost a month, the Dentdale men kept to their own territory, but others began imitating their example. Dentdale pioneered an aspect of the northern troubles which became characteristic, the taking of oaths, and it eventually provided a full-scale contingent joining the Pilgrimage by 21 October, a fortnight after the big outbreak in south-east Yorkshire around 8 October. There had been no hint of oath-taking in Craven’s popular disturbances the year before, and it is interesting that Breyar learned in his flight to Kirkby that ‘one of Dent who would not be sworn had fled to Sir Marmaduke Tunstall.’ That gentleman-dabbler in trouble in 1535 was apparently now a symbol of loyalty to the Crown.

  Why was Dentdale the trigger for the great explosion? The likely key is a monastic dissolution, just as Studley Priory’s closure provoked James Pratt’s drunken outburst in Worcestershire. In this case, the victim was the Premonstratensian house of Coverham, 30 miles east, corporate rector of the parish of Sedbergh and therefore of Dentdale. Coverham was dissolved on 14 August, by none other than that ill-starred seeker after the benefice of Wycliffe, James Rokeby, along with Cromwell’s servant and Augmentations official William Blythman. They left in charge a local man, Robert Asporner; as the insurgency flared, he was chased out, eventually taking refuge with the King’s army.22 Yet a further circumstance related to Coverham Abbey and its closure in August directly concerned Dent: the death of the Vicar of Sedbergh, Roger Horsman.