Norfolk continued to seethe while given confusing and inconsistent instructions about mustering troops, in what look suspiciously like moves to keep him occupied but which may just reflect indecisiveness in King and Council about what to do with the angry nobleman. Then, in the middle of October, just as it appeared that the Duke of Suffolk had succeded in containing the situation in Lincolnshire, and Norfolk was ordered not to advance any further out of East Anglia, news started filtering south that official concentration on neutralizing the Lincolnshire insurgents was drawing attention away from something far more serious across the Humber.54 The Yorkshire stirs had found a charismatic leader, Robert Aske. He was from a well-connected local gentry family but was also a lawyer in London – Thomas Cromwell would know him well, for they were both members of Gray’s Inn. Aske was turning the swelling mobs of commons into a single force of rebellion, converging in triumphant assemblies in York and Pontefract, and intimidating more and more nobles and gentlemen into making peace with the people’s assemblies. But more than intimidation was at work. Aske was able to present events as a sacred mission, not some run-of-the-mill tax protest or enclosure riot or howl of hatred against Cromwell. Soon the whole vast movement called itself a ‘Pilgrimage’, and its full name is too often shortened in modern writing to ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’. It was a ‘Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth’ – representing the whole of northern society.55
By 20 October, Thomas Howard was back in the game as a major player. He successfully advocated a two-pronged expedition for the North, with the Earl of Shrewsbury leading troops recruited from the Midlands and the West, and his own army from the South and East. Suffolk was left in a now subordinate role, clearing up the situation in Lincolnshire. Three days later, Norfolk was in Newark-on-Trent with a small advance force, on the verge of negotiating with the Pilgrims in their assembly in Doncaster; the King’s future seemed to lie in his hands. Even more satisfyingly, he seemed to have the prospect of deciding Cromwell’s future. Might he throw in his lot with insurgents, whose religious views he found a good deal more congenial than those of the Lord Privy Seal, and who now included most of the nobility and gentry he had so long known from northern service?56
While the Duke of Norfolk considers his options, it is worth surveying the fate of Cromwell’s associates stranded amid the triumph of the Pilgrims, now controlling so much of northern England. Monastic heads of house regarded as collaborators with Cromwell were expelled. The Master of Cromwell’s favoured order the Gilbertines, Robert Holgate, whom he had made Prior of its wealthiest and most influential house at Watton in Yorkshire, fled in late October to join the Lord Privy Seal in London. He did not return till spring 1537, by which time Cromwell had consoled him with a bishopric.57 James Cockerell, veteran Prior of Augustinian Guisborough, who had resigned under pressure from Drs Lee and Leighton in February 1536, was restored by Sir Francis Bigod around 12 November (the earliest sign that Bigod was deserting Cromwell’s cause). Cockerell replaced Cromwell’s nominee Robert Pursglove, who like Holgate gained a bishopric, albeit only the suffragan title of Hull, in 1538.58 As a second rebellion in the North gathered momentum in January 1537, the commons took into custody the monk of St Mary’s York whom Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk had nominated to head its Cumberland cell of St Bees, as he travelled across the Pennines to take up his duties.59
Some of Cromwell’s lay collaborators also faced punitive action, particularly those directly associated with monastic despoliation, showing the minimum awaiting the likes of Drs Lee and Leighton if they had been trapped in the North. The Augmentations official Leonard Beckwith (now a refugee in the south like John Freeman) had his house ransacked; so did William Blythman.60 We have already seen Robert Asporner homeless after his expulsion from Coverham Abbey – he was one of those ‘servants’ servants’ of Cromwell denounced at the Pontefract assembly by Sir Thomas Tempest. Sir George Lawson, Cromwell’s friend and relative, one of the Crown’s chief financial and military agents in the North, was targeted in renewed northern violence that winter. He was afraid to leave York to join Cromwell in London, he said, because he had been warned by several friends that ‘the commons will not only spoil all my farms and goods but also put me in jeopardy of life’.61 A servant of Sir Reynold Carnaby had his house burned down. Carnaby’s designs on Hexham Priory were only one cause of his low reputation among both the commons and some of his fellow-magnates.62
The most violent of these acts took place in what became a second phase of the Pilgrimage in winter 1537, when far fewer of the northern governing class were involved in disturbances and therefore less able to moderate them. One feature of the main outbreaks in the autumn was that many northern people directly associated with Cromwell were not treated in this extreme fashion. Once identified, they were ritually humiliated, but then given a chance to be reintegrated into the newly fashioned society of the North by oath-taking. It is fortunate for our understanding of events that most of them complied, because this forced them to explain themselves at length to the government after the rising’s defeat; their depositions and other excuses are very informative.
The most striking case is Dr John Dakyn. He could not have been a more obvious victim for Pilgrim rage: former principal of St Nicholas Hostel Cambridge (also alma mater to John Rokeby and Ellis ap Rys), he began his Yorkshire legal career as Vicar-General to the heroically pluralistic William Knight, Archdeacon of Richmond. There he was the everyday face of an Archdeaconry that in size and powers was more like a diocese, covering the Pennine region from which the 1536 stirs emerged. Dakyn had been helpful to Roland Lee in managing the Northern Convocation over the King’s Boleyn marriage. His hospitality to William Blythman and Drs Lee and Leighton in their northern work was well known, as was the fact that a close kinsman of his surname was a servant of Richard Cromwell. All that earned bitter reproach from the Pilgrims that he was a traitor, not true to the commons. At Pontefract, Dakyn was forced to become Chief Clerk to the assembly’s proceedings.63
Naturally Dakyn tried to account for this afterwards. He explained that even before the triumphal entry to York and the Pontefract assembly, in his own town of Richmond, ‘I being a stranger not born in that country, having example of death before me . . . seeing also the gentlemen of the country, as James Rokeby, Anthony Brackenbury and other . . . for the time [being] said as they [the rebels] said and did as they did for jeopardy of my life.’ There in his account is the name of James Rokeby once more. Rokeby provided his own squirmings to Cromwell about becoming a delegate to the Pontefract assembly, who had thus accepted the ‘Lollard, and a puller-down of abbeys’ back into the commonwealth of Yorkshire. Elsewhere, some of Cumberland’s leading gentlemen known to be close to Cromwell were made to take the Pilgrims’ oath of loyalty: one was Sir John Lamplugh, on his payroll both before and after the rising. Another forced oath-taker, cousin to Drs Roland and Thomas Lee, was John Lee of Isel in Cumberland, an old friend of Cromwell with a penchant for sending him breezy letters accompanied by slightly bizarre presents, such as a roll of leeches.64
Also conspicuous was the treatment of the two men most readily identified with Cromwell in the city of York, Sir George Lawson and the veteran Minster Treasurer, Lancelot Collins. When Robert Aske arrived with thousands of supporters for liturgical celebrations of his Pilgrimage with Archbishop Lee in the week of 16 October, this pair were singled out to play a prominent role in the triumph. Collins, as we noted when observing his first contacts with Cromwell way back in 1514, had put up the heraldry of his two greatest patrons, Cromwell and Cardinal Bainbridge, over his front door: threatened with having his house burned down, he hastily dismantled the display, unfortunately along with the King’s arms. Sir George was forced to be Aske’s host during his stay in the city, while Collins was made to treat Aske to a lavish dinner and furnish him with payments of ready cash.65
All this amounted to a form of the sacrament of penance: repentance and promise of amendmen
t of life, followed by reconciliation with the community. The most likely source of this remarkable idea is Robert Aske himself. He was precisely the type of the potential collaborator with Cromwell’s regime represented by John Dakyn or James Rokeby: rooted in northern gentry society, but equally at home at Gray’s Inn, where as a lawyer who understood the North he regularly did business for northern magnates like the Earls of Northumberland and Cumberland. Moreover, the government understood the psychology, and after defeating the Pilgrimage sought with some success to reverse it. When on 8 and 9 May 1537 the Duke of Norfolk set forth in York the indictments of participants and empanelled the juries to try them, he not only expected the largest gathering of county gentry seen in the city for many years, but made a particular point of appointing as jurors people close to those indicted, including near relatives of Thomas Lord Darcy and Sir Robert Constable – and, most strikingly of all, Robert Aske’s own brother John.66
Not everyone played to the Pilgrims’ script. Cranmer later commended the Controller of his household, John Wakefield, to Cromwell. Wakefield was one of a Yorkshire gentry family to whom the Archbishop gave much patronage; since the late 1520s he had been plugging away like Francis Bigod at the thankless task of promoting evangelical reformation in the North. For that and his notorious connection to the hated Cranmer, Wakefield was brought to the Pontefract assembly by Thomas Lord Darcy of Templehurst, being particularly vulnerable as a near-resident to the town, but he pointedly withdrew from the gathering. He was punished with the ‘loss of all his goods, which at that time were specially spoiled, because he was so unobedient unto their minds’. Cranmer would have liked him to receive the Cluniac Priory at Pontefract in reward for his sufferings, beyond compensation the Duke of Norfolk had already allotted to him, but it was not to be.67
Another less than penitent sinner fared rather better. William Maunsell was one of Yorkshire’s leading financial officials: long-standing county Under-Sheriff and Escheator, with consequently many local enemies and a good friend in Thomas Cromwell, not least because an escheator had much to do with administering the consequences of the new Statute of Uses. William’s brother Thomas, a priest, was unmistakably an active and enthusiastic participant in the Pilgrimage, but still felt protective towards his wayward sibling. Hearing that William ‘was in great danger of his life because he would not take the oath’ at York, on 16 October Thomas persuaded an angry Robert Aske to allow him to administer it to William in person and in private. Granted this favour, Thomas turned up at his brother’s door, where William proceeded to hit him, hard. Taking this as a no, Thomas decided nevertheless with fraternal loyalty to report to Aske that the oath had been duly administered; and that was that.68 Maunsell was rewarded for his recalcitrance after the rebellion by being made Gentleman Usher of the King’s Privy Chamber.69
By now it will be apparent that the Lincolnshire Rising and Pilgrimage of Grace were aimed at Cromwell and his associates more precisely and carefully than has generally been appreciated. The unpardonables were (as the Sawley Abbey ballad written for the Pilgrims ran) ‘Crim, Cram and Rich / With three Ls and their like’, the ‘three Ls’ or hells probably being Lee, Leighton and Hugh Latimer, or maybe just the whole clan of Lees, Bishop and all.70 Early on in events, on 15 October 1536, John Freeman advised Cromwell ‘if there shall be any one matter of the requests of the false rebels of Yorkshire redressed, that it may appear to them and all others that ye shall be a suitor for it, that the ignorant wretches may the better goodwill bear you’. In 1525, this policy had stood Cardinal Wolsey in good stead and helped bring a face-saving end to the Amicable Grant, but no similar charade would ever have worked for Cromwell.71
Indeed, any direct involvement of the Lord Privy Seal or his surname in Yorkshire proved deeply counter-productive. When negotiations for a truce reached a delicate stage on 27 October, with the Duke of Norfolk’s small royal advance guard eyeing the much greater rebel force at Doncaster, proceedings were nearly derailed by a violent quarrel between one of the Pilgrims and one of the Cromwell contingent. There was also great indignation at reports of Richard Cromwell’s ‘extreme’ words against the Lincolnshire insurgents (all too plausible; he spoke very violently of them in his letters to his uncle).72 Another near-catastrophe came in November when the Pilgrims intercepted one of the Lord Privy Seal’s al garrison at Scarborough; it promised that the commander ‘shall see them so subdued as their example shall be fearful to all subjects whilst the world doth endure’.73 This was a very different message from the government’s conciliatory public line presented in negotiations by the Duke of Norfolk, and the fact that we have two copies suggests that the rebels circulated it for propaganda purposes.
At the beginning of November, after the Duke of Norfolk had concluded a truce with the Pilgrims, the King contemplated sweeping concessions to the rebels. These were to be conveyed by the Duke. To be complete, they should have included the sacrifice of Cromwell. That possible way forward is strongly implied by the first draft of an answer which Henry composed in the first week of November to demands brought to Windsor on 2 November by Norfolk and gentry delegates from the Pilgrims (Sir Ralph Ellerker and Robert Bowes). The royal reply was a long document, frequently peevish in tone, more like a rather testy and defensive contribution to a conversation than a proclamation. This is because it was intended as a printed tract for wide distribution. A similar printed tract answering the Lincolnshire rebels was issued from Thomas Berthelet’s press at much the same time, late in 1536, but the surviving manuscript is an early and shorter draft of the Yorkshire printed text. Ralph Sadler took down the copy, which the King then corrected in his own hand. It is no scrawl, but a considered, almost final text. It is worth examining and comparing with the printed outcome for what it does and does not say on one vital matter.74
Both draft and printed text included a lengthy treatment of the Pilgrims’ criticism of royal councillors, designed to refute the claim that the Council now contained fewer noblemen than in the past. Henry recalled his first Council back in 1509, in which ‘I note none but two, worthy calling noble.’ Now his Council was overflowing with noblemen ‘both of birth and condition’. He listed them in detail, along with two knights who did not have peerages at all, but whom he clearly considered appropriate to include: Treasurer Sir William Fitzwilliam and Comptroller Sir William Paulet. ‘Now how far be ye abused, to reckon that then there were mo[re] noblemen in our Privy Council, than now?’ he concluded triumphantly. A silence shouted out from this practical syllogism. The peer whose name was conspicuously absent was Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon, and there was no mention of the office of Lord Privy Seal either, even though Henry troubled to name those of Cromwell’s two friends Fitzwilliam and Paulet. Instead the reference to Cromwell was oblique, linked directly to that other unnamed Councillor Archbishop Cranmer, and breathtakingly equivocal in contemplating their joint fates:
Where ye, the Commons, do name certain of our Council to be subverters both of God’s law and the laws of this realm; we do take them and repute them as just and true executors, both of God’s laws, and ours, as far as their commissions under us do extend. And if any of our subjects can duly prove the contrary, we shall proceed against them, and all other offenders therein, according to justice, as to our estate and dignity royal doth appertain . . . And one thing amongst others maketh me think that this slander should be untrue: because it proceedeth from that place which is both so far distant from where they inhabit, and also from those people, which never heard them preach nor yet knoweth any part of their conversation.
This was open-ended musing rather than ringing defence. It positively invited denunciation of those unnamed, and could not have been written with Cromwell anywhere near the King’s chamber. In fact he was not in permanent residence at Windsor at this time, but commuting from Mortlake or The Rolls; so Thomas Heneage and Fitzwilliam had to write to him urgently from Windsor on 5 November, telling him to intercept Ellerker and Bowes after t
hey had left the castle, to stop them going north from London.75 Cromwell was sometimes away for days at a time at this crucial juncture, causing another Pilgrim emissary at Court, Percival Cresswell, looking round the Council board at Windsor, to conclude that he had been dismissed from their number.76 For a day or two, there was a real possibility that this might happen. At least Cromwell had Ralph Sadler to keep him informed of danger – and, in the end, this first version containing the King’s betrayal of all the Lord Privy Seal’s service never reached the North. Was it the very text taken from Ellerker and Bowes when they were intercepted?
Berthelet’s printed version, among several expansions, reveals a major addition amid the King’s discussion of his Council. Cranmer’s name was inserted to head the names of the bishops, and there then followed a strong character reference for two other figures hated by the rebels:
And for because it is more than necessary, to have some of our Privy Council learned in the laws, and acquainted with the policies and practices of the world, we, by the advice of our whole Council before named, did elect and choose into our Privy Council, and also into their rooms, Sir Thomas Audley knight, our Chancellor, and the Lord Cromwell, Keeper of our Privy Seal, thinking them men in all our opinions most meet for the same rooms.77
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