Warwick and his soldiers arrived at Norwich on 23 August 1549. They were preceded by a royal herald who made an offer of pardon to the rebels if they would throw down their arms. Though some reportedly responded enthusiastically, discarding their weapons and promising loyalty to the King, others viewed the offer with suspicion and contempt, none more explicitly than ‘an ungracious boy [who,] putting down his breeches, shewed his bare buttockes & did a filthy act: adding thereunto more filthy words’. One of the watching royal soldiers was so revolted with this verbal and physical riposte that he shot the boy dead. Kett had to be restrained from marching across the lines to confront Warwick face to face. Negotiations had clearly failed.16
There followed three days of intensive door-to-door fighting in the streets of the city. At one point, on the evening of 25 August, Warwick was almost beaten, his men pleading for him to surrender. Disgusted by what the Earl saw as their cowardice, he made each of them kiss his sword in turn, demanding their loyalty to the death.17 Warwick’s resolve and, more importantly, the arrival of additional mercenaries tilted the battle the way of the royal forces. At Dussindale, the flat valley that lay south of Mousehold Heath, Warwick’s cavalry broke the rebel lines and rode among Kett’s men, massacring them, in the gleeful words of Neville, like ‘wild beasts’. Many of those not killed in the initial slaughter were executed very shortly afterwards. The gentry of Norwich, who had proved so pusillanimous on the night of the 25th when confronted with defeat, bayed for a general slaughter once they had broken the rebel resistance. It took the intervention of Warwick himself to cool their bloodlust. Although he acknowledged the rebels’ ‘wickedness to be such, as deserved to be grievously punished: and with the severest judgement that might be’, yet he wondered how far the gentry would go. ‘Would they ever show themselves discontented and never pleased? Would they leave no place for humble petition; none for pardon and mercy?’ The high-flown pleas for clemency were followed by Warwick’s clincher: ‘Would they be Ploughmen themselves, and harrow their owne lands?’18
Despite calling for restraint, Warwick nonetheless had forty-nine of the rebels hanged from the market cross.*19 And it was estimated that in total some three hundred rebels were executed in the immediate aftermath of the Norfolk rebellion. Indeed, historians have estimated that even without further retribution, the suppression of the 1549 rebellions overall represented a demographic catastrophe for the areas involved. In Norwich, the human impact was registered in the empty market stalls left vacant because their holders were either dead or had fled the area.20 Similar violence was meted out to the rebels outside East Anglia. In Kent, Sir Thomas Wyatt hanged several rioters. In Wiltshire in June of that same year, rioters broke up the enclosures surrounding Sir William Herbert’s new park at Wilton. Herbert was a violent man who had already been arraigned for manslaughter. His response to the rioters was to ‘over-run and slay them’. In the Thames Valley Lord Grey of Wilton, dispatched to deal with rebels in the Cotswolds, oversaw fourteen executions, including two priests hanged from their church steeples, before marching on to help pacify the West Country.21
Kett himself escaped the bloodbath at Dussindale, but was captured the next day. He and his brother William were taken to London to be tried for treason, but were returned to Norwich to be executed. William was hanged from the tower of Wymondham Abbey, while Robert was hanged in chains from the walls of Norwich Castle. According to Neville, his body, which would have been seen by the townspeople of Norwich as they traded and shopped in the marketplace, remained suspended from the castle walls until it finally rotted away in 1615.
The familiarly brutal end to this particular (and most celebrated) episode in England’s ‘commotion time’ provided hostile chroniclers like Neville and Sotherton with the necessary moral conclusion to their tales of iniquitous popular rebellion. The fruits of revolt, according to these accounts, were always bitter, the punishments severe but just, and inescapable. Focusing on Norfolk, and on Kett’s rebellion especially, allowed these writers to cast a convenient shadow over most of the encampments that sprang up during the ‘commotion time’. Many of the risings in fact dissolved as a result of negotiations with the authorities that at least partially satisfied rebel demands. In the case of Sotherton, a former mayor of Norwich, this also allowed him to obscure some of the Norfolk gentry’s complicity in the revolt.
The events of 1549 threatened, if they did not fully realise, a profound transformation in English politics. The ‘commotion time’ was inextricably linked with the programme of social reform and Protestant Reformation instigated by Somerset’s protectorate. The first stirrings of revolt – ditch-filling and the destruction of hedged enclosures – were probably seen as legitimated by Somerset’s enclosure commissions. The rhetoric of the ‘Commonwealth’ had a radical tinge at an elite as well as a popular level. If there was not an identifiable ‘party’ of ‘Commonwealthmen’ in Tudor government, it is at least true that at mid-century a number of lay and ecclesiastical figures, some very close to the centre of power, were advocating far-reaching social and religious changes. Hugh Latimer’s ‘sermons on the plough’ linked the covetousness of greedy enclosers with the pre-Reformation Church’s legacy of a non-preaching clergy who hindered ‘spiritual ploughing’ in the same way that the Mousehold articles linked religious and material concerns. Latimer himself joked that he was happy to be spoken of as a ‘seditious fellow’, as Christ himself had been ‘contented to be called seditious’.22 The authorisation of the vernacular Bible and the termination of a number of Henry VIII’s heresy statutes saw England experience a level of press freedom it would not see again until the 1640s.
Some of the works that appeared at this time had deeply radical overtones. The English translation of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1551 made significant alterations to the text that broadened the social implications of the work, seriously proscribed in More’s original. Utopia stated that communal living and the holding of goods in common was the way of living of the ‘rightest Christian companies’. However, while More had clearly identified these ‘companies’ only with monasticism – ‘coenobia’ in the Latin marginalia of his original work – in the translation this caveat had been removed. The translator, Ralph Robinson, himself a middling-sort ‘Goldsmith and citizen of London’, had suggested that Utopian government was ‘Godly government’, implying that reformation and social transformation were two sides of the same coin. If communitarianism and the holding of goods in common were not simply the preserve of the monastic orders, then the camps established by the rebels of 1549 might equally constitute a model of ‘Godly government’.23
Of course, Kett and his fellow rebels did not present themselves as social revolutionaries and there is no evidence that they saw themselves in these terms in private, either. Like the rebels of 1381 and 1450, those involved in the 1549 risings argued that they were the King’s friends and ‘true commons’, not his enemies. These were not regicidal republicans. Yet in one key respect, the rebels of 1549 had a significantly different intent from that of their earlier counterparts. The rebellions of the ‘commotion time’ were essentially static. The rebels took control of major sites of local government but made no attempt, unlike Tyler or Cade, to launch an assault on London. This was not due to blinkered parochialism. Rather, Kett and his men believed that they were the partners and helpmeets of the protectoral regime, not its enemies. Their targets were the oppressive magisterial class in their counties, not a clique of courtiers based in London. Clear evidence of this comes in the aftermath of the failure of Kett’s rebellion. Hearing of the Earl of Warwick’s plans to overthrow him, Somerset issued a desperate plea for support to the country at large. In response, an army of some four thousand men assembled and offered to die in defence of his cause, denouncing Warwick and his supporters as plotting the ‘utter undoing of the commons’.24 Somerset rejected the offer to lead a popular revolt and was toppled from power by Warwick in October 1549.
Unlike 1381 and, to a lesser ex
tent, 1450, the upper classes did not rally to the Crown. Somerset’s policies had alienated the majority of the traditional ruling elite. He now had to look to those below the level of the gentry to provide him with a support base. He appalled his fellow nobles by negotiating with the rebel captains, even paying some, such as Latimer of Kent, to act as go-betweens, ferrying messages from the court to various rebel groups.25 On Somerset’s part, this ploy was undoubtedly prompted primarily by pragmatism rather than principle. In a letter to the diplomat Sir Philip Hoby written on 24 August 1549, Somerset had described the rebellion as ‘no other thing but a plague and a fury among the vilest and worst sort of men’. He believed that many of the rebel complaints concealed a simple lust for power and wealth:
Some crieth, pluck down enclosures and parks, some for their commons, others pretend religion. A number would rule another while, and some direct things as gentlemen have done, and indeed all have conceived a wonderful hate against gentlemen and taketh them as their enemies. The ruffians among them and the soldiers, which be the chief doers, look for spoil.26
Yet, if he held conventional upper-class views about the motivations behind popular rebellion, Somerset was nonetheless influenced by some of the ‘Commonwealth’ ideas circulating at this point. Like other enormously wealthy noblemen, he may have been concerned about the conspicuous display of his wealth and power – his unfinished protectoral palace required some two million bricks for its construction – but he also instituted reforms on his own estates which considerably reduced the burdens of villeinage, replacing many customary dues with reasonable cash payments. More significant in broader terms were the policies that Somerset implemented in 1548–9 to deal with the crisis unfolding across the nation. Armed resistance remained anathema to the protectoral regime, but it proved willing to negotiate with the rebels if they would drop the threat of force and communicate via the device of suitably framed petitions. Somerset also put in place, as we have seen, enclosure commissioners who, drawn from below gentry level, would be empowered to review and, if necessary, remove recent enclosures. In short, Somerset’s government entered into negotiations with the people and offered them a significant share of power at the obvious expense of the major landowners.27
The response of the commons to these overtures was also very revealing and tells us much about the sophistication of popular politics. Somerset had initially believed that the risings in East Anglia and southern England, like those in Cornwall and Devon, were linked to residual loyalty to the Catholic Church. He blamed the stirrings in Norfolk on ‘papist priests’, although the rebels were very quick to assure him of their enthusiasm for the new religion. Certainly, there is some evidence that the Norfolk rebels were genuinely attached to the idea of maintaining an active, preaching ministry. The chronicler Neville acknowledged that the rebel camps had made use of chaplains for morning and evening prayers, though he claimed this was a piece of hypocrisy meant only to give their cause the veneer of sanctity. Somerset’s regime was itself suspicious of the depth of sincerity behind the rebels’ stated religious views. The Privy Council responded positively to the Essex rebels’ demands for recourse to ‘sondrie textes of scripture’ and were pleased that the articles in their petition ‘acknowledge the Gospell whiche ye saye ye greatlie hunger’. Yet they remained unsure whether these demands proceeded ‘from the harte’, or were ‘only a recytall of textes’ for their ‘present purpose’.
The evidence was contradictory. The Northaw rebels had rejected Edward’s authority on the grounds of his minority, whereas the Essex articles presented by ‘William Essex’ had acknowledged the boy-king as a ‘Josiah’ who, like the biblical monarch, because of his attachment to the faith, was better suited to rule than a man many years his senior.28 Equally, that evocative phrase from the Norwich articles calling for the manumission of all serfs on the grounds of Christ’s sacrifice may have owed less to the influence of evangelical teaching than it initially appeared. Villeinage was by this point relatively uncommon in East Anglia, but bondmen (those bound to give service to the lord of the manor as part of their tenancy) were to be found on most of the estates of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. What seemed at first a religiously inspired call for universal freedom may in fact have been a targeted attack on the power of a hated local magnate. Deducing the degree to which religious beliefs were sincerely held by the populace is a thorny historical problem and one that many historians of the Reformation find virtually impossible to resolve conclusively. What we can ascertain from the rebel petitions is that those who rose and formed encampments in 1549 understood that framing their demands in the language of the Reformation was a good way of getting themselves heard. If their own religious beliefs remain elusive, the strategic nous of those below gentry level was clearly on display.
*
The potential partnership between Crown and commons was never fully realised. After 1549, rebellions were suppressed with even greater severity than before. In the wake of the revolt of the northern earls against Elizabeth I’s government in 1569, her agents, eagerly egged on by the Virgin Queen, summarily executed rebels by the hundreds. Writing in January 1570, Sir Thomas Gargrave stated that in the North Riding of Yorkshire ‘ther ys by marcyall lawe alredy executyd, above 500 of the poore sorte’. The Earl of Sussex especially singled out those ‘constables and other officers’ whom he saw as the common people’s seducers.29 Hostile accounts of the rebellions of 1549, foremost among them Alexander Neville’s De Furoribus Norfolciensium (1575), a text given to schoolchildren as part of their education in Latin rhetoric, rammed home the evils of revolt and the harsh punishments that would befall those foolish enough to engage in insurrection. Deeper social changes during the Elizabethan era further diminished the chances of another popular rebellion as widespread as the ‘commotion time’. Many of those petty officers, such as Robert Kett, who had earlier been leading rebels were increasingly integrated with those wealthy vested interests that promoted enclosure and sought to stifle popular resistance. The energies of many prosperous yeomen were now directed at engrossing the estates of their less well-off neighbours, not in coming to their aid. Thomas Dillamore, a yeoman of Chippenham, Cambridgeshire, in 1636 was in sole possession of land that in 1544 had been in the hands of fifteen men.30 The serious threat that popular rebellion had once posed authority appeared to have been permanently negated. The so-called ‘Oxfordshire Rising’ of 1596 was a case in point: the ‘rising’ consisted of no more than the meeting of a carpenter and two millers on a hilltop in a preparation for a march on London. Despite the fact that no one else appears to have heeded this call to arms, the three men were taken into custody, tortured and then executed.31 Serious uprisings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, such as the Northern Rebellion of 1569 and Essex’s revolt in 1601, were led by the aristocracy (a trend which the civil war, at its opening at least, confirmed).
Yet 1549 did more than facilitate the further enrichment of some better-off yeomen and ensure their gradual assimilation into the political elite. It did more, even, than hold out the brief promise of a new form of government based on the cooperation of Crown and commons (a promise that was, in many respects, to be fulfilled during the 1640s). In the same way that the memory of 1381 and 1450 had clearly influenced the rebels of 1549 and provided a geography of rebellion, so the ‘commotion time’, despite its transformation by Neville and later writers into merely ‘Kett’s rebellion’, retained a powerful force in the popular memory.
Much of what historians have been able to recover about the much wider scale of the 1549 rebellions has been gleaned from statements from individuals about the ‘commotion time’ made fifty or even sixty years after the event. These were the words of ordinary men and women who remembered the ‘merry world’ of the camp at Mousehold Heath and viewed Robert Kett as an ‘honest man’.32 While Neville gloated that Kett’s mouldering bones had provided Norwich citizens with a grim reminder of the penalties for rebellion well into the early seventeen
th century, for some, the daily sight of his body on the walls of the castle may instead have brought a reminder of a brief time in which the grasp of landholders had been loosened, long-standing injustices righted and popular government established. Similarly, the decision to celebrate the anniversary of the city’s relief on 27 August with special sermons every year, originally meant as a thanksgiving for Norwich’s deliverance from the rebels, was gradually transformed over the centuries into a commemoration of Kett. By the nineteenth century, historians were revising the unsympathetic picture of the rebel leader painted by Neville and Sotherton, and by the early twentieth, as we have seen, he was even being claimed as an early socialist.
Today, the visitor to Norwich has hardly arrived in the city before he or she comes upon some street or park named after Kett. The fabled ‘oak of reformation’, propped up by stakes, remains a tourist attraction. Even the ‘ungracious boy’ who bared his backside to the royal herald was, until very recently, preserved for posterity in a mural in the shopping centre. Beyond Norfolk, Kett’s oak of reformation is celebrated in sculpture outside Kett House in Cambridge, a legacy of the fact that one of Robert Kett’s descendants, George Kett, became the Tory Mayor of the city in late Victorian times. Today, it is Kett and his rebels who are remembered and celebrated and the Earl of Warwick who has been consigned to historical oblivion. As George Kett put it, perhaps the greatest evidence that Kett was a committed Christian can be seen in his reverence for Christ’s example: ‘This forerunner of Rousseau followed the teaching of his Master in giving up his life for the people whom God had made free, but who were yet found everywhere in chains.’33
A Radical History Of Britain Page 12
