Our most recent slogs took us through Henry VIII’s dissolution of England’s religious houses and then through the Lincolnshire Rising, which was an effort to restore the monasteries. But keep your muddy boots on, because we’re not done yet. We’ve still got the Pilgrimage of Grace to get through.

Need a recap before we head off? Henry VIII took England out of the Catholic Church (kings could do that sort of thing then: I believe this, so you will too) and confiscated the property and income of the monasteries, nunneries, friaries, and etcetaries, which he fed to his ever-hungry treasury. 

He put down a rebellion in Lincolnshire quickly but it led to a larger rising in neighboring Yorkshire, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, and that’s where we’re heading now. It was led by a well-connected lawyer, Robert Aske.  

How well-connected? He was the grandson of a baron and a third cousin to Jane Seymour, who had recently married Henry of the Six Wives. So quite.

 

Before we get to what happened, though, let’s talk about why

Religion was the primary spark for the rebellions–people weren’t happy to walk or be chased away from the religion that had shaped their lives–but other elements fed into them as well. One was Thomas Cromwell’s attempts to increase the central government’s control in the North. I’m guessing this was more important to the gentry and aristocracy than to the common people. Folks who have some power aren’t usually happy to see it moved someplace else. 

Cromwell? He was Henry’s minister and (you could at least argue) his brains. He’s also the central character in the BBC’s fantastic series Wolf Hall. I leave it to you to decide which of those things is the most important.

Sorry, where were we? Other elements that fed into the risings. The church and its buildings played an important role in poor and rural communities. This wasn’t just about religion but also charity, jobs, education, and what health care and care for the elderly there was. Closing the monasteries put an end to that. 

Also the harvest had been bad the year before, so food prices had risen, and the Enclosure Movement meant landlords were taking away some peasants’ access to common land and pushing others off the land entirely, leaving them homeless and impoverished. That had started long before Henry and went on long after he was dust, and it had flat out nothing to do with the dissolution of the monasteries, but y’know, when people are feeling the pinch their anger can go in all sorts of directions.

Okay, it had a bit to do with the monasteries: the poor had been able to turn to them for a handout, and no one had a plan in place to fill that gap when they closed.

You can find a bit about the enclosure movement about halfway through this link. I really do need to write a separate post about it.

But before we get all starry eyed about the church and the good it did, remember that it was also a very rich landlord and fierce about dictating what people had to believe and how they could live their private lives–or what we might think of as private, although I’m not convinced they’d have seen it the same way.

For all that, the tone of the rebellion was heavily religious. To quote Robert Aske (remember him? leader of the rebellion?), “And that ye shall not come into our pilgrimage for no particular profit to your self nor to do any displeasure to any private person but by counsel of the commonwealth nor slay nor murder for no envy but in your hearts put away all fear and dread and take afore you the Cross of Christ and in your hearts His faith, the restitution of the church, the suppression of these heretics and their opinions by all the holy contents of this Book.”

 

The Pilgrimage

When the Lincolnshire rising disbanded, the government disbanded its army as well (England didn’t have a standing army until much later on), so when the Pilgrimage of Grace began, Henry’s government was sitting around with its proverbial thumb up its nose, unprepared for Aske to march into York with 30,000 armed–well, let’s say people. By some accounts, it was 30,000 men, but one of the fun side-effects of sexism in the English language is that it’s hard to tell when “men” means men and when “men” means people. In a popular rising, my best guess is that a wide swath of the population would’ve been swept up, including (gasp, horror!) women.

If you don’t keep your eye on those women, they’ll just show up everywhere. 

But let’s not get bogged down there. On October 24, Aske and 30,000 men and possibly not-men marched into York and restored the religious houses that had been closed. 

It’s worth knowing that Aske’s was a higher class of uprising than the Lincolnshire one, by which I mean that it had better connections. Not only was Aske a gentleman, his supporters included a baron and an archbishop, as well as some survivors of the Lincolnshire rising.

The rebels were divided into three hosts, and the one under Aske’s leadership engaged in no looting and no violence, although this wasn’t passive resistance. They did take at least one city. Still, the other hosts weren’t as well disciplined, threatening violence if local lords wouldn’t join them, and I assume making good on their threats although I haven’t been able to dig out any details. 

Rebel numbers continued to grow and rebellions to pop up in new localities. In Cumberland, a rising was led by captains called Charity, Faith, Poverty, and PIty.

Facing them all were the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury, with 12,000 men between them. The rebels now had 40,000, um, humans. Or maybe that’s 8,000 and 30,000. Or 27,000. Numbers were as liquid as spelling back then. Take them as a poetic way of saying a lot or people and a lot more people.

Whatever the head count was, the king’s forces were massively outnumbered, which is why Norfolk negotiated with the rebels, promising safe conduct for two delegates to meet the king, so off the delegates trotted–one rebel and one peacemaker–to Henry’s court, where he told them he knew more about religion than mere commoners but offered them a pardon if they’d hand over ten ringleaders. 

Back north they rode, reporting that Henry had found their demands “dark and obscure,” so rebel representatives hashed out a clarified set of demands at Pontefract Castle, which they’d seized. These were “24 Articles to the King,” also called “The Commons’ Petition.”  

They handed these to Norfolk to pass on to Henry, and Norfolk promised them a general pardon, a parliament that would be held at York within a year, and a reprieve for the abbeys until the new parliament could meet and discuss the matter. 

The rebels were divided over whether to trust Norfolk’s promises. Aske thought they could. Others were wiser, because (either at this point or earlier–I’ve lost track) Norfolk wrote to the king, “I beseche you to take in gode part what so ever promes I shall make unto the rebels for sewerley I shall observe no part thereof.” 

Sewerly? My best guess is that it means surely. Spelling? Liquid, and a thin one at that. 

That division within the rebel ranks was at least to some extent and division between the aristocrats and the commoners, with the aristocrats being more trusting and the commoners more realistic.

In early December, at Aske’s urging, the rebels disbanded and Aske was invited to court for Christmas, where he was well received.

 

Bigod’s Rebellion

Now we move on to Cumberland, where we find Bigod’s Rebellion, led by Sir Francis Bigod and John Hallam, a captain of the 1536 rebellion, neither of whom believed the promises the Pilgrims had been given. 

Unlike the bulk of the rebels, who were Catholic, Bigod was an evangelical–a full-blown Protestant–and all for England leaving the Catholic Church but not for Henry installing himself in the Pope’s place. I’d love to connect that to the rest of the post but I haven’t found a link. Still, it’s interesting and I’m leaving it in.

This new group of rebels planned to capture Hull, Scarborough, and the Duke of Norfolk, who they’d force to mediate with the government. For the sake of clarity, that’s two towns and a duke. I’m doing mix and match here.

But the gentry had survived two rebellions with their hind ends intact and weren’t in a mood to gamble on a third, and although commoners did rise, their risings were sporadic. They eventually converged on Carlisle, where they were defeated in February 1537. 

Norfolk hanged 74 rebels. His orders had been to “cause such dreadful execution to be doon upon a goode number of th’inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet . . . as well by the hanging up of them in trees as by the quartering of them and the setting up of their heddes and quarters….as may be a fearful spectacle.” 

He stopped short of quartering.

At this point, reprisals for the earlier rebellions started.  All told, 216 people were executed, including Aske and assorted lords, knights, abbots, monks, and parish priests. And I’d assume a lot of common folk. One of Henry’s goals was to divide the gentry from the common people, which worked, with the gentry sitting in judgment and commoners (with the exception of the lords, knights, and so forth) being judged.

When Robert Aske was tried, his own brother was on the jury. Only one of the people who were tried was found innocent.

 

So what, if anything, do we learn here?

Like every medieval revolt I’ve read about, the participants in these were noisily loyal to the king. How could they not be? Unless you were backing some alternative kingship candidate and had planted a sword in a stone, opposing the king was more or less unthinkable. No alternative form of government had been imagined. So the goal wasn’t to get rid of the king but to let him know his people’s true situation and get rid of bad people around him (Cromwell was the focus of attention there). If they could do those two things, he’d govern justly. 

But kings were famously jealous of their power and not quick to hand any of it over to a bunch of upstarts. Commoners were threatening because there were so damn many of them and because they were everything the aristocracy looked down on–and feared if they had any sense. On the other hand, aristocrats, being closer to the center of power, were a different sort of threat. The biggest of the feudal lords still saw themselves as ruling under the king while the king saw himself as ruling, period–or if you want to be appropriately British about this, full stop. 

This takes us back almost full circle to the paragraphs about what elements fed into the rebellion, but now we’re looking at it from the other side: it wasn’t just religion that shaped Henry’s response. It was about centralizing power.

Did any of these rebellions stand a chance of success, then? 

It depends on how we define success. They couldn’t have taken power, but then they never imagined they could. That simply wasn’t a goal. They were trying to influence the king, and they did chalk up some successes that are worth noting alongside their more obvious devastating losses. 

• The collection of the October subsidy–a major grievance–was postponed. 
• The Statute of Uses was partly negated by a new law.
• Four of the seven sacraments that the Ten Articles left out were restored, inching the Church of England away from outright Protestantism.
• A royal proclamation of 1538 promised an onslaught on heresy, by which we should understand outright Protestantism. In practice, I’m not sure it amounted to an onslaught, but it did require the name of the printer and author on any book, which was designed “to auoide and abolish suche englishe bookes as conteine pernicious and detestable errours and heresies.” It put author and printer at greater risk.

In a sideways sort of way, those changes bear out something my parents used to say. They were union organizers back in the day and believed no strike is ever lost. It’s possible that no rebellion is either.

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If you want a timeline–and I got lost enough moving between one article and the next that I was grateful for this one–take a look here.