Last week we slogged through the dissolution of England’s monasteries (and nunneries and friaries and so-fortharies) under Henry VIII, and it might’ve looked, to the casual reader, like everything fell neatly into place for ol’ Henry: the order went out, the courts assessed the money and the goodies and handed them over to the treasury, and the nuns, monks, and friars were sent out into the world to manage as best they could with the pensions they were given. A couple of hundred people were executed for opposing the changes, but in the great scheme of things that hardly counts as major opposition, especially after a few hundred years.

It didn’t all fall into place that easily, though. Henry faced some widespread opposition, starting in October 1536 and centered on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. If you don’t know your English geography, what matters is that they’re both up north, because the center of English politics has long been in London and more generally in the south. So think of this as happening in No-one-ever-pays-attention-to-usLand. 

Irrelevant photo: a geranium

The spark

There were two uprisings, and I won’t get as far as the second one this week. Sorry–it’s been that kind of week.

The first started in the town of Louth. Some royal commissioners showed up–those folks who went through a monastery’s belongings and claimed them for the crown–and one made a comment that may have been seen as a threat by the less-educated among the clergy. “Look to your books or there will be consequences.” In addition, new regulations had been introduced that affected the clergy, and taxes that affected secular folk. And people were looking not just at the closing of the religious houses but at the confiscation of  of all that expensive church-ware, some of which had been donated by local families, who therefor had a proprietary feeling about it. 

It’s worth noting that it was only the well-to-do who could donate, say, silver to a church or monastery, but ordinary people participated in grassroots fundraising that might touch up a saint’s statue that was looking weary or do something along those lines, so they too would have a sense of ownership.

As a result, three things happened. the vicar of Louth preached what one website calls an inflammatory sermon; a cobbler, Nicholas Melton, who came to be known as Captain Cobbler, seized a registrar and burned his papers; and a larger group of people held the commissioners hostage at a nunnery.

If you want to know the aim of these early uprisings, look at the documents they destroyed. Literacy was growing but still limited, and committing things to paper was a form of control. Destroy the list of what a monastery owned and it was easy to believe that you might just stop it from being confiscated.

But before I go on

I try not to use Wikipedia, because its entries change and it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness before the editors swoop in to correct it, but I couldn’t find articles with any depth to them anywhere else. So I’m leaning on it heavily here. I believe we’re on safe ground. 

Fair enough? Lets go on.

The rebellion

Before long, a full-scale revolt had broken out. The rebels came from several towns and converged on the city of Lincoln, where they dragged the diocese’s chancellor from his bed and beat him to death. We can probably take this as an indication that they weren’t in a good mood.

They sent a list of complaints to the king, and these focused on both taxes and religion. They objected to at least one of  Henry’s tax strategies, the Statute of Uses, and they demanded an end to taxation in peacetime. They also objected to the dissolution of the monasteries and to the Church of England’s first statement of its doctrine, the Ten Articles, and demanded that heretics be purged from the government, that the treasures in local churches be protected, and that they have the right to continue worshipping as Catholics. 

Henry dismissed the rebels as “rude and ignorant common people” and their entire county as “one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm,” so we can safely guess he wasn’t in a good mood either.

Who took part? Some 40,000 people, with the support of the gentry. Their opposition to the Statute of Uses  speaks to the gentry’s involvement, since it involved tax on the inheritance of land, but the number of people up in arms says the rebellion had support from people well below the level of the gentry.  

The protest–or rebellion, or whatever you want to call it–lasted from October 1 to October 4, when the king warned the rebels to go home or face the Duke of Suffolk and however many armed men he’d mobilized by then. By October 14, most of them had left Lincoln.

Why do they date the end of the protest to October 4, then? Sorry, you’re on your own there. I have no idea. What I can tell you is that after the protest broke up, the vicar of Louth and Captain Cobbler were captured and hanged, and over the next 12 days other leaders were executed, including a lawyer and a former monk–although he might not have considered himself former. An MP–that’s a member of parliament; you’re welcome–was not only hanged but also drawn and quartered for his involvement. The Tudors were nothing if not over the top about executing people.

Did that end of the tale? It did not. It led to a larger rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace. But for that, tune in next week.