Tag Archives: Henry VIII

A spy in Henry VIII’s court

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Henry VIII’s more famous for his wives than for his spies, but the wife story’s so well known that it’s hard to wring anything new out of it, so let’s talk about a spy: Petrus Alamire. Or Pierre Alamire. Or Peter van den Hove, Petrus Van den Hove, Petrus van den Hove (we lost a capital letter there, but spelling was still a liquid so we shouldn’t make too much of that), or if you like, Petrus van den Imhove. Because what’s a spy without a few names to spare? We’ll call him Petrus Alamire, because that’s the name he was wearing when I stumbled over him and it seems to be the main name he wears on the internet.

Which had not been invented when he was alive, you understand, but he might have enjoyed knowing he’d have a virtual afterlife.

Irrelevant photo: I was going to tell you this was an ornamental cherry but my phone swears it’s a plum. Either way, it doesn’t believe in growing fruit.

 

The family stuff

Alamire was born in 1470 and by one account was German-Dutch.  By another he was Netherlandish or German. Take your pick. I expect he did, more than once. Doesn’t any good spy need at least one extra nationallity? 

He had even more skills and occupations than names and nationalities: he was a scribe, specializing in illuminated copies of musical compositions. He was also a singer, composer, instrumentalist, mining engineer, merchant (he sold manuscripts, musical instruments, lute strings, and paintings), diplomat, courier, and spy. And somewhere in there he found time to be a chaplain, although only one source mentions that. But what the hell, why not? TV hadn’t been invented. A fellow had to do something in those long hours before the candle itself burned itself out.

He was from a family of merchants–details are thin; make them up if you’re in the mood–and created the name Alamire from the syllables given to the musical scale (la, mi, and re are notes six, three, and two), tossing A–a note on an instrument–in front for good luck. 

At some point he married, and I have a name–Katlyne vander Meeren–but not a date or anything substantial about her.

 

The times

The Netherlands were cranking out more composers than the rest of Europe rolled in together, spreading the gospel of polyphonic music, so it was the right time and place to be a skilled copyist and illuminator, and as musicians spread outward into the European courts, so did Alamire’s work and reputation.

To remind you of what you may already know, because that’s part of my job description, music was a Big Thing in the European courts, and moving it from place to place involved hand-made copies, which take a bit longer than downloads or even sheet music, and Alamire made work for Philip I of Castile and Archduke Charles, among others.

Alamire’s manuscripts weren’t just for some low-life musician to play, though. They were collectables made for royals and aristocrats. Each copy had to be unique and a thing of beauty, hence the illuminations. Think of them as singable, playable works of art, which made them nifty gifts. Want to buy a vote in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor? One of Alamire’s manuscripts would be perfect, which is why when Archduke Charles emerged from his cocoon he was, thanks to many expensive gifts, some made by Alamire, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

But when I talk about Alamire’s work, I’m not talking about Alamire alone, I’m talking about is him and all the people working under him, because he had an entire atelier–a workshop full of skilled but unfamous people doing his bidding.

 

Henry’s court

It’s impossible to tell Alamire’s story in any sane sequence without making things up, so we’ll skip over I have no idea how many crucial events and drop in at the point where Alamire gave Henry some musical gifts, including a beautiful manuscript. 

Why did he do that? Dunno, but gifts were the oil that kept the court machinery of many countries working smoothly, so let’s assume he was trying to catch Henry’s eye. Or ear. In return, he might get trade concessions, information, orders, connections. Sadly, he wouldn’t have gotten a cup of tea out of it because it wasn’t available yet. Tea didn’t hit Europe until 1555, and it took longer than that to reach England. Still, I’m sure it was worth his while.

People who know these things (which is to say, not me) believe the manuscript he sent was made for Louis XII and of France and his wife, Anne of Brittany, but they died before he could deliver it and–well, hell, you don’t just chuck something like that behind the filing cabinet and move on. He changed the names and poof, it was made for Henry and only Henry.

We need a date here, don’t we? Louis died in 1515, and 1515 was when Alamire started traveling between England and Europe, doing his merchant/musician/chaplain thing, and dropping in, ever so casually, on Richard de la Pole, who Henry had every reason to want to keep tabs on.

Who was de la Pole? He could–and oh my, did he–trace his descent back to the Yorkist kings–the ones Henry’s father had run off the playing field. His mother was a Plantagenet and the sister of Edward IV. and Richard III, and Richard was pretty clear about wanting to be de la Pole the First. 

Okay, it probably would’ve been Richard IV, but far be it from me to get it right on the first try. And it doesn’t matter because he never became king. In an effort to keep his head attached to his neck, he went into exile and planned to invade England a couple of times but the first draft was rejected by the publishers and he died in 1525, before the rewrite could go to press.

All of that, since he wasn’t dead yet, made him into a person Henry wanted to keep an eye on, and musicians made good spies. They had a reason to travel from court to court, and they may have had a certain invisibility, since as commoners–servants of a sort–they weren’t people who mattered. They might be off to the side, doing their music thing and in a position to eavesdrop, in rooms where important stuff was discussed. Or so says one of the sources I used. I’m not 600% convinced about the eavesdropping. If you’ve ever tried to sing in the car when the news is on,  you’ll know how little of the news you actually take in. But the other stuff–the travelling from court to court and all the rest of it–that makes sense.

It’s worth mentioning that at this point Henry, his court, and his country were still Catholic. He was still married, uncontroversially, to Catherine of Aragon. But that didn’t exempt him from worrying about invasions, enemies, spies, and things that went bump in the night. He had enough worries to make you wonder why de la Pole would want to be king.

Here again we’ll skip a few important bits of information. We don’t know what information Alamire sent back to Henry or how useful it was. What we do know is that Alamire became a counter-spy, giving de la Pole information about Henry’s court and Henry’s travels in England, which would’ve been many since kings were constantly on the move, stitching their realms together by being seen, keeping their nobles’ loyalties in place, and not so incidentally getting their extensive retinues fed at someone else’s expense.

Alamire’s letters to both the king and de la Pole have survived, making it clear that he was playing for both teams.

At some point, Henry and his chief advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, started to distrust him and not even a gift of five part books (see Ubi Dubium’s comment, below, for a convincing explanation of what a part book was), a parchment choir book, eight cornetti, many lute strings, and some political information were enough to buy his way back into Henry’s good graces.   

Alamire had the good sense to make himself scarce. He never returned to England and not many English composers show up in his manuscripts. 

That didn’t end his career, though. During the 1520s he was a diplomat and courier (getting banned from Henry’s court didn’t mean he was banned from all courts) as well as a music illustrator and copyist, and he carried letters between leading humanists of the time, including Erasmus, who described him as “not unwitty,” which probably wasn’t the glowing praise he was hoping for but could be worse. In his surviving letters, he has assorted clever and insulting things to say about other musicians. 

At some other point Christian III of Denmark paid him a hefty (if unspecified–sorry) sum of money for what’s called in the records instruction in the “craft of mining.”

Was that a way of saying spying? Or did mining really mean mining? We’re back to my old friend Dunno here. 

In 1534, Maria of Austria gave him a generous pension in return (presumably) for a number of manuscripts. Although another source calls her Maria of Hungary. Either way, she was the governess of the Low Countries after Margaret of Austria, all of which is a bit of history I’ve never stubbed my toe on until now.

And then he disappears. As will I for another week.

*

My thanks to 63Mago for suggesting spies and spying when I asked what people would like to read about. I’m sure that thought will have me wandering into related corners at some point.

And finally, apologies for posting this late. It’s been sitting around and ready to go for a week but I screwed up. I plead temporary insanity.

The Lincolnshire Rising, or dissolving the monasteries part 2

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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.

Dissolving the monasteries

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If people know anything about Henry VIII, it’s that (in descending order): he had six wives (divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived), he left the Catholic Church in a huff, and (sharp descent here) he dissolved the monasteries. 

Let’s talk about the monasteries.

Dissolving religious houses wasn’t new. For centuries, smaller monasteries either had blinked out of existence on their own or were dissolved so their endowments (their revenue-generating lands and churches) could be redistributed to other religious houses or used to fund colleges. Beyond pissing off some manageable number of people, that wasn’t controversial. What was  new under Henry was the scale. And the purpose. 

Oh, and where the money went.

 

Irrelevant photo: sunset

The why? of it all

First off, we’re using monasteries here as shorthand for not just monasteries but also abbeys, convents, and any religious houses that I’ve forgotten. It’s inaccurate and sexist but it’s simpler. Forgive me. 

If you roll all those religious houses together, you’ll have the wealthiest institution in Tudor England, owning a quarter of the country’s cultivated land and a lot of expensive bling, because devotion to god worked better when it was surrounded by gold and silver and jewels. 

All that bling was not only expensive, it was important. How would anyone know you had wealth if you didn’t show it off? It was what people and institutions did with it.

This being a time when wealth was measured not in bitcoins but in land and expensive objects, it was almost inevitable that Henry would cast his eye in the direction of those monasteries. His government was permanently short of money (blame wars–they’re expensive–and, um, lifestyle issues), and the monasteries not only had all those riches, they were aligned with the pope, who was now Henry’s enemy, what with Henry jumping into that huff and leaving the church, so they were a base of power capable of opposing him.

 

The mechanics of dissolution

In 1536, Henry’s government went after monasteries that had an income of less than £200 a year and fewer than 12 “inmates.” Sorry–not my word. They were probably counting nuns, monks, or friars but not their servants. They were closed down and their buildings, land, and money went to the crown. 

To give a sense of what £200 was worth, you could’ve bought 42 horses or 160 cows with it. It was the daily wage of 6,666 skilled artisans–or of one working for a long damn time. 

Then in 1539, the government moved against the larger monasteries, and by the next year they were being closed at the rate of 50 a month. The land and buildings of both large and small houses were sold and the bling–the movable assets–auctioned off.

In the first stage of dissolution, the confiscated buildings weren’t badly damaged, although lead was stripped from the roofs (it was valuable stuff), glazing was removed, and bells melted down. The plan was to sell or use the buildings themselves, and some of the buildings were repurposed for grand homes. You’ll still find stately homes called SomethingOrOther Abbey, and yes, they were once abbeys. 

In the later stages of the dissolution, orders went out to pull down the buildings: “Pull down to the ground all the walls of the churches, steeples, cloisters, fraters [refectories], dorters [dormitories], chapter houses.” This wasn’t cheap. The cost of tearing down Furness Abbey was 10% of the money raised by selling its property. 

Many of the buildings were partially pulled down and left to decay. Today, they make scenic ruins and people pay admission to wander through, take selfies, brush up against a bit of history, and then buy tea and sandwiches. 

 

The courts

All this confiscating and selling created a major administrative headache, and in 1535 the Court of Augmentation was set up to sort through the monasteries’ assets and income. Then in 1540, the Court of First Fruits and Tenths took charge of money the monasteries had once sent to Rome, because the end of the monasteries didn’t mean the end of the payments people owed them. 

What were first fruits, though? The first year’s profits that the new holder of a benefice owed the church. (A benefice was a church office that brought revenue to the person who held it.)  And the tenths? The 10% of each year’s income that the benefice’s holder owed the church each year until forever. All that had to be assessed, catalogued, dealt with.

The courts were part of Thomas Cromwell’s work of replacing the king’s medieval household administration with something we’d recognize today as a civil service. 

The treasury came out of the dissolution some £1.5 million richer. That would’ve been lifetimes of work by those skilled artisans we were talking about.

 

The monks, nuns, and servants

That accounts for the income, the bling, and the land and buildings, but it leaves the people who made their lives in the monasteries unaccounted for. So let’s do numbers. Some people love numbers. 

Roughly 14,000 monks, nuns, and friars were de-monked, de-nunned, and de-friared when the monasteries closed. If they cooperated, they received pensions. If they didn’t–well, some 200 people were executed for opposing the dissolution. 

I haven’t found a number for the servants who were now out of jobs and I don’t know if they were counted.

Monks and canons typically received a pension of around £5 or £6 a year, which was roughly what a chaplain was paid.

What’s a canon? I had to look it up. “A member of the chapter of (for the most part) priests, headed by a dean, which is responsible for administering a cathedral or certain other churches.”

Did you really need to know that?

The heads of religious houses did better, and as in everything else at this time, connections mattered. Family mattered. One abbot who was close to Cromwell received £100 a year–roughly the income of a rich country gentleman. Cooperation also mattered. Those who played along might be allowed to wander out into the secular world in possession of some of the house’s bling or cattle.  

Nuns–you won’t be surprised to learn–got less, sometimes no more than £1 a year. Even after the convents closed, they weren’t allowed to marry, although some did anyway. But many found no choice but to return to their families. Convents had long been refuges both for women who didn’t want to marry and dumping grounds for the unmarriageable daughters of the gentry and middle-ranking families. Both groups of women were likely to be seen as  burdens if they returned home. 

As for the servants, there would’ve been more of them than of monks or nuns. Sawley Abbey’s 18 monks had 42 servants–farmhands, plumbers, cooks, kitchen boys, carpenters, grooms, masons, laborers, and washerwomen.  

A monastery would also have had a steward–far higher up the scale than a washerwoman but still a servant–who managed legal relationships and relations with the outside world. 

With the closing of the monasteries, the servants who lived there, as many did, would have been homeless in addition to unemployed. Some dissolution commissioners made provision for them–which implies that some didn’t. At Furness Abbey, the servants were owed a good bit of back pay, and the commissioner made sure this was paid, although they got nothing, as far as I’ve read, beyond that. 

Almsmen living at the abbey received a cash settlement. 

 

Gain and Losses

Although the politically well connected and the backers of Henry’s reforms were in the best position to profit from the sales of land and buildings, traditional Catholics also bought up property. This created a group of wealthy families whose interests now lay with keeping the Church of England in place. Even when Mary took the throne and restored the Catholic Church, she couldn’t re-establish the monasteries. Whether you count that as a gain, a loss, or simply clever politics depends on your point of view.

The closing of the monasteries created some concrete problems that no one seems to have planned for. The monasteries had been home to massive libraries–collections of illuminated manuscripts. But the printed book was replacing the hand-copied one, so who needed those old things? Some were saved but many were destroyed.

Monastic and convent schools had educated boys and girls (separately of course, you barbarian), and the church had offered one of the very few ways a bright boy could climb out of poverty. With the closing of the monasteries, the schools closed.

The church also ran hospitals, and many of these were attached to monasteries. Those were lost. 

Let’s not let the word hospital fool us, though. It shares a root with hospitality, and not all hospitals dealt with illness. In England and Wales, 47% housed the poor and elderly. Another 12% housed poor travelers and pilgrims and 10% cared for the non-contagious sick. The rest housed lepers.

Monasteries also gave alms in the form of money or food to the poor. Not enough to keep them from being poor, mind you, and not enough to make a dent in their own riches, but when people are hungry–and this was a society full of people living on the edge–food is food.

No one made plans to replace any of this.

 

Nursery rhymes

According to legend, the nursery rhyme about Little Jack Horner come from this time. 

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said ‘What a good boy am I!

Thomas Horner was (allegedly) steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, and before the abbey was destroyed Whiting was supposed to have sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie with the deeds to a dozen manors hidden inside. Because if the Court of Augmentations couldn’t find them, they couldn’t claim them. Possession is nine-tenths and all that.

Again supposedly, Horner opened the pie somewhere along the way and stole the deeds to the manor of Mells, in Somerset, which had lead mines, making the plum in the rhyme a play on the Latin plumbum, meaning lead. 

A Thomas Horner did become the owner of the manor, but that doesn’t prove he found it in a pie and doesn’t explain why he’s called Jack.

Who Elizabeth I really was: a conspiracy theory from English history

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If you’re in the mood for a good conspiracy theory–one that’s unlikely to boost your blood pressure–then come with me to Tudor England. Or to nineteenth-century England. Or to Bisley, in Gloucestershire, next May Day. Or last May Day. We’re dealing with a tradition here, so it doesn’t matter what year we show up. 

Let’s start in Bisley. It’s easier to get to than Tudor England. 

On May Day, instead of picking a May Queen and dressing her up with a flowery crown, Bisley picks a boy and dresses him up like a Tudor-era girl. 

We can link that to the nineteenth century because that’s when Bram Stoker–the guy who wrote Dracula–wandered into Bisley one May Day and couldn’t help asking why the boy was wearing out-of-date skirts. 

This being the nineteenth century, the boy didn’t say, “I’m nonbinary and what’s it to you, nosyface?” before going merrily on his whaleboned way. Or awkwardly, given what it must’ve been like to move in those clothes. Instead, villagers told Stoker a local legend.

 

If you get as far as the end of the post, you’ll discover that that this photo is entirely relevant, and Li’l Red is, as you can see, horrified.

The legend

The story starts when Elizabeth I was 9, or in another version of the tale 10. (People may not have been able to imagine being nonbinary back then, but numbers could.) Either way, she wasn’t yet Elizabeth the I, so let’s call her Elizabeth the 0, or just plain Elizabeth. 

Whatever we call her, she, her governess, and her guardian were sent to Bisley to get them away from the plague that was rampaging through London. But you can’t fool fate, can you? According to the legend she died there, although not necessarily of the plague.

Exit Elizabeth.

That created something of a problem for the governess and guardian, since their job wasn’t just to educate her and keep her out of trouble but also to keep her alive, and Daddy–a.k.a. Henry VIII–could be unforgiving. So they did what any rational pair of babysitters would do and found the nearest red-headed kid of roughly the same size–who just happened to be a boy named Neville–and swapped him for the defunct princess.

You believed every word of this until I said his name was Neville, right? Anyone would. And so, of course, did Henry when he came to visit. Aristocratic parenting not being a hands-on activity in that period, he couldn’t tell the difference. Even when the kid said, “Hello, Father. I’d like to be called Neville from now on. Have hormones been discovered yet?”

Liz-Neville and their two puppeteers stayed out of London for a year–time enough, presumably, to turn a village boy into an intimidatingly well-educated princess.

Eat your ‘eart out, ‘Enry ‘Iggins. 

 

Spreading the tale

That–minus a few embellishments–was the tale Stoker was introduced to, and he did what writers do, which was to put it on paper and push it as far out into the world as he was able, which may not have been all that far since I only heard the tale recently. But never mind, we are where we are and we’ve heard it now. He included it in his book Famous Imposters.

 

The Evidence

Every good conspiracy theory needs evidence, and this one reminds us Elizabeth never had children and never married. It reminds us she wore heavy makeup, wigs, ruffs, and large clothing that kept people at a distance so they wouldn’t notice that she had, oh, say, a five o’clock shadow.

She trusted either very few doctors or only one (the number depends on which website she was relying on at the moment, or possibly which one I was) and she insisted that there be no post-mortem on her body, even though she’d be dead by the time they performed it.

And at least one contemporary had the impression that Liz and her former governess and guardian had some secret promises between them. 

It relies, silently, on people who have trouble accepting that one of England’s most famous monarchs had no Y chromosome.

Legend has it that 300 years after the alleged swap, a local minister found an unmarked grave on the grounds of the house where Elizabeth and Co. lived, and it held a skeleton of a child in opulent Tudro-era girl’s clothing, but he reburied it someplace else and, conveniently, no one’s found it.

To date, Elizabeth’s grave hasn’t been dug up to demonstrate that its occupant is female.

 

Is there any chance this is true? 

I’d say the odds of it being true are roughly the same as the odds that I was swapped for a cat in infancy. 

Meow.

Cornish history: the Prayerbook Rebellion

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The Prayerbook Rebellion started when Henry decided to divorce Katherine.

Yeah, that Henry. Isn’t it odd how we’re on first-name terms with people who wouldn’t have known us from the dirt under their feet?

By way of full disclosure, I set the start date a little early, just for context, so nothing happened for the first few years. Then in 1534 Henry founded the Church of England, with himself as its head. And–no one could’ve been more surprised than him–it decided to grant him his divorce, which the Catholic Church was being very crabby about.

Irrelevant photo: Camellia blossoms. 

 

Henry the Much-Married starts the ball rolling downhill

The reconfiguration of the church took on a logic of its own, and starting in 1536 Henry closed religious centers–monasteries, hospitals, nunneries, abbeys. Some of them served a purpose in their communities–as schools and hospitals. The confiscated land and the buildings went to the crown and a lot of it was sold off to the wealthy. Who else had that kind of money? 

We’ll get to Cornwall any minute here. I promise.

In 1537, Henry banned the feasts on saints’ days. That included St. Piran’s Day, which is where I finally get Cornwall into the picture. St. Piran is Cornwall’s patron saint, and at this point we have a reaction on record: A fisherman from St. Keverne planned a protest and was arrested and probably executed. In Truro–Cornwall’s capital–a customs officer tried to stop a ship carrying people to Brittany to celebrate some unspecified saint’s day. He was pushed into the sea. The story seems to drop out of history there but let’s assume the ship got away and the people came back later and lived happily ever after.

The next year, pilgrimages were banned. 

You get a sense of how life was changing, right? Anne Bolyn, who Henry divorced Katherine for, had been dead by Henry’s executioner’s hand for two years by now. I mention that as a reminder of how far all this had wandered from where it started.

Along with the ban on pilgrimages came a directive that churches had to use an English-language translation of the bible. When I first heard about that–this was, oh, maybe a hundred years ago–I thought it meant people could understand the book they considered holy. The problem was, English wasn’t Cornwall’s language. Cornish was. 

It didn’t go down well. So let’s talk about the ways Cornwall was both a part of England and not English.

 

Cornwall as a country and a county

Cornwall was governed by England at this point, and it had been for a long time. Technically speaking, it was just another English county.  But it also had a distinctive culture: Not just its own language, but its own style of dress, folklore, naming customs, agricultural practices, and games and pastimes.”

High on the list of games and pastimes was pushing customs officers into the sea.

Cornwall also had two distinctive administrative institutions, the Stannary organisation, which oversaw tin mining, and  the Duchy of Cornwall. We won’t stop to make sense of those; we’ll just take it on faith they underlined its sense of separation.

Writers of the time–and well into the next century–wrote about the Cornish as a separate people, as distinct and recognizable as the Welsh, and about Cornwall as almost a separate country.

So that’s what we get to plunk onto the separate-country side of the scales. On the English-county side was an English gentry, which England had long since imposed on Cornwall, and the gradual inward seep of the English language. 

It might not have looked that way at the time, but from our point of view we can see the Cornish language in a slow retreat from the Devon border down toward the tip of Cornwall’s foot. 

Why’d that happen? The English gentry spoke English, although they may (or may not–I don’t know) have spoken Cornish as well. That made it useful to know enough English to do business with them, to work for them, to mix with them in whatever other ways the non-gentry mixed with the gentry. To people who cared about refinement, the fact that the gentry spoke English would’ve made English seem like the language of refinement. 

Cornwall’s ports would also have been full of the English language and the people who spoke it. This was a time when it was easier to get from, say, London by sea than by road.

 

All hell breaks (slowly) loose

In 1547, colleges, hospitals, chapels, and guilds were closed, and no provision was made for anyone else to fill the roles they’d played in caring for the sick and educating–well, some small number of kids, but still it mattered to the ones who might’ve been able to take advantage of it, leaving a very practical gap. The next year, an English official was stabbed when he tried to take down an image in a parish church. 

That makes it sound like a sudden thing. It wasn’t. The conflict had rocked back and forth for months, but we don’t do detail here at Notes. Twenty-eight Cornishmen were arrested and ten were executed for it. 

Then in 1549, Edward VI–or at least his government, since he’d have been somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven–introduced the Book of Common Prayer. Which was in English. And it insisted that church services follow it. That demand’s called the Act of Uniformity, in case that rings any bells from your long-buried memory of history classes.

Straw.

Camel.

Back.

For all that Cornish was in retreat, it was still Cornwall’s language, and for many people it was their only language. This wasn’t bringing the church’s language closer to them, it was moving it further away. 

Nationalism, meet outraged religious beliefs. You’ll find you have a lot to talk about.

Three thousand men gathered outside Bodmin–the geographical center of Cornwall, in case that’s of any relevance, which I suspect it isn’t–and drew up a set of complaints. They chose a leader, Humphrey Arundell, who was one of the richest and most powerful men in Cornwall and from an aristocratic English Catholic family. 

Was he Cornish or English? These days, the only way to figure out who’s Cornish and who isn’t is by how many generations of ancestors a person has buried in Cornish soil. I’ve been told four. I’ve also been told two. Either way, I’m too late. Whether either of those was the standard then, when Cornish identity was more sharply defined, I don’t know. I know Arundell was born in Cornwall and that he had family in England. He could as easily have been moved by religious belief as by nationalism. 

Either this set of complaints of a later one (sorry–the quotes have all gone adrift) said, “We will not receive the newe service because it is but lyke a Christmas game, and so we the Cornyshe men (wherof certen of us understande no Englysh) utterly refuse thys newe Englysh.” 

Half the church’s confiscated land was to be returned.

The complaints were sent to the government, which shrugged its shoulders and ignored them, convinced everyone would settle down as soon as it was time for Coronation Street to come on.

Then, in the random way that these things tend to happen, a rebellion broke out in Devon, the neighboring county: A congregation forced its priest to conduct the service in Latin, and in case that wasn’t enough, a supporter of the book of Common Prayer was killed. Somehow or other things escalated and the next thing anyone knew (okay: the next thing I knew) an army was marching on Exeter, Devon’s capital. 

You know how things can get out of hand, right? One day you’re killing someone over a prayer book and before you know you’ve got a whole damn army and you’re marching on the capital, thinking, How’d I get here? Do I really want to do this? Did someone think to bring sandwiches?

Arundell hadn’t wanted a fight, but the snowball was rolling downhill too fast. His army started off toward London. His plan was to talk to the government, with a few thousand soldiers at his back to serve as a megaphone, but on the way it took Trematon Castle, where some members of the gentry had holed up, and Plymouth. It also took St Michael’s Mount, which is in the wrong direction. This tells us that sat-navs (what Americans would soon learn to call GPSs) were no different then than they are now.  

Plymouth, by the way, isn’t in Cornwall, it’s in Devon, a change that’s marked by the River Tamar, which is wide enough at that point that you’d be hard put not to notice it. It’s also very wet, both there and along its entire length. But like I said, snowball; downhill; and melting gently in the Tamar’s waters. Who’s going to argue about county borders when all that’s going on?

 

Across the Tamar

At roughly this point, the Cornish and Devon armies joined together and laid siege to Exeter for five weeks, and they would have blown up the city walls but their gunpowder was too wet. That’s the English weather for you. 

The Cornish weather’s no better.

In London, the news that a Cornish army was marching on London caused a panic. Bridges were pulled down. Plays were banned–they might turn people against the government. France rubbed its hands and declared war.

The government sent soldiers to defend Exeter.

The leaders of the Cornish on Devonian armies wrote the government again, saying essentially the same thing: “We will have our old service of matins, mass, evensong and procession in Latin as it was before.”

This time the government wrote back. Three times, in fact, all of them saying no. In a long-winded, oddly spelled sort of way.

Several battles were fought, and I won’t drag you through them. The English army was bigger and the Cornish and Devonians lost. In one battle so many were captured that the English were afraid they’d lose control of them and slaughtered them instead. 

In the final battle, 1,400 were killed and the survivors fled. Arundell went into hiding and was captured (his servant turned out to have been working for the English). He was taken to London and with other leaders of the rebellion was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Which kind of makes getting slaughtered en masse by the people who captured you look almost good. 

His lands were also confiscated and given to the leader of the English army that had defeated him. He was past doing anything with them by then, but it meant his family lost out. 

All told, some three thousand to four thousand Westcountry men were killed, including some priests and mayors hanged after the rebellion was over. According to one source, hundreds may have been killed for taking part–including many who may not have had anything to do with the uprising. 

 

The aftermath

The Cornish language went into a sharper decline after this, and although the Book of Common Prayer was translated into Welsh, it was never translated into Cornish.

Mind you, I’m not sure how welcome the translation was in Wales.

Stained glass windows were broken out of Cornish churches and images with any scent of Catholicism were destroyed, as they were elsewhere in England. 

Maps stopped showing Cornwall as a separate nation, and by 1700 you don’t find anyone writing about it as almost a separate country.

Ironically, the defeat of the rebellion, which was against the king’s new religion, set Cornwall up to support the king during the Civil War. The king was seen as British and the Parliamentary Army was seen as English. I suspect you had to be there at the time for that to make sense. The Parliamentary Army was also far more Protestantly Protestant than the king’s. I don’t know how heavily that weighed on the scales, but I assume it mattered.

When the king was defeated, it was another whack on the head for Cornwall’s status as an almost-country of its own.