The Tudors (42 page)

Such was the life of the elite and near-elite only, and it would be a mistake to suppose that it had any connection with the lives of the common people. With food as with so many things, the mass of the population lived in virtually a parallel universe, one in which spices and sugar were so expensive as to be unattainable and even meat and salt were rarities. A working family’s typical meal might consist of dark bread made of rye or barley rather than more expensive wheat flour (often a slab of this bread would be used as a “trencher” or edible dinner plate), cheese or the whey that is a by-product of cheese-making, a “pottage” or soup of oats or barley, perhaps a portion of curds or whatever fruits or vegetables happened to be in season. Though vitamin deficiencies were commonplace, especially in winter and early spring, and though crop failures could lead to malnutrition, outright starvation was almost unheard of except in the far north during the worst years. Perhaps the ultimate irony—the term “poetic justice” comes to mind—is that except in times of exceptional shortage, the diet of the plain folk was much more healthful than that of their meat-and sugar-devouring masters. Possibly that explains why so many of the Tudors were so worn out and sick at such early ages. Elizabeth, the longest-lived of them, was notably abstemious in her diet.

Rebellion and Betrayal

T
he story of how Henry VIII extracted himself from the most dangerous crisis of his life by lying to his subjects and betraying honest men who had put their fate in his hands is essentially the story of Robert Aske.

A lawyer and fellow of Lincoln’s Inn in London, Aske was one of several sons in a modestly distinguished family in the north of England. His father, a landowning knight, was related by marriage to the mighty Percy clan. His maternal grandfather had been a baron, and Robert himself, early in his career, had served as secretary to the Percy who was then Earl of Northumberland. He was thirty-seven years old early in October 1536, when he set out from his Yorkshire home for London and the opening of the autumn term of the royal court at Westminster. It was a routine business trip of a kind that Aske had been making at this same time of year almost since boyhood, first as a student and then as a practicing attorney, and he had no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. If he had started several days earlier, he would in all likelihood never have left the smallest mark on history.

Upon crossing the Humber River into Lincolnshire on or about October 4, Aske found himself in the midst of something extraordinary. Just two or three days before, a spontaneous protest had erupted in the town of Louth and begun spreading across the county. The trouble was triggered by reports that a group of royal commissioners was approaching
and was not only shutting down monasteries but confiscating the treasures (chalices, processional crosses, and the like) of parish churches. The situation was developing with startling speed: by the time Aske arrived on the scene, some of the commissioners had been taken prisoner by the protesters and set free after being given a list of demands that they were to deliver to the king. The people wanted an end to the suppression of monasteries, punishment of Thomas Cromwell’s notorious henchmen Legh and Layton, an end to the subsidy recently levied by Parliament, and the removal from office of Cromwell, Thomas Audley, Richard Rich, and a number of bishops including Cranmer. The demands made no mention of the king’s claim to supremacy—to object to that was to commit treason—but obviously they arose out of opposition to the entire royal program of ecclesiastical reform. That the impulse behind the uprising was essentially religious and deeply conservative was underscored when the people of Horncastle near Louth raised a banner that was soon adopted wherever the rebellion spread. It showed the eucharistic host, a chalice, and a figure of Christ bearing the five wounds of the crucifixion.

Aske, who would have been recognizably a member of the gentry, was taken into custody by the protesters. This was in no way unusual: in its origins the rising was an eruption of the pent-up fears and frustrations of the common people—to the extent that the initial outburst at Louth had a leader, that leader was a shoemaker named Nicholas Melton—and from the start the participants displayed a desperate hope of recruiting men educated enough to articulate their case and respectable enough to get a hearing from the authorities. Wherever such men fell into the hands of the demonstrators, they were threatened with hanging if they refused to swear “to be true to almighty god to christ’s catholic church to our sovereign lord the king and unto the commons of this realm so help you god and holy dam and by this book.” It was a rough way of finding leaders but surprisingly effective. And the rebel oath, innocuous enough when considered without context, would have been heavy with significance for the people of Lincolnshire—and no doubt for the king and his people, too, when they learned of it. It acknowledged not just the church but the
Catholic
Church, the king but none of his lieutenants. When coupled with the demands that the demonstrators had already sent south and would be repeating many
times in the months ahead, the words of the oath lost all ambiguity. They were a call for a full restoration of the old ways and the removal and punishment of those—the king alone excluded—who had undertaken the work of destruction. There is nothing surprising about the exemption of the king from criticism; anything else would have been astounding. In a society where the person of the king was quasi-sacred, at a time when the idea that the king derived his authority from God was winning wide acceptance, the humanly natural inclination to blame unpopular measures not on the sovereign himself but on his counselors and deputies was becoming more pronounced than ever.

The fact that a number of the individuals who were coerced into taking the oath quickly and voluntarily became prominent in the rising is one indication of the extent to which people at all levels of society, gentry and nobility included, were in sympathy with its aims. Aske made himself one of the most prominent of all, galloping about Lincolnshire to help spread word of the movement. Within days the rebels had tens of thousands of men in the field and took possession of the city of Lincoln. Divisions, however, soon appeared. The common folk were eager to push on toward the south, where they would have greatly outnumbered the few thousand troops that nobles loyal to the king were finding it possible to muster. But the gentry among them, perhaps mindful of how much they stood to lose in an unsuccessful contest with the Crown, insisted on waiting for Henry’s response to their demands. That response, when it came, was chilling. The king denounced Lincolnshire as a “brute and beastly” place (he had never seen it, never in his life having visited the north), ridiculed the rebels for presuming to offer advice on how to rule, and ordered them to hand over their leaders and return to their homes. Failure to comply would result in “the utter destruction of them, their wives and children.” Behind all this was the threat—to the rebels it would have appeared to be the imminent threat—of an attack by the forces of the king. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury were all known to be assembling troops, and though they were experiencing severe difficulties—not least the unwillingness of many of their own liegemen to suppress a rebellion the aims of which they heartily supported—the rebels were probably unaware of any of this. Suffolk, who was closest to Lincoln, found himself unable to muster more than a thousand men. He would have been overwhelmed
if the rebels, at least sixteen thousand of whom carried weapons of war, had advanced without delay. But the rebels had delayed and thereby lost their momentum, their leaders were quarreling confusedly among themselves, and for all they knew they stood on the brink of annihilation. Frightened and discouraged, they disbanded and began to head for home. Their rising had collapsed without encountering serious opposition.

Aske, meanwhile, had crossed back into Yorkshire, where the population was now aware of what was happening on the other side of the Humber and itself beginning to boil over. He threw himself into introducing some measure of order and organization where otherwise there would have been chaos, persuading the towns through which he passed to take no action until they received a signal from him—the agreed signal being the ringing of the church bells. When on October 10 the signal went out and the Yorkshire rising began, Aske issued a proclamation stating that its purpose was “the preservation of Christ’s church … and to the intent to make petition to the King’s highness for the reformation of that which is amiss in this his realm.” He declared himself “chief captain” in his part of the county, and by October 16, the day on which ten thousand armed rebels entered the city of York, they were using the name that he had given their movement: the Pilgrimage of Grace.

As word of what was happening spread, people all across the north began to join in. The movement quickly became bigger than it had been before the collapse in Lincolnshire, with perhaps as many as thirty thousand rebels advancing southward toward the royal stronghold of Pontefract Castle. On October 20 the castle’s garrison surrendered without a fight. The pilgrims had with them Edward Lee, the archbishop of York, though whether he had joined or was a prisoner is not clear. Most were mounted and armed, and as they moved on to Doncaster they encountered the Duke of Norfolk at the head of a force that they outnumbered by nearly four to one. Aske, by now established as the movement’s spokesman and public face, found himself in an immensely strong position. There was every reason to think that if his men attacked they could roll over Norfolk’s eight thousand troops and be on the outskirts of London within several days. Meanwhile King Henry, whose situation was far more dangerous than he understood, was cursing the pilgrims as “false traitors and rebels” and demanding that his nobles attack and destroy
them without delay. From start to finish he regarded the Pilgrimage as an unforgivable insult to his dignity as monarch. He despised the participants and was interested in nothing but revenge.

But Norfolk, the man on the scene, had to deal with reality. The pilgrims sent him a new but not-much-changed version of the same demands originally presented in Lincolnshire: no more closing of moniasteries, the removal of Cromwell and Cranmer and Rich, et cetera. Norfolk met with their representative on Doncaster Bridge and offered a deal: he himself would take the pilgrims’ demands—which they were now calling “articles”—to the king along with two of their representatives, who would be allowed to explain themselves to Henry in person. Meanwhile the armies on both sides were to disband. Norfolk, aware of how weak his position was and that many of his own soldiers were not to be relied upon in this extraordinary situation, was stalling for time and hoping that somehow the rebels could be talked into withdrawing without a fight, perhaps even into disbanding as had happened in Lincolnshire. He had the king’s grudging permission to agree to whatever the rebels asked, but only for the sake of delay. There was never any thought, certainly not on the king’s part, of actually
keeping
whatever promises might have to be made. The pilgrims were appropriately skeptical. They agreed only to meet again with Norfolk early in December, after he had returned from conferring with the king, warning that they would not do even that unless their safety were guaranteed.

On December 2 Aske and other Pilgrimage leaders assembled at Pontefract to prepare for another round of negotiations. In the intervening weeks the rank and file had grown restless—just keeping so many thousands of men fed would have been impossible except for the willingness of farmers across the north to contribute livestock and other foodstuffs to the cause—and Aske had had his hands full holding them together. At Pontefract he was again the most conspicuous member of the leadership (some historians suggest that he was to some extent a front man for more important personages who preferred for their own safety to maintain a low profile), drawing up a new and more comprehensive set of articles for presentation to Norfolk and, through him, to the king. As before there was much emphasis on reversing the religious reforms of the past several years, strengthened now with an explicit call for an end to the separation from Rome, and a number of striking new items were
added. The pilgrims wanted the legitimacy of Henry’s daughter Mary restored, the statute that allowed the king to choose his successor repealed, and a new Parliament summoned to meet not at Westminster as usual but in the north—specifically at York or Nottingham. Their articles went into considerable detail where the proposed Parliament was concerned: they called for less royal involvement in the selection of the members of Commons, less control over the business of Commons by officers of the Crown, and more freedom of speech for members. Finally they demanded a full pardon for everyone involved in the rising.

It was a startling document. If implemented, it would have reversed virtually everything that Henry had accomplished since first deciding to divorce Catherine. By weakening his grip on Parliament, it would have moved England closer to democracy than it had ever been, or would be for centuries. It illuminates as nothing else does the depth of northern unhappiness with the innovations of the 1530s and popular awareness of just how completely the king and his men—Cromwell in particular—had not only the machinery of government but the law itself under their control. For Henry, of course, the articles were an abomination, an insult, a gross and unforgivable violation of his rights. To a man like Norfolk, too, a proud exemplar of the old warrior nobility, they were an affront, a despicable attempt by presumptuous commoners to overturn the natural order.