The Tudors (54 page)

A kingdom broken into religious factions was now in danger of class warfare as well—or so it seemed, at least, to many of those with most to lose—and Somerset responded as indecisive men in positions of authority often will: by trying to please everyone. Arriving at some new kind of unity continued to appear as necessary as it had under Henry VIII, though that goal would remain unachievable as long as the government tried to enforce beliefs that most of the population found incomprehensible if not repugnant. Cranmer was instructed to bridge the gap between the conservatives and the radicals by doing something that no one could possibly have done in mid-sixteenth-century England—produce “one convenient and meet order, rite and fashion of Common
Prayer” that everyone in the kingdom could accept. It was probably inevitable that the result—the first version of the Book of Common Prayer, a volume of prayers and church services so ambiguous in its treatment of controversial questions that no one was satisfied but not even the conservatives could find reason to reject it outright—led to rancorous debate among the bishops and in Parliament. (The very fact that the conservatives were
not
grievously offended evidently persuaded the evangelicals that what Cranmer had produced could not possibly be acceptable.) Unity, in any case, was not achieved. Cranmer’s prayers (beautiful compositions by one of the supreme masters of English prose) were embedded in a new Act of Uniformity, but the fact that they were in English rather than Latin ensured a skeptical reception in many places. Stiff penalties for failure to use the new service added resentment to the brew. An uneasy sense that all the old ways were under direct attack by people determined to force a religious revolution was heightened by passage of a statute making it lawful for clergymen to marry.

All the chickens came home to roost in 1549. The protector’s brother Thomas, who had learned nothing from his earlier escape from the consequences of his own recklessness, now intensified almost to the point of insanity his efforts to advance himself at Somerset’s expense. When his wife, the former Queen Catherine, died shortly after giving birth in September 1548—inevitably it was rumored that he had poisoned her—Seymour turned his attention back to King Edward’s half-sister Elizabeth. Meanwhile he was taking a cut of the profits of the pirates that it was his duty as lord high admiral to suppress, conspiring with the vice-treasurer of the royal mint to divert a steady stream of gold and silver into their own pockets, and trying so indiscriminately to buy allies that his activities inevitably became widely known. The council had no choice but to respond. Summoned, Seymour declined to appear until a more “convenient” time, thereby making his arrest inevitable. When six weeks of investigation and the interrogation of numerous witnesses resulted in a bill of attainder charging him with thirty-three counts of high treason, he haughtily refused to defend himself. In March he was beheaded. Somerset had freed himself of his most relentless enemy, but not necessarily of a terribly dangerous one; Seymour had been too undisciplined, his ambition and resentment too wildly unfocused, to
pose a lethal threat. It would have been wiser of the protector to put him in prison and keep him there, or perhaps to exile him. By executing his own brother (or perhaps only by not stopping the council from having him killed, we don’t really know), this man who had ended Henry VIII’s bloodbath gave his critics an excuse to complain that he no less than the old king was capable of killing anyone. Such a perception could not have alleviated the distrust and fear that he had already aroused among the gentry and the nobles.

None of which might have mattered if the kingdom had not suddenly convulsed in a series of spontaneous uprisings. These were widespread and uncoordinated, communication across long distances still being little more advanced than it had been in the time of the Caesars, and most of them subsided or were put down without leaving much record of their exact cause, who led them, or what they were intended to achieve. Wiltshire, Sussex, Surrey, Hants, Berkshire, Kent, Gloucester, Somerset, Suffolk, Warwick, Essex, Hertford, Leicestershire, Worcester, Rutland—these and other counties experienced violent outbreaks of discontent in May 1549. After a period of quiet, trouble then broke out in Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Devon, and Cornwall. In all these places except Oxfordshire, where enough of the government’s Italian mercenaries happened to be on hand to help the local authorities restore order and send a dozen ringleaders to the gallows, the threat quickly assumed dangerous proportions.

In Devon in the far west the trouble has been known ever since as the Prayer Book Rebellion. On Whitsunday (the feast of Pentecost, when the priest traditionally wore white vestments), in obedience to the new Act of Uniformity, the vicar of the church at Sampford Courtenay used Cranmer’s new Book of Common Prayer instead of following the customary Latin liturgy. This provoked nothing worse than grumbling at first, but discontent somehow turned overnight into hot anger, and on Monday the townsfolk demanded celebration of the old rites. Resentment must have been smoldering throughout the region, because as word of what had happened spread, people from distant places began converging on Sampford Courtenay. Within a few days a ragtag army of ten thousand had formed and was on the march. An experienced soldier named Humphrey Arundel, a member of a landowning family with no liking for the evangelical reforms, made himself its leader. Lord John
Russell, upon arriving at the head of a body of government troops, realized that he was hopelessly outnumbered and did what the Duke of Norfolk had done at Doncaster when faced with the Pilgrimage of Grace: he offered to negotiate. The insurgents presented a list of demands, all of which dealt with religious issues. They wanted a restoration of the Latin Mass, Henry VIII’s Six Articles, images in church, and at least two abbeys in every county. Perhaps most remarkably, and demonstrating that even in the most remote corners of the kingdom there could be detailed understanding of England’s doctrinal struggles and the personalities involved, they demanded that Reginald Pole be brought home from exile and given a place on the Privy Council.

Archbishop Cranmer, when these demands reached London, wrote a lengthy response that expressed contempt for the rebels and their presumption in addressing such weighty questions. Somerset issued a series of proclamations. He offered a pardon to every rebel who submitted to the Crown. He declared that the lands and other possessions of any rebels who declined to submit could become the property of any loyal subject who chose to seize them, that anyone responsible for an unlawful assembly was to be put to death, and, rather curiously, that his commissioners were to proceed with the undoing of illegal enclosures while seeing to it that they themselves were free of guilt. There was no reason to think that enclosures had been a significant factor in the rising. The attention that Somerset gave them at this juncture raises questions about whether he understood what was happening in the west country, or whether he was sufficiently focused on crushing this challenge to the council’s authority to satisfy men of property. In any event he was lucky. Instead of advancing eastward into counties where they would almost certainly have been able to attract recruits, the rebels laid siege to the city of Exeter, where the Crown’s garrison troops held them immobile for forty days. When a royalist force made up largely of Somerset’s German and Italian mercenaries arrived on the scene at last, the rebels were forced to break off their siege and then were crushed in a series of increasingly lopsided battles. In the end nothing remained but a panicky mass of fleeing peasants. As many as four thousand men were dead by the time it was all over, most of them killed in combat but the last executed. A striking feature of the whole episode was the extent to which
the Crown had to use foreign mercenaries to save itself from its own subjects.

Far to the east, in Norfolk, an even bigger rebellion was playing itself out almost within striking distance of London. As if to illustrate the breadth of the problems facing the Crown, this one rose out of complaints completely different from those that had sent the west up in flames. As in Devon, a trivial incident had mushroomed into a general uprising, and this time not ten but twenty thousand men joined. Their demands, like those of the Prayer Book rebels, were essentially conservative, expressive of a yearning to get back to what once had been, but here the focus was economic rather than religious. An extraordinary figure named Robert Kett, a wealthy tanner and landowner, though fifty-seven years old and a grandfather, had not only joined the rebellion but made himself its leader and spokesman. He announced a number of demands: an end to enclosures (a much bigger issue here than in the west country, obviously), a rollback of rents, freedom for bondsmen or serfs (of whom there were few in Norfolk by this time), punishment of corrupt officials, and the replacement of incompetent priests and royal councilors “who confounded things sacred and profane and regarded nothing but the enriching of themselves with the public treasure, that they might riot in it during the public calamity.” The last demand was, all too clearly, a challenge to the authority of the council ruling in King Edward’s name. When the rebels were offered pardon if they would disperse, Kett replied indignantly that pardons were for criminals, not for subjects loyal to their king. With that, the rebels left themselves with no alternative to a fight to the finish, which is what Kett’s Rebellion became.

Somerset, who had preparations for another invasion of Scotland under way at this point, sent William Parr, the late Queen Catherine’s brother and now the Marquess of Northampton, to Norfolk with a mixed force of English and Italian troops. Parr, no soldier, made the mistake of leading his men into Norwich, then the largest city in England after London, where the narrow streets made it impossible for them to mass against the rebels. They were bloodily driven out. Somerset meanwhile was increasingly isolating himself, refusing to confer with the other members of the Privy Council and sending out signals that confused
rebels and loyalists alike. With one proclamation he condemned destruction of the hedges with which formerly common lands had been enclosed, and with the next he promised pardon to those who committed such acts so long as they expressed sorrow for their deeds. New local risings continued to erupt—in Kent, in Surrey, in Sussex—and increasingly the violence was directed at the property of the wealthy. When Somerset cried out in near-hysteria that the demands of the rebels were “fair and just,” his fellow councilors concluded, not unfairly, that he was cracking under pressure.

Norwich remained the epicenter of the crisis, so dangerous by now that Somerset had no choice but to call off his Scottish campaign and summon to center stage the next great figure in the Tudor saga, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The reader will recall that at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII, when the young king and his councilors were eager to dissociate themselves from the unpopularity of Henry VII, the lawyers Edmund Dudley and Richard Empson had been attainted and executed on a ridiculously implausible charge of having plotted to seize control of the government. Their real offense—which probably involved no violation of the law, was largely if not entirely aimed at the acts of bona fide lawbreakers, and certainly was done with Henry VII’s knowledge—was to have been their royal master’s all-too-visible instruments as he went about the hard business of extracting money from the most prosperous and powerful of his subjects. Edmund Dudley, whose professional and political skills propelled him into the speakership of the House of Commons and a seat on the Royal Council, had accumulated an impressive fortune as reward for his services. He had also boosted his social status by marrying a viscount’s daughter. Attainder meant that all the fruits of his success were confiscated by the Crown, so that his widow and their three sons and one daughter, of whom the six-year-old John was the eldest, were ruined.

But just a year after Dudley’s execution, his widow entered into an advantageous second marriage with Arthur Plantagenet, an illegitimate son of King Edward IV. A half-brother of Henry VIII’s mother, Elizabeth of York, Plantagenet was such an amiable soul that, in spite of being more than twenty years older than the new king, he became one of his closest companions. In short order Edmund Dudley’s attainder was posthumously revoked, perhaps a tacit admission that he had never
been guilty but more likely an easy way of enriching King Henry’s bastard uncle: the part of the Dudley estate that remained in the Crown’s possession was awarded not to the dead man’s widow or children but to Plantagenet. For reasons unknown to history, the boy John became the ward not of his stepfather but of a soldier and courtier named Edward Guildford. At some point in early adolescence he was admitted to court as a page, a humble first step on the ladder of royal service but one that was naturally much coveted. In due course he made the acquaintance of another young courtier-in-training, Edward Seymour, the future Duke of Somerset.

The lives of the two were intertwined from that point. Both participated in King Henry’s invasion of the continent in the early 1520s, and both were knighted in France in 1523. Thereafter Dudley began to advance more rapidly than Seymour in spite of being younger by four years. His success may have been owing at first to the prominence at court of both his stepfather Plantagenet (who by the time of the French war was Viscount Lisle and a member of the council) and his onetime guardian and then father-in-law, Guildford. Later, however, the talent he displayed in martial arts including jousting, one of the king’s favorite pastimes, would have brought him to the fore. By 1524 he was an esquire of the body, an honor that Seymour did not achieve until 1531, and in 1534 he became a member of Parliament. He and Seymour were among the first courtiers to affiliate themselves with evangelical reform, becoming associates of Cromwell in doing so. That they were more than casual acquaintances is suggested by the fact that, in 1532 or thereabouts, Dudley signed as guarantor of a loan taken out by Seymour.