The fatal truce
Blair Worden
THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE by Geoffrey Moorhouse Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 448, ISBN 0297643932 Over the middle third of the 16th century, between 1536 and 1569, the Tudors' hold on England was shaken by a series of rebellions. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, the northern upheaval that is Geoffrey Moorhouse's subject, was followed in 1549 by the western rising and Kett's rebellion, in 1554 by Sir Thomas Wyatt's rising, in 1569 by the insurrection of the northern earls. There had been baronial revolts in the Middle Ages, and there would be parliamentary and national ones in the 17th century, but the Tudor upheavals were of a different kind. They were regional protests, directed at the metropolitan values of a centralising administration and at the religious and economic grievances imposed or sanctioned by it.
Religious grievances bit deepest, especially in the north and west, where the outlawing of the monasteries, of saints' days, of the doctrine of purgatory, of ritual and ceremony in worship, assaulted not only an ancient creed but a communal way of living. In one sense England escaped lightly. At least the risings, and the proscriptions that followed them, were brief events, whereas in France and the Netherlands the Reformation caused protracted civil wars. Yet rebellion was the nightmare of the Tudors, who endlessly reiterated the Bible's injunctions to political obedience. Moderns, with the resources of the modern state to protect therm are safe to scoff at the unreadiness of 16th-century regimes to brook ideological dissent. But when governments lacked standing armies and police and bureaucracies, only beliefs could hold nations together.
Each failed rebellion strengthened the centre's hand, enabling it to eliminate or cow its regional opponents. Yet the margin of failure could be slight. To put down revolts, the crown depended on barons whose military following might easily be turned against it. Henry VIII's rescuer in 1536 was the Duke of Norfolk. The king mistrusted him, for Norfolk had no more fondness than the rebels for the Reformation or for its principal architect, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's leading minister. Perhaps the duke calculated that a demonstration of loyalty would aid his factional struggle against Cromwell. Or perhaps, like most people, he was terrified of Henry. The king emerges from Moorhouse's pages as a monster, uncontrollable in his rages, frantic for the blood of anyone who could be convicted, however unjustly, of treason. As Moorhouse sees, terror can work.
Though another of the rebellions, Wyatt's Kentish rising against Mary, came closer to success, the Pilgrimage was the most profound and widely supported of the Tudor revolts. It began in Lincolnshire and gathered strength as it spread into Yorkshire and thence into Westmorland and Cumberland. Its leader was the one-eyed Robert Aske, a younger son of a family of Yorkshire gentry and an impassioned opponent of Protestantism. In October 1536, heading an army of 30.000, he had Norfolk's forces at his mercy and, beyond them, the way to London open. Instead of fighting he fatally negotiated a truce that broke the unity of his following and gave the regime time to regroup.
Why? Like the western leaders of 1549, who paused at Exeter when they might have marched on the capital, Aske was inhibited by the conservatism of his intentions. Like them — and like Kett in Norfolk — he aimed not to topple the monarchy, only to remedy grievances. In his own eyes he was the most loyal of subjects. All he wanted was to awaken Henry to the evils being committed in his name by Cromwell and other low-born councillors. For Aske and his followers were socially conservative too. Moorhouse brings out the ambivalence of the rebel commoners towards the classes above them. On the one hand they ruthlessly coerced nobles and gentlemen into joining them, and then at every turn suspected them of betrayal. On the other they yearned for aristocratic guidance and approval.
The Pilgrimage has attracted intensive specialist study in recent years. What has been lacking is the coherent narrative that Moorhouse agreeably supplies. As a work of analysis the book is assured and careful, without being particularly ambitious. His principal achievement is one of evocation. Aided by thoughtfully chosen illustrations, he takes us into the dales and towns where the rebels gathered and debated and were bloodily suppressed, and recreates the moods and tensions of an episode critical in the survival and development of the Tudor state and in the destruction of an ancient religion and society.
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