Lady Hussey dipped the quill in the ink and carefully inscribed her name underneath the answers she had given to their questions. Her three interrogators signed in their turn: Sir Edmund Walsingham, lieutenant of the Tower of London; Thomas Wriothesley, royal administrator and secretary to Thomas Cromwell; and William Petre, another of Cromwell’s men.1 No doubt the paper would go straight to Cromwell’s desk; she knew he held her fate in his hand. Please God this would be the end of it and they would let her go.
Anne Grey, Lady Hussey was no shrinking violet. Now in her early forties, she had decided opinions and was not usually afraid to express them.2 The summer of 1536, though, had not been a good time to exercise her usual loquacity. In early June her husband John, Lord Hussey had travelled south from their home in Lincolnshire to attend the opening of the new Parliament in London. Anne had gone with him, not for Parliament – women, even peeresses, played no role there – but to stop at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire to visit her friend and erstwhile mistress the Lady Mary, the king’s eldest daughter.3
The summer of 1536 was an uncertain time for royal women and for those in their service. Queen Anne Boleyn had been attainted and executed for treason only a few weeks previously, and it wasn’t yet clear what all the consequences of this would be. Queen Anne’s daughter Elizabeth would no doubt lose the title of ‘princess’ and her place in the succession – the Act to ensure this was already in draft.4 The as yet unborn children of the new Queen Jane would take precedence. But what would happen to Mary, Elizabeth’s half-sister? As the daughter of the late Queen Catherine of Aragon, Mary’s position had been below Elizabeth’s for some time already.5 The annulment of her parents’ marriage had made her illegitimate in the eyes of the English Crown. In 1533 her household had been amalgamated with, and subjugated within, Elizabeth’s, and Mary’s women had faced repeated threats of dismissal.6 Mary herself had steadfastly refused to accept the invalidity of her parents’ marriage or her own illegitimacy, and there had been resultant fears for her safety.7 Now, though, Queen Anne, the causer of this rift, was dead. Surely the king would set aside all former differences and welcome Mary back into the fold?
Lady Mary herself was not the only one who thought this. Former friends and associates began to flock to her house at Hunsdon, and Lady Hussey’s visit took place in this context. Her husband had been Mary’s chamberlain, and she herself among the ladies-in-waiting before the household reduction at the end of 1533, and Lady Hussey hadn’t seen Mary since then.8 In such an atmosphere, old habits died hard, or recent events produced over-confidence. On one Monday, Lady Hussey called for drink ‘for the Princess’. The next day she answered an inquiry as to Mary’s whereabouts with the information that ‘the Princess’ had gone walking.9 Mary was not, of course, a princess any longer and it was illegal to call her that. By the beginning of July, Lady Hussey had been arrested and taken to the Tower of London.10
She was held there for at least a month and questioned at least twice. She fell sick; it made no difference.11 The questions she was asked open a window onto the king’s anxieties. Why had Lady Hussey called Mary ‘princess’? Had anybody else done so? Who had been there? What were they saying about the king’s first marriage and about Mary’s legitimacy? Had she been in touch with Mary before or since?12
Henry knew that the behaviour of royal personnel was part of the negotiation of royal status, and he had long used his daughters’ households to advertise his views on the succession.13 If Mary’s servants and friends treated her as a princess, not only would this encourage Mary herself in her pretensions, but it implied that it did not matter whether she had agreed to the royal supremacy or the Act of Succession, and thus that these things themselves did not matter. This he could not have. Nor could he imagine that Mary had arrived at such obstinacy all on her own, and he had had quite enough of disobedient women of late. He sent Thomas Cromwell to ‘visit’ the women who had recently been with Mary, to bring them before the council and compel them to swear to the statutes.14 This is probably how Lady Hussey’s incautious words were discovered and taken as encouragement of Mary’s disobedience.
It may well have been a genuine slip of the tongue. Mary had been the de facto heir to the throne for nearly fifteen years, and Lady Hussey’s dismissal from her service at the end of 1533 meant that she had never had time to get used to calling Mary anything else. There is no evidence that Lady Hussey refused to sign either the Oath of Supremacy or of Succession. Even so, it was intensely thoughtless at such a politically charged hour. All that Lady Hussey could do now was perform the submissive behaviour and abject apologies required of her and attempt to reassure her interrogators. She had only called Mary ‘princess’ out of old custom, she explained. She had not heard anybody else do so; neither she nor anybody else had said that the king’s first marriage was lawful, and nobody had spoken of Mary as the king’s legitimate daughter. She’d had no further messages or tokens from Mary. If she had offended the king, ‘she most humbly beseecheth his Highness of mercy and forgiveness, as one that is repentant for that she hath so offended, and purposeth never hereafter to fall in to semblable danger’.15
By the time Lady Hussey signed this on 3 August, Mary herself had finally capitulated. This was partly thanks to another lady-in-waiting: Mary Scrope, Lady Kingston, who had been with Queen Anne Boleyn in the Tower. The king evidently considered Lady Kingston to be a safe pair of hands, for she went almost straight from the Tower to Mary at Hunsdon explicitly to help convince her to submit to her father. How Lady Kingston persuaded Mary to do this no source is able to tell us. Convince her she did, with the help of both Thomas Cromwell and the new Queen Jane Seymour. Lady Kingston even helped Mary to draft the letter to her father.16 Mary acknowledged the annulment of her parents’ marriage, her own illegitimacy, and her father’s position as head of the English Church. It was a tremendous coup for the king, and Lady Kingston was his instrument. This was a task for ‘a very confidential lady’, as Chapuys wrote, and this gives Lady Kingston the air of a Crown agent: someone who was trusted to corral royal women into obeying the king.17 Within weeks, Mary was rewarded with seniority within the household she shared with her sister and was visited by the king and queen. The return of some of her favourite ladies-in-waiting was another carrot to soften the threat of the stick.18
That Lady Hussey was not immediately released shows how disturbed the king remained by the spectre of disobedient women. And yet he could hardly pardon his daughter while punishing her adherents indefinitely. As the days began to shorten and farmers began to think about the harvest, Lady Hussey was freed to return to her home and her husband in Lincolnshire. But had the king’s drastic treatment of her unguarded words frightened her into genuine submission or merely its semblance?
Lady Hussey must often have longed for the safety of Sleaford Castle and the company of her children during her frightening ordeal. No doubt she needed time to recover and regroup. But the mood of unease and uncertainty was broader than the royal households, the court or the aristocracy, and it was waiting for her when she reached home. Back in March 1536 Parliament had passed an Act for the dissolution of monasteries with an income of less than £200 per year, and commissions were now at work evicting nuns and monks, sequestrating valuables and dismantling centuries-old buildings.19 Lincolnshire stifled under a cloud of fear and increasing indignation. Wild rumours circled. It was said that all the jewels and plate were going to be taken away from parish churches. There were going to be taxes on all christenings, marriages and burials. Taxes would even be levied on horned cattle.20
In some areas, these tales landed amid long-standing exploitation by landlords or, indeed, landladies. Among Lady Hussey’s Lincolnshire neighbours was a fellow lady-in-waiting of some standing: our friend María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby, who lived thirty miles east of Lincoln at Eresby Place. María was strongly attached to her Lincolnshire home. She had known the county since her marriage to William, Lord Willoughby in 1516, and they had spent time there when not required to be with the king and queen at court.
María’s legal settlement with her brother-in-law Sir Christopher Willoughby meant that she could continue to live at Eresby and to manage the lands there. Her management style was what we might call hands-on. She clearly knew her estate inside out, well aware that its profit lay in farms that had not been kept in good repair during the years of legal dispute. ‘Except it be well looked to,’ she wrote, ‘it will decay sore shortly… I fear me that 500 marks will not bring it in due repair again.’21 Custodians of land, whether widows or other guardians, were not permitted to milk the land’s finite resources for profit at the expense of the future heir. But lawsuits were expensive. María still had to pay the Crown £100 a year as per the estate settlement.22 She needed to effect the repairs that had not been done during previous years while maintaining her own noble lifestyle in order to be taken seriously, and exercise due magnificence towards those below her in social standing. For this, she had to find ways to make money from her lands and tenants.
She couldn’t ruin the land itself. But there were many ways to extort money out of tenants, and María squeezed hers financially until all the goodwill had run dry.23 The dirty work was done by a triumvirate of estate officers acting on her orders: her surveyor, local priest Sir Francis Stoner; Thomas Gildon, her receiver-general, responsible for collecting and collating rents and other monies; and Anthony Missenden, her steward of manorial courts, which dealt with matters such as fines, debts and so forth. Together they worked the manorial legal system, hauling tenants up for matters that were usually allowed to slide. Her council reprimanded her tenants for failure to keep their tenements in repair, binding them on pain of a fine to do the repairs and then declaring them unsatisfactory and levying the fine in any case. Brewing without licence, harbouring vagabonds, using common land, keeping ‘meretricious’ women, failing to control destructive farm animals – all were used as a vast money-spinning exercise. Other landlords saw their profits fall during these years; María’s rose.
Resentment smouldered. On Monday, 2 October, Dr Raynes, the Bishop of Lincoln’s chancellor, arrived at Louth, to the north of the Willoughby lands, to carry out a visitation of the clergy there. He was expected. A group of townsmen had been guarding the treasure house of the church through the night, believing in the rumours that said that the jewels and plate would be seized. Armed and angry, they forced the chancellor and the priests there to swear an oath to be true to the people, and burned the chancellor’s papers.24 News of their actions spread like wildfire and sparked off similar altercations in the towns and villages nearby. Commissioners were thrown out of monasteries. There were many threats of violence to people and property, and many houses were ransacked. Within days, those from the professional classes and even some members of the gentry had begun taking leadership roles. The rebels made banners, took up slogans, wrote ballads and marched towards Lincoln. And inevitably, they began settling other, more personal scores.
María seems not to have been at home at Eresby Place, which was fortunate, since as soon as the next-door town of Spilsby rose her house was broken into and ransacked. Several of her senior officials had been riding around the estate trying to prevent the tenantry from joining the rebels. Discovered three miles from home, the bailiff of Eresby was promptly fined for his efforts and was forced to give local rebels all the ‘harness’, i.e. armour, that was in the house.25 At West Keal they broke down the doors of the parsonage ‘so to have killed Mr Gildon’ – Thomas Gildon, María’s receiver-general.26 Anthony Missenden, her steward of courts, fled.27
María’s surveyor and priest Sir Francis Stoner encountered particular danger. Like the bailiff of Eresby, he tried to ‘stay’ the rebels. He took the sum of £100 and, allegedly, 500 men and rode towards Lincoln to help suppress the rebellion. Inevitably, he was seized. Stoner was threatened, accused of having prevented 300 people from joining the rebellion – his mission had apparently had some success – and called ‘traitor to the commons’. He was forced to give up his money, and Spilsby men Robert Bawding, the late Lord Willoughby’s cook, mercer Thomas Smyth and Alexander Dolman demanded Stoner’s death. Bawding exclaimed, ‘Mr Surveyor, you have been many times hard against me’, and indeed this was true.28 The records of the Willoughby courts show that Bawding and the rest had been continually fined for many small, inconsequential offences and might legitimately feel ‘very sore’ against María’s officers.29 In the event, Stoner was lucky; the gentlemen there connected to the Willoughby affinity spoke up for him and saved his life.
There was no one single cause of the uprising. Five different rebels could have given five different reasons. But in many areas, extortion from local landlords was a significant factor, and we often forget that women as well as men were responsible for corruption on their estates. Government policies that had encouraged such rapacity were another cause, though with classic rebel rhetoric the malcontents did not blame the king for this but his advisors, specifically Thomas Cromwell and Sir Richard Rich. Some remained angry about the king’s second marriage to Anne Boleyn and demanded the restoration of Princess Mary to the succession. Many, bolstered by the clergy, were dismayed not only by the dissolution of the smaller monasteries, but by rumours of religious change in general. This was why the rebellion became known as ‘our pilgrimage of grace’, a march for the grace of God.
As the rebellion progressed, women remained in the thick of it. Lady Hussey, incautious supporter of the king’s daughter Mary, had no sooner returned home to Sleaford Castle after her sojourn in the Tower when rebellion broke out on her doorstep. Sleaford was only thirty-five miles from Louth, and the Husseys heard about the rising almost immediately. Lord Hussey was in a difficult position. His sympathies lay with those who opposed religious change, but to openly set himself against the king was to court death, and like most nobles he had little time for rebellious nobodies. He organised musters and tried to gather the gentry, but he also knew that his tenantry would not rise to fight for him. Instead on 7 October he fled, disguised as a priest, leaving Lady Hussey behind.30 The next day a party of rebels came to Sleaford to ‘take’ him. When they found him gone, they threatened Lady Hussey and put her ‘in fear for her life’. They would burn the place, they said. They would ‘destroy’ her children. They forced her to swear that she would go after her husband and bring him back, and ‘like a fool’ – her husband’s words – she did.31
Beyond this, though, Lady Hussey also gave the rebels food and drink, and even offered them money.32 For this reason she is usually thought to have been in sympathy with them, even actively working on their behalf. She was not the only one. As the rebellion moved northwards in October, Lady Elizabeth Stapleton, wife of Sir Christopher Stapleton, was with her husband and family at the Grey Friars in Beverley, Yorkshire. Her brother-in-law joined the rising. Though she’d been told to stay inside, Lady Stapleton went out to watch the commons pass by, and when asked why her husband and son had not joined, she replied that they were inside the house; ‘Go pull them out by the heads!’33
Like the rebels as a whole, the women who involved themselves in the Pilgrimage of Grace were motivated by a variety of factors. Some, like Lady Stapleton, saw it as a fight for traditional religion. It was ‘God’s quarrel’, she said.34 Queen Jane Seymour herself reputedly went on her knees before the king to ask him to stay the dissolution; she was told ‘not to meddle with his affairs’.35 Others had personal scores to settle. Katherine Howard, Lady Daubeney was one of these. The half-sister of the Duke of Norfolk, her first husband Sir Rhys ap Gruffudd had been executed by the government for high treason in what amounted to a show trial in December 1531, because the couple’s actions against the king’s officers in south-west Wales and their snide remarks about Queen Anne Boleyn had made the government nervous. In November 1536 it was reported that Katherine had gone to the rebels with 3,000 men and half a cartload of plate which was now being minted for coin.36 Court politics, like ladies-in-waiting, was rarely confined to court.
In London, María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby must have been alarmed when she heard about the rising. The news travelled quickly. The disturbance in Louth began on the morning of 2 October, and a day later local nobles were writing to the king to tell him that ‘a great multitude of people’ had risen and the number was still growing.37 As news trickled south through October and into November, María would no doubt have been afraid for her home, her estates and her loyal officers. Worse: her son-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, was appointed to lead the force northwards to suppress the Lincolnshire revolt. Worse still: he took his wife Katherine, María’s daughter, with him.38
Initially, nobles seem to have assumed that the pilgrimage would be easily put down. Thomas, Lord Borough wrote that he had sent word to his neighbours to be in readiness ‘to make them a breakfast’ – a grimly delicious turn of phrase.39 But the rebellion grew. Leaders were elected. Lawyers drafted proclamations and articles; the gentry joined or were press-ganged. The king himself cloaked his fear in righteous indignation, absolutely refusing to countenance any of the rebels’ demands. York fell. Hull capitulated.
The Duke of Suffolk was sent north because of his wife Katherine’s lands in Lincolnshire, but he had hardly spent any time at all in the region.40 Perhaps he asked for his mother-in-law María’s advice, and she surely prayed for their safety. Suffolk probably left Katherine at Grimsthorpe Castle in the south of the county, which would have been a little safer than the strongholds further north.41 It was a big ask for a seventeen-year-old to stay alone in such a dangerous location. Like her mother, though, Katherine was a brave woman. In place by 10 October, only eight days after the first rising at Louth, she immediately began finding out and reporting the local rumours to her husband by letter, that he might have a clearer idea of the situation on the ground as it unfolded. At times this must have been extremely nerve-wracking. On 10 October itself the rumour was that Suffolk had lost a field and 20,000 men, and she must have been afraid for him.42
By December she had evidently been of such use that Suffolk decided to leave her at Grimsthorpe to keep an eye on things while he spent Christmas at court debriefing with the king.43 This was necessary if he wanted to remain in favour. Those marshalling defence on the ground were compelled to compromise by the sheer size of the rebel force, to the rage of the king, who could not see why a single inch must be given. Over Christmas 1536 a truce held; Robert Aske, the lawyer who had become the rebels’ major leader, was invited to court, feted and feasted on false promises.
Aske soon realised he’d been had. Come January he recalled his men, expecting further confrontation. Sir Francis Bigod, a knight from north Yorkshire who shared Cromwell’s evangelical beliefs and had so far opposed the rebellion on these grounds, distrusted the king’s good faith. His dislike of royal interference in the Church gave him common ground with the rebels, and on 15 January 1537 he launched another revolt, accusing Aske of betraying the rebel cause. Once more the rising spread, and again women were in its midst. Lady Dorothy Darcy wrote to her husband Sir George from Gateforth in Yorkshire begging him to return.44 Catherine, Countess of Westmorland, also left alone as her husband travelled south to handle other urgent business, found herself unexpectedly called on: Sir Thomas Tempest reported that she had stayed the country, and ‘rather playeth the part of a knight than of a lady’.45
Not all of the queen’s women were so directly affected by the Pilgrimage of Grace. Some were busy with other concerns. Mary Howard, the newly widowed Duchess of Richmond, was one of these. After the unexpected death of her husband Henry, the king’s illegitimate son, in July 1536 Mary had returned to her father the Duke of Norfolk’s house at Kenninghall on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk.46 Quite how she felt about this is not known. Not all widows went back to their family, but Mary was only seventeen years of age and still a minor. Nobody was going to allow her to make her own life choices unless it was absolutely necessary.
She might have preferred to stay at court with her friends. Her experience as lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn might even have made her a helpful asset to Queen Jane Seymour’s household, but it might also have made her unwelcome. Mary was Anne Boleyn’s cousin. She’d been at the centre of her court, woven indelibly into the fabric of Anne’s queenship and of the monarchy, married as she was to the king’s illegitimate son. The deaths of Anne and of the Duke of Richmond had broken those threads, and perhaps the king and the new Queen Jane preferred them to remain that way. Howard women were not wanted at court just now.
Mary, then, lived at Kenninghall with her father when he was home, with her brothers, sisters-in-law and their children, and with Bess Holland, her father’s mistress and her own erstwhile colleague at court. Her mother Elizabeth Stafford remained under house arrest in Hertfordshire at the duke’s behest. Mary and Bess may have been friends. Yet there were still visual reminders of Mary’s mother everywhere: Stafford knots entwined with the Howard lion, her mother’s arms stamped onto plate. Many of Elizabeth’s clothes and jewels remained in coffers in the nursery, taken from her at her removal. If Mary had peeked into these she would have found the unfinished counterpoint that Elizabeth had been making when she left, for her own and her husband’s bed. Over a hundred of the letters T and E – Thomas and Elizabeth – were still waiting to be sewn into place, a visual sign of unity now morphed into a chilling reminder of what happened to unruly women in this household.47
Mary’s rooms were below the duke’s, on the first floor above the chapel. She had an outer chamber, a bedchamber, an inner chamber and a chamber for her maidservants. All were hung with costly tapestries to keep the cold at bay and provide colour and decoration. She had cupboards and coffers to store clothes, papers and embroidery silks, and a long table with two benches for herself and her maids to sit at if she chose not to eat in the dining chamber along the corridor.48 Kenninghall was sometimes called Kenninghall Palace, and with good reason; built only a decade ago it was not only large but luxurious and well appointed. Mary could have gone out riding. She had horses in the stables cared for by the duke’s staff. She could visit Bess, her father’s mistress, at her house at Mendham nearby, where she had her own room.49 She could and did embroider with her maids, tend the numerous gardens, and if women had played tennis she could have done that too – perhaps she watched her brothers do so. Kenninghall might not be the royal court, but it was no isolated hovel.
She probably hoped not to be there long. Now that Mary was widowed, there were two pressing issues facing her and her father. The first was her jointure. Mary had been married to the king’s son, and – allegedly – had not brought any dowry to the marriage, because Queen Anne had secured the alliance for the family and had persuaded the king to waive the usual financial arrangements.50 He had, however, granted Mary a jointure of 1,000 marks, or £700 per year – the equivalent of a lifetime’s wages for a skilled tradesman.51 This was income from estates that would support her in the event of her widowhood.
Nobody, least of all the king, had expected this to occur so soon. Richmond was only just seventeen when he died and Mary likewise. In theory, the king now owed Mary her jointure estates and income. Henry, though, was never one to willingly give out cash if he could find a way to avoid it, and he certainly didn’t want to have to finance his daughter-in-law for the rest of her life. Almost immediately, he pointed out that the marriage had not been consummated and that Mary had not fully been Richmond’s wife: he owed her nothing.52
This was not legally correct and no doubt Henry knew this. He was simply hoping that enough people would support it to enable him to bully Mary and her father into agreement. In this he misjudged. The matter was referred to the country’s judges and the king’s ‘council learned’ of lawyers.53 Mary’s natural champion was her father Norfolk; it was usual for men to act for and alongside their female relatives in such matters, and a father was particularly bound to do so for his daughter. It was in both their interests. If the king did not want to finance Mary for the rest of her life, no more did her father want to.
Moreover, Norfolk expected Mary to remarry. She was young, had not yet borne children, and therefore her duty to her family was not yet complete. In fact, with all the trouble this was causing, Norfolk wished aloud that her original match with the heir to the earldom of Oxford had gone ahead. Like most nobles he kept tabs on his peers’ families, and he knew that ‘at this time there is neither lord nor lord’s son nor other good inheritor in this realm that I can remember of convenient age to marry her’.54 Not only this, but without her jointure her value on the marriage market was less in any case, as he also observed: ‘if she should marry and her children not to inherit some good portion they were undone’.55 She might be the king’s daughter-in-law and the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk; but without the money this wasn’t worth much.
The king’s judges dragged their feet. Then, news of the rebellion in Lincolnshire reached London. Immediately Norfolk returned to Kenninghall to muster troops in preparation to march north. He had not been in the king’s good graces since the fall of his niece in the spring, but he was the king’s best general, above all a military man. It was unthinkable that such a crisis could be resolved without him, and a victory would restore him and his family to royal favour.56
Though initially told to sit tight at home – his conservative sympathies and dislike for the dissolution of the monasteries made the king doubt his trustworthiness – on 11 October Norfolk departed. Mary, meanwhile, remained at Kenninghall and on her father’s mind. Having treated once with Aske and the rebels, Norfolk returned south in early November and was then ordered to go northwards again. As he did so, he wrote anxiously to Thomas Cromwell about Mary’s situation. Could Cromwell speed the judges along so that it might be concluded in this legal term? He was, it transpired, worried about Mary’s singledom: ‘I am somewhat jealous of her that being out of my company she might bestow herself otherwise than I would she should.’57
This is an extraordinary thing for Norfolk to have written about his daughter. Did Mary have her eye on somebody? It would make sense for her to wait for her father to leave so that she might make a new marriage without his interference. Norfolk’s letter amounted to an admission that he could not control his own daughter. Perhaps realising this, he hastily backtracked, adding that ‘notwithstanding that unto this time it is not possible for a young woman to handle herself more discreetly than she hath done since her husband’s death’.58 It would not do for Cromwell to think her ungovernable, or him incapable.
Whether or not Mary had given Norfolk any reason to suspect her is lost to us. We only know that she remained single through that winter. Norfolk was back at court by 15 December and spent Christmas there, returning to Kenninghall in early January 1537.59 On his way home he was met by a messenger bearing a letter from Mary. It was not the first she had sent. Mary may have remained chaste while her father was away, but she had not been idle. She had consulted not only her own council but taken further legal advice and was in no doubt of her right to her jointure. Impatient, she wanted resolution and apparently did not think that the Pilgrimage of Grace was adequate excuse for delay. She knew that, at this stage, her father remained her best option as mediator with the king, but she clearly did not trust him to keep up the pressure. Her letter was designed to touch nerves, and to bounce him into further action.
If she didn’t know that her father was such a good intercessor, she wrote, she would speak to the king herself. She might yet do so, because ‘as yet proceedeth no effect but words, which makes me think the King’s highness is not ascertained of my whole right therein, for if he were, he is so just a prince that I am sure he would never suffer the justice of his laws to be denied to me, the unworthy desolate widow of his late son’. If she were to come to London and sue to the king for herself, she did not doubt that ‘his highness should be moved to have compassion on me’.60 It was an unsubtle threat, manipulation couched in the most respectful of terms. Mary thought that her father was doing a poor job and she could do better herself. Nobody could do epistolary passive aggression like an aggrieved Tudor noblewoman.
Norfolk forwarded her letter to Cromwell with his own. He was unabashedly appalled. ‘My lord,’ he blustered, ‘in all my life I never communed with her in any serious cause and would not have thought she would be such as I find her, which as I think is but too wise for a woman.’61 Was it not enough that his wife remained obtuse and recalcitrant, shut away in Hertfordshire and yet still spreading rumours all over London; must he now subdue his truculent daughter as well?
For now all that either of them could do was to remit the matter to Cromwell’s judgement. Norfolk had barely reached home before news arrived that the north had risen afresh. By the end of January 1537, he had entrusted his will and Mary’s future to Cromwell and was in Doncaster by 2 February.62 This second rising gave the king the excuse he needed to use further violence against the rebels, with Norfolk as his instrument. The putdown was brutal. Declaring martial law, Norfolk moved through the northern counties enacting mass executions of men, women and children.63 The dissolution of the monasteries did not stop; the Lady Mary was not restored to the succession; Thomas Cromwell’s ascendancy was not halted. But, like most popular revolts, success and failure were not clear binaries. María, Lady Willoughby, the rapacious landlady, had to settle for less profit from her estates in the future. Her daughter Katherine gained a new home whether she would or no; she and her husband the duke were ordered by the king to make their home permanently at Grimsthorpe, and the shape of Lincolnshire politics was thereby changed forever.64
Almost all of the noblewomen who had involved themselves in the Pilgrimage of Grace escaped without personal repercussion. Some, indeed, were irrepressible under even harsher fortunes. Lady Hussey, supporter of the Lady Mary, suffered yet another blow when her husband was arrested for his hesitancy during the rebellion. Like a good wife, Lady Hussey visited her husband in the Tower.65 It was a tense time. Likely neither yet knew what the charge would be and were desperately trying to work out the odds of his survival. Lord Darcy, too, was imprisoned for the same reason, and Lord Hussey had been present at Darcy’s questioning. Perhaps reasoning that the questions asked might shed light on the line of legal inquiry, Lord Hussey told his wife everything that he had heard. What he had heard was inflammatory – Darcy had openly blamed Cromwell for the entirety of the rebellion – and when asked by her maid Catherine Cresswell about the welfare of the two lords, Lady Hussey repeated it.66
Cresswell was hardly likely to keep such juicy gossip to herself. She told her husband. He told others. Soon the story was all over town, and being investigated in its own right. Lord Hussey was executed in June 1537 for conspiracy against the king and raising a rebellion against him, having failed to convince the jury of his loyalty. Lady Hussey, now widowed, walked free. The king and his councillors might not like the rebellious behaviour of the country’s noblewomen, they might fear what they saw as women’s gossiping tongues, but it seemed that they could not do much to stop it.