Henry did not reply to the rebels’ letter. So they wrote to him again. If they had managed to convince the King that their first list of grievances was no more than a respectful request, there was no hope of disguising the nature of the second. It was clearly a series of demands. No additional taxes except in time of war. The restoration of the Church’s ancient rights. The crown to renounce all rights to tenths and first fruits. Cromwell to be surrendered to the Commons of England. A full pardon for all the Commons – no more than was their due since they were not, and never had been, in rebellion.
The northern nobles who were loyal to the King had been slow to react to the uprising. But eventually Lord Burgh wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury in Sheffield Park and to Lord Thomas Darcy in Selby urging them to march against the Louth men. By then the news had already reached the King at Windsor. His first reaction had been to send an army north under the command of the Duke of Norfolk. Then he had second thoughts and announced that the punitive exhibition had been postponed. The Duke shared the rebels’ hatred of Cromwell. Indeed, according to Eustace Chapuys, the French Ambassador, Norfolk hoped and believed that the rebellion would ‘ultimately work the ruin and destruction of his competitor and enemy’.1
After a week or so of indecision, the march north was abandoned altogether. Tales of potential risings in the south amounted to little more than a London priest describing the Louth dissidents as ‘God’s people who did fight to defend God’s cause’2 and rumours that the Lincolnshire host was 40,000 strong and expected reinforcements from Yorkshire. However, they convinced the King that his interest lay in defending the south and waiting for the insurgents to run out of supplies, enthusiasm and courage. An army was mustered and stationed at Ampthill on the road to the capital. At one point Henry even thought of moving his court to the little Bedfordshire town and taking command of the army himself. But he changed his mind again and ordered Henry Brandon, Duke of Suffolk – supported by Richard, nephew of Thomas Cromwell, and Henry Howard, son of the Duke of Norfolk – to reclaim Lincoln in the name of the King.
Brandon marched north at the head of 3,000 men of dubious conviction and low morale. But the message he sent before him claimed that he was 100,000 strong and warned the insurgents that they faced the choice between surrender and annihilation. His ultimatum reflected the King’s contempt for what he had described as no more than the ‘rude commons of one shire and that one of the most brute and beastly in the realm’. He too sent a message north. ‘You like traitors and rebels have behaved and not like the true subjects as you have named yourselves.’ They had a clear choice: ‘deliver unto the hands of one of our lieutenants one hundred persons’ for exemplary punishment or ‘put yourselves, lives, wives, children, lands, goods and chattels … in utter adventure of destruction and utter ruin by force of violence and the sword.’3 There is no doubt that Henry meant what he said. Catholic or not, Tudor monarchs still relied on the Homily on Obedience to justify taking terrible revenge on rebels. Indeed, it required them to impose savage penalties on recalcitrants. ‘Where there is no right order their reigneth all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and Babylonical disorder.’4
The threat worked. Brandon entered Lincoln unopposed. Captive royalists were released. The draconian punishments were not, for the time being, carried out, and what appeared to be clemency won over waverers to the King’s cause. The stratagem was so successful that Thomas Cromwell felt able to describe the uprising as ‘the late rebellion attempted in the north parties of the realm’. Though in the same letter he made clear that while it had been briefly necessary ‘to appease’ the rebels, the King’s vengeance would not be long delayed. ‘And now my lord of Norfolk shall go thither and lie there as the king’s lieutenant for the administration of justice.’5 Cromwell, prudently, had no intention of going thither himself.
Cromwell’s assessment of the situation was based on wishful thinking by the barons of the north. Far from dying out, the rebellion was about to assume the full form which would guarantee its place in history. The Dymoke family banner, behind which the protestors had marched from Louth, had been returned to the parish church and replaced, at the head of the column, by a white sheet to which had been attached a hand-painted representation of the Trinity. It amounted to an assertion of the righteousness of their cause. Complaints about taxes were almost forgotten. They marched for Jesus Christ and the Church of Rome. They were pilgrims and, in October 1536, they found a man of principle and purpose to lead their pilgrimage.
Robert Aske, of Aughton in Yorkshire, was accounted a gentleman. After a brief period in the employment of the Earl of Northumberland, a distant kinsman, he had been admitted to Gray’s Inn. It seems likely that he rode south, in the autumn of the revolt, with the intention of following his profession in London. He was stopped by the pilgrims shortly after he crossed the Trent and taken, against his will, to join a muster on Hambledon Hill. It was convenience rather than conviction that made him reluctant to join the rally. In Aughton he was already a wanted man, accused – almost certainly correctly – of encouraging unrest in the East Riding. Having been forcibly delayed on his travels, he felt enough sympathy for the cause of those who delayed him to remain freely in their company. He first joined and then led what became a holy war.
Most of the men who were to become Aske’s followers saw the revolt in purely local terms – a refusal to accept the pillage of their parish churches and the degradation of the saints to which they were dedicated. Aske, the provincial lawyer, fought against the Act of Supremacy, a ‘mean division from the unity of the Catholic Church’.6 But he too was a champion of local causes. The Beverley disturbances, in which it was thought Aske had been implicated, were – like the rising in Louth – provoked by a variety of grievances. Chief among them was the demand that tithes must be paid in cash, not kind. But it was the imposition of the new religious order which pushed the people over the line that separated unrest from uprising. The revolt began in earnest when it became known that Robert Holgate, Prior of Watton Abbey, intended to obey the King’s injunction to ignore all but the officially recognised holy days and neglect the celebration of the Feast of St Wilfrid, the man who had argued for the Church of Rome at the Synod of Whitby in 663 and prepared the way for the whole Christian Church in England to accept the spiritual sovereignty of the Pope. Although the revolt was slow to spread throughout the West Riding, Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, had written to London warning against what he described as hotheads and reporting that beacons were being lit along the north bank of the Humber. If Aske was, as supposed, involved in the Yorkshire unrest, there is no wonder that the Commons of Louth came to believe that his fateful journey south was arranged by Providence.
In the same month that Aske first met the Lincolnshire dissidents, Pope Paul III decided that Rome should do all it could to encourage what might become an irresistible English uprising. After some cautious deliberation he concluded, not very decisively, that Reginald Pole – still in exile in the Vatican – ‘could do service to God by going to England whenever an insurrection should arise’.7 He had, for some time, wanted to make Pole a cardinal but he had respected, if not understood, Pole’s reluctance to join the college. He had, therefore, let the matter rest. The news from England changed his attitude. On December 22nd 1536 he sent his Chamberlain to Pole’s apartment with the message that his scruples were no longer of any account. Like it or not, Pole was to become a cardinal. To emphasise his determination, the Pope sent a barber with his Chamberlain. Pole was tonsured – the sign of a monk, though not of a priest – on the spot8 and made Papal Legate to England, with the instruction to have his writing disseminated there while he made slow progress across Germany and France. The brave original intention was that Pole would be ready to land in England and reclaim the nation for Rome when the insurgents were on the point of victory. But the Pope – discouraged by the cautious reaction to his gesture in Catholic Europe – did not give Pole permission to set out until February 1537. By then it was too late. The rebels had, as the Pope hoped, made spectacular progress south but – although they did not know it – by the time the march on London began, their cause was already lost.
The processes by which Aske became the rebels’ leader remain unknown and it must be assumed that he was chosen largely because of the strength of his character and the depth of his conviction. It was his decision that on St Wilfrid’s Day 1536 there would be a general muster on Skipworth Moor in Yorkshire, and it was Aske who read out a proclamation which confirmed the pilgrims’ loyalty to the crown. Every man was to swear to be ‘true to the king’s issue and the noble blood and preserve the Church of God from spoiling and to be true to the Commons and their wealth’. Formally Aske remained no more than the Chief Captain of Marshland in the Isle of Howdenshire. Other chief captains were elected during the muster. But there was no doubt where the real authority lay. Aske was the captain of the captains. During the day on which the muster ended he summoned a conference of representatives from each of the contingents which had gathered on Skipworth Moor and addressed them as a general would address his army on the eve of battle. God would be with them in their endeavours. They were ‘pilgrims and had a pilgrims gate to go through’. That was the moment when the idea of a pilgrimage took hold and ensured that the great enterprise would go down in history not as a revolution, but as the Pilgrimage of Grace.
The knowledge that they did God’s bidding was not enough to eradicate what amounted to the pilgrims’ social insecurity. The Pilgrims of Grace – mostly respectable men who claimed, with pride, to speak for the loyal Commons of England – grew increasingly desperate to make recruits from the gentry and nobility. As support spread (first from East to West Riding and then to Lancashire and Northumberland), the hopes were first concentrated on Lord Darcy of Templehurst, a soldier who had fought for both King Henry VIII and his father. Darcy had signed the petition for an annulment which Henry had sent to Clement VII. But it was said that, when the plea was rejected and the Pope’s authority ignored, Darcy had told the Emperor’s ambassador in London that he would welcome an invasion by the Catholic powers. When the request to join the Pilgrims was made, Darcy was holding Pontefract Castle as a refuge for men loyal to the King. He dismissed the idea out of hand.
Attempts to recruit the Earl of Northumberland also failed. There were nobles who had expressed private sympathy for the Pilgrims’ cause but, fearing for the safety of their wives and children, had refused openly to announce their support. It was decided to press them to make their views public. Lord Latimer of Snape yielded to the pressure. So did Sir Christopher Danby of Masham who – once he was incriminated by the oath – followed the dictates of his true faith, changed status from conscript to volunteer and became a noble captain. Other nobles fled before the Pilgrims arrived. Lord Scrope left in such haste that he left his wife and infant son behind.
With or without the nobility, the Pilgrimage was irresistible in the north. Suppressed abbeys and priories – Cartmel and Conishead in the Furness peninsula and Coverham and Eastby in North Yorkshire among them – were reopened. Encouraged by their success, some of the new northern recruits wanted to extend the objects of the Pilgrimage. A ‘Captain Poverty’ joined the ranks at Richmond with the intention of widening the Pilgrims’ purpose. But even he – and the Brother Poverty, Master Poverty and Lord Poverty who followed his lead – called for the restoration of Church privileges and the reopening of dissolved monasteries, as well as a redistribution of wealth. The Pilgrims began to think of themselves as crusaders, freeing English Christendom from the tyranny of the heathen.
Despite their noble declaration of purpose, it had become clear to the Pilgrims’ captains that the achievement of their aims would only be possible if they could convince the King and his council that they were strong enough to seize power. Sporadic uprisings, no matter how numerous and well supported, were not enough – even if they came together from time to time in great demonstrations of solidarity. The north of England had to be occupied and effectively governed by the Pilgrims. Robert Aske and William Stapleton, the original captain of the Lincolnshire Pilgrims, decided that York and Hull should be the Pilgrims’ first strategic objective. Stapleton met the aldermen of Hull in Holy Trinity – the biggest, and first brick, parish church in England – who told him that they remained true to the King, but offered to relay the Pilgrims’ grievances to London. They also offered to allow any local rebels, who so chose, to leave the town unhindered as long as they did not attempt to take with them the weapons and provisions that might be needed in the town if it was besieged. As it was the Pilgrims who were likely to besiege them, it was a strange offer to make. It was duly rejected and the siege began. Hull held out for five days.
William Harrington, the Mayor of York – caught between Pilgrim armies marching south from Richmond and north from Beverley – sent the city treasure to the royal castle in Tickhill and surrendered. Aske and his lieutenants were greeted at the great west door of the Minster by the Bishop’s Treasurer and, together with the diocesan clergy, went in procession to the high altar to celebrate Mass. As Aske waited, in triumph, for news from Hull, he composed what he called ‘The Oath of the Honourable Men’. It reaffirmed love of God, Church and King and required Pilgrims to swear that they did not join the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ in the hope of ‘particular gain’ for themselves and did not intend ‘to do any displeasure to any private person … nor slay or envy for profit’.9 A proclamation, drafted at the same time, was less uplifting. It accused the Privy Council of a conspiracy to ‘spoil and rob the realm’. Both documents were signed by ‘Robert Aske, Chief Captain’. Formalising his status by giving it a name caused no controversy. Exercising his seniority by taking strategic decisions did. Aske ignored the complaints and announced, without consultation, that the Pilgrimage would march on Pontefract.
Pontefract fell without a fight and the Pilgrims celebrated their bloodless victory by adding Princess Mary’s legitimisation to their list of demands.10 Lord Thomas Darcy, who had commanded the garrison, and Edward Lee, the Archbishop of York, both swore the Pilgrims’ oath. Later, when he was accused of treachery, Lee explained that ‘if we refused, [Aske] had ways to constrain us and we should find them people without mercy’.11 But Darcy found himself attracted to the Pilgrims’ cause by more than fear of death. True to the King but faithful to the Church of Rome, he was persuaded by the wording of the oath that the Pilgrims shared both loyalties. It was an early manifestation of the question that dominated much of the later Reformation. Was it possible to be both a good subject and a good Catholic? When Thomas Miller, Lancaster Herald, arrived in Pontefract with a message from the King, he found that ‘Aske sits in state with the Archbishop of York and Lord Darcy on either side of him.’12 Miller was refused permission to read the King’s message from the market cross. It contained an announcement that the Lincolnshire revolt had collapsed and that the King expected the Yorkshire rebels to send him their list of grievances and then, like loyal citizens, retire to their homes.
Miller reported to London that the Pilgrims were unyielding and had been joined by various nobles. He might have added, as confirmation of Darcy’s complicity, that the Pilgrims had adopted, as their badge, the banner which the noble recruit had followed when he led the English expedition against the Moors in Spain: ‘The Five Wounds of Christ, centred upon the Eucharist and surmounted by the crown of thorns above the name of Christ: IHS’.13 The news of Darcy’s recruitment confirmed Henry’s conviction that the rebellion must be crushed, not conciliated. Even as he offered to consider the Pilgrims’ grievances, he was ordering a brutal response to the news that the Pilgrims had restored the dispossessed monks to Sawley Abbey in Lancashire. Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, was instructed to ‘repress the insurrection immediately, apprehend its captains and have them immediately executed as traitors or sent up to us … You are to take the abbots and monks without violence and have them hanged without delay in their monks’ apparel.’14
It was raining hard and not, in Stanley’s view, suitable weather for a long march. Henry would not countenance delay. ‘You shall at once cause the abbot and chief monks to be hanged on long pieces of timber or otherwise out of the steeple and the rest to be executed in places you think fit … Let non escape.’15 Stanley attempted to obey the King’s instructions even though he knew that, when battle was joined, he would be heavily outnumbered. The armies never met. Henry changed his mind again. Yet another message from the King told Stanley to take his weary soldiers home and prepare to reinforce the royal forces in Yorkshire.
The stalemate in the north-east continued with both sides preparing for battles that did not take place. The Earl of Shrewsbury initially intended to press on to a decisive confrontation. But after he discovered that Doncaster was lost to the Pilgrims, he offered an immediate discussion of the grievances. The offer was rejected. The problem was not the idea but the proposal that both sides of the threatened conflict should nominate four emissaries to examine the prospects of an agreement. The Pilgrims suffered from an excess of democracy. They did not believe that four men could, adequately, represent thousands.
The next approach came from Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and commander of His Majesty’s forces at Ampthill. It was more an ultimatum than an offer. Again the Pilgrims were told to choose between annihilation and negotiation. Annihilation was no more within the power of the King’s army that it had been when the Pilgrims were first threatened with destruction. The earlier bluff had been intended to intimidate. The second was meant to buy time until the army was strong enough to carry out the threat. Norfolk sent a message to Henry which assured the King, ‘Whatever promise I shall make to the rebels … I shall observe no part thereof.’16
Lancaster Herald – still in Yorkshire – perhaps innocently led the Pilgrims to believe that if they accepted Howard’s offer, Cromwell would be deposed. So, after one of the innumerable conferences which confirmed their democratic instincts but undermined their negotiating strength, the Pilgrims agreed to a meeting on Doncaster Bridge. Howard, Talbot and the Earls of Rutland and Huntington led the delegation which represented the King. Aske – anxious to demonstrate the support he enjoyed among the northern nobility – nominated Darcy to lead the Pilgrims, while he remained with the host that was assembled, 30,000 strong, in view of the bridge. The morning meeting was adjourned while the two delegations considered if there was a realistic prospect of agreement. Both sides concurred that a peaceful settlement was possible – the Pilgrims because of their gullibility, and Howard because of his guile. It was the only way of avoiding an early battle, which he knew he could not win.
Howard wrote to the King, ‘The pestilence is in our army. We want victuals and money. The country is theirs. They have made it desolate.’17 As he rode south from Doncaster he sent Henry an even more sobering message. His knights had behaved valiantly, but there were ‘right few of the soldiers but thought [the Pilgrims’] quarrels to be good and godly’.18 Had he been defeated in battle, half Howard’s army would have joined the rebellion. Failure made Henry think less about peace and more about vengeance – particularly against Darcy, ‘the most arrant traitor that ever was living’.19
Henry feared that the rebellion was spreading. A combination of superstition and panic induced the Court to believe improbable stories about impending insurrections, including the accounts of a new revolt in East Anglia which was said to be led by a Norfolk woman who, in May 1537, had declared, ‘We shall never have a good world till we [come] together and with clubs and clouted shoon [hobnailed boots] shall the deed be done for we had never a good word since this king reigned.’20 The King was again haunted by the spectre of invasion by the armies of the Holy Roman Empire. Cardinal Pole had sent a message to the Emperor, Charles V of Spain: ‘I humbly entreat Your Majesty to try peaceful means first … before having recourse to arms.’21 The plea anticipated an invasion which the Catholic powers of Europe were too timid and too unprepared even to contemplate. But Henry felt less secure than at any time in his reign.
Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, preached a sermon at St Paul’s Cross which called the Pilgrims ‘poor ignorant people’ and justified the brutal suppression of the uprising. Its logic was perversely impeccable. ‘The foundation of the monasteries argued purgatory to be. So putting them down argues it not to be.’22 Thomas Cranmer, who thought it tactically wise to counterfeit conciliation, instructed Latimer to preach a second sermon which commended ‘unity without special note of any man’s folly’.23 He described the Reformation as ‘not new learning but old truths’.24 Extreme advocates of a breach with Rome and the suppression of the monasteries were told to moderate their language and, in some cases, were put under house arrest. Henry himself composed a message to the Pilgrims in what he believed to be conciliatory language. The Church, he wrote, should be grateful for his small mercies. ‘We have not done so much prejudice as many of our predecessors have done upon lesser grounds.’ So the people should give thanks that he had closed the monasteries and thus ended the ‘vicious and abominable life’ that they supported. He suggested that the north misunderstood the purpose of his policy because it was inhabited by people who had never ‘heard [his bishops] preach nor yet knoweth any part of their conversation’. The big lie followed:
Ye shall know that our princely heart rather embraceth [of his own disposition] pity and compassion of his offending subjects than will to be revenged of their naughty deeds. We are content if we may see and perceive in you all sorrowfulness for your offences and will henceforth do no more so, nor to believe so lewd and naughty tales or reports of your most kind and loving prince and his council to grant unto you all our letters patent of pardon for this rebellion: so that ye will deliver unto us ten such of the ringleaders and provokers of you in this rebellion, as we shall assign to you and appoint.25
The letter did not concede the justice of one of the Pilgrims’ grievances. But despite that, and the demand that the Pilgrims sacrifice ten of their leaders, it would – by the standards of the time – have been a monarch’s merciful response to open rebellion, had it not been for the fact that Henry had no intention of granting an amnesty under letters patent or in any other way. But time was on his side. So he agreed to yet another meeting between rebels and loyalists in Doncaster.
During the truce that followed, the Pilgrims replenished their funds with (usually voluntary) donations from the restored monasteries, and the King – as well as bidding his commanders to recruit and regroup – plotted his special revenge on his principal enemies. A messenger passed though the Pilgrims’ lines and handed Darcy a letter from Howard. It contained a complaint that the Pilgrims were breaking the truce (which was true) and the assurance (which was false) that the King believed that Darcy was held by the rebels, under duress. Darcy’s loyalty could easily be confirmed. All he had to do was deliver Aske ‘dead or alive, but alive if possible’ to the King and thus ‘raise [himself] in the favour of his Highness.’26 Darcy immediately showed the letter to Aske, but did not consult him about his reply. ‘Alas my good lord that ye, being a man of so much honour and great experience should advise or choose me to be a man of any such sort of fashion to betray or disserve any living man … to get or to win me four of the best duke’s lands in France or to be king there. I would not do it to no living person.’27 Allowing for the stress of the moment and the nobility of the message, the double negative is forgivable.
The brief peace provided the Pilgrims with an ideal opportunity to indulge their passion for discussion. A conference at Pontefract – called to decide their agenda for Doncaster – considered the need for a revised Act of Succession. Pilgrims were fearful that Henry would nominate Cromwell to succeed him. They were also, with more reason, concerned about the promised pardon and demanded that it should be guaranteed in an Act of Parliament. Their more spiritual proposals were, as an indication of their moderation, offered in the form of an opinion rather than a demand. ‘We think that preaching against purgatory, worshipping of saints, pilgrimages and images [and] all books set forth against the same or sacraments’28 should be condemned. They added a note in favour of the old feast days – one cause of the first rising.
Aske – although distracted by a visit from his brother Christopher, thought by some Pilgrims to be a spy for the King – occupied himself in providing a strategic plan for an advance south. The whole Pilgrim army should be divided into three separate units, which would cross the Trent separately and rendezvous in Nottingham. At the same time he wrote to ask Mary of Hungary – the Emperor’s regent in the Netherlands – to supply the Pilgrims with arms, ammunition and, more improbably, cavalry. Mary was also asked to intercede with Pope Paul III on their behalf. In Rome, Reginald Pole was beginning to look with more sympathy on proposals for an imperial invasion of England and was openly supporting the Pilgrims in their insurrection.
The Pontefract Conference came to a conciliatory, but obviously unacceptable, conclusion about the revision of the Supremacy Act. The Church’s temporal powers should be exercised by the King, but the Pope should remain supreme over matters affecting ‘the care of souls’. Other new demands (still called grievances) were even less realistic. Princess Mary should be Henry’s successor, and the Annates (payments to the Pope on the appointment of bishops, which the King had misappropriated) were to be collected less frequently and, like first fruits, returned to their rightful recipient. Old ‘grievances’ were repeated. The Pilgrims’ negotiating position was set out in Twenty-Four Articles, which concluded with the demand that ‘heretics, bishops and temporals and their sects … or such other or else try their quarrel with us and our partaker in battle’ suffer ‘condign punishment by fire’.29 The list of miscreants included – as well as Cromwell, Cranmer and Latimer – Leigh and Layton, the King’s northern Commissioners.
The Pilgrims chose a delegation, three hundred strong, to represent their case on Doncaster Bridge, half a dozen of whom would take part in the actual negotiations and report back to their colleagues. The negotiators were armed with written advice. It included what modern Civil Service briefing papers call ‘line to take’. The first three points were an assurance of the Pilgrims’ good faith, the expectation of safe conduct and the call for a general pardon. The fourth was a demand that ‘Thomas Cromwell nor none of his band nor sort be at our meeting in Doncaster’.30
A preliminary meeting, held on December 6th 1536, was adjourned until the Earl of Shrewsbury arrived with new orders from Henry to the Duke of Norfolk. They were, in substance, very like the old ones. The objective was total submission (as signified by individual oaths of allegiance) in return for a general pardon for all except the ringleaders. He added a secret codicil. If the rebels refused to accept his terms, Norfolk would return to London and put their case to the King, on the pretext of seeing which, if any, of their demands could be met. Norfolk was in strong support of the proposal. As a soldier, he realised the advantages of delay. As a Christian, he felt some sympathy for the Pilgrims. As a courtier, he was determined not to do anything which strengthened the position of his rival, Thomas Cromwell.
When the discussion finally got under way, Norfolk’s fraudulent promise of concessions was so convincing that Darcy could proclaim that ‘all true Catholics may joy’.31 The Duke played for time by speculating about coming to an agreement which he knew the King would not allow him to make. Some monasteries could be reopened if the abbots discussed their future with the Commissioners. Cromwell might be impeached. The pardon might be extended to cover all the leaders of the revolt. Aske reported back, first to the three hundred Pilgrims who had been chosen to support the negotiators, and then to the host in Pontefract. He adjudged his followers well satisfied. Then other members of the negotiating team, who saw the outcome differently, returned. They argued that there should be no agreement until the form of the general pardon was made known, and some proposed an immediate resumption of hostilities to convince the King that they were in earnest.
Aske, virtually repudiated by his followers in Pontefract, was persuaded to return to Doncaster and argue for a better deal. Despite hours of wrangling, he achieved nothing except increasing pessimism that a deal of any sort could be achieved. Lancaster Herald, back in Pontefract, took advantage of the stalemate to read the proclamation of the King’s pardon. Aske – whose gullibility belied his reputation – accepted the offer at its face value and announced that he was resigning the leadership of the Pilgrimage. Tearing the badge of Christ’s Five Wounds from his tunic, he swore ‘to wear no badge nor sign but the badge of our sovereign lord’. There was much rejoicing that the Pilgrimage of Grace had ended without a bloody confrontation. It took some time for the rank-and-file of the Pilgrim host to realise that virtually none of their demands had been accepted by the King.
Although Norfolk had ended the nascent revolution without making any significant concession, Henry was profoundly dissatisfied with the outcome of the Pontefract peace talks. The half promises could be, and were, repudiated. But his enemies had remained unpunished. The wording of a proclamation addressed to the dissident counties – which followed the reoccupation of Yorkshire by the royal forces – made clear that they would not remain unpunished for long.
There were too many Pilgrims to allow the King to wreak his vengeance on the entire host. So he justified selective retribution with the explanation that, because most of Aske’s followers had ‘proceeded out of ignorance and by occasion of sundry false tales … set abroad among you by sundry malicious persons’, he was inclined to ‘extend his most gracious pity and mercy towards you’. The implication that mercy would be denied to the ‘sundry malicious persons’ was clearly understood by those members of the nobility who had, with varying degrees of reluctance, joined the Pilgrims. Darcy stood firm, but less resolute characters wrote to their friends at Court to secure confirmation of their pardons. Edward Lee, Archbishop of York – fearful that his vows of loyalty to the King would be forgotten and his oath to support the pilgrimage remembered – told Thomas Cromwell, ‘If I could have foreseen that such an office would fall upon my head, I had rather been your priest than a bishop.’32
The behaviour of the fearful nobles was predictable. Robert Aske’s conduct was not. When he received the message that the King had ‘conceived a great desire to speak with him and therefore commands him to come with great diligence … And trusts that Aske at his access will, by plain speaking, deserve reward’, he accepted at once. Even the warning that he must travel to London ‘making no man privy thereto’33 was not enough to convince him that he was being lured into some sort of trap. After his death, it was claimed that he posted associates along the road south so that – if he were arrested – a swift message to the north could renew the uprising. But abduction was not what the King had in mind. Henry wanted to destroy Aske’s reputation in the north and, as a result, the unity of the Pilgrims.
There is no doubt that Aske was well received at court. Stories of Henry greeting him with a warm embrace, making him presents of a scarlet silk coat and a gold chain and appointing him to the Privy Council were, almost certainly, rumours maliciously spread by Pilgrims who were dissatisfied with the Doncaster agreement and suspected Aske of being in secret alliance with the King. In his absence the dissatisfaction increased, as the Pilgrims’ rank and file gradually realised how little they had gained. Protests against the King escalated into violence against his representatives. The monks of Sawley Abbey – no doubt conscious that their continued residence depended on the Pilgrims’ grievances being remedied – produced a document that demanded that the Pilgrims take up arms again. It was nailed to the door of parish churches. Leaseholders of monastery lands refused to pay rent to the crown. In Richmond and Barnard Castle no taxes were collected. Militancy was encouraged by stories – none of them true – of new risings in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Kent, Worcester and Oxford. Serious plans were made to reoccupy Hull and Scarborough and hold the cities ransom until Parliament met in York and addressed the grievances.
Aske was back in Yorkshire on January 8th 1537 and began, at once, to argue in favour of the Pilgrims respecting the agreement they had made on Doncaster Bridge. His choice of words convinced the sceptics that he had become the King’s agent. ‘The King’s Highness is a good and gracious Lord unto us … He has granted all our desires and petitions and will keep a parliament shortly in York.’34 In the inexplicable belief that it would provide some sort of reassurance, Aske told the Pilgrims that the Duke of Norfolk would soon come north. About that, at least, he was right.
Despite Aske’s call for the Doncaster deal to be respected, there was a new rising in Beverley and a great rally, reminiscent of the Pilgrims’ early days, was held in the grounds of Fountains Abbey. A rumour that Aske had been assassinated persuaded some of his friends to join the sporadic uprisings. So he travelled to Ripon to prove that he was still alive, and to Beverley to persuade its citizens to be patient. After a traveller from Boston told the local Pilgrims that the supposed amnesty, agreed in Doncaster, was not being respected in Lincolnshire, there was nothing he could do to prevent new risings in Lancashire. The tales were true. The hostages, demanded by the King before the local revolts had ended, had been captured and were already in prison – among them Captain Cobbler.
The King called Darcy to Court. Wisely he chose not to go. His official explanation was that he thought it his duty to remain in the north and work with Aske to prevent an uprising which was more powerful, but less principled, than the Pilgrimage of Grace. Whether or not the desire to broker peace was the real reason for his rejection of the King’s invitation, there was certainly the need for a moderating influence among what was left of the Pilgrims. Impatient and suspicious, they had found a new leader: Sir Francis Bigod of Mulgrave Castle near Whitby. Thanks to him, the Pilgrimage of Grace ended in disorder and despair.
Bigod had been a Protestant zealot. He had emerged from East Riding obscurity as a protégé of Cardinal Wolsey, was appointed one of the King’s Commissioners for Yorkshire and had contributed mightily to the completion of Valor Ecclesiasticus – the inventory of the wealth owned by English churches and monasteries. During the performance of his duties, he had happened to be in the congregation in Jervaulx Abbey when a monk, George Lazenby, had preached against the Act of Supremacy. Bigod had the monk arrested and, in consequence, became anathema to the Pilgrims. When they approached Whitby, where he had taken refuge, he tried to escape their wrath by sea, but his boat was blown north to Hartlepool. Captured by the Pilgrims, he underwent what seems to have been a genuine conversion. From then on, he was a zealot for the Pope and Rome.
Shortly after his conversion, Bigod met, by chance, John Hallam – a militant among the original Pilgrims and one of the men behind the move to occupy Hull and Scarborough, which Aske had frustrated. Bigod regarded the meeting as an Act of God which the Almighty had arranged to initiate another rising, and announced that Hallam had convinced him that a fresh pilgrimage must begin. The Yorkshire militants had found a new leader. Bigod’s eloquence moved his audiences to religious rapture. ‘Also here is that the king should have cure of your body and soul, which is plain false for it is Gospel of Christ and that I will justify to my death.’35 His strategic thinking was not of the same quality as his oratory. Short of men, the new rebels failed to take Hull, where the citizens had grown weary of religious wars. Bigod retired in disorder, leaving behind to their fate many of the men to whom he had promised a victorious pilgrimage.
The failure of the second uprising – sometimes regarded as independent of the first – convinced all but the most passionate Pilgrims that their best hope lay in Aske’s assurance of the King’s mercy. But Bigod’s behaviour had changed the prospect of even that. Henry knew that his belatedly recruited army could easily crush what little resistance remained. And he had been provided with a pretext for doing so. During his flight from Beverley, Bigod had dropped a number of papers. One of them denounced the Act of Supremacy in the most extreme terms. Discovery of the polemic made plausible the spurious charge that an armed rising had been mounted to defeat the will of King and Parliament. That was a breach of the agreement negotiated on Doncaster Bridge. The King was no longer required to keep his side of the bargain.
Bigod, still at large, continued to encourage revolt and did manage to incite one or two ineffectual risings. But, north of the Humber, all was confusion. Some Pilgrims feared that the Duke of Norfolk would treat Yorkshire as Lincolnshire had been treated. Others hoped that he would come, with no more than his personal household, to give pardons and administer oaths of loyalty. The spirit of righteous obligation which had once inspired the Pilgrims was dead. When Norfolk eventually arrived – at Candlemas 1537 – he proceeded with caution that was mistaken for leniency. One by one, Pilgrims confessed that they had ‘Offended the King in this rebellion’, swore that they repented and would not transgress again, handed over their arms and named the captains who had led the Pilgrimage.
It became clear, even to the most naive Pilgrim, that anyone who had taken part in a rebellion, after the Doncaster amnesty, would not be included in its provisions and would die. Hallam and Bigod had already been executed. There was to be one last spark of rebellion before the fire of faith was finally extinguished. Six thousand rebels mustered outside Carlisle and opened fire, with longbows, on the garrison. They were slaughtered by mercenaries recruited on the Scottish border, whom the rebels – in their simplicity – believed God would give them the power to vanquish. In town after town across Lancashire, Cumberland, Durham and Northumberland, hostages were taken and executed alongside men who were casually nominated, and often wrongly identified, as instigators of the new rebellion.
The carnage spread across all of England north of the River Trent. Two hundred and sixteen men and women were executed on Norfolk’s orders. Most of them were hanged, cut down before death, disembowelled and then beheaded. As many others died in his prison, were summarily executed or were murdered by his rapacious looting troops. The leaders of the Pilgrimage, and its most prominent supporters, were sent to London for prosecution in show trials. Among them were Lord Darcy and Robert Aske.
Darcy exercised his right to be tried by his peers. At the hearing which preceded his trial he set out, bravely and convincingly, who he believed the true miscreant to be: ‘Cromwell, it is thou that art the very original and chief cause of this rebellion and mischief.’36 There was no doubt that Darcy had been in rebellion against the crown. But it was equally certain that, after the Doncaster amnesty, he had kept the oath of loyalty and done his best to persuade others to do the same. Since it was necessary to charge him with an offence committed after the Doncaster agreement was signed, he was charged with the treasonable attempt to capture Hull and was convicted on perjured evidence. On the King’s instruction, Darcy’s execution was planned to take place in the north, so that the men and women who were still tempted to support the cause for which he died were reminded that the penalty for treason was death. Henry was persuaded that a whole army would be needed to prevent his prisoner being rescued. Death was, for Darcy, an insufficient penalty. He was posthumously expelled from the Order of the Garter; and a recent addition to the chivalrous company, Thomas Cromwell, was given his stall in Windsor Chapel.
Robert Aske was taken to the Tower for what can only be described as a show trial. The prosecution had prepared 107 questions for him to answer. They ranged from dates and details of meetings with Darcy, to his opinion on the general behaviour of the King. There was no mention of his attempts, after Doncaster, to convince his followers that Henry was their rightful sovereign. Christopher Aske confirmed the Pilgrims’ earlier suspicions that he was one of Henry’s agents by giving evidence at his brother’s trial that he had tried to persuade Robert to be loyal to the King and that his pleas had been rejected. The conviction was a formality and the sentence mandatory. Aske was to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
It was decided to risk carrying out the execution in York and that it should take place on market day – so as to attract the largest possible crowd – at the top of the hill by Clifford’s Tower. The proceedings could not begin until the Duke of Norfolk arrived, and Aske spent some of the time making the customary speech. He described the resentment he felt on hearing that Cromwell had described all northern men as traitors and called on God to witness that the King had granted him a pardon. Then he made his last wish. ‘Let me be full dead ere I be dismembered.’ The wish was granted. So it was a corpse that the hangman butchered, before draping the torso in chains and hanging it from the arm of the scaffold.