1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (19 page)

From the outset, he saw the uprising as unequivocally treasonous. The rebels were ‘false traitors and rebels’ of ‘wretched and devilish intents’, concerned with perpetrating the ‘malice and iniquity of this rebellion’. He also believed their fears were wholly unfounded and lambasted them for rebelling on the basis of ‘light tales… and such light causes’. At one point in his answer to the Lincolnshire rebels, he exclaimed contemptuously, ‘we marvel what madness is in your brain!’ He believed that the rebels acted with ‘great unkindness’ and ‘much unnaturalness’. Above all, he was affronted that his subjects should tell him how to rule:

Concerning choosing of counsellors, I never have read, heard or known, that princes’ councillors and prelates should be appointed by rude and ignorant common people; nor that they were persons meet or of ability, to discern and choose meet and sufficient councillors for a prince: how presumptuous then are ye the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm… to find fault with your prince for the electing of his councillors and prelates, and to take upon you, contrary to God’s law, and man’s law, to rule your prince, whom you are bound by all laws to obey…

He rebuked them for their interference and advised them to:

show yourself as bounden and obedient subjects, and no more… intermeddle yourselves from henceforth with the weighty affairs of the realm, the direction whereof only appertains to us your king and such noble men and councillors, as we list to elect and choose.

Henry also stressed that consent by these noble men, knights and gentlemen gave legitimacy to his policies in these ‘weighty affairs’. He pointed out that all had been agreed and ‘granted to us by Parliament and not set forth by the mere will of any councillor’ and that, in religious matters, he had ‘done nothing but what the whole clergy of the province of York, as well as that of Canterbury, have found to be conformable to God’s word’. To Henry’s mind (a classic example of the aforementioned dissonance theory, perhaps? See page 72), it was clear that everything he had done had been lawful and with the consent of others, which therefore made the actions of the northerners wholly inappropriate and illegitimate.
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Such unprovoked treason would be dealt with severely. In his first letter of early October to the commissioners of the subsidy, he recommended that the commissioners send ‘100 of the ringleaders, with halters about their necks, to our lieutenant’, or else threatened his army of ‘100,000 men, horse and foot, in harness, with munitions and artillery, which they cannot resist’, adding savagely that this army would ‘burn, spoil and destroy their goods, wives and children with all extremity’. Later in October, having heard of a rising at Sawley Abbey, he commanded the Earl of Derby to act ruthlessly towards the monks, instructing: ‘You are to take the said abbot and monks forth with violence and have them hanged without delay in their monks’ apparel.’ This was summary justice, to be delivered without trial or process of law. Despite all evidence to the contrary, right up until the December pardon, Henry continued to believe in a military solution and ordered the continued muster of troops and construction of fortifications. He continued to boast of his overstated army. He also adamantly held out for the execution of a number of ringleaders and for the rebels’ official submission before opening negotiations. Crucially, he believed his ‘honour would be touched’ if circumstances were otherwise. They were, and, as we shall see, it was.
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The Question of Obedience and Tyranny

It might be helpful to put Henry’s response in some context. All mainstream thinkers in the sixteenth century believed that subjects were commanded to be obedient and active rebellion was forbidden, no matter how abominably a king had behaved. Archbishop Cranmer, for example, wrote, ‘though the magistrates be evil and very tyrants against the commonwealth, yet the subjects must obey in all worldly things’. Even radicals such as Robert Barnes, who was executed as a heretic in 1540, concurred: he wrote ‘the Scripture commands us to obey wicked Princes’. This was also clearly Henry VIII’s point of view. Henry had wholeheartedly approved of Anne Boleyn’s gift of a copy of William Tyndale’s
The Obedience of a Christian Man
. In it, Tyndale argued that, ‘He that judges the king judges God; and he that resists the king resists God and damns God’s law and ordinance… The king is, in this world, without law, and may at his lust do right or wrong and shall give accounts but to God only.’ It was an objection that Henry raised with the Pilgrims. In a circular sent to his bishops in November 1536, Henry commanded them to go from place to place within their dioceses declaring ‘the obedience due by God’s law to the Sovereign, whose commandments they have no right to resist even though they were unjust’. He raised this point directly with the rebel representatives Sir Ralph Ellerker and Sir Robert Bowes on 27 November, reminding them that ‘God commanded them to obey their prince whatever he be, yea though he should not direct them justly’. Henry knew his political theory.
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The corollary to this doctrine of obedience was that kings were to act for the common good. In 1517, Erasmus had sent Henry a copy of his book
The Education of a Christian Prince
in which he set forth his vision of how to prepare princes to rule justly and virtuously. According to Erasmus, a good king knows that he is dependent on the consent and will of his subjects, and that it is only such consent that entitles him to exercise authority. In addition, to be good a king ought to take advice and seek wisdom, for Erasmus warned, ‘power without goodness is unmitigated tyranny’, so ‘make it your business to acquire for yourself the greatest store of wisdom so that you alone of all men may best be able to see what should be striven for and what should be avoided’. A tyrant would, by contrast, surround himself with flatterers who would not speak frankly to him. A monarch served by good, strong counsellors preserved the kingdom from tyranny and held evil at bay. It was a duty incumbent on courtiers to counsel their king, and it was the king’s responsibility to listen to his counsellors. ‘The ‘uncounselled king’ was, almost by definition, a tyrant’.
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This left the Pilgrims in something of a tricky situation. Most responded by trying to square the circle by blaming, at least in their rhetoric, evil laws on the king’s counsellors rather than the king himself. Most of the rebels, mindful of the 1534 Act of Treason, did not go as far as the abbot of Colchester, who openly and angrily spoke out against the king, saying ‘what a world is this: I hear say that all the abbeys shall go down: these tyrants and bloodsuckers doth thrust out of their houses these good religious fathers against all right and law’. Nor did they go as far as another man, who told a royal servant, William Breyar, ‘thy master is a thief, for he pulls down all the churches in the country’. The response of the crowd around Breyar was to protest angrily, ‘it is not the king’s deed but the deed of Crumwell, and if we had him here we would crum him and crum him so that he was never so crummed’ (a play on words of Cromwell’s name), ‘and if thy master were here we would new crown him’! The Lincolnshire rebels declared that Cromwell, Richard Rich, Thomas Audley, Sir Christopher Hales (Master of the Rolls) and the ‘new bishops’ were ‘the devisers of all the false laws’ and ‘the doers of all mischief’. Aske similarly denounced certain ‘evil disposed persons, being of the king’s council’, while the Pontefract articles and other demands specifically identified Cromwell and the others as heretics and subverters of the laws. In fact, the rebels believed they ‘had not offended the King’, as their complaint was against ‘the gentlemen [who] caused the proclamations to be made in his name’. With no trace of irony, the rebels proclaimed themselves the king’s ‘true and faithful subjects’.
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It was ostensibly a safe route. In 1525, Henry had sought to raise money to invade France and had asked his subjects for voluntary donations, which became known as the Amicable Grant. When his commissioners had met widespread resistance, Henry had made it known that he was appalled that his subjects had – without his knowledge – been imposed upon so unreasonably. He had shifted the blame to his chief councillor, Thomas Wolsey, who had publicly admitted that the enterprise was his own, and Henry had been able to play the role of the benevolent and just prince (in practice, Henry had had a central role in levying the tax).
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Yet, in 1536, Henry took the rebellion personally. This time round, he did not take the easy way out of allowing the rebels to blame his counsellors and leave him in the clear. Instead, by volubly objecting to their attempts to dictate his choice of counsellors, chastising them for their presumption in finding fault with his choice and insisting on his right to appoint whom he wished, Henry neatly snookered himself. Had he forgotten the words of Erasmus? If a sixteenth-century tyrant was one who only listened to flatterers and didn’t remove evil counsellors, it looked as if Henry had appointed himself to this role. Erasmus, who died on 12 July 1536, was probably fortunate not to see the king on whom his hope had rested brought so low.

The Post-Pardon Revolts

Events in early 1537 have influenced history’s view of the rebellion and pardon, but two historians, Michael Bush and David Bownes, have argued that by examining the situation in December 1536 without the benefit of hindsight, one realizes that the pardon offered to the rebels would have been greatly humiliating for the king. Despite bluster and boasts about the vast army he would bring to bear on the rebels, no such large army was forthcoming for Henry: the rebels outnumbered the royal troops by a large margin (50,000 to 9,000). Failing a military option, Henry always intended that a pardon should be offered on the basis of a prior oath of submission to him, with the exception of a certain number of ringleaders (as had been the case in Lincolnshire), and without any concession to the rebel demands, conditions which Norfolk had, in the face of the rebels’ superior might and resolve, been forced to relinquish. Adhering to the terms agreed with the rebels would have meant holding a parliament that would probably have overturned many of the religious changes of the previous years. Bush and Bownes suggest ‘what is certain is that the Anglican Church would have returned to Roman Catholicism; the dissolution of the monasteries would not have occurred… most of what Thomas Cromwell stood for would have been rejected…’ This is not, however, what happened, and why it did not has much to do with the course of events in early 1537 and, above all, with Henry’s intention that once the government was in a position to do so, those who had humiliated Henry in the past would be made to pay.
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At first glance, Henry’s actions immediately following the pardon appear quite curious. In late November, in a letter to Norfolk, Henry had described that ‘villain… Aske’ as ‘having neither wit nor experience… a common pedlar of the law’. Yet in mid-December, he wrote inviting the ‘trusty and well-beloved’ Aske to come to court secretly, claiming a great desire to speak with him and ‘to hear, of your mouth, the whole circumstances and beginning of that matter’. When Aske arrived, Henry ‘received him into his favour and gave unto him apparel and great rewards’, and soon after he left, Aske wrote to Darcy that the king had been a ‘gracious sovereign lord to me’ and extended ‘mercy from the heart’. Other rebel leaders had also been invited to join him at court, and when they returned home in January, all were confident of the king’s ‘liberal pardon’, and his intentions to hold a parliament and crown Queen Jane at York.
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This shift from wanting to execute the ringleaders to wanting to have them round for tea is intriguing. Some historians, considering the December pardon to be a spectacularly devious bluff by Norfolk (who, it is suggested, knew his master’s true character would lead inevitably to reprisals), have characterized Henry’s subsequent show of charm and mercy towards Aske and the other rebel leaders as unmitigated deceit and guile. Others have interpreted Henry’s actions as evidence of a genuine commitment to the terms reached in Doncaster. Even if we accept that the December pardon reflected a necessary and unwished-for compromise by Norfolk on Henry’s behalf, rather than a calculated scheme of great contrivance, it is undeniable that Henry’s attitude, as seen either side of Aske’s visit through his letters to his commanders in December and January, appears to be consistently one of great antipathy and obduracy towards the rebels. So how can we explain the way Henry humoured and charmed the man he would later call ‘the grand worker of that insurrection’?
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In December, the king met with his council to discuss ways and means ‘for the maintenance of perfect quiet in the future’, because although the insurrection was ‘now appeased… there remain persons who desire, either by Parliament or else by another rebellion, to compass a change from their present state’. Crucially, in terms of how he was to behave with Aske, this document noted that the ‘King should allure the nobles and gentry of those parts to obedience by his affability, assuring them that he has passed there [
sic
] crimes wholly to oblivion’, for ‘by this mean [
sic
] his Grace shall also by little and little find out the root of this matter’. Here we have the key to the approach Henry took with Aske – it was charm designed to win him over to obedience. In January, Aske’s attempts to assure people of the king’s adherence to his pardon suggests it had worked and, in fact, Aske believed Henry had kept the pardon even at his death a few months later. Henry also hoped his treatment of Aske would help him discover the true culprits and causes of the rebellion for, as we have seen, Henry was not persuaded of the sufficiency of the motives stated by the rebels. In other words, it is right to consider Henry’s treatment of Aske a form of artifice, appropriate to the underdog position of the government in December 1536 but designed as a means to reverse that.
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