The Last White Rose (43 page)

These fresh revolts gave Henry an excuse for repudiating the Doncaster agreement, and he ordered the Duke of Norfolk to declare martial law in the Western Marches. The king also repudiated his promise to grant pardons. During the summer of 1537 the North Country endured a sustained reign of terror, while seventeen pilgrim leaders were taken to London for trial and execution.

Nothing could cow Lord Darcy. When examined by the Lord Privy Seal, he told him:

Cromwell, it is thou that art the very original and chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief, and art likwise causer of the apprehension of us that be noblemen and dost daily earnestly travail to bring us to our end and to strike off our heads, and I trust that ere thou die, though thou wouldst procure all the noblemen’s heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet shall there one head remain that shall strike off thy head.
¹⁴

‘Old Tom’ was beheaded on Tower Hill, Lord Hussey at Lincoln. Most of the others were executed at Lincoln or York, suffering the usual butchery except for the knights, who because of their rank were hanged until dead. Orders were given that Robert Aske, too, should not be cut down before he was dead, although his torso was hung in chains to rot on the gibbet. The only woman among them, Margaret Cheyney – Sir John Bulmer’s ‘paramour’ – who with her lover had been found guilty on the most specious grounds, was burned alive at Smithfield – ‘a very fair creature and a beautiful’ according to an observer.
¹⁵

In the meantime, given a bad fright by what he regarded as the ‘horrible treason’, Henry had ordered Norfolk to break the North Country. About 150 of the commons, including several monks, were hanged during a campaign of calculated frightfulness: men were strung up on trees in their own gardens, priests dangled from steeples and another woman was burned. Some hangings took place without trial, to avoid any chance of acquittal. The king rejected all appeals and if a jury found a defendant not guilty he ordered a retrial – he grumbled at Norfolk’s negligence in not quartering the bodies. He announced that in the summer of 1537 he would go on a progress through the North, to accept its return to obedience, but when the time came he shirked the visit.

By any reckoning the Pilgrimage of Grace was an exceptionally dangerous upheaval: ‘a formidable counter-revolutionary programme, a fundamental rejection of the Henrician Reformation’.
¹⁶
Yet there had been few signs of Yorkism. During the Lincolnshire rising someone at Stamford had demanded ‘A new King’
¹⁷
while at Furness Abbey in a region once famous for loyalty to Richard III’s memory, some of the monks declared that Henry VIII could not be the rightful King of England because his father ‘came in by the sword’, and another prophesied that
‘the red rose should die in his mother’s womb’. One of the brethren of Furness who spoke out was named Broughton, perhaps a kinsman of Lord Lovell’s friend, Sir Thomas Broughton.
¹⁸
But that was all.

The Pilgrimage was the White Rose’s only real chance of toppling the king and they let it slip.
¹⁹
Even so, Henry continued to fear the White Rose, and not entirely without reason. He knew that, had he been driven from the throne, there was only one man who could have taken his place – Reginald Pole. Judging from his bitterness towards the entire Pole family, the possibility that Reginald might still succeed in exploiting the situation was never very far from his thoughts.

26. Autumn 1536: The Pilgrimage of Grace

1
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. XI, (iii), 786.

2
. The definitive study is R.W. Hoyle,
The Pilgrimage of Grace and
the Politics of the 1530s
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001 – which argues that the gentry only joined in order to defuse it.

3
. Dodds and Dodds,
The Pilgrimage of Grace, op. cit
., vol. 1, pp. 88–9.

4
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. XII (i), 900, 901 and 945.

5
.
Ibid.
, vol. XI, 780.

6
.
LP Hen VIII
, X, 1086; Dodds and Dodds,
The Pilgrimage of
Grace
,
op. cit.
, vol. 1, pp. 300–6.

7
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XI, 672, 722–3.

8
. C. Ross,
Richard III
, London, Eyre Methuen, 1981, p. 212.

9
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. V (ii), 114.

10
.
LP Hen VIII
, XI, 957.

11
.
Ibid.
, XII (i), 1013.

12
. R.B. Merriman,
Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell
, 2 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1902, vol. 2, p. 169.

13
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XI, 1246.

14
.
Ibid.
, vol. XII (i), 976.

15
. C. Wriothesley,
A Chronicle of England during the Reign of the
Tudors from ad 1485–1559
, ed. W.D. Hamilton, vol. 1.

16
. Bernard,
The King’s Reformation
,
op. cit.
, p. 344.

17
. Dodds and Dodds,
The Pilgrimage of Grace
,
op. cit.
, vol. 1, p. 305.

18
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XII (i), 841.

19
. Scarisbrick suggests that the Pilgrimage ‘could have openly enlisted latent Yorkist sentiment’, stressing its failure to do so. J.J. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968, p. 341.

27

Spring–Summer 1537: ‘Mr Pole’s Traitorous Practises’

‘that arch-traitor Reynold Pole, enemy to God’s word and his natural country, had moved and stirred divers great princes and potentates of Christendom to invade the realm of England.’

E. Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York
¹

In December 1536 Pope Paul III made Reginald Pole a cardinal. The new Prince of the Church had taken no notice of a letter from Thomas Starkey – obviously inspired by Henry – which had warned him that by accepting a Red Hat he would become the enemy of his king and his country. As Henry realized only too well, Pole had been given the hat because the pope was sending him to help the pilgrims. Before the year was over, Reginald set out for Flanders.

The last hope of the White Rose, Pole was a genuinely majestic figure. Paintings show an austere, patrician face with
high cheekbones, melancholy, unusually large eyes and a long black beard. That rare Renaissance phenomenon, an Italianate English nobleman, he was impressively erudite, speaking fluent Greek and passable Hebrew. Very proud of his Plantagenet blood, he was fully aware of his family’s claims. ‘My mother’s brother [was] the Earl of Warwick … who being the son of the Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward, became, by the death of that King’s sons, next heir to the English crown,’ he would remind Lord Protector Somerset in 1549.
²
Yet he had no particular desire to wear the crown himself. Pole was essentially a churchman, and if called on to be king – or king consort – he would accept the role but with reluctance, and only as a means of bringing his homeland back to the Catholic fold.

‘Here [at Rome] lives an English gentleman of the name of Reginald Pole,’ reported a Spanish envoy in November 1536. ‘His Holiness honours him much and has given him lodgings within his own palace, and over his own apartments. Though he dresses as an ecclesiastic, he is not yet in holy orders.’
³
Given such close proximity, it is likely that Paul III often discussed King Henry with Reginald, whom he had known for many years. The pope was familiar with the White Rose programme: for Mary to replace her father on the throne, possibly with Reginald as her husband. It certainly seemed a good way of bringing England back to Rome, if Henry was not prepared to do so.

At this date Catholicism was supported not just by Mary and the ‘old nobility’, but by England as a whole. While there may have been plenty of anti-clericalism and contempt for corrupt clergy, the vast majority of people still wanted the Mass. ‘Heresy’ was confined to a few tiny pockets of more or less illiterate Lollards and some small groups of ‘sacramentaries’ in London and East Anglia and at the universities, influenced by the new ideas from Germany or Switzerland – the only men and women who, as yet, welcomed the king’s rupture with Rome with unfeigned enthusiasm. Besides the rebellion in the North and the smaller one in Somerset, an abortive rising had to be
put down in Norfolk during the spring of 1537, while there were signs of open discontent in other places as well, with angry grumbling throughout the country. However, Paul III and the White Rose had two exceptionally formidable opponents in Henry VIII and Cromwell.

The pope had created Pole a cardinal so that he could go to England as a papal legate (ambassador with full powers), the Conde de Cifuentes reported from Rome. He adds, ‘it was understood that the rebels wanted him and only fair that the Pope should respond to their wishes’. The mission in the bull appointing Reginald a legate was supposedly to persuade the rulers of Christendom to settle their differences so that they would be able to attend a council and plan a crusade against the Turks. However, the bull’s small print empowered him to deal with other matters concerning the Church, including England’s break with Rome.