Subject to Change
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Subject to Change
The Pilgrimage of Grace: When England Fought the Reformation
When 50,000 northerners marched under their banners in 1536, England witnessed its largest rebellion since the Peasants' Revolt. The Pilgrimage of Grace wasn't merely a protest—it was a defining moment that threatened to unravel the English Reformation and return the kingdom to Rome.
Professor Peter Marshall, renowned Tudor historian from Warwick University, takes us deep into this extraordinary episode where religious devotion, political power, and regional identity collided with explosive results.
Henry VIII's desperate quest for a male heir led him to break with Rome, setting off changes that rippled far beyond the royal bedchamber. What began as a "change of the English Church's CEO" rapidly transformed into something more radical—monasteries dissolved, shrines dismantled, and traditions questioned. For northerners especially, these weren't abstract theological matters but direct attacks on community identity.
When the rebels and royal forces faced off across the River Don, England's religious future hung in the balance. A providential rainstorm, false royal promises, and factional divisions among the rebels ultimately preserved Henry's reformation.
Peter is brilliant in exploring the paths that led to the English reformation and to the rebellion that came within a whisker of stopping it in its tracks and tumbling Henry from his throne.
Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hogg. My guest today is Peter Marshall, who is Professor of History at Warwick University. I think Peter is best known as an expert on the English Reformation. Well today we're going to talk about an attempt to strangle the Reformation in its cradle, and that is the rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Anyway, welcome Peter to the podcast.
Peter Marshall:Thanks, thanks, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Russell:Peter, you came on the podcast before to talk about Mrs Leakey and the Bishop, which was a completely mad story of ghosts, corrupt bishops and goodness knows what else. But is it fair to say that the English Reformation is your area? That's what you're really interested in?
Peter Marshall:Well, yes, I guess. So I mean rather self-indulgently. Through my career, I've really just written about things that I've found interesting and where I thought there might be something new and perhaps unusual to say, and that was certainly the story with Mother Leakey. In fact, my most recent book, which came out last year and plug plug has just appeared in paperback, is a history of the Orkney Islands in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, which is very self-indulgent because that's where I'm from originally.
Peter Marshall:So that was a kind of return to my roots, but also a kind of a challenge to myself to think about how the history of Britain looks if you sort of switch the map around and make the centre the far north of Scotland rather than London or Edinburgh. But you're absolutely right, it's really Tudor England was what I sort of trained to do, that was what my PhD was on many decades ago, on the parish clergy of Tudor England in Henry VIII's reign, and I've written various books and articles, usually on aspects of the English Reformation in the 16th century, leading up to, as you mentioned just now, a big book in 2017 called Heretics and Believers, which was a very long history of the English Reformation in the 16th century, in which the Pilgrimage of Grace had a walk-on part of about two pages, but my plan now is to think about it in a bit more detail.
Russell:So we're going to talk about this rebellion which is in the reign of Henry VIII, and that's an attempt to overthrow the Reformation and to bring back good old Catholicism. And this is the Pilgrimage of Grace, which, by the way, I just can't get my head around the name. It's incredibly strange and actively misleading. So maybe we can talk about the name later on.
Peter Marshall:Well, there's a story around the name, so I hope we do swing back to that.
Russell:Okay, we'll come back to that, but for my podcast title, I think I need something a bit more punchy and easily digested by a general audience. So my thought was Reformation II - the fight back. So what do you reckon?
Peter Marshall:The empire strikes back Excellent.
Russell:Exactly. But then if you have Reformation II, the fight back. Then presumably you then have to have Reformation I, and then, if you're going to have Reformation I and if it's going well, I guess we have to have a prequel. Yeah, so for the purposes of this podcast, I think let's start with the prequel. And I guess my question, what I'd like you to talk about, is what's happening in England in the years leading up to the Reformation and, in particular, how are people experiencing their religious lives and if indeed you can separate your religious life from the rest of your life.
Peter Marshall:Yes, okay, so that's a big question. Sorry about that. We could talk about that for a long time and I'll see if I can sort of cut to the quick. I mean, maybe starting with the words is actually quite helpful, and I think you put your finger on the button there, russell.
Peter Marshall:It really is very difficult to separate religion out from other aspects of life in a way that we're used to in the modern world, where some people do religion, others don't. It happens on a Sunday morning or a Saturday or a Friday. Late. Medieval and 16th century England isn't like that at all. I mean, quite interestingly, they had the word religion, but they didn't mean by it what we mean by it. So religion was what monks and nuns and friars did, and the religious life was leaving this secular world to enter a monastery to serve God. So there wasn't actually a term that sort of encapsulated what we would think of as religion, because it was so deeply woven into all kinds of aspects of life. Of course I think we can more or less assume not that everybody was terribly good and pious and holy all the time, but belief in God was almost a kind of psychological necessity. There don't seem to have been any, or hardly any, atheists in the 16th century.
Peter Marshall:In anything like our modern understanding of it, religion is not something out of which you can opt, if I can put it like that. So attendance at church, at the Catholic service of mass, sunday by Sunday through the year, is a requirement of law, and you can be prosecuted in the church courts if you don't go. Religion maps onto individual lifestyles. You know the key points of life marriage, birth, preparation for death. All of these are sanctified by sacraments of the church, and what we might think of as the church's year, or what's sometimes rather grandly called the liturgical calendar, the official cycle of celebrations and services in the church maps very closely onto the agricultural calendar. So religion is woven into people's working lives as well as their spiritual lives, and some aspects of this are still with us. Universities still have their first term in October, because that's really when the church's year begins, with the celebration of Michaelmas at the end of September.
Russell:So I'm kind of thinking about the period around the early 1500s, around about the time that Luther is really getting going on the continent. Is there the same sort of pressure on the church in England as there seems to be on the continent, and in Germany in particular, or are things sort of bumping along okay?
Peter Marshall:I think they are bumping along pretty okay. I'm trying not to give the usual historian's answer to a question like that, which is always yes but no but yes. So an older interpretation and I guess we're talking, you know, 50 years and more ago which would have been the sort of standard answer to that, which is that the Reformation is a crisis waiting to happen because the church is deeply corrupt, it's deeply unpopular, it generates, through the privileges of its bishops and priests, a fair amount of resentment, known as anti-clericalism, and people are desperate for something purer, more spiritual, more sort of focused on their needs. And when Luther and others come along and offer that, people sort of accept it with open arms. And for quite a long time, really everywhere in Europe, but perhaps particularly in England, historians have been unpersuaded that that was actually the case. And once we sort of move away from the loudest voices, the polemicists, the pamphleteers, the zealots, and look at the evidence we have for local communities, it does appear that people are pretty happy. People are literally putting their money where their mouth is. You know what I mean? It's still a metaphor. They were putting their money where their mouths were. They were giving to churches in their wills, they were donating to them in their lifetimes.
Peter Marshall:A huge number of English parish churches are very substantially refurbished and rebuilt in the century before Henry VIII's break with Rome. People are becoming priests in very large numbers, which would be hard to explain if everybody resented and hated the priesthood. Of course there are problems, there is some dissent, there are some quote-unquote heretics who don't accept the official teachings of the church. These people in England are called Lollards, but a lot of historians now think they weren't perhaps tremendously significant as a sort of springboard for the Reformation. Perhaps, interestingly, in some ways the pendulum is sort of swinging back a bit and we're moving from, in the rather grandiose terms that historians use, a revisionist phase of study of the Reformation to a post-revisionist phase. And I guess, hand on heart, if I had to sort of put on a T-shirt myself, I probably would be some kind of post-revisionist.
Peter Marshall:And what quite a lot of us now think is that in some ways the church was a kind of victim of its own success and that in fact people were pretty serious about religion they were encouraged to by the church and yet, because as a human institution it was in all sorts of ways corrupt, there were tremendous demands for reformation with a small r, as we might which, precisely because it was so woven into economic and political life, vested interests of all kinds, it was quite difficult for the church to meet some of those demands for reform. Now, this didn't necessarily have blown up into a full-scale revolt and there were very particular political reasons for that, which we will come on to in a minute. But I think a kind of notion that absolutely everything in the garden is rosy is perhaps pushing things a little bit too far. One of the things actually which I think older histories often got wrong about late medieval, pre-reformation Catholicism was the idea that it had sort of it had forgotten all about Christ because it was so focused on the saints and the Virgin Mary it had sort of abandoned the true story. If anything, I think the opposite is true, that medieval religion has this extraordinary sort of emotional focus on the person of Christ God becoming man and his taking on our suffering. So the imagery of the cross and of Christ's scourgings and tortures in his passion, those are sort of ubiquitous. The Virgin Mary is important in medieval religion precisely because she is the mother of Jesus, and her very human reaction to her son's sufferings are part of what creates this cult around her, but it really emanates from her son. So people are really anxious to deepen this bond with Christ and the Reformation, and some of what Luther is saying seems to be offering an opportunity to do that here.
Peter Marshall:In fact, if I can go back to the Lollards just for a minute and if people are not sure, so these Lollards are groups of people not right across the country, but there seem to have been patches of them in the southeast, in Kent and Essex, the country. But there seem to have been patches of them in the southeast, in Kent and Essex and up along the Thames Valley. None at all, as far as we can tell, in the north of England which might be significant for the story of the Pilgrimage of Grace. They originally had a connection with a 14th century Oxford theologian called John Wycliffe who had all kinds of very philosophically and theologically informed criticisms of the church of his day. But by the early 16th century Lauderdale sort of lost its links with this kind of academic leadership and has become a kind of sceptical sort of viewpoint of people. Maybe these days we'd call them conspiracy theorists. These are people who thought no, the bread and wine and the mass doesn't change into the body and blood of Christ. The priests are having us on when they can claim they do these things. Statues aren't any good. The relics of the saints are not helpful to us. So all the things that are central to devotional life of Catholics Lollards tend to be sceptical about.
Peter Marshall:But one of the things Lollards had been very keen about was access to the Word of God in Scripture, and Wycliffe's original disciples in the late 14th century had translated the Latin Bible into Old English. This is before printing, of course, so manuscript copies of this were made and these circulate pretty widely. And in fact we know that these vernacular versions of Scripture were read not just by Lollard heretics but by lots of perfectly orthodox Catholic laypeople, because they wanted to encounter Christ in the Gospels firsthand as well, and in some ways this wasn't terribly dramatic. It's another myth about the Reformation, really, that this is the very first time where it becomes possible to translate the Bible into vernacular languages.
Peter Marshall:There are vernacular translations in Italy, in France, parts of Germany, but in England, because translation of the Bible was associated so strongly with these Lollard dissidents, these Lollard heretics, the bishops had banned it. So England was quite unusual, if not unique in Western Europe in having no officially authorized translations of Scripture at all, and that, I think, helps to explain why quite a lot of people who might otherwise not have gone against the church were rather interested. Particularly when one of Luther's English disciples, william Tyndale, translates the New Testament into English, again, this time from the original Greek rather than from Latin. Has this printed abroad and smuggled back into England from the mid-1520s onwards, and there seems to be quite a ready market for Tyndale's New Testament?
Russell:So again, this is not necessarily an anti-Catholic thing. This is just an intense interest in the religious life, if you like, or religious ideas.
Peter Marshall:Yes in its beginnings. I think that's right, of course, having sort of started down that route. Tyndale himself is actually a very interesting case study in this. Because Tyndale kicks off really as a sort of radical, zealous, enthusiastic young Catholic reformer. His original inspiration is the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who was a name to conjure with in the early 16th century, who talks about the need to update the faith and get rid of all the old superstitions and so on.
Peter Marshall:And Tyndale originally goes to the Bishop of London, cuthbert Tunstall, and asks for his patronage to fund and support this translation into English of the New Testament. And Tunstall, for various reasons, including probably this suspicion about the dangers of Bible translation sends him away and Tyndale is pretty disgruntled and kind of radicalizes himself, I guess we could say these days, and kind of radicalizes himself, I guess we could say these days, and decides that a church that is not interested in supporting this project isn't worth supporting itself in any way. So he becomes a very rabid critic of the bishops and of the Pope and of most aspects of traditional Catholic faith.
Russell:But our sovereign Lord Henry, he is a good Catholic. I mean, there's been some friction, I think, between him and the Pope, but it's the kind of friction, is it, that you would expect between a king who has got the secular power and the Pope who has got his religious authority. But Henry is a devout Catholic, isn't he?
Peter Marshall:Oh, absolutely yes, and there had been some tensions. But you're absolutely right. You know there are constantly quarrels and arguments over all sorts of things between popes and monarchs of various kinds. Quite a lot of them involve the politics of Italy, which is very fragmented and very contested, and the French have been involved there from the late 15th century and the so-called Holy Roman Emperor, charles of Habsburg, charles V. He's heavily invested there as well. In fact it probably helped that England is so far away from the cockpit of papal politics in Italy. England's not really kind of terribly invested in those quarrels and I think that helped to make English monarchs generally get on pretty well with the papacy and to be seen as particularly devout and supportive of the pope.
Peter Marshall:Henry, in fact, as people might remember, gets a special title from the pope in 1521. He becomes a fidei defensor, the defender of the faith. He's tremendously pleased because other monarchs at the time, some of his rivals, like the kings of France they're the most Christian kings Rex Christianissimus, the rulers of Spain are the Los Reyes Catolicos, the Catholic monarchs. Henry doesn't have one of these special papal titles. So when Luther comes along, he goes into print. Against Luther he writes a work of theology, which is an extraordinary thing really for a monarch to do. Now it's not terribly good or original theology, and he also has quite a lot of help from smarter people behind the scenes, including his friend at that time, thomas More, but nonetheless Henry does put the hours into it. It goes out under his name. The Pope is delighted and Henry gets his title.
Peter Marshall:Luther is predictably not delighted. One of the great things about Luther is that he doesn't really sort of, he doesn't suck up to authority for its own sake. So Luther and Henry have this extraordinary falling out in which Luther calls him all kinds of things under the sun and vice versa, and so in fact Luther's name can't really be mentioned in England in Henry's reign, even after he breaks with the Pope. From that point onwards, so in the early 1520s, it looks like England is a major power opposing the Reformation and is going to help to try and contain this problem which has sprung up in Germany. And then of course there are very particular and very personal circumstances around Henry and his marriage which throw everything out of kilter on that.
Russell:Well, you kind of teased us there, so tell us how it all went wrong.
Peter Marshall:Yes, well, I mean, I imagine aspects of this story might be fairly familiar to people. They're a little complex, so again I'll try and sort of keep to the bare bones. Henry is married in 1509, which is the same year that he comes to the throne to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the joint monarchs of Spain, the rulers of Castile and Aragon, and insofar as we can tell it seems to have been a happy marriage. But crucially, it doesn't produce a male heir. There are a series of stillborn births. There's a son who lives a couple of weeks, there is a daughter who survives, the Princess Mary, born 1516.
Peter Marshall:But a daughter is not a son, and whether or not a woman can become monarch in England is a kind of untested proposition. The last time it had been tried, back in the 12th century, it hadn't ended particularly well. Time it had been tried back in the 12th century, it hadn't ended particularly well. Now, complicating this slightly is that Henry is not Catherine's first husband. She had been married. This was the original sort of diplomatic game being played by their father, Henry VII. She had been married to Henry's elder brother, Prince Arthur, who should have been king. We should have had a King Arthur in the 16th century. But Arthur dies suddenly in 1503. And to preserve the political alliance with Spain, Henry VII arranges for the widow to marry the next son. And this requires a little bit of unpicking because, by the understanding of marriage law in the 16th century, the fact that Catherine had been married to, had had sexual relations with Arthur that had created a kind of as they would have said at the time an affinity, a relationship with the brother-in-law, and that therefore requires a special dispensation from the Pope to allow the marriage to take place. And this is a bit of a technicality, and this is the sort of favour that Popes will do for monarchs, pretty much at the drop of a mitre. And so Pope Julius II duly issues the dispensation to allow the marriage to take place, and so it does.
Peter Marshall:And then we fast forward the best part of a decade and Henry is having doubts. Why doesn't he have a son? Is it perhaps because God didn't think the marriage should have taken place? Is he being punished? And then, of course, there's a factor X on this, which is that he makes the acquaintance of a lady of waiting at the court called Anne Boleyn. And the rest is history, as they say and this is for historians. It's a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum. Is he already having doubts about his marriage when he meets Anne? Or is it his infatuation with Anne which causes him to have doubts about his marriage? We can't say for certain. But either way, he spends much of the second half of the 1520s trying to persuade the Pope to annul the marriage to Catherine. This is always called Henry's divorce, but if we want to be technical about it, it's an annulment rather than a divorce, ie a formal declaration that it had never been a valid marriage in the first place.
Peter Marshall:So in other words, the new Pope, clement VII, is being asked to say that his predecessor had got it wrong in issuing a dispensation for the marriage to take place, which is a little bit embarrassing. But you know again, this falls within the normal range of what popes would be expected to do as favours for important European monarchs.
Russell:So OK. So the obvious question is why the hell doesn't he grant the annulment?
Peter Marshall:Well, politics, politics, politics. Back to the cockpit of Italy and really the kind of superpower of European politics. Who is this young monarch, charles of Habsburg, charles King of Spain, but who was also, by a series of dynastic accidents, inherited pretty much the whole of the Low Countries, lots of territory in Central and Eastern Europe, the southern bit of Italy and, crucially, is elected to the title of Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, which gives him prestige but also practical power in Germany and elsewhere. And Charles is the son of Philip of Habsburg, who is the brother of Catherine of Aragon, so Catherine is his aunt. Oh, that's awkward.
Peter Marshall:It would be a deep personal insult to him if she were to be turned aside by the King of England, and the Pope might have been prepared to risk the wrath of Charles V and hope that it would all blow over to keep Henry VIII on side.
Peter Marshall:But Charles is engaged in a struggle for control of Italy with the French king, francis I, and, cutting a long story short, charles is pretty much victorious in that struggle in the later 1520s and in fact in the end takes control of Rome and his terrible event. But his soldiers sack the city of Rome in 1527, with much massacre of monks and nuns and terrible things going on, and the Pope becomes a kind of prisoner of the emperor and so cannot defy him and allow the divorce to take place. So Henry's prospects for getting his marriage unpicked really depend on something over which he has no control, ie the politics and the military conflict in Italy, and that swings back and forth a bit and sometimes it looks favourable, other times it doesn't. Henry's chief minister, cardinal Wolsey, is pretty much working on this full time. It looks like it's getting somewhere when Wolsey is granted a commission to hear the case in England and pronounce on it.
Peter Marshall:And so in 1529, a court called a legating court because Wolsey is the Pope's legate is opened in England. But then things swing back the other way in Italy and final decision on the case is revoked to Rome and it's pretty clear that the decision is not going to go Henry's way. So I said it was quite a complex story. But to get back to the Reformation I guess you could say the Reformation, the break with Rome happens because Henry cannot fix his marital problem through the official channels of the Catholic Church and so he decides to cut out on his own and have a unilateral declaration in England that the marriage was never valid and Catherine can be put aside and he can go ahead and marry Anne Boleyn and that involves of course defying the authority of the Pope and ultimately denying it outright and Henry's declaration that he, not the Pope, is the supreme head of the Church in England.
Russell:And do you think the English diplomats were never going to win, or were they inept in some way?
Peter Marshall:Yeah Well, I mean, it's really hard to say in some ways whether there could have been another outcome. So it's easy to be very cynical about this and say, you know, the English Reformation starts in Henry the X codpiece or whatever, and that you know Henry is just making all these high-minded statements purely for personal reasons. And I think to some extent that must be true. But kings being kings, of course they often end up believing their own shtick. And I think Henry does genuinely come to believe that his marriage has been cursed by God and that he has sinned in marrying Catherine. Of course it's in his interest to do so. But at this point the politics, the act of state as we might say, does intersect in really interesting ways with the religious side of things and Luther's story.
Peter Marshall:Is Anne Boleyn a Protestant? Maybe that's a bit premature, but she's certainly a reformer of some kind. Perhaps a better word than Protestant is evangelical. She's been brought up at the French court where there's quite a lot of interest in radical religious reform. She has people around her, like the family chaplain, thomas Cranmer, who have been very drawn towards the views of the reformers, and Cranmer is very, very rapidly career promoted from being a kind of lowly archdeacon of the church at one point to a year or so later becoming Archbishop of Canterbury when the incumbent, william Wareham, suddenly dies in 1532. Cranmer is actually really important to this story because Cranmer suggests to Henry OK, this is partly a problem of law and unpicking this complex canon law of the church, but it's also a question of history and theology as well. And Cranmer is set up in, I guess, what we call these days a think tank to look into all the kind of philosophical, historical, scriptural, theological arguments about this. And he and a couple of other big-brained clerics go away and come back to Henry in 1530 with a document rather grandly called the Collectanea Satis Copiosa, which simply means the big enough collection. And what this big enough collection proves quote unquote proves To Henry's complete satisfaction at least To Henry's absolute complete satisfaction is that yes, of course he can go ahead and pronounce on the divorce in England because he is rightfully head of the church, and this is actually sounds a bit pedantic, but it's really important.
Peter Marshall:Henry doesn't become supreme head of the church in the early 1530s. He discovers that he has always been supreme head of the church and this goes right back to that other King Arthur, that legendary one and various other slightly suspect figures of early medieval history and all sorts of interpretations of the writings of the church fathers and the Old Testament and all the rest of it. So it's a kind of revolution in the understanding of history as well that the Catholic Middle Ages turns out to be a bit of a con. These bishops of Rome have usurped the rightful authority of monarchs like Henry. He doesn't just think he's head of the church, he thinks the king of France is head of the church in France as well, and so on. So it's perhaps not putting this too strongly to say that for Henry this is a kind of conversion experience and I think, as a result, conversion experience and I think, as a result, all kinds of other possible ways forward, all sorts of fudges that might have been considered he's not particularly interested in.
Peter Marshall:You know, believe it or not, at one point the Pope was thinking about licensing Henry VIII for bigamy so that he could have two wives simultaneously. Or there were thoughts that Catherine might be persuaded to take the veil and become a nun because there was some precedent for that being a way of dissolving a marriage. Or complicated arguments could be worked out that you know in the small print, julius II had given the wrong kind of dispensation. So you know, the marriage on a technicality wasn't valid. Henry's not terribly interested in that.
Peter Marshall:He goes really for the big guns right from the start, because it's pointed out to him or he discovers himself that the Old Testament, in the book of Leviticus, has a very interesting passage saying that you know, if you take your brother's widow then you shall be childless. It appears that there is a ban in Leviticus, chapter 16, on marriage to a brother's wife. It doesn't actually say widow, it says brother's wife. You should take your brother's wife, and rather unhelpfully.
Peter Marshall:Elsewhere in the Old Testament, in the book of Deuteronomy, there's another passage enjoining people to marry their brother's widows. But Henry's supporters say no. No, leviticus is the important passage here, and when it says they won't have any children, actually the Hebrew word really means sons. So you know that pans out, and so what we might think of as a kind of Protestant principle, that the word of God is absolutely supreme and that popes are subject to it and can't reinterpret it in ways that they like right from the outset, that is, who presumably at this stage has got him surrounded by soldiers but to allow Henry to break away from Rome, I mean to break away from the Pope's authority.
Russell:That feels like that's a catastrophe for papal diplomacy. And so you know we were chatting earlier and I was saying that in the movie Dr Strangel. So you know we were chatting earlier and I was saying that in the movie Dr Strangelove. You know, the Russians have developed this doomsday weapon which is the ultimate deterrent. But then somebody points out to them that you know, there's no point in having a doomsday weapon if nobody knows you've got it. So does the Pope realize you know what's going to happen if he turns them down? Well, henry has done quite a lot of threatening of the Pope. Realise what's going to happen if he turns them down.
Peter Marshall:Well, henry has done quite a lot of threatening of the Pope, so this doesn't come out of the blue and he's got all the nobility of England signing sort of letters threatening the Pope with this, that and the other. So it's not something that happens quickly or suddenly and in fact the question of precisely when the break with Rome happens is really quite hard to answer. I mean it happens sometime between 1531 and 1535, but there's a whole series of sort of gradated steps that gradually bring it about. I mean, I think another crucial thing hang on.
Russell:There's the act of this, there's the act of supremacy in 15, so I feel that must be.
Peter Marshall:Well, yeah, it's kind of happened before then I think I mean, if I had to sort of point to something. It's an earlier Act of Parliament in 1533, the Act in Restraint of Appeals, which sounds a bit dull. It says that appeals from English church courts could no longer be sent forward to be heard in Rome. Fine, and that has direct relevance to Henry's own divorce case. But the preamble, the introduction to this act, has this extraordinary ringing phrase in it. It says this realm of England is an empire. Now why does that matter? An empire is rather different from a kingdom. An emperor is different from a king, and the understanding at the time is that an empire recognizes no external superior authority. So what Henry is doing in a sense and he's been kind of playing with this earlier in his career, with the rhetoric of what we might call imperial kingship is that he's flat out saying it in the 1530s that yeah, the popes have no right to have any say on things that happen in England. But what nobody knows at the time is that this is going to be permanent, and I think that's quite crucial. You know, there has been a kind of comparable bust up before go right back to the early 13th century Wicked King John has an interdict put on him. He's excommunicated by the Pope Mass can't be said anywhere in England and in the end, you know, that is all sort of sorted out. The Pope is quite reluctant to excommunicate Henry because he doesn't want to escalate things, because he doesn't want to escalate things. So there's an excommunication which is drawn up and it's sort of stuck in the top drawer of the Vatican in the hope that things might sort themselves out, and indeed they might have.
Peter Marshall:If we go to the start of 1536, I mean, a couple of things happen. Catherine of Aragon dies in January 1536. Rumours say poisoned, but in fact probably of natural causes and grief at her hard treatment. And then in May of 1536, anne Boleyn also dies, absolutely not of natural causes but of a large sword chopping her head off, after Henry tires of her and decides to believe that she is guilty of incest and witchcraft and all sorts of terrible crimes. So in a sense Henry's marital history gets a completely clean slate in 1536. Whatever the status of these earlier marriages that's water under the bridge he can remarry absolutely validly in the eyes of the church. So there's an opportunity at that moment, I think, for a reconciliation. The papacy would probably have been up for it, but Henry himself is not, because by that point he's had two, three years of posing around as supreme head of the church, and it's something that he does not want to give back the church and it's something that he does not want to to give back.
Russell:And I mean, as I understand it, henry, if you asked him, would say I'm head of the church but I'm still a good catholic. But presumably there are many people in the realm who think that by by virtue of sort of abrogating the headship of the church like this, he's not not a good Catholic and so there must be friction between Henry and other sort of churchmen, for example, and presumably that's creating crevices into which the evangelicals can kind of put their wedges and bring Henry more over to their way of thinking.
Peter Marshall:Yep, absolutely.
Peter Marshall:So I think you put your finger on it again. I mean, in some ways the whole Reformation is an argument about what is a good Catholic so, of which we are all celebrating the 1700th anniversary this year, commits Christians to belief in one holy Catholic and apostolic church, and this is said today by Roman Catholics, methodists, anglicans, presbyterians. So you know, being a Catholic and believing in the Catholic Church is a pretty standard thing for Christians. Church is a pretty standard thing for Christians. But is that Catholic church to be identified with the church which is in communion with the Bishop of Rome? That's the kind of question.
Peter Marshall:So Henry VIII's reformation? Because Henry himself in some ways remains tremendously conservative. As I said earlier, he can't stand Luther. He doesn't like Luther's idea of justification by faith. So he's still pretty wedded to the idea of a theology of what I guess we could call good works Human beings have to contribute to participate in their own salvation. He wants to keep the Latin Mass and other sacraments, like sacrament of penance or confession to a priest. So sometimes all of this is called Catholicism without the Pope. That's Henry's Reformation in a nutshell. But that's precisely the question Can you have Catholicism without the Pope?
Peter Marshall:And English Catholics divide on that question, whether willingly or unwillingly. Most go along with it. Some, perhaps because they're convinced that the Pope is not essential to traditional Catholic faith. Some because they think it's all going to blow over and there's no point making things worse in the meantime. And a minority among the clergy, a very small minority, only one of the bishops, bishop John Fisher, of this small and unimportant diocese of Rochester, will not accept the break with Rome, and among the leading laity of the nation, fewer still. Really. Only the former Lord Chancellor, sir Thomas More, is not prepared to recognize the break with Rome, and More and Fisher are both executed in the summer of 1535. The Pope thinks he can save Fisher's life by making him a cardinal. Henry VIII will never dare execute a cardinal of the Holy Church and he's underestimated his man there. In fact, this has the opposite effect, and this is like a red rag to a bull or a red hat to a king. This probably accelerates Fisher's execution. But yeah, absolutely.
Peter Marshall:The question of whether Henry can be what he regards himself as being a good Catholic and whether you can have Catholicism without the Pope, that's absolutely a pointed issue, and it's a moving target as well, because in 1532, 1533,. All that's really happening is, you know, if you want to see it this way, all that's really happening is a change of CEO. You know, rather than the Pope, it's the King. Fast forward a couple of years when Henry has had people like Thomas Cranmer, or the guy who eventually really replaces Woolsey as his chief minister, chief secular advisor, thomas Cromwell, kind of advising him. It's gone a bit further.
Peter Marshall:So the rhetoric of the word of God and that being more important than the traditions of the church, that is being pushed quite strongly. There's a set of 10 articles drawn up for the church in the summer of 1536, which cast doubt on some of the validity of some of the sacraments, which cast doubt on the existence of purgatory, the place after this life where, it's believed, souls are purged of their sins before entry into heaven. In the spring of 1536, an act is passed through Parliament dissolving some of the smaller monasteries, and that involves also closing down shrines and pilgrimage centres that had been housed in monasteries. Some of the holy days that had been celebrated locally, particularly very local celebrations of the patronal saint of the particular parish church and of the dedication day, the anniversary of when that church had been founded these are either abolished or it's said that they all have to be celebrated on the 1st of October because otherwise they get in the way during harvest time. So you know, economic rationale is now kind of trumping religious tradition.
Peter Marshall:So by the summer of 1536, the idea that this is not going to change anything, this is just Catholicism without the Pope. A lot of people are having doubts about this. Another figure who dies about this time, a couple of years later actually, is the Bishop of London, john Stokesley. And he'd gone along, it seemed, pretty happily with the break with Rome in 1532-3. And on his deathbed Stokesley is supposed to have said oh, that I had Holden with my brother Fisher and not left him when time was. So you know, buyer's remorse is starting to set in among some figures. But people like Stokesley, these old-school Catholic bishops, are being replaced by supporters and allies of Cranmer and the Boleyns. So people like Hugh Latimer, who just a couple of years earlier was in danger of being burnt as a heretic by 1535, he's Bishop of Worcester and making policy for the church.
Russell:So I guess we finally sort of crept up into the pilgrimage of grace, because this is the reaction to these changes that have been steadily being made. So do you just want to introduce the pilgrimage of grace and maybe finally we can find out how.
Peter Marshall:So this is the name that is given to a rebellion, or perhaps it's better to say a series of rebellions that convulses really the whole north of England in the autumn of 1536 and really rests about a third of the country out of the control of the government, and it's the largest popular rebellion in England since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. And in fact whether the numbers are bigger then or in 1536-7 is a bit hard to say. So it's a very big deal. It happens in the North, but it wasn't necessarily bound just to be restricted to the North. I think this is one of the things that makes it really significant. There seems to be quite a lot of discontent grumbling in other parts of the country as well and in fact one of the most early significant and serious outbreaks in 1536 is in Lincolnshire, which technically isn't really a northern county, it's North Midland County. In 1536 is in Lincolnshire, which technically isn't really a northern county Right, it's Midlands, north Midlands County. And at that point the government's real worry is that this will spread south and east into East Anglia where there had been quite a lot of rumblings about government policy. The southwest is a worry as well. So from the government's point of view it's a sort of blessing that they end up with a rebellion which they can confine to the north of England. But it might have become a larger conflagration.
Peter Marshall:As I said, it breaks out Well, it's always said that it breaks out in Lincolnshire at the very beginning of October of 1536. About a week earlier, in the last week of September, there's a very serious gathering of several hundred people in the village of Dent, the sort of northwestern end of the York time. But the Lincolnshire Rebellion becomes very rapidly very, very dangerous and the rebels take control of the local capital, the city of Lincoln. The government sends an army north under the Duke of Suffolk, henry's brother-in-law, to try and contain it. That's pretty successful in that by the middle of October the Lincolnshire Rebellion has more or less collapsed and Henry is breathing a sigh of relief and in fact disbands a large army that he's summoned to Amptail in Bedfordshire to march north and help crush it. And as soon as he's done that, there's further news from the north to say oops, and help crush it. And as soon as he's done that, there's further news from the North to say oops, it has now spread into Yorkshire and it's spreading elsewhere as well Lancashire, the Lakeland, counties of the far Northwest, county, durham, north Yorkshire, so everywhere is kind of up in arms.
Peter Marshall:Now, the causes behind this, that's the question historians always want to ask. Causation, we're always kind of obsessed with it and there's been a long running debate and I've done this with my own students and people do it for A-level essays. You know, was the pilgrimage of grace a religious rising or was it a socioeconomic rising, popular rebellion from the grassroots up? Or was it a kind of political conspiracy all planned by leading figures who were alienated from the court? And you kind of tick a box on this and it's just far too interesting and complex and messy, I think, for any of those single word answers really to count. I mean going back to where we started the conversation. I mean going back to where we started the conversation.
Peter Marshall:Separating religion from other aspects of life is really hard and people probably didn't see a clear distinction between threats to their traditional religious way of life and things like excessive and immoral taxation, with which they also felt they were being burdened at the time. One of the things that's pretty clear is that a trigger factor, if we can call it. That is not just what's happened, but rumours widely spread, rumours of what is going to happen next, and these are I mean we know what some of them are, because the government tries to track down the sources of these rumours and tries to counter them through its own propaganda and says none of this is true, but these are things like they're going to be taxes on baptisms and burials, right? So there's economic and religious very closely fused together, that we're going to rationalize churches and any churches within five miles of each other are going to be closed down churches and any churches within five miles of each other are going to be closed down.
Peter Marshall:Now, none of this is true and you could say well, people will believe these implausible things, but actually the government is already doing unimaginable things. It's closing down monasteries that have stood for hundreds of years. It's broken the link with the papacy, which has stood for hundreds of years as well. So these rumours are not particularly implausible in the context of that, I think. And things like the attack on local saints' days really hit at a sense of local pride and local identity, and this is aggravated, I think, by a more general sense of alienation in the North that you know they don't care about us down there. I mean, this is still an aspect of British life, I think. I mean, maybe in some ways the Book of Grace is at the roots of some of that.
Peter Marshall:Henry VIII, like all medieval monarchs, goes on progress. He tours around the country, staying in noblemen's manor houses at their expense through the summer. He lets himself be seen by the people, but he's never been to the north of England. So Northerners, unlike people in the Midlands or even the Welsh borders, have never seen the king, and I think that's part of a factor here as well, parliament is always held in London, so it's perhaps no coincidence that a demand for a parliament of Nottingham, or at York or somewhere else in the north, to specifically consider their grievances is very central to the demands of the rebels as they turn out. So why is this a pilgrimage, yeah, rather than just a rebellion? Well, I mean, it's partly of course that there's a kind of irony that nobody ever wants to admit that they are rebelling against the king because there's sort of consensus that this is bad. And so in fact what people tend to do is that they protest, that they're super loyal to the monarch and they are in fact trying to rescue the monarch from wicked evil advisers. And this is a bit of a helpful fiction. But there's also some truth to it, because a great deal of the anger among the rebels in 1536 is directed against Henry's counsellors and bishops like Cranmer and particularly Thomas Cromwell. So Cromwell becomes a kind of bogey figure in the north of England who is seen as. Another thing about rebellions is they're often quite sort of conservative in their social outlook. So the fact that Cromwell is low-born he's jumped up, he's not a natural, noble counsellor of the king that's absolutely a mark against him of the king. That's absolutely a mark against him. So Henry needs to be saved from these heretics and traitors like Cromwell who have corrupted and poisoned his mind and led him astray, and that, I think, is partly a sort of convenient fiction. But also genuinely believed in the North. I mean to understand where this notion of a pilgrimage comes from.
Peter Marshall:We have to bring into the story an extraordinary figure who is one of these people who sort of you know, flares out of nowhere into becoming a national celebrity um for a few months and then disappears again. And this is a guy called robert ask um. And ask Ask is the younger son of a not particularly important East Riding gentry or landowning family. He's gone into the law, so he trains at the Inns of Court in London and he has a legal practice kind of partly based in London and partly based in Yorkshire, and he's had some important clients. He's done some work for the Earl of Northumberland at one point and he gets caught up in the Lincolnshire rebellion. Now this is all a bit murky. Whether he's entirely there by accident or whether he's gone to sort of insert himself into the action is not very clear. They make him swear an oath to be loyal to them. And the swearing of oaths in the Pilgrimage of Grace is really interesting, really important. We might come back to it.
Peter Marshall:And so, having been captured by a group of the Lincolnshire rebels, within a week Ask himself is leading a group of Yorkshire rebels on the other side of the Humber and there's a rather momentous meeting on a hillside just outside the town of Market Waiton in the second week of October 1536, when Ask, leading a party of men from what's called the Marshland, just on the northern banks of the Humber, meets up with another character called William Stapleton, who's got a company of rebels from the town of Beverley, and they sort of discrush their strategy and asks says to him we are pilgrims and we have a pilgrimage gate to go, and gate here is, you know, not something on hinges. This is a northern dialect word meaning a road, a route, a destination. We're on a pilgrimage path. So I mean historians of course, have thought about this and one view is that this is a way of kind of diffusing the idea of rebellion and making it seem a little less sort of threatening and harmful. It's not a rebellion, it's a pilgrimage. A little less sort of threatening and harmful. It's not a rebellion. It's a pilgrimage and it's religious and they're just petitioning the king. We might say it's a kind of big demonstration march. It's not really particularly threatening. I'm actually not convinced about that because there had been armed pilgrimages at various times in the Middle Ages. And what is an armed pilgrimage? It's a crusade. Yeah, so this is kind of the ideology of invoking god and invoking divine blessing on armed resistance to the authority of the crown. So you know, rather than being something nice and cozy, I think it's something actually potentially really quite explosive. But but this idea really takes off.
Peter Marshall:He draws up an oath which all participants in the rebellion have to take, and that in itself, I think, is interesting, because where did this idea of an oath come from? Well, oath-taking is very widespread in medieval life and you take oaths on all kinds of occasions in medieval life. And you take oaths on all kinds of occasions when you become a lawyer, for example, or when you appear in court or become a member of a guild or a trade company. You swear oaths for everything. But Henry VIII, with the advice of Cromwell, has completely politicised oath-taking by in 1534, requiring the entire population to swear an oath recognising the Boleyn marriage and the succession of Anne Boleyn's children and therefore implicitly at least, denouncing the authority of the Pope. And the oath that ASK is spreading around the participants in the rebellion, I think, is in some ways a direct riposte to that earlier oath.
Peter Marshall:And this oath talks about this our pilgrimage of grace for the Commonwealth and Commonwealth is a really significant word here as well. I mean it's a familiar word. We have the Commonwealth, which is the residue of the old British Empire, but in the 16th century it kind of means two connected things. I mean it means society, and it also means the common wheel or the common good or the benefit of society. So the Commonwealth is a kind of ideal of a well-ordered, well-run society, you know, human society as it ought to be, as God wants it to be.
Peter Marshall:And a very strong idea kind of motivating the rebels is that the Commonwealth is out of kilter, that people like Cromwell have corrupted it, undermined it. This is partly why, although I do think actually it starts at the grassroots, and one of the things that really interests me about the Pilgrimage of Grace is that this is an opportunity actually to see, for once, not just Henry VIII and the six wives and Cromwell and Thomas More and the usual suspects. This puts the spotlight on ordinary people and their concerns and the lid is lifted on Tudor society for a few months at least, and we hear an awful lot about ordinary people and in fact their capacity for really quite sophisticated political organization and political thinking. So in Lincolnshire actually the trouble really starts in the market town of Louth and there it's a group of local sort of yeoman or anachronistically we might say, middle-class figures who take control, seize the treasury of the church, start ringing the bells, start arming people and organizing. It's actually a shoemaker called Nicholas Melton who becomes known as Captain Cobbler, who is the leader of the rebels there.
Peter Marshall:So it starts with this kind of grassroots organization but strangely, or perhaps not strangely, these more plebeian rebels want the gentry to be their leaders. In fact they kind of force the gentry to be their leaders. So people like Robert Ask are taken prisoner and made to swear oaths of various kinds and assume the leadership of the rebellion. And that's because that's the natural order of society, that's the Commonwealth, the nobles, the gentry, the clergy, the commoners, all in their God-given places, all kind of working together. One of the big debates still unresolved, and perhaps actually unresolvable, about the Pilgrim's Grace is whether the gentry are coerced into taking part or whether it just suits them to say, when everything has collapsed, that they were coerced into taking part and in fact that's a convenient excuse for them.
Russell:But there's one event which I kind of want to bring into this, which is one that's happened in Germany and it's all over and done with, and that's the Peasants' War. And there's two things about that that strike me. I mean one is it has been put down with utmost savagery. So that leaves me thinking. Does Ask not realize where this is going to lead? And then my second question is that the Peasants' War seems to be they're looting the monasteries. They hate the monasteries and the tithes they have to pay. So I'm wondering why is the Pilgrimage of Grace supporting the old order, whereas the Peasants' War was sort of trying to tear it down? And why does Ask and others, you know, not notice? You know what happens to people who rebel?
Peter Marshall:Great questions and really hard ones to answer. I think, yeah, the German Peasants' War of 1525 to 6, which I suspect is not terribly well known in this country, perhaps a little better known for obvious reasons in Germany, another anniversary being celebrated this year. Of course this is 1525. It's much bigger than the Pilgrim's Grace. This is hundreds of thousands of people and it ends with extraordinary slaughter. So it really is traumatic in all kinds of ways. Its relationship to religion is also much debated. Is it just about economic grievances and wicked grasping, oppressive landlords and the residue of serfdom, or is it a kind of genuine excitement about the ideas of Martin Luther? Luther himself, of course, is rather horrified to have his ideas being adopted and, as he sees it, perverted by the rebels in Germany. And Luther doesn't look at his best when he publishes a tract urging the German princes to slaughter and massacre them without any mercy. So there absolutely are parallels and I think those parallels are clear to people at the time. I don't think the German Peasants' War is invoked too much in the propaganda produced by Henry's supporters, which is interesting. It is actually invoked quite a lot by Catholic propagandists against the very idea of the Reformation. People like Thomas More talk about it, because you know you start by questioning the authority of the church and this is what you end up with is anarchy and chaos. You're also absolutely right and this is brought out very clearly in a brilliant recent book by Lyndall Roper on the German Peasants' War that monasteries are a very central target of it, and she talks about the German Peasants' War being a kind of anti-pilgrimage, in which pilgrimage sites are destroyed and monasteries are torn down and their inhabitants thrown out, and that the monks are seen as really oppressive landlords. So why that German popular rebellion is against monasteries and the English Yorkshire one is in favour of them is a really interesting question. I mean, that's possibly partly about the different social roles that monasteries perform in those two settings, or it may be just rather more contingent factors about what merges with a sense of grievance.
Peter Marshall:In the German context and in the different political circumstances of the English one, the Pilgrimage of Grace does not end with huge slaughter, and I think that's one of the reasons why it's often, you know, rather seen as a bit of a storm in a teacup, an interesting footnote to things. And I mean, I'm sceptical about that, partly because it could have ended with battle. And you know, I think open warfare is only very narrowly avoided we might come back to that in a moment and it's also not exactly bloodless. I mean, there are at least 200 people who are judicially executed in the aftermath. And OK, you know it's a bit of a tasteless question, isn't it?
Peter Marshall:It's 200, you know hangings a bit of a tasteless question, isn't it? It's 200, you know hangings and beheadings. Is that a lot or a little? You know, it's obviously a much lower lot of life than is experienced in Germany, but there's nothing quite like it in the first half of the 16th century in England. So there is pretty, you know, savage retaliation and retribution. But the parallel, I think where the parallel is interesting, is again that kind of merging of economic grievances and religious grievances. And in fact, although this is something on which I'm not expert, there are also peasant rebellions in places like Sweden in the 16th century which take on a rather conservative anti-Reformation tinge to them as well.
Russell:And once the rebellion gets going, who's got the upper hand? Is it the rebels or is the government on top from the start?
Peter Marshall:So I think I mean one of the things you always have to remember about Tudor England is that this is government on the cheap. So there is no standing army, there is no police force, there is a minimal bureaucracy and government is carried out by you know persuading lords and gentlemen to kind of, you know, work part-time as government officials. So you know, I think what we have to unimagine, if I can put it like that, is the idea of a kind of you know scruffy, untrained band of peasants with pitchforks and a sort of you know government army with muskets. Absolutely not. These are, you know, military forces which are organized, trained, led in pretty much exactly the same way. The government maybe has a few more cannon, but that's just about it, and what the pilgrims have is an overwhelming superiority of numbers.
Peter Marshall:The sort of crunch point really is at the end of October 1536. And in Yorkshire, either side of the River Don and on the northern banks, you've got Ask's army, his host from Yorkshire, either side of the River Don, and on the northern banks you've got Aske's army, his host from Yorkshire, which is probably 30,000 men, with another 20,000 on the way. So this is a huge army and you've got the government commanders, the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury, both of whom, interestingly, very conservative Catholics who detest Thomas Cromwell. So that's another of the what-ifs. These Catholic nobles remain loyal to Henry in 1536, but there might have been circumstances in which they didn't.
Peter Marshall:Henry, to start with, is kind of apoplectic with rage. He can't believe it that these scruffy, smelly peasants in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire are defying him. They're traitors. So he's sending kind of almost unhinged letters to Shrewsbury and Norfolk saying you know, go and massacre them. And you know, man, woman and child have to be put to the sword if they rise up again. So that you know, this would be a terrible example. Duke of Norfolk, who has, you know, much more military experience than Henry, realizes this is not a goer and that actually if he does commit to battle he's likely to be defeated. There's a rather plaintive letter he sends to Henry at one point where he says you know, I haven't got any cavalry, half the army's coming down with sickness. The other half of the soldiers in my army sympathize with the rebels anyway, and they have got rather nice phrase, I think. He says they have all the flower of the north.
Peter Marshall:So you know all the important landowners, um and um uh ask himself, probably wants to negotiate peacefully if he can. But there are ze zealots, hotheads in the Pilgrim's leadership, saying, no, we need to press on to London, and they might well have done so. There's a bit of skirmishing between the two armies, between their cavalry scouts, in that last week in October, north and south of the River Don, there's a very, very heavy fall of rain on the night of 25th October which makes the fords of the river impassable, and that is seen both at the time and subsequently, as that's what saves Henry's throne. This is providential, this is protestant reign that, um, you know, prevents the, the rebels committing to to battle. Well, yeah, maybe, I still think they could probably have forced their way across the bridges, um, if they, they put their minds to it.
Peter Marshall:Um, so norfolk, um, actually, I mean norfolk, is the sort of cynical hero of the hour. This is thomas howard, the duke of norfolk, um, uh, who is getting these letters from henry but also trying to sort of calm things down, and he writes back to henry saying basically, don't worry, whatever I promise them, I won't mean it and won't consider myself holden to it. So you know, norfolk is completely prepared to sacrifice his own honor on the altar of Henry's throne. And so there is a very uneasy truce, rather than a battle, at the end of October and there's a couple of months where it's not really clear what is going on, other than the king has lost control of the whole of the north of England. Norfolk has given a wink and a nod promise that, yes, there will be a parliament. Norfolk has given a wink and a nod promise that yes, there will be a parliament. The rebels send ambassadors down to London to communicate their demands to the king and they think they've won.
Peter Marshall:Ask thinks that they've triumphed against Henry, and conventional wisdom is that no, they're deceived because Henry's got a master plan to betray them and you know everything was going to go wrong.
Peter Marshall:I'm not sure that's true, you know. I think in some ways they sort of have one of all concedes yes, there will be a parliament in the north of England and yes, there will be a free pardon. He's very, very reluctant to give a pardon and even when he's agreed to give a pardon, he wants people like Ask himself and Lord Darcy, who's the sort of leading nobleman who takes the side of the rebels, and some other figures like the Yorkshire gentleman, Sir Robert Constable, rebels and some other figures. Like the Yorkshire gentleman, sir Robert Constable, he wants them all exempted from the pardon. Some heads have got to roll and in the end he has to accept that everybody is going to be included in the pardon which is issued at the beginning of December when the rebels at Pontefract drop a very detailed set of demands which are sent to henry, which kind of cover all bases social, economic, political, religious, um and include a demand for the pope to be restored as head of the church.
Peter Marshall:So you know it's a um well, I've said that they, they say the pope to be head of the church in in all matters touching cure animarum, the cure of souls. So the pope to be head of the church in all matters touching cure animarum, the cure of souls. So the pope to be head of the church in spiritual matters and Henry can be head of the church in political matters. I mean, it's hard to see how that would be different, frankly, from the situation before 1530. So it's pretty much a complete reversal of the Reformation, restoration of the monasteries. And in fact the rebels have gone ahead and themselves restored a dozen and more monasteries that had already been suppressed. In some cases, whether the monks wants to be restored or not asks people put them back in.
Peter Marshall:So it looks like things are on the cusp of a complete reversal of the Reformation. I mean it doesn't happen. I think really it doesn't happen because this was always a rather fragile coalition of the nobility, the clergy, the gentry, the commoners in the north of England, who have things in common they all see Thomas, cromwell and heresy as their enemy, but they have very different political and economic interests and in fact, you know, the feeling against the nobility, particularly in the northwestern counties, is because they're seen as oppressive landlords. And after the truce is declared pretty rapidly the commons of course are cut out of the loop. Henry and Norfolk are doing all their negotiation with the socially elevated leaders. So there are soon concerns that the gentry are going to betray us and in fact there are bills being posted on church doors saying that the gentry are going to betray us. There's talk of new risings, new rebellions. So things are very much kind of on a knife edge.
Peter Marshall:Ask, meanwhile has been invited down to London to have Christmas at the court, and goodness, I wish we had detailed, firsthand account of that and we don't, unfortunately. We know that Henry gifts him a nice red silk doublet which he takes back with him and presumably Henry turns on the charm. In all his private letters Henry only talks about that arrant traitor Ask. But face to face, we gather he's charming and Ask, I think, is taken in and comes back, you know, telling people that the king has a genuine love for the north and he's going to let us have the parliament and everything's going to be great.
Peter Marshall:But they don't buy it and there are a series of renewed outbreaks in February and March of 1537. There's a failed attempt to seize control of Hull and of Beverley and risings again in the Northwest, and these are actually put down, in many cases, by gentlemen who had been leaders of the main pilgrimage just a few months earlier. And what this means is that the truce and the terms of the truce and the pardon have been broken. And so the Duke of Norfolk declares martial law. He starts rounding people up and hanging them.
Peter Marshall:Frankly, there's a battle outside Carlisle where several hundred rebels are killed and there's a decision taken to hang 74 leading rebels from the northwestern counties and Norfolk and his officers go through the towns and villages hanging these people and leaving their bodies on gibbets. There's, in fact, a really kind of tragic and poignant aftermath to this, because it's groups of local women widows and daughters and mothers-in-law who cut the bodies down and have them buried in the local churchyards and when the authorities find out they're furious and there's an investigation and a bunch of these women are hauled in and questioned about this. So there's this crackdown and the government plays a reasonably straight bat on this, because nobody can actually be arrested for actions that took place before December 1536. In other words, for the period covered by the pardon.
Russell:So how did they get Robert Aske onto the scaffold?
Peter Marshall:Well, yeah, good question. They get Aske, they get Constable, they get Darcy. They're all summoned to London in the spring of 1537, and they all go because they think the king is going to congratulate them on doing a good job of keeping the peace and containing it in the north. And in fact, on all kinds of twisted bits of evidence and technicalities, and who said this and what was meant in this conversation, they managed to sort of twist things to suggest that they have all in fact broken the terms of the pardon. So there's a whole bunch of leaders who are arrested, tried and executed and, in a kind of final irony, one of the demands of the rebels had always been for execution of justice in the north of England, had always been for execution of justice in the north of England. So Constable is sent to Hull to be hung up in chains and Ask is sent to York. So, as a kind of terrible example, their executions take place in the north. Darcy, as a nobleman of course, is entitled to be beheaded, so he has a cleaner and swifter death at the Tower of London.
Peter Marshall:But on the other hand, some of the other leading figures of the Pilgrimage of Grace there's a guy called Robert Bowes, who is one of the hotheads, one of the zealots who wanted to bring battle to Norfolk in October 1536, leading gentleman in County Durham and neighbour in North Yorkshire. And Bowes has a kind of stellar career in the aftermath and becomes a leading figure on the Council of the North and one of the wardens of the marches and a kind of powerhouse in the north of England. So there's this interesting and rather sort of traumatic legacy, I think, of defeat, the defeat of the north by the south and, as perhaps always happens with some kind of great political defeat, of those who are victims of it and those who manage to accommodate themselves to the new order in the way that figures like Bowes do.
Russell:There was something I picked up and it may have been in your book Heretics and Believers, but following the crushing of the pilgrimage of grace. Actually there were two things, and I'm not quite sure why I wrote this note down. We'll come to it, but they downgrade the significance of Thomas Beckett and I thought that was quite interesting.
Peter Marshall:Yes, there's a kind of indirect connection, I think. So Thomas Becket, just to remind people, is 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury who gets in a huge bust up with King at the time, henry II, over the so-called liberties of the church. So you know various kind of judicial and political rights that the Church of England has, particularly the right of churchmen, priests, not to be tried in secular courts, and this leads to his exile and then his return from exile and then that famous conversation where Henry II says who will rid me of this turbulent priest? And a few of his knights take this rather literally and dash across the channel and hack Archbishop Becket to death at his own altar in Canterbury Cathedral and Becket's shrine at Canterbury becomes the holiest place in England. You know the Canterbury Tales, chaucer's Pilgrims they're going there, but huge numbers of people go there because he's a martyr and martyrdom is the kind of top grade of Christian sainthood. In a way he's given his life like Christ gave his life for religion and the truth, and so we think of St George as the patron saint of England. Actually, in the Middle Ages, thomas of Canterbury, he's not called Thomas Beckett. He's only called Thomas Beckett as a result of Tudor propaganda against him. He's St Thomas of Canterbury in the 15th and early 16th century. He's really kind of the patron saint of England.
Peter Marshall:Henry, of course, once he falls out with the Pope, sees all kinds of parallels between people who are opposing him and Beckett's opposition to Henry II. There's an almost too close for comfort parallel between Thomas Beckett and Thomas More, both middle-class Londoners, personal friends of the king, who end up refusing to follow him, both chancellors of England, both in a sense martyred and become the focus of a cult which the crown doesn't like. So as a result of this even before, if you like, henry has turned against other saints and other shrines Beckett becomes a kind of non-person. His history is rewritten, so there's a special proclamation to try and persuade everyone in the country that he was not a holy saint and martyr but actually an errant traitor. His shrine at Canterbury is destroyed in 1538, and its treasures are taken away Quite.
Peter Marshall:What happens to Beckett's bones is one of those enduring historical mysteries. It's possible they're reburied somewhere else. It's possible they're burnt. It's possible there's actually a kind of mock trial of Beckett that takes place then. This actually is the ultimate break with the Pope. This is the thing that Henry does that offends Catholic opinion in Europe more than anything else is his sacrilegious treatment of the Shrine of St Thomas. So it's in the end of 1538 that the Pope gets that excommunication out of the top drawer and rewrites it and publicly promulgates it. So in a sense the final break with Rome is 1538. And it comes about as a result of Henry's treatment of a centuries-old dead archbishop. But it's a kind of symbolic breaking of the ways with the Catholic past.
Russell:I guess that with Ask's death Henry is triumphant. But always with these rebellions it must have given Henry a fright. So do they get anything out of the rebellion? What follows from it?
Peter Marshall:Yeah, it's a good question and it's not an entirely straightforward one to answer. I mean, in one sense the Pilgrimage of Grace is a complete failure and a traumatic failure for the north of England and there's, you know, quite a lot of evidence of how deep those wounds are. And years later people are still grumbling and plotting and you know that long running theme in English life of a kind of cultural divide between the north and the south, which is already there before 1536. But I suspect the Pilgrimage of Grace does something to deepen that. In a terrible irony, the thing the Pilgrimage grace was designed to do, which was to prevent the dissolution of the monasteries, probably in fact ensures that it will be a complete dissolution. That hadn't been a certainty in 1536.
Peter Marshall:It's possible that Thomas Cromwell was only thinking about a kind of scaling down of monastic life, but Henry thinks that the monks he actually says this outright in one of his letters the monks are behind all of this. You know Henry is paranoid about monks and so I think it hastens the dissolution. In fact, one of the abbeys, which is the Abbey of Furness in Lancashire, which has been kind of quite implicated in the rising in that part of the country, the abbot is desperate to prevent himself being kind of, you know, hauled in, and part of the country the abbot is desperate to prevent himself being kind of hauled in and locked up for it. So he agrees freely and voluntarily to surrender his monastery and all its lands to the king. Now, why does that matter? Because that becomes the model which is rolled out for the whole of the rest of the country over the two following years.
Peter Marshall:1536 is a compulsory suppression of the smaller monasteries. Technically, what then happens is that all the larger monasteries, completely of their own free will, surrender themselves to the crown. It's another legal fiction, but quite a useful one. And this involves, you know, monks signing documents saying oh, we've come to realize it's all superstition and we're wasting our time and so we want to, you know, stop and hand everything over to the king, and the Pilgrimage of Grace certainly accelerates that.
Peter Marshall:Having said all that, it is a huge scare and Henry is getting absolutely conflicting advice.
Peter Marshall:He's got some people, you know, whispering to one ear saying well, you know, it's the papists who've done this and the only way we can be safe in the future is to get rid of all the papists, to push on further and faster to make everybody a good Protestant to, you know, get rid of all the old superstitions.
Peter Marshall:And on the other hand, you know there are other voices, norfolk and other noblemen among them, who are saying well, you know, we have to be really careful. This has been kind of provoked by going too far too fast, and Henry, I think, is more naturally inclined to listen to that side of the Reformation. But there is a slowing down of what had been quite a frantic pace of reform in the mid-1530s, and the late 1530s and early 1540s are a slightly more sort of conservative phase of reform. And so the Pilgrimage of Grace, I think, is part of the reason why full-scale, proper Protestant reform doesn't actually happen until Henry himself dies and his son, edward VI, takes over. So in some ways not perhaps a complete failure, I mean it was a demonstration of where some of the limitations of the power of the crown were and what the people of England could actually achieve if they banded together in force.
Russell:Okay, well, that's fantastic, Peter. Thank you so much.
Peter Marshall:Yeah, sorry I was going on at too much length, but, as you can see, there's quite a lot to say.
Russell:Okay, well, let's leave it there and thank you, Peter Marshall, very much indeed.
Peter Marshall:A huge pleasure, thank you.