CHAPTER IV
FACTS AND RUMOURS

The great events of the year 1535 were the executions of the Charterhouse monks and of More and Fisher in June and July, followed by the visitation of the monasteries by Cromwell’s commissioners in the autumn. There is no need to retell these stories, for the object of this chapter is neither to extol the martyrs nor to defend Cromwell’s visitors, but rather to try to discover the feeling of the nation at large, manifested by the words of numberless forgotten men and women, who often paid for their devotion to the religion of their fathers with their lives[277].

All up and down the land the friaries were storm-centres of revolt, and the King’s first attack upon them only increased their influence. The Friars Observant were the most recently reformed branch of the Franciscan Order. They had been introduced into England by Henry VII, and had only six houses in the country, Greenwich, Richmond in Surrey, Cambridge, Southampton, Newark, and Newcastle-on-Tyne[278]. Their house at Newcastle had formerly belonged to the conventual brothers of the Order until Henry VII replaced them by the Observants[279]. It was natural that this Order, newly established in England, should contain the most uncompromising enemies of Henry VIII’s policy, and they denounced the divorce so resolutely that their houses were suppressed in 1534[280]. The friars were transferred to the conventual houses of the Order, but the result of this was that they infected the whole body with their own discontent. But the other friars, though as yet not directly attacked, were not ready to accept the new state of affairs quietly. On the contrary, of all Cromwell’s opponents, they most hated the Act of Supremacy. This was passed in the autumn of 1534, and throughout the following year popular indignation grew and grew, as the agitation against the new laws was secretly carried on. A friar who had embraced the New Learning[281], hot against all “superstitious and popish remembrances,” described the methods of his unconverted brethren to Cromwell. In many church windows was pictured the story of St Thomas of Canterbury, and he had heard the pardoners relate how the martyr was slain for resisting the King, in defence not only of the liberties of the Church, but also of the rights of the poor; for he would not grant the King that “whosoever set his child to school should pay a tribute, nor that no poor man should eat certain meats except he paid a tribute.... These words and divers others remaining in the people’s heads, which they call the articles of St Thomas.” Then the preacher would point to the window where the penitent king knelt naked before the martyr’s shrine, and leave the listeners to draw their own moral. The friars mendicant “living by the alms of the King’s subjects” were received everywhere by the poor as friends and teachers, although Cromwell’s correspondent declared them to be all “unlearned and without discretion.” They would seek out the “aged and simple” and “drive them into admiration with such words as—Oh, father or sister, what a world is this! It was not so in your father’s days. Ye may see it is a parlous world. They will have no pilgrimage. They will not we should pray to saints, or fast, or do any good deeds. Our Lord have mercy on us! I will live as my forefathers have done, and I am sure your fathers and friends were good.... Therefore I pray you continue as you have done, and believe as your friends and fathers did; whatsoever the new fellows do, say and do for yourself while ye be here.” The reformer considered that these friars “do much hurt and will do, except they be otherwise provided for, that they may no more so scatter abroad.” He concluded by asking for a dispensation from his habit that he might “preach God’s word.”[282] It may be imagined that his sermons would little please his old brethren, and as a commentary on them or their like may be quoted the words of a certain White friar, who said “that we should see a new turn of the Bishop of Rome if we lived; that we were a many wretches of this realm, without any charity, thus to blaspheme him, seeing that he does not write against us, but we, malicious wretches, write and rail against him without any charity; and though some of his predecessors were evil, he is a good man.”[283] The Pope referred to was Paul III. The friars were above all wandering preachers, and reports of seditious sermons by Black, White, or Grey brethren were sent to Cromwell from Norwich, Canterbury, Bristol, Kingswood in Wiltshire[284], and Newcastle-on-Tyne, where the prior of the Black friars preached a series of Lenten sermons in 1536 against the Royal Supremacy and then fled to Scotland[285]. Some of the friars were simple and ignorant enough, but no less powerful among the people for all that; others were more like one of whom Latimer complained,—“wilily witted, Dunsly learned, Morely affected, bold not a little, zealous more than enough,”[286] i.e. learned in the lore of Duns Scotus and holding the opinions of Sir Thomas More.

As an instance of the sort of conversation that went on within the friaries there is the case of the Grey Friars of Grantham, which was remarkable as being the northernmost house in which there was a treacherous brother. Friar John Colsell, in his deposition of 23 August 1535, tried to fasten a charge of treason upon the Warden and other brethren, though his motive was rather private malice than any love of the New Learning. The Warden stated in his defence that he had rebuked two unruly friars, who threatened to complain to the general visitor, whereupon he said, “Well, this fashion will not last always. I trust we shall have the correction of our own religion again, for it hath done a hundred pounds worth of hurt since it was otherwise; for now, if they be checked for their misorder they will threat a man to complain of him, and yet in the end, after he know the truth, I trust the same visitor will take them as they be.” Another of the accused friars had remarked, concerning the erasure of the Pope’s name from the service books, “If every Act were as well executed as this, we should have a merry world.” One of the refractory friars asked, “Be they not so?” “No, for there was an Act made concerning the Statute of Array, that no man should wear satin, velvet nor damask unless he were a man of lands or a burgess, which be now broken.” The aldermen of Grantham and other men of influence in the town gave evidence in favour of the Warden, among them Gervase Tyndale, the master of the free school. Tyndale was by no means inclined to favour friars in general[287], for in November 1535 he wrote to Cromwell asking for money, as he was employed in the business of certain friars who were about to practise necromancy. In the same letter he complained of a “doctor” who had preached in the town on All Souls’ Day about purgatory, saying that earthly fire was to the fire of purgatory as a picture is compared to a man, and that one penny given to a priest would release souls from purgatory. Tyndale remonstrated with him, but the preacher had the support of the congregation. He called Tyndale a Saxon heretic behind his back, and drove away all the boys from the free school, lest their master should infect them with his opinions[288].

The preaching, however, was not all one way, for there were a few “heretics” wandering up and down the country, friars of a new creed. These poor men were greatly to be pitied, standing as they did between two fires. Henry and Cromwell were willing to use them, but regarded them with the utmost suspicion, and were always ready to pounce upon them if they transgressed the very narrow limits allowed. The ordinary clergy and the mass of the people regarded them with hatred and contempt. Their acts at first seem simply to have stirred up opposition, though here and there are signs that their teaching was beginning to produce an effect[289]. Any earnest soul simply and honestly trying to find a satisfying religion must have been much confused by the laws provided for his guidance. The parson of Staunton in Gloucester was in trouble for saying that “if the King our sovereign did not go forth with his laws as he began, he would call the King Anti-Christ;”[290] while Wotton-under-Edge in the same county was full of discord “by reason of divers opinions”; and one John Plummer was accused of saying “there shall be a new world or Midsummer Day,” by which he meant, as he explained, that he hoped “the King in his Parliament would make some order of punishment for those who neither fast nor pray.”[291]

The questing soul would have found that it was just as dangerous to speak for as against purgatory[292]; and if he dared to call images idols he was not only likely to be attacked by his indignant neighbours, but was also within reach of the law[293]. The law indeed permitted the reading of the Scriptures in English, but public opinion was so much against it that a layman complained of being set in the stocks for having an English psalter[294], and the Prior of Haverfordwest appealed to Cromwell against the Bishop of St David’s, who had forced him to give up his English testament “as if to have a testament in English were horrible heresy.”[295] So strong was this feeling that even the Bishop of Lincoln, Longland, who was accounted a heretic, complained to Cromwell of “Sir Swinnerton” and other preachers who were bad characters and encouraged people to read English books; the men of Lincolnshire “much grudged” against them[296].

But wandering preachers, whether heretic or papist, were only the skirmishers of the religious fray; the reformers were weak in numbers, but they poured their books and tracts, like an unceasing fire of heavy artillery, from their foreign batteries; also they had an immensely powerful, though suspicious, ally in the King. The romanists, on the other hand, always hoped for but never received reinforcements from the Pope. But they had numbers and tradition on their side, and their army was very efficiently officered by the parish priests. The steady, quiet opposition of these men was much the most effective defence attempted against the King’s ecclesiastical policy. They had been ordered to blot out the name of the Pope in all prayer and service books, and to repeat a collect for the welfare of the King and Anne Boleyn[297], but Cromwell’s informers continually reported cases of disobedience[298]. The vicar of Stanton Lacy, Salop, was accused of covering the Pope’s name by a piece of paper fastened down with balm, instead of erasing the words[299]. All the religious were very loath to reform their mass books. They could not believe that the quarrel with Rome was more than a passing cloud. “When the King is dead all these fashions will be laid down,” was the general belief[300]. Richard Crowley, curate of Broughton, Oxford, was accused of calling the Bishop of Rome Pope, and of comparing him to the sun, the King to the moon and the people to the stars, with the application that “the moon takes her light from the sun and as the light of the sun is taken from us, so the world is dark and the people in blindness.” He offered his parishioners pardon “during the utas” at the feast of the Name of Jesus (7 August), declared that the power of the Pope was as great as ever, and professed himself ready to die for the true faith, like More, Fisher, and the fathers of Zion[301]. Only a few were as bold as he; others, who “would rather be torn with wild horses than assent or consent to the diminishing of any one iote of the bishop of Rome his authority, of old time and always holden and kept in this realm,”[302] were content to speak their minds and then seek safety overseas[303]; but the greatest number were like the curate of Rye, who, though he had taken the oath to the King, had “done the contrary,” and spread tracts against the Royal Supremacy[304].

So few people as yet favoured the New Learning that most of our knowledge of the discontent is due to local disputes. If a priest quarrelled with his parishioners, they would bring accusations against him which, however true in themselves, would never have been laid against a popular man. An example of this occurred at Harwich, Essex, at the end of the year 1535, when thirty-two of his flock brought a variety of charges against the priest, Thomas Corthrop, such as that he had not erased the Pope’s name from his mass book, that he had called Dr Barnes “false knave and heretic,”[305] that he had preached Anti-Christ and not shown who Anti-Christ was, and so forth. He had also said in a sermon at Bethlehem without Bishopgate, London, that “these new preachers nowadays that doth preach their three sermons a day have made and brought in such divisions and seditions among us as never was seen in this realm, for the devil reigneth over us now.” The root of the complaint, however, lies in the last two articles:—“That when the young men of the parish entered the church on December 26 to chose them a Lord of Misrule with minstrels to solace the parish and bring youths from cards and dicing, the said priest had taken the pipe out of the minstrel’s hand, and struck him on the head with it, and did next day preach a sermon that the Children of Israel came dancing and piping before idols”; and that he falsely accused his parishioners of hunting and bowling instead of coming to church[306]. If it had not been for his puritanism in these respects, most likely nothing would have been heard of his conservatism in others.

The preachers were chiefly concerned with the relations between England and the Pope, but the commons looked at the matter from a more personal point of view. Queen Katherine was universally beloved, while Queen Anne was detested. It was the divorce and the slaughter of the monks that roused popular indignation rather than the abstract question of the supremacy. A woman of “Senklers Bradfield,”[307] Suffolk, was accused of rejoicing because Anne’s child was still-born (February 1535), and of calling her “a goggle-eyed whore,” adding, “God save Queen Katherine for she was righteous queen, and she trusted to see her queen again, and that she should warrant the same.”[308]

Henry himself fully shared the ill-will showered upon his new wife. A Buckinghamshire man declared “the King is but a knave and liveth in adultry, and is an heretic and liveth not after the laws of God,” and also “I set not by the King’s crown, and if I had it here I would play at football with it.”[309] A yeoman named Adam Fermour, of Waldron in Sussex, had just returned from London. His friends asked what the news was. “What news, man?” said he. “By God’s blood! evil news, for the King will make such laws that if a man die his wife and his children shall go a-begging. He fell but lately and brake one of his ribs, and if he make such laws it were pity but he should break his neck.”[310] The act that roused his indignation must have been the Statute of Uses[311]. A few laymen, perhaps, took exception to the Royal Supremacy, but most contented themselves with abusing the King and Queen[312]. Others again reviled the King’s favourites, and, of course, Cromwell first of all. The vicar of Eastbourne said to an unreliable friend, while walking in the churchyard, “They that rule about the King make him great banquets and give him sweet wines and make him drunk,” and then “they bring him bills and he putteth his sign to them, whereby they do what they will and no man may correct them.” He lamented the execution of the Bishop of Rochester (Fisher) and of Sir Thomas More, saying that they would be sorely missed, for they were the most profound men of learning in the realm[313].

As time went on, disloyalty steadily increased. At Coventry in November 1535 the royal proclamations were torn down from the market cross[314]. At Chichester in April 1536 a seditious bill was posted up[315].

From Crowle in Worcestershire came several reports of treasonable speeches. In August 1535 Edmund Brocke, an aged husbandman, walking home from Worcester market in the rain, was heard to say, “It is ’long of the King that this weather is so troublous and unstable, and I ween we shall never have better weather whiles the King reigneth, and therefore it maketh no matter if he were knocked or patted on the head.”[316] A year later accusations were brought against James Pratt, the vicar of Crowle. Witnesses deposed that on the Sunday before St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) he had said in an ale-house “that the church went down and would be worse until there be a shrappe made, and said that he reckoned there were 20,000 nigh of flote, and wished there were 20,000 more, so that he were one, and rather tomorrow than the next day, for there shall never be good world until there be a schrappe. And they that may escape that shall live merry enough.” Statistics were very roughly calculated in those days, but the 20,000 men whom the vicar believed to be “nigh of flote” appear again and again in the report of the rebels’ forces, and perhaps he had some grounds for his prophecy, though he was probably drunk when he made it. If not strictly temperate he was at any rate brave and loyal to his friends; when examined by torture, he would confess nothing but that he had heard divers persons, whom he would not name, say the Church was never so sore handled[317]. Earlier in the same year (1536) Thomas Sowle, a priest of Penrith in Cumberland, had wandered south to Tewkesbury, where he said in an ale-house, “We be kept bare and smit under, yet we shall rise once again, and 40,000 of us will rise upon a day.”[318] By degrees the mutterings of discontent became more definite. Thomas Toone, parson of Weeley, Essex, came home from a visit to the north at the beginning of September 1536 in harvest time. Two of his parishioners went with him one day into the fields called “Lambeles Redoon” and “Wardes” to gather tithe sheaves. “There shall be business shortly in the north,” said the priest, “and I trust to help strength my countrymen with 10,000 such as I am myself, and that I shall be one of the worst of them all.” The labourer answered quietly, “Little said is soon amended.” The priest added hastily, “Remember ye not what I said unto you right now, care ye not for that, for an Easter come, the King shall not reign long.” The priest went on up the furrow gathering the tithe sheaves, and the two countrymen agreed together to say nothing of the matter for the present[319]. They waited, like hundreds of others, ready to applaud the priest if he succeeded, or to accuse him if he failed.

Such was the state of the south on the eve of the rebellion. The general opinion was that “the new laws might be suffered for a season, but already they set men together by the ears and in time they would cause broken heads.”[320] In the north the discontent was all the more dangerous because less is heard of it[321]. It was by no means less active than in the south, but there were fewer informers. In 1535, Layton, one of Cromwell’s hated visitors, wrote to his master on the religious state of the northern counties, where he was about to begin his visitation of the monasteries: “There can be no better way to beat the King’s authority into the heads of the rude people of the north than to show them that the King intends reformation and correction of religion.” He described them as “more superstitious than virtuous, long accustomed to frantic fantasies and ceremonies, which they regard more than either God or their prince, right far alienate from true religion.”[322] And there are a few indications of the trend of popular sympathy.

Edward Lee, the Archbishop of York, though usually entirely subservient to the King, once or twice protested against the granting of licences to heretic preachers, who spoke against purgatory, pilgrimages, and so forth “wherewith the people grudge, which otherwise all the King’s commandment here obey diligently, as well for the setting forth of his title of supreme head as also of the abolition of the primate of Rome.”[323] In spite of this assertion, when the parish priest of Guisborough, Yorkshire, was reading the articles of the King’s Supremacy in church on 11 July 1535, John Atkinson, alias Brotton, “came violently and took the book forth of the priest’s hands, and pulled it in pieces, and privily conveyed himself forth of the church.” A search was made for him, but perhaps not a very exhaustive one; at least he was not found[324].

Very touching are the words of the priest of Winestead, who on Midsummer Day 1535 begged his people to pray for him, “for he had made his testament and was boune to such a journey that he trowed never to see them again. And it is said there is no Pope, but I say there is one Pope.” He was committed to the Archbishop’s prison at York and his fate is unknown[325].

The Royal Supremacy was attacked in books as well as by action and example. On 7 July 1535 Bishop Tunstall wrote to tell Cromwell that a book called “Hortulus Animae,” but printed in English, had been brought to him from Newcastle, and that he found in the calendar at the end of it “a manifest declaration against the effect of the act of parliament lately made, for the establishment of the King’s succession ... which declaration is made ... upon the day of the decollation of St John Baptist, to show the cause why he was beheaded.”[326] It was easy to draw a sufficiently trenchant parallel between Herod, Herodias, and St John on the one hand, and Henry, Anne, and the Catholic martyrs on the other. Later in the same year other books were “taken up,” which treated of purgatory and magnified the power of the Pope[327].

The depositions against William Thwaites, parson of Londesborough, form the fullest case remaining against a Yorkshire parish priest, and they are especially interesting because the circumstances must have come under the notice of Robert Aske. His brother Christopher had lands in Londesborough, and John Aske was the magistrate who heard the second set of depositions on 13 November 1535. John Nesfield, the bailiff of Londesborough, was the principal witness. He charged the vicar with saying “about the Invention of Holy Cross last” (3 May 1535) that he was glad to hear of the subsidy “for now shall ye temporal men be pilled and polled as well as the spiritual men be.” He also said that England had now no allies but the Lutherans, and that an interdict on the realm lay at Calais and other foreign ports. If it were brought into the country, there would be no more Christian burial for men than for dogs, “howbeit the King will not obey it.” He had refused to attend when summoned to appear before Archdeacon Magnus on 29 June 1535 at Warter Priory, when the other curates of the deanery were given briefs to declare every Sunday; these must have been the briefs for the Royal Supremacy[328]. Thwaites never published his copy until the Sunday before Holyrood Day (14 September), when his parishioners began to murmur. There were three other witnesses who had heard him say that the King would be destroyed by the most vile people in the world “and that he should be glad to take a boat for safeguard of his life and flee into the sea, and forsake his own realm; and, masters, there hangs a cloud over us, what as it means I know not.” He also spoke much of prophecies about future battles[329].

Thwaites was tried at the York Assizes in March 1536, and was acquitted on the grounds that the charge was malicious. Nevertheless he was sent up to London to appear before Cromwell next term[330].

Although all classes were to a certain extent hostile to the religious changes, a sharp line was drawn between the disaffection of the gentlemen on account of the new laws, and the unrest of the lower orders under social conditions. The troubles of the commons may be summed up in the one word—change. Everything was changing,—the relations of the landlord to the tenant, of the labourer to the land, of the buyer to the seller, of the layman to the church,—and in most cases the change bore heavily on the poor man. It was all this changing that he resented so profoundly; he disliked to see the abbeys pulled down and the monks turned out, just as he disliked raised rents and sheep-farming enclosures, and an English service in the parish church. About an abstract question like that of the Supremacy he cared little, and if the King had been content with his new title and spared the monasteries, there would probably have been no rebellion, but only a series of isolated disturbances raised by the commons and easily put down by the gentlemen, such as the Craven riots of June 1535. The rioters tore down the enclosures made by the Earl of Cumberland, the most ill-beloved of the northern nobles. Their grievances were the usual ones: fields which when tilled had supported families were turned into pasturage for the lord’s profit, and the common lands were shamelessly stolen. The authorities had no difficulty in finding and punishing a suitable number of offenders[331]. In December there was rioting in Galtres Forest by York, but here the sympathy of the gentlemen was with the rioters, for in spite of the evidence the inquest which the Earl of Northumberland appointed to deal with the affair refused to “find a riot,” at the instigation of Thomas Delaryver, one of the jurors[332]; and in April 1536 Sir Arthur Darcy appealed to Cromwell on behalf of the people of Galtres Forest, who were being troubled by Mr Curwen and Sir Thomas Wharton about an alleged riot although it was barley-seed time and they were in great poverty[333].

The people about Snape assembled in April 1536 to attack the commissioners for the subsidy, but when they reached the place they only found the spiritual officers holding a court, and so they dispersed[334]. This assembly must have been promoted by the yeomen farmers, who, being the poorest class included in the subsidy, naturally resented it most.

At the end of 1535, commons, yeomen, and gentlemen were as yet far from forgetting their contending economic grievances in their common religious ones. Darcy himself was involved in a quarrel with his tenants at Rothwell about enclosures[335], and parties with interests so different might never have united, if the dissolution of the lesser monasteries had not welded them into one.

The Act was passed in March 1536[336], and the suppression began in May. News travelled so slowly, and the proceedings of the government were so little understood, that the first intimation of the coming change must often have been the arrival of the commissioners who were to suppress the monastery. The effect on the people may be imagined when they saw the monks turned out, their alms stopped, their lands given to an absentee landlord, their buildings pulled down, or unroofed and left to fall to ruin.

When the idea of dissolving the monasteries was throwing the whole kingdom into a turmoil, it may well be asked how it was received in the monasteries themselves. There is strangely little information on this point. As early as February 1536, that is, a month before the act was passed, Thomas Duke[337], the vicar of Hornchurch, Essex, had been heard to say that “the King and his council hath made a way by wiles and crafts to pull down all manner of religious, and thus they go about to abbots and priors and possessioners and agree with them to deliver up their rights and promise them a sufficient living, a hundred marks or more, and when they have given all over, all other must needs give over, but an they would hold hard for their part, which be their rights, the King could not pull down none, nor all his council.”[338] From this and other evidence it is clear that Cromwell had taken steps to ensure the peaceful surrender of houses[339]. In the majority of cases the monks must have felt very bitterly against those who forced them from their chosen life, and numbers of abbots and abbesses spared neither trouble nor gold in vainly trying to save their houses from the general spoil. Others again simply could not believe that such an order would really be carried out; such a one was the Abbot of Woburn, whose ruthful story Froude has told[340]. In June 1536 the Abbot of Tavistock was heard to say at table, “Lo, the King sends about to suppress many houses of religion, which is a piteous case; and so did the Cardinal (Wolsey) in his time, but what became of him and what end he made for his so doing, I report me unto you; all men knows.”[341]

It has often been said that if all the religious had borne themselves as did the Carthusian martyrs, the Reformation would have been impossible. This is perfectly true, and perhaps, religiously speaking, the monks ought to have been prepared to die to a man rather than give way, especially as their training was supposed to be the best possible preparation for martyrdom. But they were handicapped. The King struck so suddenly that they had no time, even if they had the necessary determination, to agree on any common action. There were no positive orders from the Pope, and the immediate superiors whom the monks were bound to obey were often either bribed by Cromwell or turned out to make way for government servants. Then there were discontented monks, and monks who inclined to the New Learning, in many of the houses. Nevertheless there was nothing that could have stayed real enthusiasm if it had swept through the monasteries. The monks of the Charterhouse could die, and the canons of Hexham could take up arms. Others might have done as they did, instead of going forth sadly and lamenting their hard lot. It was not that the religious did not care, but that they did not care quite enough. And yet it is scarcely fair to blame them for lack of zeal. It is impossible, humanly speaking, that a large and scattered class of men and women, united only by the common aim of their lives and schooled in implicit obedience, should be able to defy in solid and unbroken ranks the law under which they live. The case of the romanist priests who suffered during the Elizabethan persecution is not to the point. They were enthusiasts who were eager for martyrdom, like the leaders of a forlorn hope. The religious of Henry VIII’s reign were peaceful votaries, and however well the monastic life may have fitted them to praise God, feed the poor, and teach the children, it could not produce men capable of resisting constitutional authority. People grumbled as much then as now at acts of parliament, and thought of resisting them as little. The monks were not as a class capable of refusing to acknowledge Henry’s supremacy, but they were eminently suited to carry on a long passive resistance, and this was one of the reasons which moved the King to rid himself of them. Having once recognised Henry as Head of the Church of England, they were helpless against the further attack. Morally they had admitted themselves absolutely at his mercy; actually they might perhaps have made a better fight than they did, for the people were almost everywhere on their side; but as the whole aim of their way of living had been to cut them off completely from the world, the better they were from the ecclesiastical point of view, the more helpless they were to take any action in practical life. They were not even convinced that any action on their part was necessary.

The fall and execution of Anne Boleyn in May 1536 was received with universal rejoicing, and conservative people expected the longed-for reaction in ecclesiastical affairs. But in the very month that rid them of the cause of their troubles the suppression began. Before the end of July they realised that their hopes were not to be fulfilled, and within the next month the country was alive with “rumours,” as the royal spies said, though it was really a secret political agitation. The King was at great pains to trace out these rumours after the rebellion, because he wished to represent that such of them as he had no present intention of carrying out were the only cause of the rising. Consequently, when the poor, deluded commons discovered how false the tales were, they would at once return to their allegiance, without making any inconvenient demands. Nevertheless the rumours were usually based on fact, or anticipated measures which were afterwards taken, and the outstanding facts of the Treason Act, the Succession Acts, the subsidy, the Royal Supremacy and the Dissolution of the Monasteries were undeniable and gave colour to the rest. When the King was actively engaged in robbing a church, what hope was there that he would spare his subjects? The commonest rumours were as follows:

(a) All the jewels and vessels of the parish churches were to be taken away, and such as were necessary were to be replaced by tin or brass[342]. This report was the natural sequel of the pillaging of the monasteries and the destruction of the shrines. Though Henry himself did not make such a confiscation, it occurred in his son’s reign.

(b) All gold, coined and uncoined, was to be taken to the mint to be tested, and every man would be obliged to pay for the testing[343].

(c) One of the rumours which had least foundation in fact was that parish churches were to be at least five miles apart. Where they stood nearer together, the separate parishes were to be united into one, and the unneeded churches were to be pulled down[344]. Even now there is great local rivalry between parish and parish. At that time it often rose to a positive feud. The idea that the ancient landmarks would be removed and that men would be compelled to worship with their neighbouring enemies was enough to make some parishes take up arms.

(d) A tax was to be levied on all horned cattle. Those on which it had been paid would be marked, and any found unmarked would be confiscated[345]. This rumour probably originated in the legislation concerning graziers[346].

(e) In anticipation of Cromwell’s parish registers, it was said that all christenings, marriages, and burials were to be taxed[347].

(f) No poor man was to be permitted to eat white bread, goose or capon without paying a tribute to the King[348]. The probable source of this rumour has already been mentioned[349]. It is a reminder that though the Tudor sumptuary laws seem very quaint now, they must have been a real hardship at the time.

(g) Finally, it was said that every man would be sworn to give an account of his property and income. If he falsified the return all his goods would be forfeited[350]. This was simply a complaint against the subsidy in rather an exaggerated form.

Such were the more fantastic of the stories which were passing from mouth to mouth. It is evident that they were no wider of the truth than many political agitations in our own time, and with them were united the real grievances which have already been mentioned They passed through the country from market to market[351], and can be traced as far south as Devon, where on 5 September a “somner” was accused of spreading them[352]. They circulated chiefly in the midland and eastern counties. Aske declared that they were never heard in Yorkshire until after Guy Kyme brought them with the Lincolnshire articles[353]. Stapleton however heard at Beverley that several parishes were to be made into one and the church jewels taken away[354]; and Breyar was told of the tax on horned cattle and on every “child and chymley” at Sturley and Retford[355]. It is natural that rumours should spread from the south to the north bank of the Humber, and Aske first heard them from the ferryman as he was crossing at Barton[356]. It would be difficult to find a better way of spreading news than by enlisting ferrymen to repeat it to their fares. But though the rumours were certainly known in Yorkshire after the rising began, they do not seem to have spread very far, or to have had much influence there. The newsbearers who carried them need not be accused of ill-faith; in all probability they really believed what they said, and this gave their words all the more weight. Their work may be compared to that of the Evangelical Brotherhood in Germany, formed in 1524, whose members each contributed a small weekly sum “to defray the expenses of the bearers of the secret despatches which were to be distributed far and wide throughout Germany, inciting to amalgamation and a general rising.”[357] The effect of their propaganda was soon seen.

Early in August 1536 riots broke out in Cumberland, and the Bishop of Carlisle was accused of promoting them[358]. In Norfolk there were stirrings at the beginning of September. An organ-maker “intended to make an insurrection” at Norwich, but he was arrested by the Duke of Norfolk, who also took up another “right ill person” who spoke lewd words[359]. Men from Lincolnshire were reporting in other counties that “anyone who would go thither at Michaelmas should have honest living, for diking and fowling,” and there were several who took the hint and set out for Lincolnshire as soon as the harvest was over[360]. The commissioners and their servants were by no means careful to allay the unrest. On St Matthew’s Day (21 September) a tall serving-man in Louth church declared that the silver almsbowl was “meeter for the King than for them.” Whereupon one of the congregation “fashioned to draw his dagger, saying that Louth and Louthesk should make the King and his master[361] such a breakfast as they never had.”[362] It was said at Grimsby that the people of Hull had sold their church plate and jewels and paved the town with the proceeds, in order that the King might not get them[363]. In the Yorkshire dales the people had taken an oath and were on the verge of rebellion, openly speaking treason[364].

It was impossible that rumours should circulate and oaths be taken without some human agency, but the men who were conducting the agitation are difficult to discover. The King’s pardon to the rebels only covered the period of the actual rebellion; any treasonable word or action before that time was to be punished. In consequence very little can be learned about the time of preparation. The prisoners naturally declared that they had been taken unawares and knew nothing of the business until they were compelled to join the insurgents. In such a situation a little prevarication is pardonable, and it is scarcely wronging Aske, Stapleton, and others to say that they probably knew more than they would admit about the origin of the rebellion. Sometimes there is a glimpse of a friar or a vicar, such as the priest of Penrith and the vicar of Crowle, and sometimes it is some person indirectly ecclesiastical, a summoner or an organ-maker, who may be suspected of knowing the secret; but of the laymen engaged in the agitation only two can be identified, and very little can be discovered about even these two.

One of them was Guy Kyme of Louth, who was executed at Lincoln after the rebellion[365]. On Saturday 30 September and Sunday 1 October 1536 he was at Grimsby. He said that his business was “about the conveyance of certain suspected pirates of a ship of Feversham to Lincoln,”[366] but several people believed he was already in communication with the disaffected in Yorkshire[367], and during the rising he was sent as a messenger from the insurgents to Beverley[368]. Anthony Curtis, the other agent, is a still more problematic character. He lived in Grimsby[369], and was connected with the Askes[370], though the relationship cannot now be traced. He was a fellow-lawyer of Robert Aske’s at Gray’s Inn[371]. Like Kyme he was concerned in carrying news from Lincolnshire to Yorkshire[372]. Both these men, it is to be noted, were from the north of Lincolnshire, and several details seem to point to the fact that this country was the headquarters of the agitation.

In addition to the definite rumours about new taxes and changes, there was the vaguer but perhaps no less influential mass of wandering prophecies. As early as 1535 a certain hermit of Bristol, returning home after a visit to Lincolnshire, called Katherine of Arragon “the Queen of Fortune,” and declared that when the time came she would make ten men against the King’s one[373]. During May and June of the same year it rained continually, and it was murmured that this was God’s vengeance for the death of monks[374]. In London a prophecy went about that there would be a month “rainy and full wet, next month death, and the third month war,”[375] and another that “the floods flowing in Britain shall cause a great insurrection.”[376] The connection between floods and rebellion was obvious; when the rain spoiled the harvest the people starved, and were ready for any mischief. Before the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany it was prophesied that there would be a second Flood in the summer of 1524[377]. Prophecies almost as vague and quite as likely to come true can be found to-day in any newspaper; now, as then, the weather and politics are the two subjects on which mankind always listens to the seer, however often misled.

The story of one of the strangest prophecies was told by a Dorsetshire justice on 20 May 1535. A servant of his was overheard lamenting first the stormy weather, and then the state of the kingdom, “saying it was a heavy world and like to be worse shortly, for he heard say that the priests would rise against the King.” Inquiries were made, and the servant admitted that one of the tenants had told him some such words, which he had from an old man living but three miles from Chideock. The justice set out to see the prophet, who was too aged to come before him. When questioned he said it was true he had told several neighbours that “the priests should make a field”; he knew this from his master, a very wise man, who had been dead fifty years. The rest of the prophecy ran, “that the parish priests should rule England three days and nights, and then the White Falcon should come out of the North-West and kill almost all the priests, and they that should escape should be fain to hide their crowns with the filth of beasts, because they would not be known.”[378] The White Falcon was the badge of Anne Boleyn, and these very adaptable phrases suggest the brief reign of Mary and the Catholic persecutions under “the White Falcon’s” daughter.

Anne Boleyn’s reign and fall were said to have been foretold by Merlin[379]. “A.B. and C.” are of frequent occurrence in the prophecies, even after her death, probably standing for Anne Boleyn and Cromwell. The monks of Furness had a saying “that A B and C should sit all in one seat, and should work great marvels,” and that afterwards “the decorate rose shall be slain in his mother’s belly.” It does not appear how long this saying had been known in the house, but during the winter of 1536 they interpreted it to mean that Henry should be slain by the hands of the priests, for the Church he oppressed was his mother[380]. The prophecies circulated chiefly in the monasteries and among the priests and friars. The Prior of Malton in Rydale described a picture drawn on parchment which he had seen fifteen years before (1512) at Rostendale (Ravenstonedale) in Westmorland; it showed a moon waxing and waning, each moon with the date of the year beneath. Over the full moon was drawn a Cardinal, and under the old moon two headless monks; in the midst was a child “with axes and butchers’ knives and instruments about him.”[381] This recalls another prophecy of 1512, which made a deep impression on the mind of Cromwell, “that one with a Red Cap brought up from low degree to high estate should rule all the land under the King ... and afterwards procure the King to take another wife, divorce his lawful wife Queen Katherine, and involve the land in misery ... that divorce should lead to the utter fall of the said Red Cap ... and after much misery the land should by another Red Cap be reconciled or else brought to utter destruction.”[382]

Dr Maydland, a Black friar of London, had discovered by necromancy in November 1535 that the New Learning should be suppressed, and the Old restored by the King’s enemies beyond the seas. He was in hopes that the King would die a violent death, and that he would see the Queen (Anne) burnt, and the head of every maintainer of the New Learning on a stake[383].

It was treason to possess copies of such prophecies. On 2 April 1536 the parson of Wednesborough was accused of possessing one; other accusations against him were that he was a Scot, and “if well handled” could “declare a multitude of papists[384].” In June the canons of Tortington in Sussex were accused of reading prophecies[385], and, as mentioned above, the vicar of Londesborough repeated them. In spite of the danger, scrolls of prophecies were often circulated by the owner among his friends, who took copies or committed the striking parts to memory; some made regular collections, borrowing or learning all they could find to add to the rolls, and so, as sayings or writings, the verses spread through a whole district. One of these collections is preserved among the Lansdowne MS[386]; it seems to have been compiled about 1531 as a whole, but contains later entries[387]. In it is a version of the prophecies of Thomas the Rymer, and it concludes with an account of the great deeds to be done by “a child with a chaplet,”[388] who shall reign for fifty-five years, and after restoring peace in England shall recover the Holy Cross from Jerusalem and bring it back in triumph to Rome, where his bones will finally be buried in great honour. As long as the King remained a faithful son of the Church there was no harm in this ordinary ballad conclusion, but once Henry had quarrelled with the Pope it wore a very different aspect, and men began to think that the King who was such a welcome guest at Rome could not be Henry himself, or one of Henry’s heirs, but his conqueror[389].

The vicar of Mustone was accused before the Council of the North in 1537 of spreading seditious prophecies. This man, John Dobsone by name, was like nearly all the northern clergy secretly in favour of the Pope. Doubtless most of his parishioners agreed with him, but three of them, disliking either his opinions or himself, accused him of relating in the ale-house and the church porch that the King would be driven out of his realm, and then return and be content with a third part of it; that the Eagle “which is the Emperor ... shall rule all the land at his pleasure”; that the Dun Cow “which is the bishop of Rome ... shall come into England jingling with her keys and set the church again in the right faith”; also that “When the Crumme (Cromwell) is brought low Then shall begin the Christ’s Cross row.” The vicar denied the charge that he had any such writings in a book, though he admitted he had seen such a collection. He also denied that he had ever repeated them in public, and all the witnesses whom his accusers cited bore him out in this, and declared he was an honest man denounced from private malice. The Council, though they committed him to gaol and wrote to the King for instructions, were inclined to take a lenient view of his case. But they energetically set to work to hunt out the originators of such dangerous sayings. The result is like an Arabian story, tale following tale in endless sequence. Dobsone had first heard of the prophecies at the White Friars at Scarborough in October 1536. The Warden of the Grey Friars, who was visiting there, spoke of a prophecy that was going about, whereupon the Prior of the White Friars produced a roll of paper on which a number were written. It was in fact a collection that he had been making for some years. He lent it to Dobsone, who justified his confidence by returning it in a fortnight. Another friend of the prior’s was not so particular. He borrowed the roll and it was stolen from his house during the insurrection, but several accounts of the contents remain. The prophecies were said to be declared by “Merlion,” St Bede, and Thomas of Ercildoune, but they were copied from many sources[390]. The earliest told how “when the Black fleet of Norway was comed and gone, after in England war shall be never,” and other things equally harmless[391]. Others were given the prior in May 1536 by a priest of Beverley, whom he never saw before or after. They began “France and Flanders shall arise” and perhaps included the Eagle and the Cow, as well as some obscure forebodings of battles where “the clergy should stand in fear and fight as they seculars were,” with which a “long man in red” would have something to do. The most interesting relate to the great northern families, which were indicated by their badges, as is usual in sayings and ballads. The cock was the crest of the Lumleys, and one prophecy runs “the cock of the north shall be plucked and pulled, and curse the time that ever he was lord,” but after his misfortunes “he shall busk him and brush his feathers, and call his chickens togethers and after that he shall do great adventures.” “The moon shall lose her light, and after shall take light of the sun again” refers to the crescent badge of the Percies, and the Tudor crest of a rose surrounded by the rays of the sun. The scallop shells of the Dacres “shall be broken and go to wreck.” At the end of the roll “Thomas demandeth of Merlion and Bede saying when shall these things be? About the year of Our Lord God 1537.” The Council of the North thought the rhyme about Cromwell the most serious, and made every effort to find the author. There were numberless versions, the best lines being: