I can’t say how much I enjoyed the research and writing this book, especially as I was permitted to include some of my own pen and ink drawings. Please share with any one who you think might be interested. And follow the link below to a blog post that I have written for the History Press. If you’d like to buy the book click on the image.
Time flies when you’re having fun! I thought it was about a week since my last post – turns out to be rather more.
In August 1642 King Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham, effectively starting the English civil war. – this did not bode well for Nottingham Castle when Parliament gained the upper hand. Essentially England was divided into the North and West which supported the king and the South and East which supported Parliament.
October 1642 – Battle of Edgehill – not decisive. The Earl of Essex commanded Parliament’s army. Had Charles been able to reach London the war might have had a different outcome. Instead there was intermittent fighting across the country and the king based his court at Oxford.
1643 –
The Oxford Propositions – similar to the Nineteen Propositions and like them they were rejected.
Charles I came to an agreement with the Irish – which did not go down well in England. They joined the king’s men in Cheshire and the North-West but the use of Catholic troops was counter-productive as it gave Parliament propaganda gold.
The Royalists had the upper hand until Parliament came to an agreement with the Scots. In January 1644 a 22,000 man army would cross the border into England. The royalist army in the north was sandwiched between the Scots and the Parliamentarians.
1644
Rupert of the Rhine headed north with his cavalry to support the royalists.
July 1644 The Battle of Marston Moor – the royalist commander William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle lost the battle and left the country. It meant that the North of England came under the control of Parliament.
Newark remained a royalist stronghold but the tide had turned.
1645.
Parliament presented the king with the Uxbridge Propositions – yup – they were like the Nineteen Propositions and the king rejected them again.
June 1645 The New Model Army which was much more organised and professional than the royalists won the Battle of Naseby.
5 May 1646 Charles I surrendered to the Scots who gave him to Parliament in return for £400,000
In 1648 there were Royalist uprisings in many parts of the country including at Colchester. It became known as the Second Civil War. In August 1648 a joint force of Scots and English Royalists was destroyed by Oliver Cromwell’s army at Preston – many Scots fugitives were held captive at Chapel en le Frith.
In January 1649 – having been put on trial Charles I was executed.
A typical GCSE question asks: Explain the significance of the trial and execution of Charles I for royal authority…
It changed the relationship between the authority of the monarch king and parliament. Continuity of kingship was broken. There was a new form of government. The Commonwealth placed greater emphasis on the rights of men. Even when a monarch was restored, Parliament redefined prerogative rights and the idea of the Divine Right of Kings was dead in the water. It was certainly very evident that kings were only men and that they were fallible.
Charles I was viewed in many quarters as a tyrant. The idea of holding rulers to account was popular from then onwards e.g. America and France.
The changes were almost too radical. There was uncertainty and unrest. People didn’t know what to call Oliver Cromwell and when he died he was replaced with his son – Richard – in a way that was redolent of a royal accession. It meant that when the monarchy was restored, that it benefitted from a reluctance for change.
There were three civil wars fought between 1642 and 1651 across Britain’s three kingdoms. Charles, married to Henrietta Maria, was increasingly distrusted because of his use of royal power, his economic policies and disagreement about religion.
There were many types of Christianity in Charles I’s realm from High Church groups such as the Arminians, favoured by Archbishop Laud, who supported vestments and altar railings and whose Book of Common Prayer laid out the form services should take. The archbishop believed in the ‘beauty of holiness’ and wanted lots of decoration. Many people saw Laud’s vision of the Church of England as almost Catholic in the form it took and it didn’t help that there were so many prominent Catholics at court including Henrietta Maria, Charles’ queen upon whom he relied for advice after the demise of his favourites.
For many people in England religion was related not only to faith but to national identity. It wasn’t that long since the Spanish Armada of 1588 or the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – ‘Popish plots’ was examples of treachery.
In 1637 Puritan pamphleteers had their ears cropped and were branded for criticising Laud – which made him look rather cruel.
In 1638 the Scots revolted when Charles attempted to impose the Book of Common Prayer upon them.
Charles was forced to recall Parliament to raise funds to fight the Scots – parliament was sympathetic to the Puritans. The so called long parliaments lasted from 1640 to 1653. Recalled, and knowing that the king needed cash Parliament issued the Grand Remonstrance against the king in November 1641 and in June 1642 issued the Nineteen Propositions which was a bid to gain more power for themselves. By then the relationship between the monarch and his parliament was at breakdown. At the end of August, Charles raised his standard at Nottingham Castle and the country was at war.
Click on the pictures to open the links for more information about the books below. Diane Purkiss’s book provides an excellent account of the English civil war. I really enjoyed Michael Arnold’s Stryker series written against the backdrop of the turbulent 17th century.
In 1629, Charles I dissolved his parliament having been presented the Petition of Right in 1628. In March 1629 the Speaker tried to dissolve Parliament, on the king’s orders, but was held in his chair by three MPS while the commons voted against some of the king’s decisions. The Speaker of the House was in a difficult position – he stated that he was parliament and the king’s servant. Charles I was not amused when he was told what had happened and dissolved parliament immediately. He decided that he did not need parliament to raise funds – instead he would rule by royal prerogative and that meant finding older ways of raising taxes. He returned in effect to personal rule and feudal taxation.
Charles used: feudal dues, customs duty and income from his own estates. James I had often been short of money and Charles’ favourite the recently assassinated Duke of Buckingham had involved England in a disastrous war with the French. Now Charles levied a tax called Distraint of Knighthood – any man who possessed more than £40 a year was required to attend a royal coronation, when one occurred, to receive a knighthood. Failure to do so resulted a fine. Charles’ coronation was in 1626 and £40 was not as much money as it had once been. Now though, Charles didn’t hesitate to levy the fine to raise funds. Not only was there this war in France to be fought there was also support to be provided for Charles’ sister, Elizabeth also known as the Winter Queen and her husband, Frederick V the Elector Palatine / King of Bohemia in the Thirty Years War.
There was also ship money. This was usually levied during time of war in coastal counties but Charles now directed that the tax should be raised across the whole kingdom. As a result there was a high profile court case against John Hampden who refused to pay.
And just in case you wanted something else – there was the grant of monopolies to individuals who paid for the right and then increased the price on whatever they held the monopoly upon.
Was Charles I a tyrant? He wasn’t a cruel man and didn’t have a secret police to enforce his whims but he ruled without recourse to parliament, on occasion men were imprisoned without trial and the taxes he imposed while legal in the strictest sense of the word had often fallen into disuse by the time he resurrected them. And then there were his religious beliefs which he tried to impose on all his subjects – more of that anon.
Divine right is the belief in the God given right of a monarch to rule. The idea was established in the reign of James (1603-25) who believed that the king was subject to no other earthly authority and could only be judged by God. Any attempt to depose or even to restrict the powers of the king went against God’s will. In 1598 he had published a book called The True Law of Free Monarchies. He claimed that ‘Kings are justly called gods for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power on earth’. The Basilikon Doron written by the king as a set of instructions for his eldest son, Prince Henry, in 1599 identified his ideology more clearly.
The book is divided into three parts:
I) how to be a Christian king
2) practical aspects of kingship
3) the king’s behaviour in everyday life.
James’ belief in the divine right of kings had a negative impact on his relationship with the English Parliament. During the reign of his successor, Charles who inherited the throne following the deaths of his elder brother in 1612 and James in 1625 also believed in the divine right of kings. Charles I also believed that because he was God’s representative only he had the right to make laws and that to oppose him was a sin. He believed that he was above the law and had to govern according to his conscience.
By the time James died in 1625 Parliament was suspicious of the Stuart kings, by 1628 the tension turned to Parliamentary demands known as the Petition of Right. Charles lacked both experience and confidence and relied upon the advice of his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham advocated a raid on Cadiz which was a disaster. Parliament demanded that she should be impeached – so Charles dissolved parliament before it granted him any funds. Buckingham arranged for the king to marry a French Catholic bride (Henrietta Maria) and then went to war with the French in 1627 in support of the Huguenots of La Rochelle – the whole thing was a disaster because of poor planning. By 1628 Charles was at war, without any money and was trying to extract forced loans. He had no choice but to call Parliament.
Sir Edward Coke, a lawyer, put together the Petition of Right which stated, there would be no more forced loans; no imprisonment without trial – 5 knights had been sent to prison because they refused to pay Charles’ forced loan. In addition there would be no further use of free lodgings (billeting) for soldiers in civilian households and no use of martial law against civilians. At the same time, the House of Commons granted the king five subsidies but only if he agreed their terms. Coke and Parliament were defining the law by asserting rights that already existed. It should have been an opportunity for the king and parliament to learn to work together…
Click on the book to open the link in a new tab to find the book and read more about their contents. I love Leanda de Lisle’s writing. Last year she published a biography of Charle’s queen, Henrietta Maria
Reformation, taxation and enclosure were causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. During the reign of Henry VII rebellions including the Lovell/Stafford rising, the rebellion in favour of Lambert Simnel and the Perkins Warbeck rebellion were all related to the dynastic upheavals of the fifteenth century. it wasn’t really just about bloodlines by that time, it was also about power and influence at court – who would help the king to govern. But even they had more than one cause.
Taxation and enclosure: this could be a localised problem as with the Yorkshire rebellion of 1489 that saw the murder of the Earl of Northumberland. The same was true of the Cornish Rebellion of 1497 that was then followed up by the Cornish commons joining with the Perkin Warbeck Revolt. The most well known of the rebellions associated with enclosure was Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk in 1549 during the reign of Edward VI. Local taxation, rent rises and enclosure of common land led to risings based on social and economic need – but they weren’t necessarily a major threat to the Tudors because they were regional rather than national. Where the rising was contained in one area it was easier to put down.
Religion: The Pilgrimage of Grace is the most obvious example, but in 1554 when Mary Tudor, a.k.a. Bloody Mary, was on the throne Wyatt’s Rebellion aimed to place Elizabeth on the throne because she was protestant.
The Tudors always feared rebellion but they centralised government, used propaganda and had a secret service. The real problem with any rebellion was if it was backed by a foreign power like the French, Spanish or the papacy. One of the reasons Henry VIII was so alarmed by the Pilgrimage of Grace was because there was a potential threat from Catholic nobles who wanted Princess Mary restored to her rightful place in the succession. Taken together with the support of the gentry (not always given willingly) and the clergy it was perhaps the biggest challenge to Tudor authority. The Pilgrimage of Grace is something studied at school because it was the biggest rebellion that expressed anti-Reformation beliefs.
Henry VIII and Thomas Wolsey continued with their programme of closing the monasteries but it was only during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I that opinions completely polarised. Reformers became gradually more radical, while Catholics wanted to keep to their traditional values. It was one of the reasons that the presence of Mary Queen of Scots in England was difficult for Elizabeth. The Scottish queen was recognised by many catholics as England’s legitimate monarch and it led to prolonged plotting against Elizabeth.
Religious contention would lead, in 1605, during the Stuart era, to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 which aimed to kill James I and his heir, destroy the Protestant parliament and leave the way clear for a Catholic restoration. The plotters intended to place James’ daughter Elizabeth Stuart on the throne, convert her to catholicism and ensure that she was married to a Catholic husband. In 1701 the Act of Settlement finally drew the matter of the religion of the succession to a conclusion – the monarch had to be Protestant or Parliament wouldn’t recognise their right to rule. Ultimately in 1714 George I became King of England because he was the nearest in line to the throne from among the potential claimants who was a Protestant. Of course, that didn’t stop the Catholic heirs of James II (who had been deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – his son James (the Old Pretender) and his grandson Charles (Bonnie Prince Charlie, a.k.a. the Young Pretender) attempting to regain the throne for the Catholic branch of the Stuart family in the Jacobite rebellions of the eighteenth century.
And of course, in between the times – the seventeenth century saw the English Civil Wars, which is where we will be going next.
The pilgrims of 1536 demonstrated that religion could be an alternative authority to the Crown. Rituals and symbolism were important throughout the rebellion. The image here shows monks and a bishop heading the procession of pilgrims- they carry a cross and a banner showing the five wounds of Christ which was the pilgrim badge. One of the things that this did was to create a sense of unity among the thousands of pilgrims who came from many layers of society with diverse social and economic backgrounds.
The Five Wounds of Christ depict the injuries Christ sustained during his crucifixion. They were a powerful reminder of the rebels’ catholic beliefs and their opposition to Henry VIII’s reform of the Church. The imagery was an easy way for ordinary people to understand what the protest was about – that the rebels objected to the break with Rome and the closure of the monasteries. Men who might not have rebelled against the king would protest because they believed that their spiritual life – and eternity – were being damaged by the Crown.
The rebels took an oath of allegiance to the Pilgrimage of Grace, took part in masses and mass processions and had churches return to the old way of conducting services. As well as showing their devotion to God, these were an act of defiance against the authority of the king.
Having provided a title of the Pilgrimage of Grace I provided you with the Lincolnshire Rising as a preliminary and now will round it all off with Bigod’s Revolt – demonstrating that the rebels, or pilgrims as they preferred to be known, definitely didn’t do joined up.
In December 1536 the Duke of Suffolk agreed terms with the Pilgrims and Henry pardoned them. He didn’t really have much choice. His army was too small and besides which Suffolk was rather busy restoring order in Lincolnshire. Aske’s error lay in taking Henry’s word that they were free to go and that he would address their grievances. In reality the king had been on the receiving end of a nasty shock. There may have been as many as 50,000 rebels across the north of England and it didn’t help Henry that the gentry were involved. Their organisational skills and use of the regional wapentake system meant that it was harder for the royal authorities to put the rebellion down. It was perhaps only because the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire rebellions weren’t co-ordinated that matters hadn’t taken a turn for the worse – that and of course, the rebels didn’t want to overthrow the king, they just wanted him to change his mind about getting rid of Catholicism and the monasteries.
Henry invited Aske to spend Christmas with him at Greenwich and the lawyer had complained to the king about Thomas Cromwell little realising that the minister was acting on the king’s orders.
SIr Francis Bigod, initially in favour of reform and one of Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners tasked with looking at the monasteries before he had a change of heart, disagreed with Robert Aske. He didn’t believe that the king would keep his word. His view was corroborated by the evidence of a military build up at Hull. On 16 January 1537, Bigod renewed the rebellion. He was supported by men who had grievances with their landlords putting up the rent. This was a result of the closure of monasteries. Men purchased land but needed to get their money back – putting up the rent was one way of doing that. Bigod planned to attack Hull and to capture Scarborough Castle.
At the end of January the Duke of Norfolk declared martial law – rebels could be hanged without trial. On 1 February 74 rebels were hanged in Westmorland. Thee executions continued even though the Duke of Norfolk expressed pity for the rebels to Cromwell. He understood that land enclosure and rent rises had as much to do with the rising as rebelling against the king.
Aske returned to Yorkshire and gathered his men intending to defeat Bigod. His intention was to join up with the Duke of Norfolk’s army but so far as the king was concerned the agreement made in December was off because Bigod’s revolt, in his eyes was an extension of the Pilgrimage of Grace. When Norfolk arrived at Beverley, most of Aske’s men were captured.
Francis Bigod was found hiding with two servants in Cumbria. He was taken to Carlisle Castle before being sent to London where he was executed on 2 June 1537. Â Aske, Thomas Percy and Lord Darcy were also arrested as were other members of the gentry, along with six abbots including the Abbot of Jervaulx who was a very unwilling participant in the Pilgrimage of Grace. They were all executed as were six abbots. Aske was executed on 12 July 1537 at York. Perhaps they were marginally more fortunate than Margaret Bulmer whose husband John was one of the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. A priest called John Watts testified as to her involvement and she was promptly tried, found guilty of treason and burned at Smithfield. Women found guilty of treason were burned rather than being hanged because apparently it preserved their decency. It was only in 1790 that the Treason Act abolished the penalty of burning for high treason.
In 1536 an act was passed closing the lesser monasteries worth less than £200 per year. By September there were three groups of commissioners in Lincolnshire i)commissioners to dissolve the monasteries, ii) commissioners to collect a subsidy and iii) commissioners to investigate the fitness of the clergy for their jobs. There were lots of rumours about church plate being stolen, that taxes were to be levied on all horned cattle, that there would be new taxes for baptisms, marriages and burials…there were other even wilder rumours. An atmosphere of suspicion and panic began to brew. It didn’t help that the monasteries were the organisations which provided alms and medical care to the poorest members of society. The gentry and northern nobility had their own grievances. Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister was busy reducing the power of landowners. Inflation continued to rise. Basically the north was not a happy place and men had just about had enough of their king playing with their long established beliefs.
The Lincolnshire Rising turns into the Pilgrimage of Grace.
There’s 2 more parts to the Pilgrimage of Grace – but to get you thinking, these are the kinds of question that sixteen year olds are being asked for their history exam where a working knowledge of the Pilgrimage of Grace is useful:
Have ideas, such as equality and democracy, been the main reason for protest in Britain?
Explain your answer with reference to ideas and other factors.
Use a range of examples from across your study of Power and the people: c1170 to the
present day. (16 marks)
Has religion been the main factor in causing protest in Britain since Medieval times?
Explain your answer with reference to religion and other factors.
Use a range of examples from across your study of Britain: Power and the People: c1170
to the present day. (16 marks)
And for those of you who would like to know more about The Pilgrimage of Grace – click on the picture to open a new tab.
Society remained unequal even though feudalism was no more. Rebellion against the Tudors was not about class or fairness, it was, after the Wars of the Roses, about belief and, of course, money! Equality and democracy were not always reasons to protest.
Kings should only tax their subjects to meet the needs of war or other exceptional circumstances. In 1483 an act of parliament made non-parliamentary taxation illegal. In medieval times this was eventually worked out as a fixed about known as fifteenths and tenths and was a valuation made upon a whole communities. The Tudors came up with the idea of assessing individuals. These taxes were known as subsidies and were arbitrary. They were levied in 1489, 1497 and 1536. Opposition to the subsidies in Parliament led to heated arguments and to outbreaks of violence in the wider realm. Tax collectors were not popular men. Between 1485-1547 there were 11 recorded cases of tax collectors being assaulted and more than 100 occasions when goods and property seized by the tax collector was forcibly taken back. On occasion resistance to taxation resulted in the challenge to royal authority turning into rebellion.
In April 1489 the 4th Earl of Northumberland tried to collect a subsidy that had been granted to Henry VII by Parliament so that he could support Brittany against the French. Northumberland confronted a gathering near Thirsk and was promptly assassinated. He was the only person to be killed during the uprising. Polydore Virgil and the Great Chronicle of London suggested that Northumberland was killed by men sympathetic to the Yorkist cause. Although the Percy family was traditionally Lancastrian in sympathy, the 4th earl was a teenage in 1461 at the Battle of Towton and was eventually rehabilitated by Edward IV who he served in various roles. In 1485 he was at the Battle of Bosworth in charge of the reserves. His failure to enter the fray was regarded as extremely treacherous by the Yorksist supporters of Richard III and even today historians regard him as being a supporter of Henry VII rather than the man whose colours he wore. Vergil and the writer of the Great Chronicle of London thought much the same. In either case Northumberland was either killed because of the loyalty of the north to the memory of Richard or because Henry wished to impose his will on the north – and Northumberland paid the price for forcing it upon the men of Yorkshire.
The rebellion of 1497 was perhaps more serious. Taxation became a major issue in Cornwall where Henry was levying a subsidy to raise an army to deal with the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck (obviously if you’re a Yorkist then he wasn’t a pretender but this isn’t the time or the place for that discussion). Parliament granted the king two fifteenths and tenths and a subsidy equating to £120,000 which was huge. In addition wealthier members of society found themselves subject to a forced loan. The Cornish were already fairly irritated by regulations imposed on the tin mining industry and the loss of their privileges which were an important part of the local economy.
Recognising that blaming the king would be treason the agitators blamed the king’s advisors Cardinal Morton and Reginald Bray. They marched to London to present their grievances to the government and to demand an end to the taxation. They were led by a blacksmith and a lawyer. As well as gentry, and tin miners there were men from all the working class ranks of society and by the clergy. At Wells in Somerset they even gained the support of Lord Audley – who was fairly cash strapped at the time. In a way it made the rebellion more alarming because it crossed the social hierarchy.
By the 13 June 15,000 protesters were at Guildford. The army that Henry intended to send to Scotland had to be diverted south. On 16 June the rebel army arrived at Blackheath causing panic in London but the support wasn’t as widespread as many of the protesters hoped. Plus no one wanted to be a rebel – the consequences were unpleasant. A large number of men deserted, especially when they heard that Henry’s army had swelled from 8,000 to 25,000 – making it one of the largest armies ever gathered by a king of England.
The Battle of Blackheath took place on 17 June 1497 at the bridge at Deptford Strand. Lord Daubeney, the king’s commander crossed the bridge, was captured by the Cornish but quickly rescued. The Cornish didn’t have any reserves or any artillery. They were soon defeated. The leaders of the rebellion, including Lord Audley, were hanged, drawn and quartered. Originally the king thought he would send the butchered body parts to Cornwall as a warning but decided that it wouldn’t be wise – he was right. Instead he fined everyone involved with the rebellion – he was systematic and severe – unsurprisingly the Cornish promptly rebelled again, still in 1497, and joined forces with Perkins Warbeck who landed in Cornwall that September.
Polydore Vergil, who was a Tudor historian, recorded that resistance to Tudor taxation did not always take the form of violence. When Cardinal Wolsey tried to raise funds for Henry VIII’s French campaigns between 1513 and 1525 many men simply shrugged their shoulders and said they couldn’t afford the payments. The Amicable Grant of 1525 was aimed specifically at the clergy but Wolsey found that many abbots simply claimed not to have the money or that the economy was so bad that even if they sold goods they would be unable to afford what the king wanted. At Lavenham in Suffolk the subsidy was largely paid by wealthy clothiers but they owned less than 3% of the property and many of the adult males of the area were out of work. As a consequence some 4,000 men from all walks of life banded together to protest – the tax collectors, on this occasion the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, were hesitant to stir the anger of the protesters and had some sympathy with their difficulties. Public opinion wa becoming more vocal and it meant that the first two Tudor kings were forced to recognise that the Crown rested on partnership with the men who paid tax. Popular opinion was becoming more important than ever before.
For a comprehensive overview of Tudor Rebellions click on the image to open the link.
