Tudor Rebellions

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Anthony Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000038743
• Edition: 7
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Tudor Rebellions, now in its seventh edition, gives a chronological account of the major rebellions against the Tudor monarchy in England from the reign of King Henry VII until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.

The book throws light on some of the main themes of Tudor history, including the dynasty's attempt to bring the north and west under the control of the capital, the progress of the English Reformation and the impact of inflation, taxation and enclosure on society, and makes comparisons with the other Tudor realm of Ireland. This new edition has been revised once more to take into account the exciting and innovative work on the subject in recent years and bring the historiographical debates right up to date. The primary sources, alongside the narrative history, allow students to fully explore these turbulent times, seeking to understand what drove Tudor people to rebel and what sort of people were inclined to do so. In doing so, the book considers both 'high' and 'low' politics, and the concerns of both the noble and the unprivileged in Tudor society.

With supplementary materials including a chronology, who's who and guide to further reading along with a selection of maps and images, Tudor Rebellions is an invaluable resource for all students of Tudor history.

Part I

The background

1 The shape of Tudor society

Early modern England was an unequal society, and gloried in the fact. Half a century after Queen Elizabeth’s death, even the most radical groups in the upheaval of the English Civil War found it very difficult to grasp the concept of equality. The Levellers, for instance, did not conceive of political equality: their commonwealth would have excluded the very poorest sections of society from political life. Only that tiny minority, the Diggers, then began to work out the meaning of the equality of humanity, and they found few sympathisers.

If this was true for an England which had executed its king, it was truer still for the comparatively settled pre-revolutionary world. Class warfare is difficult to find there, because class warfare implies individual classes striving against each other for primacy in society: such a notion was very rare indeed in early modern Europe. The different groups in the social order were fixed for all time; social change meant not a change in the relative positions of those groups, but a change in the status of individuals, who moved from one fixed status group to another. There was only one ‘class’ to exercise supreme power, standing at the head of this social order; below that level, every status group could rest secure in the knowledge that it had not merely a superior group in the system but also an inferior. The lowest in the system could hardly be considered a status group, could hardly even be conceded existence.

Consider a contemporary snapshot of early modern society taken by a lawyer and fashionable humanist intellectual, Sir Thomas Smith. Smith wrote his descriptive tract The Commonwealth of England in the 1560s; he found a fourfold division in society. The first of Smith’s four divisions comprised gentlemen. It was this class of which he spoke most, being a gentleman himself. Indeed he redivided the class into two, beginning with ‘the first part of gentlemen of England called nobilitas major’. By this Smith meant the parliamentary peerage, that section of the landed elite who, by political accidents which had largely settled down into precedent by 1500, received a regular individual summons to attend parliament in the House of Lords. Then there were ‘the second sort of gentlemen which may be called nobilitas minor’; this could in turn be subdivided in descending status order into knights, esquires and gentlemen.

Second were the citizens and burgesses: the people of the cities and towns, islands of privilege in the middle of the gentry’s political world, but islands varying in size from London to some tiny and puny place which had dwindled to a village. Third were the yeomen, the prosperous middle sort of the countryside. Smith recognised their importance, perhaps more than other commentators would: he clearly felt that they were of more account than townsmen, for he said that after the gentry, the yeomen had ‘the greatest charge and doings in the commonwealth’. Last were what Smith flatly said were ‘the fourth sort of men which do not rule’. In his brief account of the fourth section of society, Smith said that they

have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth and no account is made of them, but only to be ruled, not to rule other, and yet they be not altogether neglected. For in cities and corporate towns, for default of yeomen, inquests and juries are impannelled of such manner of people. And in villages they are commonly made churchwardens, aleconners and many times constables, which office toucheth more the commonwealth, and at the first was not employed upon such low and base persons.

Particularly from the last statement, one can see that Smith was not making a sociological analysis; he was describing power. Two further things were notable about his description. First, it wanted to be a description of a rural world; it could not ignore the towns, but they spoiled the simplicity. So Smith described the citizens as his second category, but rushed on to the yeomanry who were the natural step down the ladder from gentlemen. And amid the fourth sort, it was the towns which led the way in disturbing the natural order by spreading the load of responsibility, because towns did not have yeomen. Second, there is a huge gap in the description even after Smith had talked about his fourth category. A large proportion of the population – cottagers, labourers, beggars – would never come near even to the humble offices he had named. Smith had in any case more or less dismissed the fourth category of people whom he does mention. The political nation, the people who mattered, he implied, were restricted to his first three categories. This might have been just about accurate in 1560; not so by the eve of the English Civil War.

Nevertheless, Smith was right that his first three categories were the main wielders of power. Each group had its accepted sphere of operation, once more graded in hierarchical fashion. The nobilitas major could automatically command a say in local affairs if they wished, but their place was with the monarch in central government. Not all would wish to take up this role. A peer like Andrew Lord Windsor during the 1530s or the Earl of Derby under Elizabeth might choose to ignore the Court because he did not like the religious atmosphere. In Derby’s case, this was despite the fact that he had been named a privy councillor; he preferred to stay in his native Lancashire building up an unchallengeable local power-base. However, there could be very serious trouble if peers who did wish to claim their place in central affairs felt that they were being denied it. This brought Richard Duke of York to the point of staging a coup d’état against Henry VI, it provoked the northern earls to rebellion in 1569, and led the fourth Howard Duke of Norfolk and the second Devereux Earl of Essex to the block. It has even been seen as causing the English Civil War.

The nobilitas minor, on the other hand, were the natural governors of the counties, with only a secondary claim on the affairs of central government. The counties which they ruled as justices of the peace (JPs) were groupings of the basic units of Elizabethan administration, the townships and parishes, with, in the middle of them, in an uneasy relationship, those troublesome urban chartered corporations. Townships and parishes were the places where the yeomen held their office, as churchwardens, bailiffs, constables and the like.

Even with greater and lesser gentry reckoned together, the political leadership was a notably small group. In 1587, for instance, there were around 1,500 JPs; so counting those out of political favour, plus adult sons, and a handful of powerful widows, about 2,500 people mattered in central and local affairs. It was said that Queen Elizabeth could personally scrutinise the lists of actual and potential JPs for the whole country and decide on their fitness. Certainly the papers of Lord Burghley (William Cecil) show that he tried to do so. The small scale of power politics reflected the small scale of English life generally: most of the population lived in very small rural communities. London was unique in England for its size; by the early sixteenth century it was at least five times as big as Norwich, its nearest rival. Even most county towns, such as Coventry, York, Exeter or Worcester, were in the 6,000–8,000 league. England was much less urbanised than much of western Europe, but across the whole continent, for the most part, the focus of life was the local community: ‘the fundamental bond, the first resort in cases of confrontation, and the most potent source of outbursts of collective violence’ (Bercé, 1987: viii).

This small scale meant that personal and political relationships were inextricably confused. Much early modern historical writing is obstinately anecdotal, reflecting the society which created it: a face-to-face world. That meant that its elite had to display certain skills less obvious in government today. Tudor politics was ritualistic, and those rituals called for its leading actors to be actors in a literal sense, putting on bizarre costumes, and holding the centre of stages, moving and gesturing in particular ways. Some monarchs were incompetent at this, and lost out accordingly – for instance, Henry VI. Others, like Edward IV, Henry VIII and Elizabeth, enjoyed it, excelled at it, and benefited accordingly. Other monarchs simply disliked public theatre. A sensible monarch like Henry VII made up for being personally retiring by putting on plenty of expensive public Court display; a foolish monarch like Charles I did not bother, and enjoyed splendour away from the public arena.

The realities of sixteenth-century life increasingly disturbed official attempts to portray a harmonious and static social order. The flood of monastic, chantry and crown lands produced an open and speculative land market, and growth in London and provincial food markets, galloping inflation and increased commercial activity and litigation offered exceptional opportunities for social mobility in Tudor England. This mobility is demonstrated by statistical evidence for the later part of the century and was noted and commented on by contemporaries (Stone, 1966). Those most successful in the competition for social advancement made frenzied efforts to conceal their movement in society by inventing pedigrees or taking arms (Stone, 1965). The attitudes and standards which determined the hierarchy of social status are subtle and difficult to determine. There was sometimes disagreement when a man died as to whether his new house and prosperous farm had entitled him to move up a rung on the ladder. A man might refer to himself in his will as a yeoman but be called a husbandman by his neighbours who made the inventory of his farm. Yet the most important distinction in Tudor society remained that between gentry and commons. To be accepted as a gentleman a man had to be rich enough not to have to work, and able to display the standard of living expected of the gentry.

The commons of Tudor England, that vast mass of the people who had no formal political role and could only bring their grievances to the attention of the government by riot or rebellion, were conventionally regarded in gentry discourse as fickle, irrational and stupid. In the view of those believing in their own God-given right to govern, ‘Democracy’ was a term of abuse, meaning ‘rule by the mob’, as was the idea of ‘popularity’, rule by the people. The mid-sixteenth-century spread of Reformed Protestant ideas from mainland Europe, suggesting that all males should have a part in church decision-making, heightened such sensitivities, even though most Puritans would vehemently have denied that their religion threatened the existing orders of society (Cuttica, 2019). ‘The people’, said Archbishop Whitgift, defending the hierarchical Church of England against what he saw as a dangerous pandering to ‘popularity’ in Puritans advocating Presbyterianism, ‘are commonly bent to novelties and to factions and most ready to receive that doctrine that seemeth to be contrary to the present state and that inclineth to liberty’ – liberty was another bad word, meaning licence. The ruling class commonly claimed to regard the multitude as beneath contempt; since the aim of government propaganda in time of rebellion was to ensure the loyalty of gentry, it was usual to emphasise the lowly status of ‘the rascal mob’ and make little of such gentry support as the rebels maintained.

Henrician and Edwardian official publicists filled their works with much crude social hostility to the lower orders. There is much less evidence of it in the other direction. Where there was serious pressure of population on natural resources, or a gentleman exploited the opportunities economic conditions offered at the expense of the commons, envy of the rich might quickly turn to open and violent anger and a sense of injustice [Doc. 20, p. 164]. Expressions of class hatred are mostly isolated outbursts of rage by individuals, who usually could offer no practical course of action to back up their words; repeatedly they invoked some imagined external force, like divine intervention, or a foreign invasion. Rarely was such talk heard amid rebellions or riots (Clark, 1976: 380). Even in time of rebellion the fundamental assumptions of Tudor society persisted: the commons expected the gentry to give the lead. If the gentry closed the gates of their parks and retired to their manor houses, the commons went and sought them out. They persuaded or intimidated them into taking their side. The gentry, to their alarm, often found this assertion of their social status in rebellions decidedly provisional. ‘When they were compliant they were ecstatically appreciated; but the commons treated instances of independence and non-co-operation with deep suspicion and outbursts of rage’ (Bush, 1996: 409). Yet only in the case of the 1549 commotions in south-east England was hostility between the orders a major element in sixteenth-century popular disorder [Doc. 20, p. 164]. The tradition of deference survived the upheavals of the century.

Tudor central government was conscious that this deference might not necessarily be directed to the monarch. In the north the close bonds of provincial society took additional strength from the survival until towards the end of the Tudor period of the dominance of such families as the Percys, Cliffords and Dacres whose power, once based on livery and maintenance, continued through appointments in their households, as stewards of their lordships and constables of their castles. The idea of faithfulness to a magnate connection survived even into the seventeenth century (James, 1966a). In 1619 Sir Henry Curwen, himself sheriff and knight of the shire in Cumberland, ‘humbly tendered his service’ to the ninth Earl of Northumberland from Workington, ‘that place wherein many of my ancestors have been servants’. ‘My ancestors’, he wrote, ‘alwayes have been imployed in service in that noble house of Northumberland, and although I acknowledge myself inferior to the meanest of them, yet none of them have ever borne a more faithful affection to that famous house’.

Nevertheless, England was an unusually centralised country by medieval European standards, and became more so in the Tudor age. In the early fifteenth century it had won an epic struggle against the Welsh leader Owain Glyn Dŵr, who had nearly deprived the English of control over the culture and society of Wales; yet one of the most remarkable political facts of the sixteenth century was the total lack of serious rebellion in Wales, even while the government brought the Welsh more firmly within English government and dismantled their traditional religion. Nationwide, even in the north, magnates did not pose the convincing alternative to a centralised government which was all too available in France or the Holy Roman Empire. The vigour of English common law, that is, royal law, is significant. Virtually every subject of the Tudor monarchs could find some way of getting a grievance into the royal courts: even the remaining villeins could usually smuggle in their cases against their theoretical lack of legal existence. This contrasts starkly with other supposedly monarchical states in Europe: in Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, for instance, the monarchy was newly excluded during the sixteenth century from jurisdiction over disputes between lords and tenants (Bercé, 1987: 52).

2 Ideas of submission, ideas of justice

Tudor governments lacked an army with which to maintain obedience for most of the century, and even when they gained rudimentary permanent local defence forces from the 1570s, the trained bands, these could not always be relied on against local grievances (Boynton, 1967). They therefore needed to persuade or convince their subjects to remain passive through a generally accepted theory of obligation and submission. The need became more acute with the changes of the 1530s and the dangers attending on them. Thomas Cromwell saw the necessity of organising and directing a group of publicists to elaborate on the theory of non-resistance already expressed by the Bible translator and Protestant theologian William Tyndale in his Obedience of a Christian Man (Zeeveld, 1948). He maintained close control of the printing presses, almost entirely suppressing counter-propaganda; in 1538 the import of English books printed abroad was banned (although Cromwell was ready to circumvent this ban when it suited his own policies, importing English Bibles printed in France in order to increase the supply of Bibles in England). The arguments deployed by Henrician publicists, men like Richard Morison, Thomas Starkey and Robert Barnes, were taken up by those who replied to the rebels of 1549: Sir John Cheke, Thomas Cranmer and Philip Nichols [Docs 10, 15, p. 151, p. 158]. The pamphlets and ballads of Elizabeth’s reign continued to echo the same themes, which were dependent on the assumption that any obligation to rulers such as the kings and queens of England was also an obligation to God.

Modern western societies make a clear distinction between Church and state, but in Tudor England this was not so. The concept of a secular ‘state’ is not easily applied to the secular jurisdictions of early modern Europe, since they were normally tied to the fortunes and personalities of a great family such as the Tudors, and they also had pretensions to have been created by the providence of God. The idea of a state designed to fit particular human circumstances, rather than being part of a God-given created order, was given currency in political discourse by the writings of the Florentine politician Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). Machiavelli’s open cynicism and his apparently abstract analysis of an amoral method of conducting government shocked European proprieties, and most people felt it wise to speak of him with disapproval, at least in public. Senior English politicians did begin using the word ‘state’ unselfconsciously in the 1590s, and around that time the more powerful rulers of Europe were evolving the more centralised, bureaucratic systems of government geared towards sustaining war economies, which may be described as states. Yet a more flexible word is needed to describe the enormous variety of secular or civil government, in contrast to the forms of government evolved by the Church, to be met with in sixteenth-century Europe. One word familiar at the time, but which now has a slightly archaic or specialised meaning, is a word we have already encountered: ‘commonwealth’, or its various cognates (such as the Latin Respublica, which did not normally then mean ‘Republic’). We wil...