Pilgrimage of Grace

8 Key excerpts on "Pilgrimage of Grace"

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  Heretics and Believers

  A History of the English Reformation

  • Peter Marshall(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Pilgrimage makes nonsense of a frequently asked question: why there was ‘so little opposition’ to Henry’s religious policies. It was a massive move-ment of protest, which wrested a third of the kingdom from the royal grasp, and enjoyed unknown but considerable levels of sympathy in the rest. It gave Henry, quite literally, the fright of his life. Heads were bound to roll, but if the Pilgrims had pressed their advantage, they would have been different heads. The failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace is explicable, but it was far from inev-itable. Nonetheless, that failure was a watershed moment: the champions of the old order had drawn themselves up to their full height, and had been faced down. Contemporaries drew contrasting conclusions. Some pointed to the dangers of affronting the traditionalist instincts of the populace. For others, the rebellion proved the connection of old-fashioned religion to treasonous subversion, and the necessity of pressing on boldly with reform. In a tract against the rebels, Henry’s propagandist Richard Morison insisted that ‘preaching of the gospel is not the cause of sedition, but rather lack of preaching of it’. 27 The contest between these contradictory counsels, among the King’s advisors, and in the King’s own head, produced political conditions of unprec-edented volatility in the years following. Sugar and Mustard ‘It is evident that the King of England is running openly to his ruin and that God means to punish him.’ The papal nuncio in France, Rodolfo Pio, bishop of Faenza, had from the first seen the Pilgrimage of Grace as a heaven-sent oppor-tunity to humble the heretic king of England. In February 1537, he urged the Pope to consider that ‘now is perhaps the time to make use of the Cardinal of England’. 28 H E R E T I C S A N D B E L I E V E R S 254 Reginald Pole was raised to the Sacred College in December 1536; at the start of the following year Paul III named him legate to the Valois and Habsburg courts.

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  Insurrection

  Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell and the Pilgrimage of Grace

  • Susan Loughlin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  2

  The Pilgrimage of Grace:A Holy Crusade?

  A series of revolts against the Crown broke out in the autumn of 1536. What actually precipitated them? It will be argued here that the cause of religion was the paramount motivator for the participants and that the revolts were, in essence, spontaneous and popular. The king’s religious innovations were discussed in the previous chapter. In addition to the dissemination of the Ten Articles and First Henrician Injunctions, government commissioners were working in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in September and October in an ‘atmosphere of rumour and alarm’. It was the presence of these commissioners in Lincolnshire, following the first wave of the dissolution of the monasteries, that arguably was the catalyst that unleashed the latent fear and resentment of a huge number of the king’s subjects in the North.

  Although the Lincolnshire Rising ended by 11 October when the gentry sued for pardon,1 the revolt had spread to Yorkshire and gathered pace. It is the Yorkshire rising which is correctly referred to as the Pilgrimage of Grace and the title seems to have been devised by the rebel leader, Robert Aske, at York2 – it is first mentioned in the State Papers on 14 October. The revolt was so large that the Duke of Norfolk referred to it as representing ‘all the floure of the north’3 and it was brought to an end on 8 December when the king’s messenger, Lancaster Herald, brought a general pardon and the commons dispersed.4

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  Oaths and the English Reformation

  • Jonathan Michael Gray(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Pilgrimage of Grace was a battle of oaths. response as imitation: the administration of the pilgrims’ oaths The rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace responded to the oath of succession by imitating it, a point that a few historians have recognized but not explored in any detailed manner. 12 This imitation was in the administration of the pilgrims’ oaths. In the same way in which Henry sent commissioners throughout his entire realm to administer the oath of succession, so did the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace tender their oaths throughout every region that they controlled. Indeed, as the revolt spread, so did the administration of the pilgrims’ oaths. On Tuesday, 3 October, William Leache, who had been in Louth a day earlier when the uprising commenced, brought word of the rebellion to the town of Horncastle. Immediately, Leache gathered a force of one hundred men, and they compelled the sheriff and other gentlemen of Horncastle to swear ‘for saue garde of ther lyffes that they schuld be true to [god] the kyng and the commons and the ffayth of the church’. 13 On Wednesday, Richard Dylcoke of Humberston arrived in Louth. The rebels at Louth forced Dylcoke to swear their oath and then sent him back to Humberston to raise and summon the people there to do likewise. 14 That same week, the rebels of Lincolnshire stopped the Yorkshire lawyer Robert Aske at Ferriby and required him to swear an oath 12 Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 39; Bush, Pilgrimage of Grace, 12. 13 NA sp1/110, fol. 124 v (LP, xi 967). 14 NA sp1/110, fol. 173 r (LP, xi 974). 146 Oaths and the Pilgrimage of Grace to be ‘trew to God and the king and the comyn welth’. 15 Aske swore, and by 6 October he was back in the East Riding spreading news of the revolt. The first town to rise north of Lincolnshire was Beverley. A letter had arrived (supposedly from Robert Aske) instructing the town to swear the commons’ oath.

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  CALVIN@500

  Theology, History, and Practice

  • Topping, Vissers(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  The real condemnation and abolition of pilgrimage in England during the Reformation comes from the political authorities. Henry VIII, we know, went on a personal pilgrimage to Walsingham when he was still married to Catherine of Aragon, walking barefoot the last mile, to pray for a male heir. Some say that this unanswered prayer was his reason for later shutting down pilgrimages, and his particular hatred of Walsingham. Probably a more obvious and pressing reason for Henry’s huge distaste for pilgrimage were the large resistance movements of 1534, when some 30,000 peasants from York protested his changes to the Church. They named their march “the Pilgrimage of Grace.” Pilgrimage for Henry became synonymous with treason. It is striking that one of Elizabeth’s first moves was to stamp out every trace of pilgrimages at the former shrines. The injunctions of 1559 order the destruction of monuments of pilgrimage. 39 Likewise, a century later, the Anglican monarch Charles I passed an act in Parliament to limit the practice of “communion seasons,” citing: “disobedient people, who ordinarlie, when the communion is not ministrat in thair parishes and at all other tymes when their occasions and their humor serves thame, not onelie leaves thair owne parish kirkes bot runnes to seeke the communion at the hands of suche minister as they know to be disconforme to all good order, which is the meanes of their disobedience to his Majesteis laws” 40 Political leaders are anxious about people on the move, as they cannot be controlled; in the age of absolute monarchy no Tudor or Stewart monarch could tolerate loosening connection to institutions that would happen with pilgrimage. I suggest that this nervousness is because they intuitively knew or feared that movement, the key element of pilgrimage, is destabilizing to institutions, dangerous to order

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  After the Reformation

  Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter

  • Barbara C. Malament(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  33 / Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace some of the Lincolnshire rebels expressed the desire for noble blood of which one would expect to hear in a peasant uprising and which, for instance, was prominent in the inept plotting inspired by the northern events that occurred in Norfolk in 1537. 14 The usual story is really very odd: everywhere leading gentlemen of ancient authority are shown quivering in their shoes at threats to themselves, their families, their houses and livestock, and the next moment they are seen taking a most active lead, gathering their tenantry to march to assembly points, debating the purposes and demands of the rising, imposing the terms of negotiation and treating the commons as cannon fodder. No doubt there were popular stirrings here and there, but that the Pilgrimage came to be entirely commanded by supposedly coerced members of the ruling classes is beyond all dispute, and Cromwell had good rea-son to ask why they should all have been so frightened into posi-tive action when they could point to no single case in which a gentleman had suffered in life or limb for resisting the rebels. 15 Determined loyalty was indeed possible, even though it seems quite often to have been grounded in feuds between gentlemen,· thus Sir Brian Hastings, an enemy of Darcy's and hostile to the Percies, never wavered even though it cost him some heads of cattle. One may believe that the crowds of riotous husbandmen and artisans scared some people, and Aske on occasion used threats to extract money and victual from reluctant monks and assistance from reluctant towns,- but the overwhelming im-pression must be that the Pilgrimage originated among the better sort, who brought out the people, leading at first from behind and soon enough from the front. The point has been thoroughly estab-lished for Lincolnshire, while the pervasive influence of the Percy connection has been elucidated for Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland.

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  Pilgrim Routes of the British Isles

  • Emma J Wells(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Crowood

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: A History of Pilgrimage

  Open a book and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

  Hebrew proverb

  T hroughout contemporary and medieval literature, the concept of ‘pilgrimage’ is thought to have acquired different meanings for different cultures, eras, levels of society and even religions. Accordingly, a precise definition of the term has often eluded scholars but, in essence, historical pilgrimage involved any journey undertaken for a specifically religious purpose and which involved an overnight stay at a pilgrimage centre, particularly the latter. Canon law defined it as a mandatory journey imposed as penance for wrongdoing, or a voluntary act which involved a preliminary vow – and both had to be undertaken in the appropriate manner, that is, carrying the pilgrim insignia of scrip and staff. Derived from the Latin peregrinatio, or wandering/travelling around, pilgrimage journeys thus usually have a specific underlying religious intention. On the other hand, the Middle English Dictionary attributes a wide range of meanings to the term ‘pilgrim’, from the Latin word peregrinus (per, through, and ager, field, country, land), including: a traveller to a holy place; a wayfarer; an alien/foreigner/stranger/sojourner/exile for the Christian faith; or man or soul as an alien, especially one whose home/destination is heaven.

  Map showing location of all seven routes in Britain. JIM BRIGHTMAN

  The zenith of pilgrimage to these blessed sites in Britain was from the mid to late Middle Ages. The acquisition of relics was vital to the income of a church, and it was believed that the possession of saintly relics increased a church’s spiritual authenticity. Parish churches, monasteries and cathedrals all vied for pilgrims’ custom with sacred relics or, failing that, a locally associated saint was very much an in-demand entity. People would travel far and wide just to get a glimpse of the shining beacons of their faith: the shrines of saints, due to their promises of hope and the ridding of sins. And in addition to an historical form of tourism – a sort of ‘been there, done that’ – it is this penitential hope, the quest for penance of one’s sins, that motivated most and forced some to direct others to go on their behalf both in life and, making suitable provision in their wills, also after death.

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  The Sacred Community

  Art, Sacrament, and the People of God

  • David Jasper(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Baylor University Press

    (Publisher)

  In an England fast approaching the political and religious trauma of the Reformation, they were not 46 The Sacred Community far from Thomas Cromwell’s Injunctions of 1536 and 1538, which attacked, with increasing severity, the practice of pilgrimage and the cult of saints as “phantasies” to be replaced by more scripturally vali-dated works of charity and mercy. 2 Already in the late fifteenth cen-tury, the practice of pilgrimages to sacred places associated with the saints was being criticized by, among others, Thomas à Kempis in his best-selling Imitation of Christ (first translated into English in 1503), to be replaced by devotion to the divine presence in the Sacrament of the Altar. Thomas writes curtly and dismissively: When visiting such places, men are often moved by curiosity and the urge for sight-seeing, and one seldom hears that any amend-ment of life results, especially as their conversation is trivial and lacks true contrition. 3 Early in the fifteenth century in England, the Catholic poet and playwright John Heywood (ca. 1497–1578), who was to leave Eng-land during the reign of Elizabeth and die in exile, wrote an enter-taining interlude entitled The Play Called the Four PP (ca. 1544), which begins with a dialogue between a Palmer—that is, a pilgrim who has visited the Holy Land and carries a palm leaf as a sign of this—and a Pardoner, who doubts the value of the Palmer’s “labour and ghostly intent.” This Palmer is a much-traveled man, having spent most of his life in journeys to Jerusalem, where he visited Christ’s sepulchre, Calvary, “Josophat and Olivet”; then Rome, to see the shrine of Saint Peter; as far as Armenia, where he saw Noah’s Ark; and a whole catalogue of English places of pilgrimage from Walsingham to Muswell, Willesden, Canterbury, and Dagenham.

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  Henry VIII and the English Reformation

  • David G Newcombe(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  However, the trouble began not in the north but in Lincolnshire. Whipped up by rumour and anti-government preaching, riots broke out in Louth in October 1536 and spread throughout the shire. In fact, this was not the beginning of a concerted rebellion against the Crown and its policies; there were actually three separate risings. The Lincolnshire rebellion lasted from 1 October until 18 October 1536; the rising in Yorkshire, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, lasted from October to December 1536; and a further set of risings in the north-west took place sporadically in January and February 1537. Of the three the Pilgrimage was the most dangerous.

  The revolts had much common ground. The issues at stake were complicated. Bad harvests, objections to the peacetime tax imposed by Cromwell, and dislike of the Statute of Uses and of Henry’s revival of his feudal prerogatives all played a part. While all these were included in the complaints of the rebels, religious issues dominated the minds of those who rose. In Yorkshire, the rebels chose to think of themselves as Pilgrims and marched under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ. The north was conservative and distrusted the innovations that it saw creeping into its religion. The dissolution of the smaller monasteries was the final blow.

  The Lincolnshire rebellion ended as quickly as it had started. Having outlined their demands, which included not only their objections to taxation, the Statute of Uses, innovations in religion and the dissolution of the monasteries but also demands for the dismissal of Cromwell, Cranmer and other reforming bishops, the rebels waited for the king to respond. When it became apparent that the king would not negotiate with rebels, the resolve of the gentry leadership crumbled. They were not inclined to risk all and persuaded the rank and file to disband.

  A far more serious revolt began in Yorkshire only days after Lincolnshire’s abortive rebellion had begun. Under the leadership of the lawyer Robert Aske, some 30,000 men moved on York. Their demands were virtually identical to those of the men of Lincolnshire. The difference was that there was a great deal more support for this rising among the nobility, including Lord Darcy, the old foe of Wolsey, who was nevertheless not a supporter of the royal supremacy. A rising of this nature was dangerous indeed. Henry had only a small army under the duke of Norfolk at his disposal and could not hope to defeat the rebels in the field at this time. Had the rebels wished to press home their advantage, a defeat of the duke would have left the way clear to London. However, the rebels felt that negotiation was the best way to secure their demands and entered into an ill-fated discussion with Norfolk, who never had any intention of keeping the terms that he agreed to at the time. The Crown was buying time. Aske was in a very strong position at York, where he had taken over the government of the north, and may have felt confident that he could negotiate in good faith with the king’s representative. The rebels’ council met to finalise the Pilgrims’ demands in early December, and when Norfolk offered a free pardon and appeared to agree to some of the rebels’ demands Aske disbanded his army, sure of success.

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