Yorkshire Rebellion

5 Key excerpts on "Yorkshire Rebellion"

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  Rebellion and Riot

  Popular Disorder in England During the Reign of Edward VI

  • John A. Andrew, III(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  4

  Rebellion played a smaller role during the reign of Elizabeth, but even Gloriana felt the sting of revolt in 1569 when the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland restored the Latin mass at Durham Cathedral, called for the arrest of Sir William Cecil, the queen’s leading adviser, and demanded the restoration of Roman Catholicism. Less threatening than the mid-Tudor rebellions, the rising of the northern earls revealed the deep-rooted discontent of the aristocracy and its tenants. The last rising of the Tudor era took place in 1601, only two years before the death of Elizabeth, when the Earl of Essex, frustrated by his loss of royal favor, led 200 supporters up Fleet Street, London, in a desperate and futile attempt to restore his political ascendancy.5 A survey of Tudor rebellions leads to the inescapable conclusion that every rebel captain whether artisan or earl and every popular cause — religious, political, or economic — suffered defeat. What is remarkable and usually overlooked by historians is the courage of generations of Tudor rebels to resist oppression and go down to defeat in the face of overwhelming odds.

  Although popular disorder was endemic throughout the sixteenth century, the pattern of rebellion and riot was extremely diverse. The rebellion of Henry Tudor in 1485 began as a royalist conspiracy against the Yorkists, and the dynastic interests of the Courtenays and Mary Stuart played important roles in later risings. When political opposition to the Tudors was not dynastic, it usually included conflict between court and country. For example, the northern aristocracy in 1536 and 1569 and the western gentry in 1549 vigorously opposed policies emanating from the court. The leadership of Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil aroused regional discontent; remote counties feared centralizing reforms of all kinds; and in 1549 the western gentry saw the Edwardian Reformation as little more than the program of court politicians supported by a clique of heretical clergy. After Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s, religion emerged as a divisive issue that fired political and social instability. Only under Edward VI did Catholics and Protestants rise at the same time. Religious unrest during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth came primarily from Catholics opposed to the royal supremacy, the monastic dissolution, and innovations in the church, while Mary’s opponents were exclusively Protestant. Real or imagined social and economic grievances played a part in many rebellions, particularly the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk. Riots almost always stemmed from economic issues; frequently heard grievances concerned rent payments, food prices, enclosure, and property rights.

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  Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe

  • Jeffrey Denton(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Therefore, the king's liegemen of Kent had assembled to provide redress 'with the help of the king ... and all the commons of England, and to die therefore'. Forming part of the same tradition of revolt was the Yorkshire uprising of 1489. One of its muster proclamations read: 'all the north parts ... shall be ready in their defensible array ... for to gainstand such persons as is aboutward for to destroy [the king] and the commons of England', closing with the statement 'and all this to be fulfilled and kept by every ilk commoner upon pain death,.6The Cornish uprising of 1497 fell into the same category of revolt. A feature of the tradition was a march on London. The rebels of 1381 and 1450 reached their goal, apprehended the evil ministers taking refuge in the Tower and ex-ecuted them; the Yorkshire rebels of 1489, like those of 1536, got no further than Doncaster. Amazingly, considering the distance they had to march, the Cornish rebels of 1497 reached Blackheath, camping where both the rebels of 1381 and 1450 had camped, only to be cut down by the king's army.7 This was described in the Great Chronicle of London: 'in the latter end of May the commons of Cornwall gathered them in great numbers and chose unto them a blacksmith for their head captain'. The chronicler declared that behind the explicit aim of remov-ing a number of evil ministers responsible for imposing a hated tax was Michael Bush 111 the hidden agenda to do 'as Jack Straw (of 1381), Jack Cade (of 1450) and other rebels did before them'.8 The tradition culminated in the two huge rebellions of 1536, the Lincolnshire uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace, soon followed by the Post pardon revolts of 1537 and the two large-scale uprisings of 1549, Kett's rebellion in East Anglia and the Prayer Book uprising in Devon and Cornwall. 9 The Prayer Book uprising produced a petition entitled 'sixteen articles of us the commoners of Devon and Cornwall in divers camps by east and west Exeter'.

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  Elizabeth I and Ireland

  • Brendan Kane, Valerie McGowan-Doyle(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 The end of rebellion, in short, meant the coming of the modern, an era in which the mobilisation of state forces was undertaken primarily for external theatres. A difficulty with this interpretation, however, is that studies of Tudor rebellions invariably focus on England alone. Although the authority of the Tudor crown also embraced the kingdom of Ireland, rebellions there do not make the historiographical cut as ‘Tudor rebellions’. The standard work on the subject, Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Tudor rebellions, consigns Irish unrest to an epilogue in which explicit distinction is made between domestic risings of the ‘Tudor’ type and the ‘overseas’ imperial variants found in Ireland – a place which, the authors state, emerged as ‘the first English colony; the beginning of a world empire; the first hint that England would be something more than a minor European power’. Whereas the 1596 Oxfordshire Rebellion was laughable and the state’s reaction to it was overkill, and the Essex Rebellion was driven in part by the simple fact of the earl’s mental ‘instability’, matters in Ireland ‘turned into a genocidal conflict, in which English forces saw themselves as fighting a barbaric race who deserved no mercy’. 4 If the former were law-and-order problems, the latter were winner-take-all colonial wars. This is not to claim that there has been no effort to see connections between rebellions in the two realms. 5 In his brilliant analysis of the 2 Mervyn James, ‘The concept of order and the Northern Rising, 1569’, in Mervyn James, Society, politics and culture: studies in early modern England (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 308– 415. More generally on his views of the collapse of traditional northern society, see James, Family, lineage and civil society; a study of society, politics and mentality in the Durham region, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1974). 3 James, ‘At a crossroads of the political culture: the Essex revolt, 1601’, in James, Society, politics and culture, pp.

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  The Welsh Braveheart

  Owain Glydwr, The Last Prince of Wales

  • Phil Carradice(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword History

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Four

  Rebellion

  The Welsh rebellion – Owain Glyndwr’s war – cannot be looked at in isolation. It was part of a wider conflict, one that involved the deposing and killing of a king and the establishment of a usurper on the throne of England. It took place at a time when murder and mayhem were, if not daily occurrences then certainly regular events. It was a time when armies marched across the land, burning and pillaging as they went. In its brutality the era foreshadowed only too clearly the destruction of the later Wars of the Roses.

  The tyranny of Richard II was short lived, barely two years, but it saw a seismic change in the upper echelons of English society. The arrest and execution of the Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Arundel in 1397 had clearly unblocked some sort of dam in Richard’s head, causing him to lose whatever little self-control he had possessed.

  He had come to the throne early and had been fêted and lauded all through his childhood and adolescence. There was no doubt that he was brave, his performance during the Peasants’ Revolt had shown that, but Richard was sadly lacking in judgement. As an absolute ruler he had no reason to be self-critical or to question either his ability or his actions. Whatever he did was right, it had to be – after all, he was the king.

  Now, following the success of his coup against Arundel and Gloucester, Richard felt all-powerful. When, in 1398, his position was made even more comfortable by the sudden death of another ‘enemy’, Roger Mortimer, the Earl of March, his emotions began to surge and propel him forwards.

  Suddenly the king’s natural desire for dictatorial rule burst into the open. Unlike most mediaeval monarchs, Richard had very little in the way of guidance or assistance from older, wiser nobles. He was alone and made his mistakes alone.

  One of the first things he did was to remember his antipathy towards the Duchy of Lancaster and banish his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt. The popular and powerful Bolingbroke, Henry of Lancaster to give him his correct title, was perceived as a major threat and exile seemed an appropriate way to deal with this potential opponent. It was mistake number one – Richard would have done better to kill him.

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  Empire Imagined

  The Personality of American Power, Volume One

  • Giselle Frances Donnelly(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  And lastly, if we should not do it ourselves we might be reformed by strangers to the great hazard of the state of this our country whereunto we are all bound. God save the Queen. 23 They further refined and amplified this proclamation twice more, never mentioning the Queen of Scots or the Duke of Norfolk by name but insisting on the return of the old religion, the old political order, and the removal of “new” men like Cecil, all the while professing their loyalty to Elizabeth. As was the norm for resistance movements in Britain, it was the actions of “evil advisers,” not the wrongdoing of the monarch per se, that legitimized active disobedience. And as badly as the rebellion was organized, planned, and logistically supported, and as short as its duration was to be, a remarkable seven thousand men rallied to its standard. In sum, the feudal obligation brought out the lesser ranks of England’s north, though as K. J. Kesselring convincingly shows, the overwhelming majority of the earls’ makeshift force came from the yeomanry. Clearly, the promise of a restored of Catholicism provided the raison d’etre of the rebel cause. Their principal banner recalled the Crusades by depicting the five wounds of Christ, and their principal targets were Protestant married ministers and churches. One Christopher Jackson made it his priority to terrorize the wife of Parson Edward Otbye; Jackson swore “a vengeance upon all fuckbeggar priests and the errant whores their wives.” 24 From Ripon in Yorkshire, where they celebrated Mass and burned Protestant books, the rebels moved generally south in the direction of Tutbury, where Mary was then held. 25 On November 25, Mary was moved again to Coventry, and the revolt began to run out of energy, its failures of planning and inability to sustain an army in the field beginning to tell

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