in Holderness [in Yorkshire]. I axid him, ‘I prai yow, do yow know what be their demawnds & he said, Have yow not sene them I awnserid no but I said I had sene the bokke yn printe, the awnser to the Lincolneshere men’s demawnds. He said so fairly I will send them yow them sone to lokke upon.23
Nothing too suspect there, the natural conversation of two men engaged with politics. They hadn’t spoken in front of the proprietor of the Horse’s Head nor his wife, but that was only necessary caution. Clarke’s servant delivered the printed papers to Throckmorton that evening ‘and after I had read them I threw them yn mi chamber window’.24 The papers were explosive material: they described Cromwell as a ‘simple and evil disposed person’, who had ‘spoiled and robbed, and further intending utterly to spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’. His policies were ‘contrary [to] the faith of God and honour to the king’s majesty and the commonwealth of this realm’. The oath the rebels took in Yorkshire swore ‘to expulse all villain blood and evil councilors against the commonwealth from his grace and his privy council of the same’.25
Anyone who could be suspected of disseminating these words would clearly die. Throckmorton kept them in his room, lying in the window, until another old friend, Sir William Essex, came to London.
the same nyght he and I mette met att supper at the queins hedde betwixte the tempull gates. And afterwards, when we two remained alone, we fell in communion of the rebells off the northe and then he axid me if their demawnds and those of the Lincolne shere men were all won. & I said they were much the same, as yt apperith bi the bokke yn printe, which he had seen. Then I sent mi servant to my chamber for them, and lent them to Sir William, who put them yn his purse and so departid.26
Sir George had said, ‘Your servant may copy it if you will’: now the seditious words were out and spreading in London and beyond, with Throckmorton and Essex perceived as the source. Essex’s clearly literate chamber boy, Geoffrey Gunter, made another, secret copy for himself. When he accompanied Sir William down to his house at Lambourn in the Berkshire Downs, he gave it to a friend of his en route at Reading, where it rapidly travelled around the community of priests, innkeepers and no doubt their customers, copied at every turn. This was viral rebellion, first in print, then word of mouth, then by manuscript.
Essex discovered what had happened, knew how catastrophic it was and ‘had but little rest all night’. Throckmorton made his way down to Berkshire, ignorant of what was happening, only to find a posse of Berkshire officials riding to court, with copies of the papers Throckmorton had shown to Essex only days before. When Throckmorton reached Essex’s house the next day, he found Sir William in bed, having not been able to sleep the night before, but he got up and first in the parlour and then in the privacy of the garden, the repeated setting for secret and intimate Tudor conversations, they discussed the crisis.
They decided, quickly enough, to tell everything and to hurry to London, where they could divest themselves of the truth. Essex was to send his servant first and then to follow himself, and Throckmorton to follow only ‘if the matter were not well taken. He should send me word, and I would come up myself.’ No word came and Throckmorton, in early December, returned to London. On the road, his own servant met him and told him that Sir William Essex had been put in the Tower. When Throckmorton arrived in London, he too was arrested and by 11 December had joined him there, in the place of torture, terror and death.
We only know these intimate and concrete details of George Throckmorton’s movements in the autumn of 1536 – his toings and froings, his dinners and suppers – because the interrogation in the Tower dragged it out of him. His confession is still in Cromwell’s papers. No fact was too small to convince the Lord Privy Seal that the truth was being told: the papers lying in the window, the dinner with the landlord of the Horse’s Head in Cheapside, the chamber boy, the rebellious servants, Sir William’s exhaustion after his night of worry.
Yet Throckmorton was not entirely open in this confession. He said he couldn’t quite remember where or with whom he had been sitting at supper when he talked the dangerous rebel talk. It was only six or eight weeks earlier; he must have been lying. To lie to the King and Cromwell in the Tower in the murderous police state of mid-1530s England showed some mettle. He signed his confession with ‘the heaviest heart that ever had living man’ and he told the King that ‘yt makith mi harte blede withyn mi bodie’27 to imagine that he thought him disloyal, but there is no doubt that, to some extent, he was. It seems clear that at Christmas 1536, Throckmorton thought he could get away with his double game a little longer. He and Essex were held in confinement on into January 1537. Those in the know at court ‘doubted of their lives’ but they were wrong. Before the end of the month both men were released and Throckmorton was restored as a Justice in Warwickshire.
It was, as Peter Marshall has said, ‘a close shave’,28 but far more desperate events were to unfold the following September. A high-glamour Knight of St John, Sir Thomas Dingley, an international warrior on behalf of all the deep-rooted, crusading and Turk-fighting traditions of the Catholic church, had been heard abusing the King and talking about rebellion. He was betrayed, arrested and sent to the Tower, where among much else he described to Cromwell’s interrogators all the subversive remarks George Throckmorton had made to him in the early 1530s: how Throckmorton had talked so loosely in St John’s Hospital in Clerkenwell, in the garden there, about the King’s dabbling with all three Boleyn women, the frighteners which Cromwell put on Members of Parliament, all this in front of ‘light’ people, people of no substance, people who were bound to spread the rumours.
Dingley would be axed on Tower Hill in July 1539. For now, his garrulous confessions put George Throckmorton in the most dangerous place he had ever been. Kathryn Throckmorton, his wife and the mother of his many children, now wrote from Coughton in desperation to her half-brother William Parr. Parr was a ferocious Protestant ideologue, Cromwell’s eyes and ears in Northamptonshire, with all the right connections to the new regime. Kathryn could be sure that her blood relationship – they had the same mother – even with a man who espoused everything her husband most loathed, would trump any difference in religion. Sixteenth-century blood, as Patrick Collinson has said, was thicker than bile. ‘Good brother’, she wrote on 20 October 1537, ‘Mr. Throkmerton ys yn trobull, as I thinke yow knowe.’ She begged him to come to her ‘incontinent’, without delay, ‘upon the cuming off mi son’s to yow’.
Not that I will desire yow to speke to mi lorde prive Seale [Cromwell] for him, but that yow will come to giffe me yor best cownsill and advice … for the helpe off him and myselfe and mi childerns. I dowghte not but for all his trobull & bissines the King will29
The letter is torn off there – it certainly went on, as the tops of the letters in the next line can be seen – but there is no doubting these are the hurried words of a desperate woman.
In the Tower, Throckmorton himself knew how serious this was. He abandoned the lack of candour from January and now poured out everything he had held back then: the meetings with Dingley, his boastfulness as someone who ‘durst speak for the common wealth’, his suppers at the Queen’s Head, his friends there, their real names, their secrecy in front of the servants, the encounters with More, Fisher and Reynolds, the challenges thrown to him by those ideologues of the Catholic church, his own agonized conscience, his wavering between the idealism of the martyr and the need to survive, not only as an individual but as the person who held the future of the Throckmortons in his hand.
George said he intended no harm to the King. He had behaved ‘lewdly and noughtly’.30 He begged the King to ‘have pitie on me, my wife and poore children for the service that I and all my blood hath doon to you and yor progenitors in tyme past’.31 Now he could only ask pardon, having perceived his error by reading the New Testament and The Institution of a Christian Man, the bishops’ guidebook to an acceptable form of religion.32
George Throckmorton
