Pilgrimage of Grace began on 2 October 1536 among the artisans of Louth, a Lincolnshire market town sandwiched between the wolds and the fens, as rumours swirled of an impending seizure of church goods. York opened its gates to a rebel force commanded by Robert Aske, a lawyer from Selby, on the 16th. Aske framed the uprising as a pilgrimage for the defence of the church and the upending of heretical privy counsellors.31 Richmondshire agitators who spread the rebellion into Cumberland and Westmorland placed greater emphasis on agrarian grievances, despatching polemics in the name of Captain Poverty.
With the exception of Lancashire, where the Stanleys managed to quell the disturbances, control over nearly all of the country above the Ribble and Don slipped to nine rebel hosts, 50,000 strong in total.32 The king guilefully said he found their grievances ‘general, dark and obscure’, so they gathered at Pontefract early in December to approve a petition. Aske sifted through the submissions to compile two dozen articles for debate by the lords and gentlemen present, who bowdlerised the demands of the upland peasantry for a cap on entry fines and statutory intervention to prevent enclosure of the waste.33 Massively outnumbered by the rebels, the king’s representative, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk – a Tudor loyalist despite personal sympathies for the old religion – went beyond his brief to grant a general pardon and a sitting of Parliament at York to roll back the Reformation. On this basis Aske persuaded the commons to disperse.
An authority on the court and character of Henry VIII suggests that had the Pilgrimage ‘been more aggressive and not trusted the king so readily’, it could have unseated him.34 But outside Cumbria, where antagonistic landlord–tenant relations were particularly strained, there were too many layers of deference – of the rebel hosts toward their landowner leaders, and of the Pilgrims as a body toward the Crown – for a regionally circumscribed movement aiming at religious restoration and tenurial fairness to propel itself forward into regime change. Aske spent Christmas at court only to find himself on the scaffold the following July. The promised Parliament at York never materialised.
The response of the Tudor state to these turbulent months was to strengthen its apparatus and set about eradicating regional autonomies in earnest. Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury and a Cambridge man by education, justified the crackdown by damning northerners as ‘a certain sort of barbarous and savage people, who were ignorant of and turned away from farming and the good arts of peace, and who were so far utterly unacquainted with knowledge of sacred matters, that they could not bear to hear anything of culture and more gentle civilisation.’35 A permanent Council in the North was instituted as a regional enforcement vehicle for the Privy Council, and a store of royal patronage – augmented by expropriated monastic land – dispensed to build up lesser landowners as a counterweight to the old magnate dynasties. ‘For surely we will not be bound of a necessity to be served with lords. But we will be served with such men what degree soever as we shall appoint to the same’, instructed the king.36 Promotion of minor figures to Border offices, and cuts to the grants they received, did nothing to enhance security along the perimeter – foreign mercenaries had to be brought in – but served the more pressing need of safeguarding the monarchy from aristocratic resurgence on the periphery.
The Catholic heads of the great northern dynasties, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmorland, made one final, doomed attempt, early in the reign of Elizabeth, to defend their religion and social primacy. Smarting from loss of position to Elizabeth’s clientele gentry, goaded into action by hot-headed members of their entourage, on 14 November 1569 they entered Durham Cathedral, overturned the communion table and celebrated a Catholic Mass. Shortly afterwards they issued a proclamation complaining of how ‘diverse new set up nobles about the Queen’s majesty, have and do daily, not only go about to overthrow and put down the ancient nobility of this realm, but also have … set up and maintained a newfound religion and heresy, contrary to God’s word’.37
Elizabeth’s pick for Bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, had sermonised against veneration of aristocratic lineages.38 A fierce Puritan, the new broom gathered around him fellow evangelicals such as William Whittingham, appointed dean of Durham Cathedral. Both men had spent part of the Marian interlude in exile in Calvin’s Geneva. Pilkington went down so badly with his congregation that he confessed to William Cecil, leading statesman of the Elizabethan court, ‘I am grown into such displeasure with them, part for religion and part for ministering the oath of the queen’s superiority, that I know not whether they like me worse, or I them’.39
When the uprising broke out, Pilkington fled to London disguised as a beggar while Durham thronged with parishioners eager once again to practise Catholic rites. Despite this enthusiasm, however, only a few thousand turned out to contest the Anglican settlement in arms: yeomen farmers for the most part, some aggrieved by Pilkington and Whittingham’s grasping estate management, along with poorer sorts pressed into service by threat of spoil or the promise of cash reward. Few had tenurial connections to either peer. Although reputed to love their lord better than their queen, Percy tenants in Northumberland stayed at home. After the Pilgrimage of Grace the Crown had leased out Percy manors to clients of the rival Forster clique, accelerating the decay of the family’s seigniorial jurisdiction.40 The rebels decided against hazarding an attack on York. Instead a small detachment seized control of the port of Hartlepool, vainly hoping for a landing by Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba, while the main force laid siege to Barnard Castle on the Tees. On 16 December, as royal troops advanced north to Darlington, the earls lost their nerve, fleeing from the jaws of defeat across the Scottish border.
Lawrence Stone characterised the Northern Rebellion as ‘the last episode in five hundred years of protest by the Highland Zone against the interference of London’.41 To ensure there would be no recurrence, Council of the North president Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, summarily executed 600 rank-and-file rebels under martial law – a body count several times higher than Norfolk had inflicted after the Pilgrimage and comparable to English atrocities in Ireland, where Sussex had served as lord lieutenant. Common law trials of estate-holding rebels provided another windfall of forfeited property to the Crown. Northumberland was sold out by the Scots and beheaded at York, while Westmorland stewed in exile in the Spanish Netherlands on a pension from Philip II, his estates in Durham confiscated by the Crown and later sold to royal courtiers and coal-owning parvenus from Newcastle. Pilkington returned to his diocese triumphant. ‘I am, by the blessing of God, restored to my flock’, he congratulated himself in a letter to Swiss reformer Henry Bullinger.42
The demise of the northern earls was followed, at the end of the Elizabethan period, by a Union of the Crowns, which diminished the strategic significance of the Anglo-Scottish frontier – now ‘the very heart of the country’, observed James I, who did away with wardenships and marcher law.43 The North was reduced to a periphery like any other, and like the others offered James’s successor more support during the Civil War than he ever received from the capital, damned by Charles I’s Secretary at War, Sir Edward Walker, as ‘the head and fountain of this detested rebellion’.44
Musgrove dates the emergence of the Royalist North to the fourteenth century, when England’s kings had exhorted the region to take up arms against the Scots as well as the French, and northern clerks, prelates, knights and merchants such as the de la Poles had assumed prominent positions in the departments of state. The Wars of the Roses of the fifteenth century then strengthened the sentimental ties linking the Crown to castle towns such as Pontefract, which would be the very last Royalist holdout against Parliament. Without the modernising impetus that Puritan ideology transmitted to London and East Anglia, northern England remained in thrall to past glories, a region marked out by its ‘backwardness and deep-seated traditionalism’.45
Left idling as advanced capitalist agriculture took off in East Anglia and much of the South East, the northern countryside was certainly backward. As far south as Lancashire and Yorkshire, ‘tenant right’ customary tenures persisted that had historically
