Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (17 page)

Many persons assembled with bills, halberds and other defenceable weapons, ready standing in the street, like men ready to defend a town of war.

And in their passing in the street, the common bell of the town was rung … and the great bell in the monastery was likewise rung, whereby the people forcibly assembled towards the monastery when the said Lionel and Robert found the gates and doors fast shut.

One of the canons, called the Master of Ovingham, appeared on the leads of the roof with many others, all in armour and carrying bows and arrows. He told the commissioners: ‘We be twenty brethren … and we shall die ere that you shall have the house.’

Five or six more monks, with swords strapped to their waists, appeared on the tower and the roof. Around the nervous commissioners gathered ‘many people, both men with weapons and many women’. The officials shouted up: ‘Advise you well and speak with your brethren and show to them this our request and declaration of the king’s gracious writings and then give us answer finally.’

Eventually the sub-prior, in his monkish robes, produced a document which turned out, rather embarrassingly, to be Henry’s confirmation of the priory’s charter. He told the commissioners: ‘We think it not the king’s honour to give forth one seal contrary to another and before our lands, goods or house be taken from us, we shall all die. That is our full answer.’

The commissioners retired in disarray. Hexham held out by force of arms for two weeks but finally surrendered and was suppressed in March 1537.
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Similar resistance was met at Norton Priory in Cheshire a few weeks later, in October 1536. Commissioners Combes and Bolles had expelled the abbot and monks and were busy packing up all the jewels at the monastery when their work was interrupted by the return of the abbot.

This time, he had two or three hundred men with him.

The commissioners, in fear for their lives, barricaded themselves in the tower and sent a desperate plea for help to Sir Piers Dutton, Sheriff of
the County of Cheshire. He reported to Sir Thomas Audley, the Lord Chancellor:

The letter came to me about nine of the clock in the night upon Sunday last and about two of the clock in the same night I came hither with such of my [friends] and tenants as I had near about me.

I found diverse fires made there … and the abbot had cause[d] an ox and other victuals to be killed and prepared for his company.

I … came suddenly upon them, so that the company there fled … and I took the abbot and three of his canons and brought them to the king’s castle of Halton and there committed them … to be kept as the king’s rebellious [subjects] on pain of £1,000.

Afterwards I saw the commissioners with their stuff conveyed thence.
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These appeared to be nothing more than little local difficulties. Much worse was to follow.

In September 1536, Cromwell took a long-awaited three-week break from his heavy workload for a holiday in Northampton. He returned to his official duties on 23 September at Windsor Castle. As he quietly dealt with his papers and correspondence on the morning of Monday, 2 October, a dangerous rebellion broke out 182 miles (293 km) to the north, at the prosperous market town of Louth in Lincolnshire.

It was caused by the rumours rife throughout Lincolnshire that Cromwell was now about to seize the possessions of parish churches. The cellarer Henry Thornbeck had heard talk at a market near Sleaford that ‘church jewels should be taken and after, that all cattle unmarked should be confiscated and christenings and burials taxed’. Thomas Mawre, a Benedictine monk from Bardney Abbey, had seen a ‘tall serving man’ in Louth church the previous day ‘who said openly that a silver dish with which they went about to beg for their church was more meet for the king than for them’. He was suspected to be a servant of Cromwell’s and one of the congregation ‘fashioned to draw his dagger, saying that Louth … should make the king and his master such a breakfast as he never had’. The chorister Thomas Foster told his friends during the church procession: ‘Go we to follow the
crosses, for … if they be taken from us we be like to follow them no 58 more.’
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The next morning, Dr John Frankish, Registrar of John Longland, the Bishop of Lincoln, was due in Louth, probably to collect clerical taxes. The townspeople believed he was there to confiscate their church goods and a group of eighty or a hundred locked themselves into St James’s to guard them. When Frankish arrived in the town, he was mobbed, his account books taken away from him and burnt at the market cross.

A priest called William Morland, formerly a monk from the dissolved Cistercian Abbey of St Mary at Louth Park, was watching and Frankish begged him: ‘For the Passion of Christ, priest, if you can, save my life!’ Morland helped him escape from the town and forty of the crowd, some armed, went off to the nunnery at Legbourne, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) away, to capture the commissioners charged with its dissolution. En route, they met and violently seized another of Cromwell’s servants called John Bellow, who was ignominiously stuck in the stocks at Louth. Commissioners John Millicent, William Gleyn and John Brown were also detained. Millicent, who was Cromwell’s receiver, was put in the stocks with Bellow. Henry Sanderson and Robert Hudson demanded that they should be hanged, and the former helpfully offered some timber for a gallows.
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Happily, they were spared
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as the leaders of the crowd were more intent on the plans for the Louth rioters to journey en masse the next day the 20 miles (35 km) north-west to Caistor, where the collectors of the subsidy tax were due the next morning. The priests amongst them promised they would ring their bells to summon their parishioners for a rendezvous with the Louth protestors at Orford, midway between the two towns.

Next day, the collectors prudently withdrew outside the town to Caistor Hill, but a number were captured and Nicholas, the servant of one of the local gentry, Lord Burgh, was beaten to death as his master escaped on horseback. The captives were taken back into Caistor and John Porman told them the Lincolnshire men demanded an end to the monastic suppressions and further taxes and that Cromwell should be delivered up to them, together with a number of bishops including
their own Bishop Longland and Archbishop Cranmer.
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That night, the collectors were forced to write a letter to the King:

The cause of their assembly was, as they affirmed to us, that the common voice and fame was that all the jewels and goods of the church of the country should be taken from them and brought to your grace’s council and also that your said loving and faithful subjects should be put off new enhancements and other importunate charges, which they were not able to bear by reason of extreme poverty.

Humbly beseeching your grace to be good and gracious both to them and to us to send us your gracious letters of general pardon or else we be in such danger that we will never like to see your grace nor our own houses [again].
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The Lincolnshire uprising rapidly spread to Horncastle, Market Rasen, Kirton Soke and north to the shores of the Humber, where beacons of rebellion burnt on the Wednesday night. John, Lord Hussey, former chamberlain to Princess Mary, wrote to Robert Sutton, Mayor of Lincoln, and Sheriff Vincent Grantham with news of what had turned into an insurrection:

I heard at nine o’clock this morning … that there is a company of false rebellious knaves risen in Lindsey. I command you to see the city surely kept, so that no such evil disposed rebellious persons can pass through it and to be ready with such company as you can make to suppress them.

Take up bows and arrows in the bowyers’ and fletchers’ hands at a reasonable price … and handle the matter secretly.
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Cromwell heard the news from the same source. Hussey told him on 4 October: ‘There is a company of light persons risen in the further side of Lindsey,’ and the next day warned that ‘the country is becoming more and more rebellious. They are today coming towards Lincoln but not in such great numbers, I believe, as it is [rumoured]. I have called my countrymen and most … say they will be glad to defend me but I shall not trust them to fight against the rebels.’
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Cromwell also received two letters from Sir Marmaduke Constable, further south at Stilton, Cambridgeshire, one containing the oath the
rebels swore on joining the uprising: ‘You shall swear to be true to Almighty God, to Christ’s Catholic Church, to our sovereign lord the king and unto the commons of this realm, so help you God and Holydam
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and by this book.’ Sir Marmaduke also disclosed that the rebels demanded to keep their holy days; that suppressed monasteries should be reinstated; and that ‘they be no more taxed’. Cromwell must have blinked when he read their last requirement: ‘They would also fain have you.’
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John Rayne, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln, had presided over a consistory court at Bolingbroke the previous Saturday, but then had fallen ill and stayed in a chantry priest’s house to recover. The Horncastle rebels found him there and he was brought into a field, to be greeted by screams of ‘Kill him, kill him!’ from the crowd, many of whom were priests. One of the rebels, Brian Stanes, later testified: ‘William Hutchinson and William Balderstene of Horncastle pulled him violently off his horse, kneeling upon his knees and slew him with their staves and being dead, the priests crying continually “Kill him!” this respondent also struck the chancellor upon the arm with a staff.’
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His clothes were ripped off him and these and his purse were distributed ‘to the poor men among the rebels’. Another man was also killed: Thomas Wulcie, who is known to have been in royal service, was pointed out by William Leach and accused of being a spy. He was hanged from a convenient nearby tree.
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Was his swift and brutal death caused by his name sounding like that of the fallen cardinal?

Local gentry were now joining the rebels. At Horncastle, they declared that if they ‘prospered in their journey’ they intended to kill ‘the lord Cromwell, four or five bishops … and the Chancellor of the Augmentations [Riche]’ – the ‘devisers of taking church goods and pulling down churches’. The commons asked them: ‘If you had them, would that mend the matter?’ And the gentlemen said, ‘Yes, for these be the doers of all mischief.’
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The rebels, now numbering at least ten thousand men, entered Lincoln on Friday, 6 October to a warm welcome from the county town’s inhabitants. They celebrated their arrival by wrecking the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace and seizing the field artillery stored in the city.

Meanwhile, at Windsor, there were indications that Cromwell had
underestimated, if not totally misjudged, the scale of the revolt. Preoccupied by the volume of state business that had built up during his vacation, he plainly believed that some kind of minor police action would be sufficient to quell what he considered to be merely small-scale disturbances. Circular letters, signed with the stamp ‘Henricus Rex’, were immediately drawn up for distribution to loyal local gentry: ‘As a number of evil disposed persons have assembled in Lincolnshire, robbing our subjects and putting them in danger, you are in all haste to set a sure stay in the parts about you and advance to the place where you hear the said persons haunt, joining with other faithful subjects to repress them and from time to time you shall apprehend such as you think fit …’ There seems little recognition in these words that Henry’s administration was faced with a burgeoning popular revolt and that civil war now loomed. Cromwell resorted to black propaganda as another weapon against the insurgents and began drafting more royal letters:

Forasmuch as the king, understanding of a traitorous assembly in Lincolnshire, intending the destruction of his person and the robbing and murdering of his true subjects and the deflowering and ravishing of their wives and daughters, has, for the subduing of their most traitorous and malicious attempts and purpose [ordered the gentry] with all haste … [to] advance to the place where … the said persons haunt, joining with other faithful subjects, to suppress them.
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Then, suddenly, the hard truth seemed to dawn, doubtless born out of incandescent royal fury over any opposition to the crown and its policies. Henry’s reply to the lay subsidy commissioners, still held by the commons of Lincolnshire, was carefully corrected in Cromwell’s writing and smacks of a firm grip now being taken. There is no sympathy for his officials’ plight, only anger at this affront to Henry’s imperial dignity: ‘We take it as great unkindness that our common and inferior subjects rise against us without any ground … As to the taking away of the goods of the parish churches, it was never intended. Yet, if it had been, true subjects would not have treated with us, their prince, in such violence … but would have humbly sued for their purpose.’ The King also firmly denied that any further taxation was planned. Then came the sting within the royal message:

This assembly is so heinous that unless you can persuade them for the safety as well of your lives as theirs to disperse, and send 100 of the ringleaders with halters around their necks to our lieutenant, to do with them as shall be thought best, and thus prevent the fury of the great puissance which we have already sent against them, we see no way to save them.

The letter ends with blatant threats:

We have already sent out the Duke of Suffolk, our lieutenant, the Earls of Shrewsbury, Rutland and Huntingdon, Lord Darcy, with Yorkshire, the Lord [High] Admiral [Sir William Fitzwilliam] and diverse other nobles with 100,000 men, horse and foot, in harness [armour], with munitions and artillery, which they cannot resist.

We have also appointed another great army to invade their countries as soon as they come out of them and to burn, spoil and destroy their goods, wives and children with all extremity, to the fearful example of all lewd subjects.
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This was all bluff and bluster. It may have assuaged Henry’s notorious temper but the threats bore no relation to the feeble strength of his forces on the ground. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, only arrived at Huntingdon with a small advance party on 9 October, with ‘neither ordnance nor artillery nor men enough to do anything; such men as are gathered here have neither harness nor weapons’.
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