The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In the summer of 1536, for the first time, the King used his newly assumed power to define doctrine,
and many people believed that the Catholic faith itself was threatened. The Ten Articles of religion of
July 1536 were meant to end confusion, but marked instead a long period of uncertainty in the life of
the parish. Prayers for the dead were still allowed, but with the proviso that scripture named no such
place as purgatory, nor its pains; images of saints remained, but reverence to them was 'only to be
done to God, and in His honour'; both veneration of saints and prayers for the dead stood quite apart
from things necessary to salvation. Ominously, only three of the sacraments were named. In the North
they warned: 'See friends, now is taken from us four of the seven sacraments, and shortly ye shall lose the other three also, and thus the faith of the Holy Church shall utterly be suppressed.' Injunctions to the clergy followed upon the Articles. The conjunction of assaults upon traditional practice revealed
the Government at its most destructive. Rumours spread of the impending destruction of parish churches and of treasure given by popular devotion over generations, and when the dissolution of the
monasteries began it seemed to prove all the rumours true.
As the parish of Louth in Lincolnshire went in procession on 1 October, following its silver cross, a parishioner shouted: 'Masters, step forth and let us follow the cross this day; God knoweth whether
ever we shall follow it hereafter.' Within days 10,000 were in revolt; 'The country rises wholly as they go before them.' The 'dangerest insurrection that hath been seen' followed; a series of rebellions through six northern counties, lasting through the autumn and winter of 1536-7, raising 'all the flower
of the North', a force so large that no royal army could have suppressed it if it had come to battle.
The Lincolnshire rising was a spontaneous rising of the common people, spurred by their disaffected
clergy. But it was inchoate, and soon the disparate elements among the rebels turned against each other.
'Ay, be they up in Lincolnshire?' asked Lord Darcy, who was one of those northern lords who had known that 'it will never mend without we fight for it'. Within a week of the first rising a movement began which was more coherent by far: the Pilgrimage of Grace. Led by Robert Aske, their Grand Captain, who was both visionary and politic, the Pilgrimage united the grievances of a whole society
against alien innovations from the South, devised by heretic 'evil counsellors' around the King.
The pilgrims' grievances were inevitably economic, social and political, as well as narrowly religious,
but only the defence of Holy Church, 'now lame and fast in bounds', could have united so many different groups in this mass demonstration and overlaid it, through long waiting days, with an almost
mystical aura.
'God be with them,' said Aske; 'they were pilgrims and had a pilgrimage . . . to go.' This was no less
than a crusade. The pilgrims sang as they marched-

                                                           Christ crucified!
                                                           For thy wounds wide
                                                           Us commons guide!
                                                           Which pilgrims be

-and they marched behind the talismanic banners of the five wounds of Christ and of St Cuthbert for
protection. Religion sanctified their actions as rebels, and their clergy promised them heaven if they
died in that quarrel. True, someone had to invent the oath, compose the songs, contrive the thousands
of banners and badges, but that does not negate the pilgrims' faith. True, the people lamented the loss
of the religious houses for reasons which were not only spiritual, and feared the intrusion of southern
landowners and new ways and the upsetting of their 'old, ancient customs'. Yet the course of the Pilgrimage supports Aske's contention that the suppression of the abbeys was the first cause of the rising. 'Rather than our house of St Agatha should go down, we shall all die,' vowed the people of Richmondshire. The religious were restored by the rebels in sixteen out of fifty-five of the suppressed
houses, and there they stayed while the pilgrims held the North. In the aftermath of the rising of the
King, blaming these 'corrupters of the temporalty [laity]', ordered the monks and friars to be hanged
in chains.
The Pilgrimage was never suppressed by a royal army, although large forces marched North and under Norfolk, Suffolk and Shrewsbury. The chronicle stories of providential rain which swelled the rivers
and prevented battle hid the ignominy that the King was forced to treat with rebels. Henry sent a Gentleman of his Privy Chamber to summon Aske to the royal presence. Aske came south and had
'good words and good countenance' with the King. The rising collapsed because of a paradox within
it: that the pilgrims were sworn not only to Holy Church but to their King. Henry was outraged by
these protests of obedience, and it was true that the pilgrim oath to defend Holy Church militant
might exert a more compelling claim. Lord Darcy, 'Old Tom', faithful servant of the Tudors for nearly
fifty years, would not hand over the traitor Aske, to whom he had sworn loyalty, for 'What is a man
but his promise?' The pilgrims had a higher loyalty still; they must 'set more by the King of Heaven
than by twenty [earthly] kings'.
When the rebels insisted, 'Forward now, or else never,' they were prescient. The rebellion failed, and
Holy Church was 'undone'. There were many who regretted not standing with the pilgrims, and though
some might warn of another rising - 'Beware the third' - this was the last protest against the assault on
the Church and ancient customs which might, just might, have halted the advance of Reformation in
England. Later, when people reflected on the deep allegiance to the old Church and wondered why it
had been better defended, they might have remembered the pilgrims. Henry called the Pilgrimage a 'tragedy'; he meant a tragedy for the northern nobility, fallen from high estate. It was a tragedy, too,
for those Cumberland widows who cut down the bodies of their dead husbands from the gallows;
for the monks who, though often unworthy of the sacrifice made for them, were now cast out; for
the religious houses, left open to the sky; for the evangelicals, who had looked for the plunder to be
spent upon the commonwealth, not to bloat the coffers of the King and his favourites. Nothing could
save the greater monasteries from dissolution and oblivion. Within eight years all the monasteries,
nunneries and friaries within England and Wales - though not in Ireland - were put down. The nobility of the North, who perished in their old allegiance, suffered an eclipse. The people dreaded more radical reform, and were powerless to prevent it. Who would stop the heretics now?

The evangelicals, knowing that their time might be short, now moved to bring the Gospel to the people, so that they would never lose it, and to wage war against idolatry and superstition. Ideas which only a while before had been heretical were now enforced as a new orthodoxy, but this was an orthodoxy hard to defend, challenged by zealots who tried to extend the campaign to purify the Church to attack fundamental Catholic doctrine, and also by conservatives who waited and worked for the return of the old ways. Distinctions between true and false worship were always relative.
Evangelicals pointed out the inconsistencies in official actions: for Parliament too dissolve the monasteries, while the Church still maintained the doctrine of purgatory was 'uncharitableness and
cruelness'. The people must be taught the truth and given certainty. The King might see himself as a
purifying Old Testament monarch, but the idols Josiah had destroyed were pagan, not the familiar
and sacred images of the Catholic present and past. This king who had boasted himself 'defensor fidei'
was now seen as 'destructor fidei'.
In the war against idolatry it was the governing orders who now destroyed the world of which they had been guardians. Their priority was to inculcate a scriptural faith, but their energies often seemed
destructive. An iconoclastic campaign began in 1538 to destroy the idols which led the people to false worship and to confound false miracles with true ones. The most famous and spectacular images were wrested from their shrines and brought to London, a 'jolly muster,' to be dishonoured and destroyed.
The Rood of Grace of Boxley Abbey, a miraculous crucifix which was believed to speak to its supplicants, was revealed as a puppet, operated by strings. Latimer and Cromwell devised grim iconoclastic carnivals. An ancient prophecy that the image of Dderfel Gadarn, 'the great god of Wales',
would set a forest on fire was horribly fulfilled in May 1538: while Latimer preached, the traitor Friar Forest was burned alive with, and by, the image. Such ceremonies were profoundly shocking and subversive: the benefit sought from the miraculous Rood of Grace was no less than the assurance of
being in a state of grace; to Dderfel Gadarn was attributed the power to rescue damned souls from hell. And the images failed to respond to the reformers' challenge to defend themselves.