Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (10 page)

When the first news of the rising reached London, the Council feared that the revolt had been set afoot by the Lady Mary, the King’s Catholic half-sister. The arrival of the petition stilled this fear; then apprehension gave way to outrage, that country clowns should dare to set their terms for the King himself. Protector Somerset was sympathetic to the peasants’ cause. But he had support from none save Latimer, and he knew also, distracted as he was by further outbursts of revolt up and down the country, that the government could not afford to tolerate insurrection. On 21st July he sent a herald to Norwich with a temporizing reply in the King’s name, promising certain reforms and a pardon to all rebels who would disperse. Kett was not satisfied with this, perhaps recognizing that there could be no pardon for him as the leader. ‘Kings are wont to pardon wicked persons,’ he replied, ‘not innocent and just men: they for their part have deserved nothing.’ The herald called Kett a traitor, and rallying to him some of the moderates, including the mayor of Norwich, retired into the city and shut the gates.

As time went by, the conduct of the rebels in the Great Camp
grew worse. Boredom with the present was added to anxiety for the future so that Kett could hardly govern them. ‘They were content with a licentious and idle life’, wrote Hayward, ‘wherein they might fill their bellies with spoil, rather than with labour.’ They certainly filled their bellies. Of sheep, which they naturally considered to be the devil’s animal and the cause of their troubles, they slaughtered and ate twenty thousand in a few days. Three thousand bullocks were consumed, and numberless hens, ducks, geese and swans. Private deer parks were raided, the fences thrown down and the deer carried off to the cooking pots. Whole woods were destroyed to provide both shelter and fuel. The citizens of Norwich were now intimidated by the great, hungry band of rebels across the river. ‘The women resorted twice a day to prayer’, wrote a young inhabitant of the city, ‘that God would deal mercifully with them, that they might live to talk of it, thinking it impossible at that time, they were so devoid of hope.’

With the departure of the herald, Kett knew that the rebels would have to fight for their cause. He began to strengthen the defences on Mousehold Heath, and moved his artillery to cover Norwich. The Council in London gave the task of suppressing the rebellion to the Marquis of Northampton, a genial courtier, who marched north with some 1,500 horsemen and a band of Italian mercenaries. But Northampton was no soldier. Almost immediately he allowed his force to be surprised by the rebels, and so outweighed by the press of numbers that not even the cool fighting of the mercenaries could make any headway against the enthusiastic rustics. After a day and a night of furious confusion, Northampton fled from Norwich with his remaining forces and Kett took possession of the city. In the fighting Lord Sheffield was killed; his horse fell into a ditch, ‘and as he pulled off his helmet to show them who he was, a butcher slew him with a stroke of a club’.

After the failure of Northampton, the task of defeating the rebels, who now appeared to be a serious menace, was entrusted to the Earl of Warwick. Warwick was a hardened soldier and a great supporter of enclosures; the rebels could expect no mercy from him. He brought together Northampton’s scattered troops and appeared before Norwich on 22nd August. He then sent another herald to Kett at Mousehold Heath offering once again a pardon to all who would disperse. Kett was inclined to listen, but in the course of the negotiations a soldier was offended by the rude
gestures of a young rebel and shot him dead. The negotiations broke up angrily and the rebels chased Warwick and his army within the city walls.

For a week Warwick held out in the city with great difficulty; his numbers were small, and his baggage-train and supplies were waylaid and diverted to Mousehold Heath. On the 26th the arrival of 1,000 experienced German
landsknechts
, originally intended for Scotland, eased his danger. Aware that time was on the side of Warwick, Kett decided to attack; but at the very moment when he needed his best judgment, his usual prudence and good sense deserted him. The strain of controlling the mob on the heath, the certainty that failure would lead to his own death, affected him. The knowledge of the rightness of his cause and the unlikelihood of realizing it overcame him. He was afflicted by omens; ‘a snake leaping out of a rotten tree, did spring directly into the bosom of Kett’s wife; which thing struck not so much the hearts of many with an horrible fear, as it filled Kett himself with doubtful cares.’ He was persuaded by an old country saying to abandon his strong position on Mousehold Heath and to go down into the valley of Dussindale overlooked by the city. It was a fatal decision. The rebels were at the mercy of the disciplined fire of the
landsknechts
and soon surrendered. On 1st September Protector Somerset sent an account of the battle to Sir Philip Hoby: ‘On Tuesday last, issuing out of their camp into a plain near adjoining, they determined to fight, and like mad and desperate men ran upon the sword, where a mort of them being slain, the rest were content to crave their pardon. One Kett a tanner, being from the beginning the very chief doers among them fled, and the rest of the rebels, casting away their weapons and harness, and asking pardon on their knees with weeping eyes, were by my Lord of Warwick dismissed home without hurt and pardoned.’ The victorious soldiers returned to Norwich where they found at the Cross two barrels of beer provided for them by the city fathers at a cost of 12s.

Kett and his brother fled as far as Swannington, eight miles from Norwich, but there they were overtaken and captured in a barn. On the day of the victory, 28th August, the trial of the leaders began in Norwich. Nine ringleaders were hanged from the ‘oak of reformation’ and many others were put to death with the full barbarity reserved for rebels; they were hanged, drawn and quartered, and their severed heads were fixed to poles on the city
towers. Robert and William Kett were sent to the Tower of London to await their trial and inevitable execution. They were tried and found guilty, and returned to Norwich on 1st December. A week later they were hanged, Robert in Norwich Castle and William from the top of Wymondham steeple. Of their rebellious followers, between 1,500 and 3,000 had been killed in the battle and a large but uncounted number were executed.

Kett’s rebellion was snuffed out with ease, and so too were all other revolts against the Tudors. Yet Kett seemed to have good chances to improve the hard lot of the peasant. His grievances were real and sad, and recognized to be so by some of the best men in the kingdom. He had the support not only of the austere churchman Latimer, but also of the all-important Protector Somerset. ‘I have heard in deep secret’, the Emperor’s ambassador wrote to his master, ‘that the Protector declared to the Council as his opinion, that the peasants’ demands were fair and just; for the poor people who had no land to graze their cattle ought to retain the commons and the lands that had always been public property, and the noble and the rich ought not to seize and add them to their parks and possessions.’ Moreover, the Tudors, intent on maintaining their despotic rule, were no friends to aristocratic privilege; they allied themselves with the masses against an upstart aristocracy, and were thus inclined to listen to popular complaints.

But stronger reasons made Kett’s defeat inevitable. Complaint was one matter, revolt was another. At Bosworth Field the Tudors had put an end to an age of lawlessness, and they could not allow another to begin. All revolts, for whatever motives, were steps towards anarchy and threats to the centralized power of the monarchy; all were swiftly crushed, whether they were religious uprisings such as the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and the revolt of the northern Earls in 1569, or agricultural uprisings such as Kett’s rebellion. Also, though the peasants were suffering from real injustice, the demands which the rebellion presented were conservative and backward-looking. There was no advantage in going back. The feudal system had decayed beyond repair, and the changes that came about were on the way to increasing the prosperity and well-being of the country. Unhappily, the poor peasants were the victims of this change. A peasant turned off his land was not comforted to know that he was now one of the free and mobile workers
on whom the rise and success of the new industries depended. The wandering labourer with neither roof nor employment was not consoled by the thought that he was now a freeman, no longer tied by the bonds of the feudal relationship. But the agricultural changes and the rise of industry ensured that bondage gradually died out; ironically they were the means to bring about the prayer of the Norfolk rebels that ‘all bond men may be made free’.

The main reason, however, for the failure of the rebellion was the opposition of the moneyed and propertied classes. The accumulation of wealth was the chief enthusiasm of the Tudor age, and neither the King, the lords nor the commons could stand against it. Capitalism was the new, magic means to riches, and no device of the capitalists was more effective than enclosure. Those who fought enclosures felt the enmity of the numerous and bold ranks of property. Wolsey and Somerset, the two Tudor statesmen who opposed enclosures, though they were in their days the most powerful men in England, were brought down. And whatever measures the government made, they could not be enforced against the current of the time. ‘We have good statutes made for the commonwealth as touching commoners and enclosers’, Latimer said, ‘but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth.’ The enforcement of the law lay in the hands of the justices, and they on the whole were keen enclosers. ‘No man’, Edward VI shrewdly commented, ‘that is in fault himself, can punish another for the same offence.’ Tudor policy could not work without the support of the middle classes.

In general, the Tudors found no means to right the injustice caused by the agrarian changes. For the first time in England, the government faced the problem of unemployment, and this malady puzzled the Tudors as much as it has puzzled all other administrations. The best the Tudors could do was to make some provision for the relief of the poor. Kett’s rebellion, which brought home very clearly the poverty and the desperation of the countryside, helped to encourage this legislation; this one minute success was the only monument to all those peasant corpses in the Norwich field. The ground for the new poor law had been prepared some years before by the Spanish humanist Luis Vives whose
On the Relief of the Poor
was written in 1526 while the author was living at the court of Henry VIII. When the dissolution of the monasteries added the sick and the destitute from the monastic hospitals
to those already impoverished by enclosures, and sent them out on the roads, new relief for the poor was urgently needed. In 1536 the principles of Vives, which had already been tried at Ypres in Flanders, were incorporated into English legislation.

Vives had proposed quite simply that begging should be made illegal; that all vagabonds and beggars who could work should be made to work; and that all those who could not work should be placed in hospitals and almshouses. It was a simple matter to prohibit begging, but the other aims of the Act were harder to bring about. ‘Valiant beggars’—those who could work—were to be whipped for the first offence, have an ear clipped for the second, and be put to death for the third; but no suggestion was made as to what work the able-bodied should do and how they should find it. The Act of 1536 and subsequent laws were more successful in providing for those who could not work. In 1547 local authorities were ordered to find houses to lodge the sick, old and useless. But as these houses depended on charity, they were not easily found. Finally, in 1572 the justices were allowed to impose a tax for these lodgings, and to appoint overseers who took the relief of the poor out of the hands of the parish priest.

Poor Kett, what unfathomable affairs he meddled in. An old engraving shows a plump, beaming man of about middle height, sitting in rustic state beneath his ‘oak of reformation’ with sword at his side, dealing simple justice to his country followers. He was himself a small landowner and prosperous enough, but his modest dealings in the new economy did not blind him to the value of his countryside, its past and its people. When that avaricious fellow Serjeant Flowerdew stripped the lead from the church at Wymondham, Kett, though no supporter of the old religion, was distressed for his community to whom the church meant much. When his fellow countrymen rose up against the evil of enclosures, Kett willingly tore down his own hedges and led the good fight against the oppression of the gentry. He was not the first simple soul to be trodden down by the indifferent steps of material progress.

1
   ‘Serjeant’ was a legal title, not a military one.

4

Mary Tudor

S
TRANGE AND CONTRADICTORY
was the life of the Renaissance prince. In England the Tudors had advantages over all former kings. They had magnificence, authority, and control of the land as never before. The country was their estate and they the wilful farmers of it, good or bad according to their whim and judgment. So often frank and easy with their subjects, the Tudors seemed to court and win the good wishes of the populace. Monarchs danced at the maypole, strolled arm-in-arm with commoners, hunted, played, entertained in the full sight of the people. Henry VII was by nature cold and aloof, yet men of no importance easily found places at his banquets and dined with the greatest in the kingdom. His affable second son, though the proudest and most imperious of men, delighted to rub neighbourly shoulders with his subjects. Revels, pageants and progresses were for the entertainment of court and people alike; and when the crowd sometimes intervened, as they did on a famous occasion at Richmond when they broke up the pageant and stripped the King and his courtiers, the Sovereign was not offended by their rude liberties.

Powerful, brilliant and self-willed, still the Tudors were anxious rulers, oppressed by insecurity. With an uncurbed license to do as they pleased they feared that the subject would assert the right to a similar individuality, and their fears made them violent and tyrannical. They were suspicious of the people they governed with such a peremptory power. In his troubles, as his popularity declined, Henry VIII told Marillac, the French ambassador, that he had a miserable people whom he would quickly impoverish so that none would dare raise a hand against him. As the century passed and the problems of the realm grew, the royal family lived amid the whispers of plots and in the fear of assassination. ‘Marriage with the royal blood’, wrote Francis Bacon at the end of the Tudor age, ‘was too full of risks to be lightly entered into.’ To forestall
the terrors of rebellion, the Tudors would strike first, and queens, bishops, dukes fell under the headsman’s axe. At the heart of the royal insecurity was the fear for the succession. The Tudors were a new dynasty without the reverence that attaches to an ancient line. If the succession was not clear, who could prevent the return of the factions and the anarchy from which Henry VII had rescued England at Bosworth Field?