A Brief History of the Tudor Age (33 page)

In October 1536, a revolt broke out in Lincolnshire against the dissolution of the monasteries and against the lower-class politicians – the ‘villein blood’ – in the
Privy Council, especially Thomas Cromwell, and the ‘heretic bishops’. It had petered out within a few days, but not before it had spread to Yorkshire, where there was a far more serious
insurrection under the leadership of the noblemen and gentlemen of the county. By the end of November, 40,000 rebels, armed with pikes, were at Doncaster, ready to cross the Trent and march south.
Henry VIII’s general, the Duke of Norfolk, had only 7,000 troops with which to oppose them; and the dry autumn had caused the water level in the Trent to fall so low that it would soon be
possible to ford the river at many places. So Norfolk persuaded Henry VIII to grant nearly all the rebels’ demands and to pardon them for having taken part in the rebellion.

Henry most graciously received the rebel leaders at Greenwich, and their followers dispersed and went home; but two months later, a very minor revolt broke out in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Henry used this as an excuse to arrest and execute nearly all the leaders of the earlier revolt and to hang some four hundred of their followers, not for their participation in the first rebellion,
for which they had been pardoned, but on trumped-up charges of having taken part in the second abortive rising. Three of them were executed as traitors because they had called on the people to stay
quietly in their houses and not help the rebels; for it was argued that this was treasonable, as they should have told them to leave their houses and help suppress the rebellion.

In the reign of Edward VI, two formidable revolts broke out almost simultaneously in the summer of 1549; and at the same time there were riots against enclosures of land in several counties in
south-east England. The people of Devon and
Cornwall were rebelling against the recent introduction of the Protestant Book of Common Prayer, and demanded the restoration of the
old Catholic Mass and the burning of heretics. The people of Norfolk, most of whom were Protestants, demanded an end to enclosures of common land.

The rebels in the West murdered one prominent local Protestant, and several Protestant supporters fled from the district. One of these was a Protestant seaman, Edmund Drake, who later became a
clergyman; he fled from Tavistock to Kent with his family, including his infant son, Francis Drake. Francis spent his adolescence learning seamanship on the Medway, and imbibing the Protestantism
of his neighbours in Kent.

The government expected the Western rebels to march on London, and took the precaution of destroying the bridge at Staines to prevent them from crossing the Thames and reaching the northern
bank; but the army that Somerset sent against them, under Lord Russell and Sir William Herbert, defeated the rebels at Clyst St Mary before they had left Devonshire. The government sent Sir Anthony
Kingston and other officers to try the rebels by courts martial, and many were executed, including the Mayor of Bodmin. When Kingston arrived at Bodmin, the Mayor invited him to dinner. Kingston
accepted the invitation, but told the Mayor to erect a scaffold in the courtyard of his house, as it would be necessary to hang some rebels. After dinner, the Mayor told Kingston that the scaffold
had been erected. Kingston then ordered the Mayor to go up on to the scaffold, as it was he who was to be hanged on it.

The Protestants were convinced that the rebellion in the West had been instigated by a handful of Papist priests, particularly by the vicar of Poundstock, near Bude, in Cornwall.

John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, defeated Kett’s rebels on Mousehold Hill, a few miles north of Norwich, and suppressed the rebellion. Kett and several of the rebels were
executed. Warwick returned to London to plot the
coup d’état
which overthrew Somerset, who was thought to have encouraged the rebellions by his liberal policies.. Warwick
became the ruler of England, and two years later was created Duke of Northumberland.

He persuaded Parliament in 1550 to pass an Act against unlawful assemblies. If twelve or more persons assembled with the object of removing a member of the Privy Council from office, or bringing
about any change in the law, or burning houses or barns, or obtaining lower rents or a lower price of corn, they were to be executed as traitors or felons. If more than forty of them assembled,
anyone, including their wives or servants, who brought them money, weapons, food or drink was also to be executed as a traitor. If two or more persons, but less than ten, assembled for any of these
purposes, they were to be punished by a year’s imprisonment and a fine. No mayor or JP who killed any of them in dispersing them was to be liable to punishment or damages; and tenants of a
lord of a manor who were between the ages of eighteen and sixty were to forfeit their land if they refused to serve in the forces against them.

Northumberland was overthrown by another revolt, which broke out when Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen after the death of Edward VI in July 1553. Mary called on the people to support her as
the rightful Queen, and within a few days 40,000 people had assembled at Framlingham, ready to fight on her behalf. It shows the moral effect of the royal name, and the attachment of the people to
the principle of hereditary monarchy, that this was the only revolt during the Tudor Age which was successful. Wyatt’s Protestant rising in Kent next year, in
protest
against Mary’s plan to marry Philip of Spain, was suppressed; and so was the Catholic rebellion in the North against Elizabeth I in 1569, when 5,000 men rose under the Earls of Northumberland
and Westmorland. They captured Durham, burning the Book of Common Prayer in the cathedral and celebrating Mass there; but the rising in the North was suppressed before Philip of Spain had time to
send them any effective aid. More than 600 of the rebels were executed after summary trials by courts martial.

In 1601, Elizabeth’s former favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, led a revolt in London, ostensibly to protect himself against the members of the Privy Council who were planning to
arrest and assassinate him. It was easily suppressed, and Essex and five of his supporters were executed.

Whenever a rebellion broke out, the government was confronted with the same problem which it faced on the outbreak of war, because there was no standing army at the King’s disposal, except
for the garrisons in the two frontier outposts at Berwick and Calais. There was also a very small force of men-at-arms who resided at court to protect the King’s person. Within a month of his
victory at Bosworth, Henry VII had created a corps of fifty men-at-arms whom he named ‘the Yeomen of the Guard’; and Henry VIII increased their number to 600 in 1520.

In times of war and rebellion, the King relied on the old system which had existed in feudal times. He ordered his nobles to summon the gentlemen in their counties to come with their tenants,
bringing a specified number of horsemen, infantrymen and bowmen, to muster at a certain place on a certain date. When there was a threat of invasion by the Scots, or an invasion of Scotland was
being planned, the lords and gentlemen of the northern counties were ordered to assemble at Newcastle, usually in about three weeks time.

When the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out, Henry VIII called on the nobles and gentlemen throughout the West Midlands to go with their tenants to join the Duke of Suffolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury
at Nottingham and Mansfield for service against the
rebels, while the gentlemen in the South of England were told to come to Ampthill to form a reserve army. He was able to
assemble an army of 7,000 men within a fortnight.

When a French invasion was expected in the summer of 1545, Henry made preparations for armies totalling 90,000 men to be ready to assemble to repulse an invasion attempt at any point between
Lincolnshire and Cornwall. Preparations were made to light beacons on the hills all the way between the South Coast and the North of England, so that the people throughout the realm could be warned
of the invasion far more quickly than any horseman could ride from the Channel to the Scottish Border. Three beacons were built on every hill; one fire was to be lit when the enemy fleet was
spotted; a second fire when the enemy approached within four miles of the coast; and a third when they landed. When a French raiding party landed at Seaford and burned the town and Sir John
Gage’s house at Firle, all three beacons were lit, and the levies of Kent and Sussex were ordered to assemble at Uckfield; but by the time they arrived there, the French had already
re-embarked.

When the Rising in the North broke out in November 1569, Elizabeth raised an army of 28,000 men in the traditional way by calling on the nobles and gentlemen of the whole realm to join the
advance-guard under the Earl of Sussex and the reserve army under the Earl of Pembroke; and the army of 22,000 men which was assembled at Tilbury in 1588, when the Armada was sighted off the
Lizard, was raised in the same way.

In London, all the citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty were required to enrol in the city trainbands and to be ready, when summoned, to defend the King and the city against a foreign
invader or English rebels. When there was a rumour in April 1539 that the armies of the Emperor Charles V in the Netherlands were about to launch an invasion of England – it was a false
report – 16,300 men turned out in the trainbands and marched in armour from Mile End to St James’s Park, and back by Holborn and Newgate through the city, while Henry VIII stood for
five hours at the gatehouse at Whitehall to see them march
past. The London trainbands came out in January 1554 to defend Queen Mary against Wyatt’s rebels, and they
suppressed Essex’s rebellion against Elizabeth I in 1601.

The English continued to rely on this type of army long after foreign kings were enlisting mercenaries to fight their wars. By the end of the fifteenth century, mercenaries were being widely
employed in Europe. The Emperor Maximilian fought his wars in Italy against Francis I in 1516 with Swiss mercenaries whom he paid with money lent to him by Henry VIII. A king who needed mercenaries
made a contract with the captain of the mercenaries and paid him a lump sum, and the captain assembled a band of mercenaries and paid his men the wages for which they were prepared to serve. But it
was not a wholly satisfactory arrangement, for mercenaries could not be relied upon to fight as bravely or loyally as native soldiers fighting for their own king. The English were proud of being
able to dispense with mercenaries, and were envied for this in other countries.

Henry VIII fought his wars against France and Scotland in 1513 and 1522–3 using only his English soldiers; but he supplemented them during his last war with France by enlisting German and
Spanish mercenaries for the first time in 1544 and 1545. He at once encountered the drawbacks of mercenaries. He became involved in arguments with the captain of the mercenaries as to whether their
first month’s pay should be reckoned from the day when they set out from their assembly point at Aachen or only when they reached the battle area at Boulogne, where they were to serve. On
another occasion, a German mercenary captain seized the envoys whom Henry had sent to negotiate with him, and refused to release them until a ransom had been paid. Mutinies by mercenaries were
common, for when mercenaries mutinied, the king who had hired them had only two choices: either to give in to their demands, or to hire other mercenaries to suppress them.

Henry had a more satisfactory experience with the 1,300 Spanish mercenaries whom he hired to fight against the Scots in 1545; but in their case, too, there were some minor difficulties,
because the mercenaries, who were billeted in private houses in Newcastle, refused to eat English food, and their landladies complained about the smell of the Spanish food which they
cooked for themselves in the landladies’ kitchens.

In the reign of Edward VI, Somerset’s government hired Spanish and German mercenaries to suppress the revolts in Devon and Norfolk. Mercenaries were usually prepared to fight for any king
who hired them, and for or against either Protestants or Catholics, irrespective of what their own religion might be. But they were often reluctant to fight against their own sovereign, and though
some mercenary captains were prepared to do so, a captain often inserted a clause in his contract by which he agreed to serve against any prince except his own sovereign, or against a sovereign
whom he had served in the past and hoped to serve again in the future. The Catholic Spanish mercenaries who were hired to suppress the revolts of 1549 were quite happy to fight against Catholic
rebels; but one of the reasons why Northumberland decided to submit to Mary in 1553 was that he feared that the Spanish mercenaries in his army would be reluctant to fight against a princess who
was known to be the protégée of their own sovereign, Charles V.

Mary refused to hire Spanish mercenaries, or to accept the help of the Spanish troops whom Charles V offered to her, to suppress Wyatt’s rebellion, because she thought it would be
politically unwise to do so, as Wyatt was accusing her of betraying English interests to Spain; and she insisted on employing only the London trainbands to suppress the revolt. Elizabeth I
reluctantly agreed to lend money to the Dutch Protestants and to Henry of Navarre to hire German mercenaries to fight against the Spaniards in the Netherlands and in France; but when she eventually
agreed to send her own troops to help them, they were English soldiers enrolled in the traditional way; and she suppressed the long-drawn-out rebellion in Ireland between 1594 and 1603 with English
soldiers.