The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [173]
This was the aforementioned Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness, a statement of doctrine drawn up by my bishops in hopes of doing exactly that. The recent changes had so confused the laity that I had thought some clarification of beliefs was in order.
The resulting Ten Articles were a magnificent compromise between the traditionalists and the reformists. Like all compromises, it evidently satisfied no one of either persuasion and unduly alarmed both factions.
The northerners heard, also, in a distorted and distant way, that commoners had replaced noblemen in the King’s Council. They had always been served well by “their” noblemen, and feared for themselves without their guardians. But more than anything else they feared change. Like the slow-growing trees in their region—which took three or four years to attain the one year’s growth of a similar tree in southern England—they were unable to respond quickly to climactic changes. The plant that grew from their soil was the Pilgrimage of Grace.
A pilgrimage was what they called it, but a rebellion was what it was. It broke out in spots, like the pox, all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Eventually the mass coalesced into a great pustule—some forty thousand strong —in the area of the middle of Yorkshire. I did not pop the pustule directly —that would have made too great a splatter—but lanced it and let it drain away and dry up.
So much for metaphor. Now let me set down, in summary, exactly what happened in those autumn months of 1536.
I had sent my commissioners north to supervise the suppression of the small monasteries, as stipulated in the Act of Parliament. The first resistance they met was in the hamlet of Hexham, in Northumberland. There an armed mob of monks and townspeople chased them out.
Next, a spontaneous revolt arose in Lincolnshire. The rebels surrounded the castle of Kyme, where Bessie Blount and her new husband, Edward, Lord Curt, where I met with him at Christmas.
Thus ended the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace—neither a pilgrimage nor imbued with grace. But it did alert me to the deep-seated affection for the monasteries and the “Olde Religion” in my far-flung territories. When I met with Aske, one of his requests—and a reasonable one, too—was that I show myself to them, so that they might know me as well as my southern subjects, and that I agree to hold Jane’s Coronation at York. It was a pleasant thought, and would make Jane’s crowning altogether different from Anne’s.
In the end, though, the rebellion in the North failed because it had only the common people’s loyalty, not that of the great lords of the North: the Nevilles and Percys; the Earls of Derby, Shrewsbury, and Rutland. These looked at the magnificent Cistercian monasteries and realized the properties could be theirs, if they but supported my policy. And they were right.
The other rebellion, more unexpected and uncharacteristic, came from within the royal apartments. Jane herself took the part of the Pilgrims. Tender-hearted, she hearkened to their complaints and tried to persuade me to capitulate to them.
“Can you not let the monasteries in the North remain?” she begged. “Their needs are different from ours, their land is different. How can you know unless you see for yourself?”
“There can be no exceptions,” I tried to explain, gently. “For once exceptions begin, they never end. The Welsh, the Cornish, the fen country— all will want their special concerns catered to. Besides, this business of the monasteries concerns only myself and Rome.”
I had an ugly flash of memory. “These rebels, like Darcy and Hussey and Dacre, Lord Abergavenny, were first seduced into