Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) / From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion

by Anonymous

But with Catherine departed his good genius. He gave a free play to his ambitious desires, and renewed his endeavours to compass a clandestine marriage with the Princess Elizabeth, as he had done with Catherine. Finding, however, that such a marriage would annul the claims of Elizabeth to the throne, he next devised means to extort from the Council a consent, which he was well aware it would never yield voluntarily. For this purpose he is said to have courted the friendship of the discontented section of the nobility, and made such a display of his wealth and retainers as was calculated to alarm the Protector and his party. The Protector now resolved to get rid of so dangerous an enemy, though he was his own brother. Sharrington, master of the mint at Bristol being accused of gross peculation by clipping the coin, issuing testoons, or shilling pieces, of a false value, and making fraudulent entries in his books, was boldly defended by the admiral, who owed him £3,000. But Sharrington, to save his life, ungratefully betrayed that of his advocate. He confessed that he had promised to coin money for the admiral, who could reckon on the services of 10,000 men, with whose aid he meant to carry off the king and change the government. This charge, made, no doubt, solely to save his own life, was enough for Somerset. Seymour was arrested on the 16th of January, 1549, on a charge of high treason, and committed to the Tower.

There was no lack of charges against him, true or false. It was stated that he had resolved to seize the king's person, and carry him to his castle of Holt, in Denbighshire, which had come to him in one of the royal grants; that he had confederated for this purpose with various noblemen and others, and had laid in large stores of provisions and a mass of money at that castle. He was also charged with having abused his authority as lord admiral, and encouraged piracy and smuggling, and with having circulated reports against the Lord Protector and Council too vile to be repeated. But the most remarkable were the charges against him of endeavouring, both before and after his marriage with the queen-dowager, to compass a marriage with the king's sister, the Lady Elizabeth, second inheritor to the Crown, to the peril of the king's person and danger to the throne. A Bill of Attainder was brought in against him; he was condemned without a hearing and executed on the 27th of March.

The Protector no sooner had put his brother out of his path into a bloody grave, than he was called upon to contend with a whole host of enemies. A variety of causes had reduced the common people to a condition of deep distress and discontent. The depreciation of the coinage by Henry VIII. had produced its certain consequence—the proportionate advance of the price of all purchasable articles. But with the rise in price of food and clothing, there had been no rise in the price of labour. The dissolution of the monasteries had thrown a vast number of people on the public without any resource. Besides the large number of monks and nuns who, instead of affording alms, were now obliged to seek a subsistence of some kind, the hundreds of thousands who had received daily assistance at the doors of convents and monasteries were obliged to beg, work, or starve. But the new proprietors who had obtained the abbey and chantry lands, found wool so much in demand, that instead of cultivating the land, and thus at once employing the people and growing corn for them, they threw their fields out of tillage, and made great enclosures where their profitable flocks could range without even the superintendence of a shepherd.

The people thus driven to starvation were still more exasperated by the change in the religion of the country, by the destruction of their images, and the desecration of the shrines of their saints. Their whole public life had been changed by the change of their religion. Their oldest and most sacred associations were broken. Their pageants, their processions, their pilgrimages were all rudely swept away as superstitious rubbish; their gay holidays had become a gloomy blank. What their fathers and their pastors had taught them as peculiarly holy and essential to their spiritual well-being, their rulers had now pronounced to be damnable doctrines and the delusions of priest-craft; and whilst smarting under this abrupt privation of their bodily and spiritual support, they beheld the new lords of the ancient church lands greedily cutting off not only the old streams of benevolence, but the means of livelihood by labour, and showing not the slightest regard for their sufferings. The priests, the monks, the remaining heads of the Papist party did not fail to point assiduously at all these things, and to fan the fires of the popular discontent.

The timidity of the Protector forced the ferment to a climax by the very means which he resorted to in order to mitigate it. He ordered all the new enclosures to be thrown open by a certain day. The people rejoiced at this, believing that now they had the Government on their side. But they waited in vain to see the Protector's order obeyed. The Royal proclamation fully bore out the complaints of the populace. It declared that many villages, in which from one hundred to two hundred people had lived, were entirely destroyed; that one shepherd now dwelt where numerous industrious families dwelt before; and that the realm was injured by turning arable land into pasture, and letting houses and families decay and lie waste. Hales, the commissioner, stated that the laws which forbade any one to keep more than 2,000 sheep, and which commanded the owners of church lands to keep household on the same, were disobeyed, the result being that numbers of the king's subjects had diminished. But though the Government admitted all this, it took no measures to make its proclamation effective; the landowners disregarded it, and the people, believing that they were only seconding the law, assembled in great numbers, chose their captains or leaders, broke down the enclosures, killed the deer in the parks, and began to spoil and waste, according to Holinshed, after the manner of an open rebellion. The day approached when the use of the old liturgy was to cease, and instead of the music, the spectacle, and all the imposing ceremonies of high Mass, they would be called on to listen to a plain sermon. Goaded to desperation by these grievances, the people rose in almost every part of the country.

In Wiltshire, Sir William Herbert raised a body of troops and dispersed the insurgents, killing some, and executing others according to martial law. The same was done in other quarters by the resident gentry. The Protector, alarmed, sent out commissioners to hear and decide all causes about enclosures, highways, and cottages. These commissioners were armed with great powers, the exercise of which produced as much dissatisfaction amongst the nobility and gentry as the enclosures had done amongst the people. The spirit of remonstrance entered into the very Council, and the Protector was checked in his proceedings; whereupon the people, not finding the redress they expected, again rose in rebellion.

In Devonshire the religious phase of the movement appeared first, and rapidly assumed a very formidable air. The new liturgy was read for the first time in the church of Sampford Courtenay, on Whit Sunday, and the next day the people compelled the clergyman to perform the ancient service. Having once resisted the law, the insurgents rapidly spread. Humphrey Arundel, the governor of St. Michael's Mount, took the lead, and a few days brought ten thousand men to his standard. As the other risings had been easily dispersed, the Government were rather dilatory in dealing with this; but finding that it steadily increased, Lord Russell was despatched with a small force against the malcontents, accompanied by three preachers, Gregory, Reynolds, and Coverdale, who were licensed to preach in such public places as Lord Russell should appoint.

The rebels had sat down before Exeter when Russell came up with them; but conscious of the great inferiority of his force, and expecting no miracles from the eloquence of his preachers, he adopted the plan of the Duke of Norfolk in the late reign, and offered to negotiate. Upon this, Arundel and his adherents drew up and presented fifteen articles, which went, indeed, to restore everything of the old faith and ritual that had been taken away. The Statute of the Six Articles was to be put in force, the Mass to be in Latin, the Sacrament to be again hung up and worshipped, all such as refused it homage were to be treated as heretics, souls in purgatory should be prayed for, images again be set up, the Bible be called in, and Cardinal Pole was to be of the king's Council. Half of the Church lands were to be restored to two of the chief abbeys in each county; in a word, Popery was to be restored and Protestantism abolished.

All this time Lord Russell lay at Honiton, not venturing to attack, the Government sending him instead of troops only proclamations, by one of which a free pardon was offered to all who would submit; by another, the lands, goods, and chattels of the insurgents were given to any who chose to take them; by a third, punishment of death by martial law was ordered for all taken in arms; and by a fourth, the commissioners were commanded to break down all illegal enclosures. None of these produced the least effect. Lord Russell had sent Sir Peter Carew to urge the Protector and Council to expedite reinforcements; but the Protector and Rich charged Sir Peter with having been the original cause of the outbreak. The bold baronet resented this imputation so stoutly, and charged home the Protector in a style so unaccustomed in courts, with his own neglect, that men and money were promised. Nothing, however, but the proclamations just mentioned arrived, and at length the rebels despatched a force to dislodge Russell from his position at Honiton. To prevent this, he advanced to Feniton Bridge, where he encountered the rebel detachment and defeated it. Soon after Lord Grey arrived with 300 German and Italian infantry, with which assistance he marched on Exeter, and again defeated the rebels. They rallied on Clifton Downs, and Lord Grey coming suddenly upon them and fearing they might overpower him, he ordered his men to despatch all the prisoners they had in their hands, and a sanguinary slaughter took place. A third and last encounter at Bridgewater completed the reduction of the Rising of the West.

But the most formidable demonstration was made by the rebels in Norfolk. It commenced at Aldborough, and appeared at first too insignificant for notice. But the rumours of what had been done in Kent, where the new enclosures had been broken down, gradually infected the people far and wide. They did not trouble themselves about the religious questions, but they expressed a particular rancour against gentlemen, for their insatiable avarice and their grasping at all land, their extortionate rents, and oppressions of the people. They declared that it was high time that not only the enclosure mania should be put a stop to, but abundance of other evils should be reformed.