Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (14 page)

During his brief stay in York, Aske, working with other men who shared his views, for he was by no means alone in his determination to be heard, began to coordinate a more widespread rebellion. Large numbers of men had risen throughout Yorkshire and the movement spilled over into Lancashire, Westmoreland, Durham and Cumberland. The next objective was to take and hold a fortress that would be vital to the outcome. Many of the leading figures of the Church and the local nobility, including Archbishop Lee of York and Lord Darcy, had taken refuge in Pontefract Castle. Soon Lord Latimer would join them. But he was already sworn to the rebels.

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HERE WAS UNREST
and armed coercion in Richmondshire before Robert Aske arrived in York. By 11 October it was closing in on Snape. On that day a group of several hundred men, probably fired into action by the proclamation at the Ripon horse fair that the king’s army was coming to deliver retribution to the men of Lincolnshire, descended on Jervaulx Abbey. Together with Fountains, Rievaulx and Byland, this was one of the four great Cistercian abbeys of north Yorkshire. Peaceful and prosperous in its idyllic setting by the river Ure, Jervaulx was not one of the monastic houses marked for suppression. Its abbot, Adam Sedbar, apparently had no wish to join those who were disaffected; initially he seems to have regarded them as more interested in stealing the abbey’s horses than doing God’s work. For
several nights he hid from them until they threatened to burn his abbey to the ground. When he did appear, he claimed to have been physically attacked and forced to take the oath, though other accounts suggested he soon became an enthusiast for the rebels’ cause. The oath he took was actually administered by a local gentleman, not an enraged member of the commons. At about this time, though we do not know precisely when or in what circumstances, Lord Latimer and his brother-in-law, Sir Christopher Danby, also took the oath.

Snape lay close to Jervaulx in lower Wensleydale, so it is not surprising that Latimer found himself soon caught up in the wider Richmondshire rising. Lord Darcy told Henry VIII that ‘[t]hey [the commons] have surprised a great many gentlemen in their own homes’, and he specifically mentioned Danby.
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It is likely, from this report, that Lord Latimer was taken in the same way, forced, by circumstances, to leave his wife and children behind at Snape. A number of ladies in the north were broadly sympathetic to the aims of the Pilgrimage. Katherine’s own views at the time may well have been ambiguous: she would have known that her husband was conservative in religious matters, yet she knew, too, that the Parr family were committed to the monarchy and that her brother William was showing an interest in religious reform. No doubt she was nervous for her husband’s safety and his future. She would have been as well aware as anyone that siding with rebels, no matter what the circumstances, was a course fraught with danger.

Latimer, like many other gentlemen who became embroiled in the Pilgrimage of Grace, was most probably ambivalent. Men who thought like him were worried about the economic and spiritual implications of the dissolution of the monasteries, fearing the inroads of new ideas in the vacuum that closure would create and also the loss of charity given to the poor. Latimer’s position, as the eldest of his branch of the Nevilles, was somewhat unusual. Many of the gentlemen pilgrims were younger sons, who could become involved and take a stand without prejudicing the heredi
tary rights of their elder brothers. If this sounds surprisingly altruistic, it was an oft-repeated pattern in those days when the survival of the family was so important. The degree of coercion exerted on such men, many of whom were justices of the peace, has recently been questioned. But armed opposition to the king was a highly dangerous path. Latimer and others like him soon took on more prominent roles in the Pilgrimage because they realized, more than Robert Aske, the consequences of failure. It was natural for them to assume leadership of the commons, in any case. Yet they were careful to make sure that it was known that they had not begun this thing, merely sought to bring it to a peaceful and honourable conclusion.

The north Yorkshire rebels, by now 10,000 strong, massed in Richmond on 14 October. Here they elected Robert Bowes, a local gentleman in his forties, like Latimer, as their leader. It is not known where Latimer himself was at this time. Only on 22 October, when he arrived at Pontefract Castle does he emerge again, in the company of Lord Lumley and young Henry Neville, the twelve-year-old son and heir of the earl of Westmoreland. The lad may have been a hostage for his father, but he was carrying the banner of St Cuthbert, a powerful piece of religious symbolism from Durham Cathedral. Used in battle against the Scots, it represented both the piety and the fierce, independent spirit of the north of England. At its centre was a relic, the cloth in which St Cuthbert’s body was said to have been buried. ‘The banner cloth was a yard broad and five quarters deep . . . made of red velvet, of both sides most sumptuously embroidered and wrought with flowers of green silk and gold . . . in the midst of the said banner was the holy relic and Corporax cloth enclosed . . . covered over with white velvet . . . having a red cross of red velvet on both sides . . .’
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This and the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, under which the pilgrims also gathered when they confronted the royal armies, was precisely the sort of symbol hated by the reformers in London.

What did Lord Latimer feel as he sat on horseback beside his old friend and Westmoreland’s boy? He had a son himself not
many years older, left behind at Snape. Was it elation mixed with apprehension, pride mingled with the cold fear of meeting a traitor’s death? He and Lumley, with much experience between them of defending England’s northern border for the Tudors, now found themselves at the head of an army estimated to be between 30,000 and 50,000 men, destined for London. It was a sober host, convinced of the justice of its cause and confident that the king would give gracious audience to its demands. But it never got anywhere near the capital.

T
HE CAPTURE OF
Pontefract was a natural goal for Aske and the rebels after their success in the rest of Yorkshire. The Norman motte and bailey castle had been expanded over the centuries and was the greatest fortress in the north. Little of it remains today, but in 1536 it was still the ultimate prize, both for the king who needed to hold it and the rebels who wanted to take it. But the castle had a sinister reputation. Richard II had died there in February 1400, probably starved to death on the orders of Henry IV, the cousin who had usurped his throne. Throughout the Middle Ages Pontefract was used as a prison. It appeared formidable. Yet the sheer size of the castle, covering seven acres, and its commanding position above the town, flattered to deceive. It was not well provided with weapons and was therefore far less easy to defend than might have been supposed.
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The extent of the anxiety of the lords who had taken refuge within the walls of Pontefract is eloquently expressed in a letter of 15 October to the earls of Shrewsbury, Rutland and Huntingdon, commanding the king’s forces at Newark:

It is true the commons for the most part of Yorkshire be up and today we hear there meet before York above 20,000 men, besides many who have gone to them in Lincolnshire. There is no doubt the commons of this shire and Lincolnshire receive messages from each other. They increase in every parish, the cross goes before them . . . We remain here
according to your advice and indeed know not whither we could depart in surety. I, Darcy, have twice written to the King of the weakness of the castle but have got no answer, and without speedy succour we are in extreme danger, for Tuesday next, at the furthest, the commons will be here as they do affirm, not withstanding your proclamation was sent to York to them to be read. And whereas we hear that the commons of Lincolnshire are on the point of returning home on certain conditions . . . we think it right expedient that the like comfort should be sent hither.
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And to this gloomy prognosis was added in a postscript the information that ‘news has just come that Lord Latimer and Sir Christopher Danby be taken with the commons and be with them’. So it was known, a week before Latimer arrived at Pontefract, that he had gone over to the rebels, albeit unwillingly.

The letter was signed by the archbishop of York and the other lords waiting uneasily inside Pontefract, but its chief author was Thomas, Lord Darcy, constable of the castle. Darcy was an old soldier who had fallen out of favour with Henry VIII, or perhaps more accurately, with, Henry’s former chief minister, Wolsey. He had acquired considerable wealth from his lands but little royal patronage and there are indications that he found the continual obligation to defend England’s borders with Scotland irksome, a resentment shared by many northern noblemen. But he was also, like Lord Latimer and Robert Aske, a religious conservative. He did not want to die a heretic and though he never considered himself a traitor, he had talked of rebellion before 1536. Darcy had opposed the king’s divorce and was a supporter of Princess Mary’s claim to the throne. He and other gentlemen of his persuasion in northern England considered her still to be the true heir of Henry VIII, despite her loss of status. Yet it would be wrong to assume from this that the Pilgrimage of Grace was long planned, or that it was politically inspired and masterminded by a cabal of discontented nobles. The timing of the uprising and the involvement of such large numbers of the common people seems
to have genuinely surprised Darcy. In London, it was thought that he protested too much, that he was always in league with Aske. Why else would he have given Pontefract up without a fight and joined the rebels?

The simple answer is that he had little choice. He had been unable to muster men, as the king commanded – they had all gone over to the rebels. Without sufficient manpower to defend it or a ready supply of munitions, Pontefract was merely a hiding place. Certainly no one else seems to have been keen to assume the mantle of leadership. The most senior figure in the castle was the archbishop of York, Edward Lee, but he was not the man to challenge Darcy for this unenviable role.

Lee was in a very difficult position. The second prelate of the realm was no Cromwellian reformer but he did not share the passion of the men of the north. Always careful to stay on the right side of Henry VIII, it was his decision to spend more time in his archbishopric than his predecessor Wolsey had ever done that meant he could not escape the Pilgrimage of Grace. Along with Darcy and his fellow detainees, Lee took the pilgrims’ oath at Pontefract after the surrender to Aske’s forces. There was little for him to do now but to await the outcome of events.

Once he had made the decision to support Robert Aske, Darcy turned all his experience of soldiering to the rebels’ advantage. In Sir Robert Constable, another Yorkshire gentleman sworn by the rebels, he now had someone with whom he could work closely and whom he trusted. The two had fought together twenty-five years earlier against the Moors in Spain, in the service of Ferdinand of Aragon. But they had not taken up arms for the Catholic King just as adventurers; their Christian faith had been central. Now that very faith was under threat in England. There can be no doubt that they subscribed to the articles later drawn up in the name of the Pilgrimage, which called for ‘the heretics, bishops and temporal, and their sect, to have condign punishment by fire . . . or else to try the quarrel with us and our partakers in battle’.
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Aware that the number of their supporters was growing all the time, but as yet uncertain of the precise tally, Darcy and Aske were confident of fielding an army of 20,000 to 30,000 men by the beginning of the last week of October 1536. Their aim was nothing less than to march on London, nobles, gentry and commons united in their determination to remove the evil counsellors around the king and to make Henry change his mind on the religious direction that had been set. This was, at root, an attempt to turn back the Reformation that had already begun. There were no threats against the person of Henry VIII himself, but belief in the sanctity of kingship, embodied in the coronation rite, had proved an ineffective last resort for four kings of England in the previous two hundred years. Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Richard III had all been removed by force from the throne and met miserable ends. Henry could not have taken much comfort in these precedents. Surprised and greatly angered by this huge uprising against him, he had no intention of leading from the front. That task he would leave to others.