Only two years after the royal supremacy was written into law, and only months after Henry VIII’s first reforms of religious worship, a series of rebellions threatened to halt the English Reformation in its tracks.
These rebellions started in October 1536 in the small market town of Louth in the Lincolnshire Wolds and quickly spread through Yorkshire and the north. The imagery of the rebellion was religious; those involved called themselves ‘Pilgrims’, they carried banners with images of the Five Wounds of Christ and they demanded the rooting out of heresy, the restoration of dispossessed monks and nuns, and the renunciation of Henry’s recently asserted royal headship of the Church. This series of rebellions came to be known as The Pilgrimage of Grace. But how did this challenge to Henry’s religious reformation start?
Rumours had been circulating in Lincolnshire about the confiscation of church goods and the demolition of ‘surplus’ churches since the late summer of 1536. In Louth these rumours were compounded by a number of coincidental events. The most significant of these was the expected arrival of the Bishop of Lincoln’s representatives, Dr Frankish and John Hennage. The people of Louth believed that they were there to confiscate their church goods and possibly sack some of their clergy. This inspired the town’s Vicar, Thomas Kendall, to give a rousing sermon against their supposed action of seizing of the church’s goods. This was followed by an outburst by a singing-man and parish guild alderman, Thomas Forster, at the carrying of the crosses in procession to the church.
‘Our Lord speed you, for I think ye shall be taken away shortly, so that we shall never follow you more!’
As a result, a group of men barricaded themselves in the church overnight, including the man who would become their rebel leader – Nicholas Melton, also known as ‘Captain Cobbler’.
On the morning of his arrival, John Hennage was seized by a crowd and then released after he promised to discover whether there was any truth in the rumoured confiscation. Dr Frankish narrowly escaped being beaten up by his own colleagues and had to watch his books and papers being publicly burnt. Later in the day, two of Cromwell’s servants overseeing the dissolution of a nearby nunnery were captured. At this point we could consider these events to be small-town trouble and certainly not a full-scale rebellion. However, it became more than this when a group of townspeople from Louth travelled to the neighbouring village of Caistor the following morning. They expected to find some of the king’s subsidy commissioners there and their aim was to find out whether or not their church goods were indeed under threat. However, upon seeing their approach, the subsidy commissioners fled.
By that evening, word of the Louth uprising was spreading. There was a copycat rising at another nearby town, Horncastle, where a number of gentry were captured and made to join the rebellion. On the following day Dr Rayne, the chancellor of the diocese of Lincoln, whom the rebels found ill at Bolingbroke, was brought to Horncastle and beaten to death by his own clergy.
The rising at Louth was founded on the expectation that the goods of their parish church, including precious plate and other liturgical gold and silver, would be confiscated. The rising at Horncastle was founded on the belief that this confiscation had already taken place. This rebellious fervour was then spread across the county by groups riding out and recruiting local men for their cause. These rebels swore an oath, captured members of the gentry, and called men to arms. This was a rebellion based on the ideology of a pilgrimage, with the aim of protecting local, religious interests and freedoms.
Within a few days, the rebels had organised themselves into a force of about 10,000 men and they entered Lincoln. There they drew up a list of demands which were sent to the king. However, when the king’s representative, the duke of Suffolk, arrived at Lincoln on Wednesday, 11 October, he found it fairly easy to persuade the rebels to go back to their homes with promises of a council to address their grievances.
Within a fortnight the rebellion in Lincolnshire had petered out, but a new rebellion was beginning across the county boarder in Yorkshire. What had started as a small uprising in a market town would become one of the biggest popular rebellions in England since the Great Revolt of 1381.
By Claire Kennan.
Claire is a PhD student and Visiting Teacher in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Citizens Project Officer.
