What struck me forcefully, reading the state papers, were the many indications that the King and his advisers were frightened they might meet with hostility and even violence in the north. The organizers made certain that the gentry and city councillors who came to submit themselves along the way, both in the towns and in rural stopping-places, came in numbers limited by them. Henry’s soldiers were always there.
This most political of Progresses was brilliantly choreographed. The local ruling classes would meet Henry and Queen Catherine along the way, make gifts to them, and those who had rebelled in 1536 would read long submissions begging forgiveness before taking fresh oaths of loyalty. Oaths were vitally important in Tudor times; those who swore knew for sure they had the King’s forgiveness for the past, but equally that if they broke their oaths their fate would be terrible. And no doubt favours and positions were handed out behind the scenes. The attempt to bring James IV of Scotland into an English alliance failed, however; the following year a decade of aggressive warfare against Scotland began.
The ordinary people who had created the great army of 1536, and could have formed another in 1541, played no part other than as spectators. The whole strategy was based on the belief that if Henry could decisively win the loyalty of the northern elites, he would be safe. It worked; there were no more rebellions in Yorkshire in Tudor times. In 1541, however, given the prevailing mood in the north, I think there must have been some hostility to the Progress among the commons, and this is the mood I have portrayed in York; a sullen populace who, as the city records show, drove the council to their wits’ end by refusing to lay sand and ashes before their doors to ease the King’s passage through the streets.
The Blaybourne story, remarkable as it may seem, is founded on fact. There is evidence that Cecily Neville, mother of the Yorkist kings Edward IV and Richard III, claimed that Edward IV was not fathered by the Duke of York, and rumours at the French court identified the father as an English archer named Blaybourne. Michael K. Jones’s Bosworth 1485 (Tempus Publishing, 2002) relates the story, which was also told in a Channel 4 documentary, Britain ’s Real Monarch (2004). They traced the man who would be the rightful King today if Cecily spoke true, an amiable Australian sheep farmer (and republican) who would be King Michael I. I am not entirely convinced that Cecily Neville spoke the truth; I think there are flaws in some of Dr Jones’s lines of argument, particularly on possible dates of conception for Edward IV. But it might be true. Certainly the story was known to Thomas Cromwell; the Spanish ambassador Chapuys asked him about it in 1535, perhaps to annoy him.
What is still true – astonishingly, in the twenty-first century – is that Queen Elizabeth II retains the title Henry VIII took for himself: Supreme Head of the Church of England, Defender of the Faith and – in theory at least – God’s chosen representative in England.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to the staff of the libraries of York City Council, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire County Councils, and the Universities of Sussex and London, for their help in locating research materials about the Progress of 1541. The Richard III Society, American Branch, enabled me to download the Titulus Regulus from their website. The highlights of a research trip to York were the remarkable re-creation of a late-fifteenth-century house at Barley Hall in the city centre, and the excellent and imaginative exhibition on St Mary’s Abbey at the Yorkshire Museum. I am most grateful to Warwick Burton of York Walks for a very informative tour of King’s Manor and for his help with subsequent queries, to Robert Edwards for driving me across the route of the Progress from York to Hull, to Rev. Nigel Stafford for showing me round the lovely old church at Howlme-on-Spalding Moor, and to Mrs Ann Los for sharing her information on Leconfield Castle. Andrew Belshaw kindly found Arnold Kellett’s The Yorkshire Dictionary (Smith Settle, 2002) for me, which was very helpful on matters of dialect. Thanks also to Jeanette Howlett for taking me on a visit to the Sussex Working Horse Trust, where I learned much about the type of horses that moved the Progress across England; to Dr Jeremy Bending, who kindly advised me about Wrenne’s cancer, and to Mike Holmes, who corrected my wildly inaccurate notions about what the sea journey would have been like. Needless to say, any errors in interpreting the wealth of helpful information I was given are my own.
More thanks – once again – to Roz Brody, Jan King, Mike Holmes and William Shaw for reading the book in draft, and to my indefatigable agent Antony Topping for his help and comments – and for the title. Thanks again to my editor Maria Rejt and to Mari Roberts for her copyediting; and to Frankie Lawrence for a mammoth bout of typing.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The only study of the 1541 conspiracy I have found is an article written by Geoffrey Dickens as long ago as 1938: A.G. Dickens, ‘Sedition and Conspiracy in Yorkshire’ (Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, vol. xxxiv, 1938-39). Michael K. Jones’s book, cited above, was fascinating and thought-provoking on the Blaybourne legend. For the Catherine Howard story, Lacey Baldwin Smith’s A Tudor Tragedy (Alden Press, 1961) remains the fullest account, with David Starkey’s Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (Vintage, 2004) giving an interesting modern perspective.
R.W. Hoyle and J.B. Ramsdale’s article ‘The Royal Progress of 1541, the North of England, and Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1534-42’, in Northern History, XLI:2 (September 2004) is useful on the politics of the Progress, though I think it seriously underestimates the centrality of the conspiracy in Henry’s journey north. For details of what the Tudor court on Progress might have been like I am indebted to Simon Thurley’s The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (Yale University Press, 1993) and David Loades’s The Tudor Court (Barnes & Noble, 1987). Dairmaid Mac-Culloch’s Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale University Press, 1996) helped in my attempts to get the measure of that most complex of men. For both the conspiracy and the Progress the ambassadorial reports in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. XVI provide material that is fascinating but frustratingly limited.
R.W. Hoyle’s The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (OUP, 2001) and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Pilgrimage of Grace (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002) were both very useful. Moorhouse tells the story of the Mouldwarp legend.
D.M. Palliser’s Tudor York (OUP, 2002) was a mine of information on the city. Christopher Wilson & Janet Burton’s well-illustrated St Mary’s Abbey (Yorkshire Museum, 1988) was very helpful on the layout of the monastic precinct. There is still debate in York about whether Henry stayed at King’s Manor when he was there. I think he did; it makes obvious logistic sense. The idea that the hundreds of workmen known to be present and building tents and pavilions were building a scaled-down version of those used at the Field of the Cloth of Gold is mine, but it fits with the limited evidence in the Letters and Papers. And there was no time to build anything more substantial; they had less than two months to get there and complete everything.
The song welcoming the King to York in Chapter 16 will not be found in any book on Tudor music; I made it up. I hope it has an authentic ring.
C J Sansom
