‘Oh?’
‘Cranmer has written to me. I think he feels guilty for my time in the Tower, perhaps for cozening me into that job in York in the first place. He is a complicated man. I think the things he feels he must do bring him disquiet, in a way they never did to Thomas Cromwell. There is a vacancy for an advocate in the Court of Requests, and he has put my name forward. Things are changing again. The Duke of Norfolk has lost his place now Queen Catherine has fallen. His whole family are in disgrace. The reformers like Cran-mer have access to patronage again. The pay could be better, but anyway it will suffice now I have paid off that damned mortgage on my father’s farm. I will be working for common folk, ordinary people. I think I would like that.’
He smiled. ‘No more arse-licking to rich clients.’
I laughed. ‘No.’
‘Then I’d like it too.’
I rubbed my hands together. ‘Then shall we start with Sergeant Leacon, get his family their lands back?’
‘Yes.’ Barak extended his hand, and I shook it. Not all men betray, I thought. We turned away, leaving the true ancestors of our false King to their eternal rest.
HISTORICAL NOTE
The major political significance of Henry VIII’s great Progress to the North of 1541 has been largely overlooked by historians, perhaps distracted by the wholly unexpected exposure just afterwards of Catherine Howard’s liaison with Thomas Culpeper. In Sovereign I have followed David Starkey’s interpretation of their relationship (Six Wives, 2003), that it probably went no further than flirtation. Cranmer was the key figure in Catherine’s interrogation, and her downfall was a setback for the religious conservatives at Henry’s court, especially her uncle the Duke of Norfolk. Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, whom he married a year later, was a strong reformist.
I have made one alteration to historical fact: Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk was in fact co-organizer of the Progress along with the Duke of Suffolk and was present in York. However, as he featured so prominently in the last Shardlake novel, Dark Fire, I thought it would overcomplicate the plot if I brought him back in a minor role here. While Henry VIII did seek petitions for justice along the route, I have invented the arbitrations in York.
The Progress was indeed beset by cold weather and unremitting rain in July, and calling it off was discussed. I have, however, invented the stormy weather of October 1541.
The north of England had never been fully reconciled to Tudor rule. Under pressure of changing trade patterns, falling wages and the enclosure movement, discontent grew in the early sixteenth century until the religious changes of the 1530s brought the commons of the doctrinally conservative region to rebel in October 1536. Within weeks, an army of perhaps 30,000 armed northerners was camped on the river Don, prepared to march south, collect support and remove Cromwell, Cranmer and Rich from the council.
Henry broke his promises to meet some of the rebels’ demands if they disbanded, and ruthlessly suppressed fresh outbreaks of rebellion in 1537. Robert Aske and the other leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace were executed. There are conflicting accounts on whether Robert Aske was hanged in chains and left to die at York Castle, or whether he was granted a speedier death. I think he was hanged in chains; for Henry VIII to keep his promise that Aske would be dead ere his head was struck off in such a macabre way seems to me exactly in tune with the King’s character.
After 1536, the dissolution of the larger monasteries, which meant the seizure of their resources by the Crown and the remittance of rents and profits to London, together with the effects of heavy taxation in 1540-1, caused further economic distress and religious discontent. Anger can only have festered deeper in 1537-41, for all that things seemed quiet. The revived Council of the North in York, set up to maintain royal control there, would almost certainly have operated a network of informers. Sir William Maleverer is a fictional character, but I think he was probably not untypical. And in early 1541 a conspiracy was uncovered. It was planned by a group of gentry and ex-religious and was to start with a rising at Pontefract Fair in April. The limited evidence indicates that the 1541 rebels were prepared to go further than those of 1536 – the French ambassador Marillac reported to Philip V that they called the King a tyrant; surely this indicated they intended to dethrone him. Even more surprising and dangerous, Marillac reported that they were prepared to make an alliance with the still Catholic Scots. Northern English people looked on the Scots as uncivilized, dangerous barbarians (exactly the way the southern English looked on the northern English), and the conspirators’ anger must have been desperate indeed to consider allying with the ancient enemy. There was no evidence of a link to conservative Gray’s Inn lawyers in 1541, though there may have been one in 1536; I have revived this aspect for my plot.
The prospect of another army of northern rebels marching towards London, this time perhaps accompanied by the Scots, and perhaps even the Scots’ allies the French, must have been the ultimate nightmare for the Henrician state. Foreign ambassadors reported in 1541 that the English rulers were even more alarmed than they had been in 1536. After the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Royal Progress to the North had been mooted, but the idea was shelved. Now it was quickly revived, and Henry’s anxiety is indicated by the extraordinary speed with which the gigantic Progress was organized – it set out three months after the conspiracy was exposed. This was a remarkable feat, for not only was it at least three times the size of a normal Progress, not only did it travel much further than a royal Progress had since the 1480s, but it was an armed Progress, with a thousand soldiers accompanying the King and England’s artillery shipped to Hull. Meanwhile, the heir of the alternative (and Catholic) royal line, the Countess of Salisbury, was butchered in the Tower without trial.
For details of how the Progress looked, sounded and smelt I have had to rely on the books cited below, and on my imagination, to flesh out the limited information provided by the French ambassador Marillac’s reports and other records in the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII. The portrayal of the supplication of the City of York at Fulford Cross is based on the official account in the York civic records.
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.