– augmented by expropriated monastic land – dispensed to build up lesser landowners as a counterweight to the old magnate dynasties. ‘For surely we will not be bound of a necessity to be served with lords. But we will be served with such men what degree soever as we shall appoint to the same’, instructed the king.36 Promotion of minor figures to Border offices, and cuts to the grants they received, did nothing to enhance security along the perimeter – foreign mercenaries had to be brought in – but served the more pressing need of safeguarding the monarchy from aristocratic resurgence on the periphery.
The Catholic heads of the great northern dynasties, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmorland, made one final, doomed attempt, early in the reign of Elizabeth, to defend their religion and social primacy. Smarting from loss of position to Elizabeth’s clientele gentry, goaded into action by hot-headed members of their entourage, on 14 November 1569 they entered Durham Cathedral, overturned the communion table and celebrated a Catholic Mass. Shortly afterwards they issued a proclamation complaining of how ‘diverse new set up nobles about the Queen’s majesty, have and do daily, not only go about to overthrow and put down the ancient nobility of this realm, but also have … set up and maintained a newfound religion and heresy, contrary to God’s word’.37
Elizabeth’s pick for Bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, had sermonised against veneration of aristocratic lineages.38 A fierce Puritan, the new broom gathered around him fellow evangelicals such as William Whittingham, appointed dean of Durham Cathedral. Both men had spent part of the Marian interlude in exile in Calvin’s Geneva. Pilkington went down so badly with his congregation that he confessed to William Cecil, leading statesman of the Elizabethan court, ‘I am grown into such displeasure with them, part for religion and part for ministering the oath of the queen’s superiority, that I know not whether they like me worse, or I them’.39
When the uprising broke out, Pilkington fled to London disguised as a beggar while Durham thronged with parishioners eager once again to practise Catholic rites. Despite this enthusiasm, however, only a few thousand turned out to contest the Anglican settlement in arms: yeomen farmers for the most part, some aggrieved by Pilkington and Whittingham’s grasping estate management, along with poorer sorts pressed into service by threat of spoil or the promise of cash reward. Few had tenurial connections to either peer. Although reputed to love their lord better than their queen, Percy tenants in Northumberland stayed at home. After the Pilgrimage of Grace the Crown had leased out Percy manors to clients of the rival Forster clique, accelerating the decay of the family’s seigniorial jurisdiction.40 The rebels decided against hazarding an attack on York. Instead a small detachment seized control of the port of Hartlepool, vainly hoping for a landing by Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba, while the main force laid siege to Barnard Castle on the Tees. On 16 December, as royal troops advanced north to Darlington, the earls lost their nerve, fleeing from the jaws of defeat across the Scottish border.
Lawrence Stone characterised the Northern Rebellion as ‘the last episode in five hundred years of protest by the Highland Zone against the interference of London’.41 To ensure there would be no recurrence, Council of the North president Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, summarily executed 600 rank-and-file rebels under martial law – a body count several times higher than Norfolk had inflicted after the Pilgrimage and comparable to English atrocities in Ireland, where Sussex had served as lord lieutenant. Common law trials of estate-holding rebels provided another windfall of forfeited property to the Crown. Northumberland was sold out by the Scots and beheaded at York, while Westmorland stewed in exile in the Spanish Netherlands on a pension from Philip II, his estates in Durham confiscated by the Crown and later sold to royal courtiers and coal-owning parvenus from Newcastle. Pilkington returned to his diocese triumphant. ‘I am, by the blessing of God, restored to my flock’, he congratulated himself in a letter to Swiss reformer Henry Bullinger.42
The demise of the northern earls was followed, at the end of the Elizabethan period, by a Union of the Crowns, which diminished the strategic significance of the Anglo-Scottish frontier – now ‘the very heart of the country’, observed James I, who did away with wardenships and marcher law.43 The North was reduced to a periphery like any other, and like the others offered James’s successor more support during the Civil War than he ever received from the capital, damned by Charles I’s Secretary at War, Sir Edward Walker, as ‘the head and fountain of this detested rebellion’.44
Musgrove dates the emergence of the Royalist North to the fourteenth century, when England’s kings had exhorted the region to take up arms against the Scots as well as the French, and northern clerks, prelates, knights and merchants such as the de la Poles had assumed prominent positions in the departments of state. The Wars of the Roses of the fifteenth century then strengthened the sentimental ties linking the Crown to castle towns such as Pontefract, which would be the very last Royalist holdout against Parliament. Without the modernising impetus that Puritan ideology transmitted to London and East Anglia, northern England remained in thrall to past glories, a region marked out by its ‘backwardness and deep-seated traditionalism’.45
Left idling as advanced capitalist agriculture took off in East Anglia and much of the South East, the northern countryside was certainly backward. As far south as Lancashire and Yorkshire, ‘tenant right’ customary tenures persisted that had historically afforded yeoman farmers security of landholding in return for military service on the Border. A post-1603 landlord campaign spearheaded by James I to replace them with commercial leasehold arrangements had become bogged down in legal wrangles. In Cumberland, to cite an extreme case, most farmers still held their land by customary tenure at the close of the eighteenth century.46 The continuing weight of agrarian custom may do more to explain the conservativism of the rural North, and the absence of a parliamentary party within it, than the ancient battles invoked by Musgrove.
If the tenant-right controversy tempered the popular reception of the king’s cause in the region, Catholicism afforded a counterbalance.47 The old religion survived in gentry households and out-of-the-way upland areas. In Lancashire, unusually, it retained a mass following, particularly in the western fringe of the county which traded with Catholic Ireland.48 For its adherents, if neutrality wasn’t a viable option, the choice between Charles’s High Church Anglicanism and Westminster’s intolerant evangelism – the latter, in effect, a super-sized version of the old Pilkington regime in Durham – wasn’t difficult, and the Crown offered a better muster point than a pair of already diminished noble lineages had in 1569.
Charles handed command of the far north to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, a London patron of the arts whose West Riding family had risen up the social ladder through service under Henry VIII, profiting from the dissolution of the monasteries. In circumstances that are obscure, Newcastle quickly raised a ‘papist’ northern army of some 8,000 men after being instructed to enlist loyal subjects without examining their consciences. Two-thirds of gentry families in Lancashire who engaged for the king were Catholic, as were one-third in Yorkshire.49 ‘Royalism in the North of England cannot be reduced wholly to religion or economics’, insists Musgrove. But it is altogether inexplicable without them.50
In London, by contrast, evangelical merchants operating outside the framework of royal trading companies helped to swing opinion behind Parliament. The affinity of Puritanism with commerce, and the chafing of small clothiers at Crown restrictions on manufacture and trade, also brought growing textile handicraft towns in the North onto Parliament’s side. The country linen weavers around Manchester rebuffed James Stanley, the king’s commander in Lancashire and Cheshire, when he laid siege to the town in September 1642, their resolve stiffened by a Puritan preacher. Stanley was also thwarted in Bolton, ‘the Geneva of Lancashire’, which Prince Rupert would ultimately storm en route to Marston Moor. In keenly contested Yorkshire, Bradford and Halifax gave essential manpower and supplies to parliamentary forces under the Fairfaxes, who were short of backing from their own gentry class. The denizens of the cloth-working parishes were ‘the only well-affected people of the country’, Ferdinando Fairfax advised Westminster.51
Musgrove highlights the fact that the North provided relatively few men of national standing between Parliament’s