Wrapping up our look at Tudor Rebellions, this episode looks at the long-term effects of the rebellions, and how they affected social, religious, and foreign policies.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Episode Transcript:
– and now to the show, to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible, because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and our own humanity. This is Episode 54 wrapping up the little unit I’ve been working on here on Tudor rebellions. But before I get started, a few reminders. First, please check out the Agora Podcast Network of which this podcast is a proud member. The Agora Podcast of the Month for September is Lands of Leviathan. This podcast analyzes concepts and theories from Political Science and International Relations, using themes, trends and trivia in popular culture. Listen to two nerds discuss state reformation during a zombie apocalypse, or how the Jedi Council would function in our international system.
Also a plug for my Patreon page and all the other activities going on my website. So if you’re listening to this, and you’re going, “Gee, I wish I could support this podcast. Heather’s so cool. She does such a good job, and she has such a nice voice, and I could totally give $1 an episode to this show.” I have a solution for you. If you go to patreon.com/nomadchick, I really should have named it something else. I’ve been using this “Nomad Chick” moniker since I was like 24. And it’s just really stuck with me. Anyway, it’s my alter ego. I was the Nomad Chick.
Go to patreon.com/englandcast, and sign up to be my patron for as low as $1 an episode. And thank you very much to my newest patron Al, your support is always appreciated. And patrons get really cool rewards like members-only feeds, and early episodes, and fun chat sessions, and a lot more. So also, the England trip for the Evensong service and the choirs and Cathedral tour for next April is back on. Go to Englandcast.com/tours for more information on that. You can totally come to England with me. And we can wander around the Cotswolds and we can go to Cambridge and listen to Evensong service in King’s College, and we can go to Winchester and see the original Round Table. We can go to Bath and hang out in the Roman baths together. It’s gonna be so much fun, you guys! You know you want to come to England with me. Alright, I’m done. I’m done with announcements.
Now we’re going to wrap up rebellions. If you haven’t listened in the past two episodes on rebellions, I would recommend that you do that first, because in the first one, we talked about the general reasons why people rebelled against our Tudor monarchs. In the second, we talked about specific rebellions. And now we’re going to synthesize all of this information and talk about some of the long-term impacts that these rebellions had on England and our monarchs.
So there were actually several successful Tudor rebellions, starting when Henry VII himself defeated Richard III on Bosworth Field, because that was in fact a rebellion. There were other ones like The Amicable Grant, where the crown actually backed down from their demand of higher taxes. Mary Tudor defeated the rebellion against her from Lady Jane Grey and from the Protestants. And in fact, the Tudors were able to defeat all of their dynastic rebellions, obviously because they hung on for 120-odd years.
As we discussed in a previous episode, the early rebellions against the crown were actually to try to replace the Tudors completely, like try to replace Henry Tudor, whereas by the end, the rebellions were simply to try to alter the succession like with the Rebellion of the Northern Earls to have Elizabeth name Mary Queen of Scots as her heir. Early on, Henry Tudor often had to stall for time in order to figure out how to deal with each rebellion because the crown was still very weak under him, so he had to figure things out and do some negotiation. But by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, none of that, she was able to just act immediately and ruthlessly.
It’s important to note that early on, many of these rebellions were simply a continuation of the Wars of the Roses. And we can see, like I’ve said before, it’s so important, we can see the Wars as ending definitively at Bosworth. But we’re looking from 500 years later. We know now that the Wars the Roses were done at Bosworth, but it wasn’t that clear at the time, even into the mid-1530’s, 50 years after Bosworth, Henry VIII was still killing Yorkists who may have been a threat. By this point, though, there was another element of the rebellions and the punishment, and that had to do with religion, because he was of course trying to bring in this religious reform.
And the best example of that is when Henry executed the very elderly Margaret Pole. She was the daughter of Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, so we’re going way back towards the Roses here. But Edward IV was the Yorkist king. He had two brothers, Richard III, and the Duke of Clarence. Richard III, of course, was Gloucester, and he became Richard III. And then the Duke of Clarence is the one who has drowned in Malmsey wine, for those of you who are into those little bits of trivia. And the Duke of Clarence had a daughter Margaret Pole, he also had a son who was killed by the Tudors.
Anyway, Margaret Pole had survived into Henry VIII’s reign, she survived into the mid 1530’s. And then her son was a Catholic Cardinal, and he was in exile in Italy. And so Henry took that opportunity to kill off the last remaining Yorkist, kind of as punishment for Cardinal Pole still being Catholic. It was actually a really gruesome execution too, like the Lady Margaret Pole was really old, and she apparently didn’t go quietly, and it wasn’t pretty. Henry shouldn’t have done it. Anyway. I digress. (I’ve had a lot of caffeine today.)
The Tudors were able to meet all the dynastic threats head-on – see this is what happens when I go off my script, I need to just read my script. The Tudors were able to meet all the dynastic threats head-on, and they made the crown much stronger and much more secure than it had been in generations. But rebellions did change things and have impact, for example, with foreign policy.
So let’s talk about the impact of rebellions on foreign policy. Henry VIII had to make peace with Scotland, for example, so that he could send his troops to Cornwall to deal with the rebellion going on in Cornwall. This would be a recurring theme and rebellions that influenced foreign policy thanks to the monarch being unable to fight because of a rebellion. There were times when the government gave into rebels, like The Amicable Grant, which had wider repercussions with foreign policy. So Henry VIII had been hoping to invade France, and he had to change his foreign policy thanks to the difficulties that he was having to get money for the invasion. In the future, when taxes were assessed, they were actually assessed more towards the wealthy rather than the poor, who had a harder time paying.
But in the meantime, France was actually at one of its weakest points after the Holy Roman Emperor had captured King Francis, it would have been an excellent time to invade. And, of course, Henry VIII, one of the things about him was he really wanted to follow in the footsteps of his hero, Henry V, and capture France, and increase English lands in France, and become the King of France. And this would have been an actually really good time for him to try to work on that, but he couldn’t strike when he wanted to in 1525, because he didn’t have the money. Sometimes rebellions meant that troops couldn’t be used to carry out invasion plans. And then like I talked about with Cornwall, and that also happened in 1549.
So in 1542, England had gone to war with Scotland, there were a number of successful battles, and one of them was in 1547, at a place called Pinkie, and at that point, Edward decided that he was going to invade Scotland, and he was going to garrison troops to conquer the country. After the 1549 Rebellion though, the troops needed to be used to fight the rebels and so the plan to conquer Scotland had to actually be abandoned.
Another foreign policy change thanks to rebellions would be the anti-Spanish feeling in England during the reign of Mary Tudor, and her marriage to Philip of Spain. Relations with Spain which were at such a high, early in the Tudor reign with the marriage of Catherine of Aragon to Henry VIII, would decline quickly in part thanks to the fear of the Spanish in England. The Spanish would go on to help Irish rebels against England throughout Elizabeth’s reign, and so the relationship went even more sour. Of course, there were other reasons for the decline. But certainly part of it came from the fears that were stoked by the rebels and I’m talking specifically about Wyatt’s Rebellion right now and, and the rebellion to not have Mary marry Philip.
There were other changes to the social structure from the rebellions as well. So Kett’s Rebellion led to a change in social policy against the poor. In 1547, The Vagrancy Act had condemned any vagrants to two years of slavery for the first offense, and for a life of slavery for any subsequent crimes of vagrancy. But by 1552, The Poor Law replaced this. And this was an act that designated a new position called the “collector of alms: in every Parish, and it provided that each parish would also keep a register, a list of all of its licensed poor, and the collector was to determine how much the poor needed in that parish, and then to assess a weekly tax on the residents to care for the poor.
So there was an assumption that all the poor would be cared for, and because of that, it was actually illegal to beg at that point. But these Poor Laws came from Kett’s Rebellion, and they came from John Dudley, he was the first Duke of Northumberland and it was a reaction to Kett’s and the other smaller rebellions that were going on over land enclosures and the bad economic conditions that were going on in the 1540’s. John Dudley began prosecuting landlords who were guilty of illegal land enclosures as well. So the rebels were hanged and were punished for their crime of rebelling.
But they actually did have an impact long-term on social policy in England. And Kett’s was also perhaps the fall of the Duke of Somerset thanks to his inability to suppress the revolt. It was actually ironic because he had tried to look into the legalities of land enclosures for a while before Kett’s Rebellion came about, and he wasn’t able to further anything with that, and then he was unable to stop the rebellion, and that was part of his downfall.
Another success in social policy was that when Mary I married Philip of Spain, he was not actually crowned king, but rather he was her consort. So in addition to impacting the foreign policy, this was quite a big deal for social policy. It meant that a woman was ruling on her own without a king above her. And this, of course, would set the stage for Elizabeth to be able to rule as powerfully and as firmly as she did.
Change in social policy, part of that was the fear of Catholics after the Northern Earls rebelled for Mary, Queen of Scots. Many of the religious changes, the Reformation changes, the Protestant changes may have been sped up thanks to the rebellions who were trying to fight that. For example, after the rebellion of the Northern Earls, and their rebellion for Mary Queen of Scots, the laws against Catholics became much more strict. Suddenly, being a priest was a crime. And we looked at this and other episodes over the past year, specifically the ones on the Catholic experience, Mary, Queen of Scots and Walsingham, suddenly there was the spy network, Walsingham’s spy network devoted to rooting out Catholics and finding people who didn’t go to church. And suddenly there were these priest holes and just being a priest and saying “mass” became a crime.
And that hadn’t happened before the rebellion of Northern Earls. It was really that rebellion that suddenly made being a Catholic a crime, so it backfired on them. It could be argued that this wouldn’t have happened to this level had there not been the rebellion.
And additionally, England as a society, became much more Protestant because of this. So that within 100 years of Elizabeth’s death, there was not just a civil war that centered around religion, but also in 1688, England would depose of one king and invite another monarch over simply because the new one was a Protestant, and I am of course, referring to the Glorious Revolution, which is really beyond our time period here. But it’s really interesting to note that much of this anti-Catholic fever started thanks to rebellions, like the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Prayer Book Rebellion.
And some of these people who were actually trying to keep the old ways, and it really didn’t work with them. There were changes in social and economic policies after some of the rebellions like I said, especially in 1549. That was a big period of unrest. And a lot of the unrest happening at that point was because the economy was really bad and the government wanted to portray these rebellions as social rather than religious. And it was a good bit of PR for them to show that they were making some changes in response to the protests of their citizens.
In the early 1550’s, there were a series of laws passed, designed to help the poor and the rising unemployment. First, the coinage was reevaluated in 1551. This had the effect of slowing the inflation that was really crippling the poor. They also pass laws against illegal land enclosures. And to control the price of corn in 1552, they began licensing corn dealers. As I said before, the Poor Laws changed that was designed to help provide more help to the poor. And there were several other actions taken to try to regulate the cloth industry hoping that better standards would result in better sales abroad. Sales were falling in the cloth industry because of some shoddy workmanship. So having higher standards would supposedly result in better sales.
After 1596, there was a similar uprising in Oxfordshire and Elizabeth took similar actions. So 1549 and 1596 really had the effects of a lot of economic changes.
One interesting impact that the rebellions had on England as a whole was that the border regions came under much more centralized control, and became more closely woven into relations with London after the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Council of the North was reformed, and the lesser gentry were appointed under Henry VIII as deputy wardens of the Borderlands. Henry VIII visited York, and Yorkshire as a whole came under much more scrutiny than it had before. After the Rebellion of Northern Earls, men without any local connections, or local biases were brought in to run the council. And also any magistrates who were Catholic sympathizers were replaced.
It’s kind of like when things are going well, and you just ignore somebody, like if you have an employee, and they’re doing a good job, and you just ignore them, but then they screw up, and then you’re like, totally micromanaging them. It’s a similar kind of thing. The relations between London and the North became much closer. And really, the UK became much more centralized in part because of that.
So there are a lot more impacts that can be traced to the Tudor rebellions. But I think these are the most important ones – the strengthening of the central government, like we just talked about, the consolidation of power in the Tudor dynasty. The reformation continued on perhaps even at a faster pace, that particular brand of the English Reformation, which was Elizabeth’s great compromise of keeping a more Catholic liturgy than we saw in Germany and other Protestant places, but having a Church of England that was a separate Church of England.
So that continued on at a faster pace. And certain social laws were passed to try to help the poor, like I just talked about, relations with Spain went to crap. And I’m not sure that they ever really recovered from that. And a woman monarch reigned on her own despite having a husband. So all of these are really big events to have happened, and they are directly traced to rebellions and revolts.
So for the book recommendation for the past two episodes, I recommended one book in particular called Tudor Rebellions, and it’s a really good book, but I should add that while there aren’t a lot of popular secondary sources on Tudor rebellions, popular history, if you’re interested in reading more accessible accounts of the Tudor rebellions, there are actually a lot of people who have published A-level revision notes and many of them are teachers and professors who are making their scholarship available to students. So if you search for Tudor rebellions on Amazon, for example, you will find a lot of ebooks that are specifically A-level revision notes, and they’re actually really good, and they also give a lot of notes to primary sources and places you can go online.
So thanks so much, everybody for listening. As always, you can get in touch with me on Facebook at facebook.com/Englandcast or via Twitter at @Teysko. And I would like to remind you that if you like this show, please leave us a rating or even a review on iTunes or whatever your favorite service is. It helps people to discover the show and decide if it’s something they want to listen to. And I want to say thank you to @intermediatic for your kind review the other week on iTunes. And I promise you, I will start to do more on Elizabeth. Some of you have said that in your reviews. I’m getting there, okay? Patience my friends, patience.
Alright, thanks so much for listening. The next episode will be the regular Tudor Times interview on their Person of the Month. That’ll be in about two weeks. Then we’re going to have a guest episode on Henry VIII’s mistresses from James of The Queens of England Podcast and then I’ll be back with a little unit looking at literature and the rise of reading and writing from the days of Caxton to the stationery sellers in St. Paul’s in Elizabeth’s time. So don’t forget to check out the website Englandcast.com where you can get links to Patreon and to the England tour and all kinds of fun stuff, reading lists, everything like that there. So Englandcast.com. Thanks so much, guys. I will talk to you soon!
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]