The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson
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abbeys yerley goith out of the contrey to the Kinges highness.’ This was the cause shared between the rebels in the north and the group of Catholic gentlemen around Throckmorton: protest and despair against the dismantling of the past.
To demonstrate his loyalty at this most fearsome test, Throckmorton raised 300 men from his Midlands estates for the royal army gathered to suppress the rebels. They marched down to Bedfordshire, with Throckmorton’s sons appointed captains of the different bands. But his own soldiers let him down, claiming that if the great Catholic lords joined the rebellion, Throckmorton would turn rebel too.
This was dangerous talk – it is impossible to tell if it was true – and Cromwell got to hear of it. He also heard that two of Throckmortons’ soldiers ‘were with the rebels’ – again probably untrue, but in the age of ‘Wordes only’, adding yet more dissonant notes to what was already a frightening reputation.
George came down to London, met his friends again in the Queen’s Head and the perilous chat started up:
I do well remember sitting at a supper but I do not so well remember where, won at the boorde did axe what were the demawnds that ye rebels of the northe requirid, and everi man lokkid upon other & no man wolde make awnser. & then I said that it no matter for yt was in every man’s mouth, and we were all true men there, so we mai talke of yt; and said the false knave Aske would rule the King and all his realms. & so rehearsid his demawnds, as far as I remembered them … amongst others that to have my ladie Mary made legittymate, not approving that more than other. Who were at the boorde I do not well remember.19
It was convenient not to remember much. Fear was in the air. When the Duke of Norfolk had warned Thomas More that the wrath of the King meant death, More replied, ‘Is that all, my Lord? Then in good faith is there no more differens betweene your grace and me, but that I shall dye today and yow tomorowe.’20 Few could manage that level of calm. Thomas Wyatt’s poem, written in May 1536, when imprisoned in the Bell Tower of the Tower of London, expresses what no one else dared say. From his barred window he witnessed the executions of Anne Boleyn’s brother and the other four young men accused of sleeping with her. ‘These blodye dayes haue brokyn my hart,’ Wyatt wrote, as if he were the only voice of conscience in this terrible decade. ‘The bell towre showed me such syght/That in my hed stekys day and nyght.’21 That in my head sticks day and night: it is a literal truth that these people were living with their nightmares.
On Sunday 19 November, when the first Lincolnshire phase of the Pilgrimage of Grace was over and the trouble had spread north into Yorkshire, Throckmorton heard the sermon preached in St Paul’s in London. After it he went with an old friend, Sir John Clarke, ‘to dine att ye Horse Hedde, yn Chepe, … with the goodman off ye howse yn a littill lowe parler’,22 another of those small dark London rooms in which the key conversations of the age occurred.
After we had dinid & ye goodman & his goodwife had left the boorde he & I fell yn to comunion of the rebellions off ye Northe, & he axid of me what I hard of yem yn ye cuntre as I came upp. He said it a saying yn London that thei be upp in Holderness [in Yorkshire]. I axid him, ‘I prai yow, do yow know what be their demawnds & he said, Have yow not sene them I awnserid no but I said I had sene the bokke yn printe, the awnser to the Lincolneshere men’s demawnds. He said so fairly I will send them yow them sone to lokke upon.23
Nothing too suspect there, the natural conversation of two men engaged with politics. They hadn’t spoken in front of the proprietor of the Horse’s Head nor his wife, but that was only necessary caution. Clarke’s servant delivered the printed papers to Throckmorton that evening ‘and after I had read them I threw them yn mi chamber window’.24 The papers were explosive material: they described Cromwell as a ‘simple and evil disposed person’, who had ‘spoiled and robbed, and further intending utterly to spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’. His policies were ‘contrary [to] the faith of God and honour to the king’s majesty and the commonwealth of this realm’. The oath the rebels took in Yorkshire swore ‘to expulse all villain blood and evil councilors against the commonwealth from his grace and his privy council of the same’.25
Anyone who could be suspected of disseminating these words would clearly die. Throckmorton kept them in his room, lying in the window, until another old friend, Sir William Essex, came to London.
the same nyght he and I mette met att supper at the queins hedde betwixte the tempull gates. And afterwards, when we two remained alone, we fell in communion of the rebells off the northe and then he axid me if their demawnds and those of the Lincolne shere men were all won. & I said they were much the same, as yt apperith bi the bokke yn printe, which he had seen. Then I sent mi servant to my chamber for them, and lent them to Sir William, who put them yn his purse and so departid.26
Sir George had said, ‘Your servant may copy it if you will’: now the seditious words were out and spreading in London and beyond, with Throckmorton and Essex perceived as the source. Essex’s clearly literate chamber boy, Geoffrey Gunter, made another, secret copy for himself. When he accompanied Sir William down to his house at Lambourn in the Berkshire Downs, he gave it to a friend of his en route at Reading, where it rapidly travelled around the community of priests, innkeepers and no doubt their customers, copied at every turn. This was viral rebellion, first in print, then word of mouth, then by manuscript.
Essex discovered what had happened, knew how catastrophic it was and ‘had but little rest all night’. Throckmorton made his way down to Berkshire, ignorant of what was happening, only to find a posse of Berkshire officials riding to court, with copies of the papers Throckmorton had shown to Essex only days before. When Throckmorton reached Essex’s house the next day, he found Sir William in bed, having not been able to sleep the night before, but he got up and first in the parlour and then in the privacy of the garden, the repeated setting for secret and intimate Tudor conversations, they discussed the crisis.
They decided, quickly enough, to tell everything and to hurry to London, where they could divest themselves of the truth. Essex was to send his servant first and then to follow himself, and Throckmorton to follow only ‘if the matter were not well taken. He should send me word, and I would come up myself.’ No word came and Throckmorton, in early December, returned to London. On the road, his own servant met him and told him that Sir William Essex had been put in the Tower. When Throckmorton arrived in London, he too was arrested and by 11 December had joined him there, in the place of torture, terror and death.
We only know these intimate and concrete details of George Throckmorton’s movements in the autumn of 1536 – his toings and froings, his dinners and suppers – because the interrogation in the Tower dragged it out of him. His confession is still in Cromwell’s papers. No fact was too small to convince the Lord Privy Seal that the truth was being told: the papers lying in the window, the dinner with the landlord of the Horse’s Head in Cheapside, the chamber boy, the rebellious servants, Sir William’s exhaustion after his night of worry.
Yet Throckmorton was not entirely open in this confession. He said he couldn’t quite remember where or with whom he had been sitting at supper when he talked the dangerous rebel talk. It was only six or eight weeks earlier; he must have been lying. To lie to the King and Cromwell in the Tower in the murderous police state of mid-1530s England showed some mettle. He signed his confession with ‘the heaviest heart that ever had living man’ and he told the King that ‘yt makith mi harte blede withyn mi bodie’27 to imagine that he thought him disloyal, but there is no doubt that, to some extent, he was. It seems clear that at Christmas 1536, Throckmorton thought he could get away with his double game a little longer. He and Essex were held in confinement on into January 1537. Those in the know at court ‘doubted of their lives’ but they were wrong. Before the end of the month both men were released and Throckmorton was restored as a Justice in Warwickshire.
It was, as Peter Marshall has said, ‘a close shave’,28 but far more desperate events were to unfold the following September. A high-glamour Knight of St John, Sir Thomas Dingley, an international warrior on behalf of all the deep-rooted, crusading and Turk-fighting traditions of the Catholic church, had been heard abusing the King and talking about rebellion. He was