Remembering Rebellion in the Tudor South West

Abstract

This article explores how the five major rebellions which took place in Devon and Cornwall between 1485 and 1603 were subsequently remembered by the region’s inhabitants. It begins by demonstrating that – although early modern elites generally preferred to say as little as possible about episodes of popular protest once they had been safely suppressed – the revolts which had occurred under the Tudor monarchs went on to be officially memorialised in several South Western communities. The article then moves on to discuss how local gentlefolk looked back on the rebellions, and argues that such individuals tended, in their retrospective accounts, to exaggerate the degree of social radicalism which had been exhibited by the insurgents. Next, the article considers the few scraps of evidence which have survived about popular memories of the protests, and suggests that, while the specific grievances which had motivated the rebels may well have been quite quickly forgotten, the desperate courage with which they had fought – particularly during the Western Rising of 1549 – had continued to be remembered by the ordinary people of the region for decades to come. The fourth and last part of the article looks at ‘modern’ commemoration of the revolts and draws out some general conclusions.

Between the accession of Henry VII, in 1485, and the death of Elizabeth I, in 1603, a series of major rebellions against the policies of the central government took place in the kingdom of England – and these periodic insurgencies have attracted the attention of some of the greatest scholars of the Tudor age. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Krista Kesselring, John Walter and Andy Wood – to name only the most prominent figures in the field – have all produced immensely stimulating books and articles which deal, either in whole or in part, with the popular disturbances of the sixteenth century.¹ The textbook which gave those perturbations the collective name by which they have become familiar to generations of history students, moreover – Anthony Fletcher’s Tudor Rebellions, originally published in 1968, and, from 1996 onwards, regularly revised by MacCulloch – is still going strong, more than fifty years after it first appeared.² The bibliography which accompanies the latest edition illustrates just how rich and varied the seam of historical writing on the insurrections of the Tudor period has by now become.³ So intense has scholarly scrutiny of these episodes been, indeed, that it would be easy to assume that there can be little of interest left to say about them. But while we now have a much more detailed understanding of the causes of the individual protests, and of precisely what transpired while they were underway, we still know far less than we would like about how they were regarded in retrospect. This article will delve into the shadowy afterlives of the Tudor rebellions – and, more specifically, will consider some of the ways in which memories of these dramatic events continued to ricochet through the popular imagination long after the insurrections themselves had come to an end.

Over the past three decades, historians of early modern England, like their colleagues working in other fields, have become increasingly fascinated by the tangled interconnections which exist between history and memory, and have produced a succession of stimulating works on that theme. There is now a burgeoning scholarly literature on the memorialisation of the English Civil Wars, for example: a literature which is paralleled by a similar efflorescence of academic writing on the memorialisation of the English Reformation.⁴ Yet, while many historians have touched, in passing, upon some of the specific ways in which the risings of the Tudor period were viewed in retrospect, only a handful of writers have devoted sustained attention to the mental and cultural legacies of these episodes: most notably, perhaps, Andy Wood, Amanda Jones, John Walter and Nicola Whyte.⁵ Their work, moreover – like that of most of those who have provided us with more fleeting insights into the afterlives of the Tudor rebellions – has been chiefly focused on the protests which took place in the South East of England and the Midlands.

The present article seeks to build upon the work of those who have already laboured in this particular vineyard by asking what the scattered fragments of evidence that we still possess can tell us about memories of rebellion in the far South West: a region of the country which has, so far, been but little discussed in connection with this subject. The article is divided into four parts. The first provides a thumbnail sketch of the rebellions which took place in the Tudor South West, before moving on to consider how they went on to be ‘officially’ memorialised: chiefly in a civic context. The second explores some of the ways in which local gentlemen looked back on the rebellions during the Tudor and early Stuart periods. The third part turns to ask how those below the level of the gentry looked back on those same rebellions during that same period: a question which it is especially difficult to answer, of course, but also one that is of especially absorbing interest. The fourth and last part investigates more recent memorialisation of those same dramatic events – and draws out some general conclusions.

The sequence of rebellions and their subsequent memorialisation in civic rituals, charters and texts

A total of five more or less serious insurrections occurred in the Tudor West Country. The first began at St Keverne, in the far west of Cornwall, in May 1497, when local people were stirred to anger by what they saw as Henry VII’s excessive financial demands. The Cornish protestors marched eastwards, picking up many supporters as they went, and eventually got as far as Blackheath, only a few miles from London. Here, they were defeated in a bloody battle fought with the king’s army on 17 June.⁶ The second rebellion broke out just three months later, again in West Cornwall, when the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck disembarked near the Land’s End and was proclaimed as Richard IV by his local partisans. Warbeck raised several thousand men, advanced into Devon and laid siege to Exeter, the regional capital. Yet he failed to capture the city, and, once news had arrived that Henry VII was hurrying westwards with a powerful army, Warbeck’s nerve failed him, and his insurgency collapsed.⁷

The third revolt, remarkably enough, broke out in exactly the same place as the first. In 1548 the inhabitants of St Keverne and the nearby parishes rose up in arms against the protestantising religious reforms of the boy-king, Edward VI. The insurgents converged on the town of Helston, where they killed an unpopular government agent named William Body. In the wake of Body’s death, the protestors’ number grew to some 3,000 men but they were persuaded to disperse by local gentlemen a few days later.⁸ The fourth rebellion – and the most formidable of them all – took place during the summer of 1549, when the people of Devon and Cornwall rose up en masse against the ongoing religious changes, and, again, laid siege to Exeter. Edward’s ministers were forced to assemble a substantial army to deal with what they clearly regarded as an existential threat and the protestors were only defeated after a series of pitched battles which left as many as 4,000 people dead.⁹ The fifth and last rebellion, by contrast, was something of a damp squib. In 1554 the evangelical Devon gentleman Sir Peter Carew, together with a knot of local supporters, attempted to stir the county’s inhabitants into joining a projected national revolt against the forthcoming marriage of the Catholic Queen Mary to Philip II of Spain. Carew’s appeals fell on largely deaf ears, however, and within days he had fled abroad, leaving the handful of men who had joined him to be quickly rounded up by the authorities.¹⁰

All five of these revolts failed, then, and all of them were suppressed within days, weeks or, at most, months of their commencement. Yet this does not mean that they should be regarded as insignificant or inconsequential. On the contrary, they were among the most momentous things to have happened in the South West between the Black Death and the Civil War – and the rising of 1549, in particular, has been well described as a ‘cataclysmic event’ in the region’s history.¹¹ It is no surprise to find that memories of the revolts continued to suffuse West Country society throughout the early modern period, therefore, and, as we shall see, such memories were sometimes deliberately fostered through both official and semi-official acts of commemoration.

At first sight, it may seem strange that any one in a position of authority during the Tudor period should have wished to commemorate rebellions at all. Such episodes were embarrassing reminders of the fact that subjects were not always obedient to their rulers, after all, and that they could sometimes rise in arms against them: a fact which rulers themselves would obviously not wish to acknowledge. It may well have been partly for this reason, indeed, that Henry VII brusquely dismissed the suggestion that a formal ‘triumph’ should be held to commemorate his defeat of the rebels at Blackheath, ‘saying that he had not gained a worthy victory, having been against such a base crew as those Cornish men’.¹² If monarchs could see little advantage to themselves in perpetuating the memory of rebellions, however, provincial town governors occasionally could. And it is interesting to note that, although Henry had pointedly refused to mark his defeat of the Cornish rebels in June 1497, a few months later the king himself began a tradition which would, for centuries to come, commemorate his defeat of the second rebel force that had risen in support of Warbeck later that same year.

In 1599, the chamberlain of Exeter, John Hooker – a noted antiquary and a man whose work will be frequently returned to here – noted that a ceremonial sword had been carried in civic processions in his home town for ‘a hundred years or above’, the tradition having been started ‘by the gift of King Henry the VIIth, who, being in this city for the appeasing of the rebellion of Perkin Warbeck … and … seeing the mayor to have … no sword, did un-gird himself of his own sword … and delivered the same to the … mayor to be carried before him’.¹³ Thereafter, Hooker averred, the sword had always been borne before Exeter’s mayors when they processed through the city in state, ensuring that, whenever such processions occurred, the inhabitants would be reminded of the events of 1497. We may note that Henry VII’s sword – the ‘Sword of State’, to give it its official title – is still carried in civic processions in Exeter to this very day: one of the surprisingly numerous ways in which – as the final part of this article will show – the rebellions of the Tudor period continue to be commemorated in twenty-first-century local society.¹⁴

Why should the town governors of Exeter have been so keen to incorporate this sword into their civic rituals, and to continue doing so long after Henry VII himself was dead? The answer is obvious. By instituting a commemorative practice which regularly summoned up the ghost of Warbeck’s rebellion – a rebellion which they themselves had helped to defeat – Exeter’s civic elite were underlining their own loyalty, and thus their status as ‘true subjects’ who deserved to enjoy special royal favour in the future. And precisely similar calculations surely help to explain why they later decided to inaugurate a second, and far more elaborate, commemorative practice: this time to underline the role which Exeter had played in resisting the Western rebels in 1549. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the town ‘masters’, as the city councillors were colloquially known, instituted an annual day of thanksgiving on 6 August – one which would soon come to assume the name of ‘Jesus Day’ – in order to mark the anniversary of the city’s relief by the royal army in 1549 and the breaking of the rebel siege.¹⁵ Once again, they were drawing the world’s attention to the part which Exeter had played in resisting rebellion – and to their own exemplary loyalty to the Crown.

Accordingly, from at least the late Elizabethan period onwards, every 6 August the mayor and his brethren marched to the cathedral in solemn state, with Henry VII’s sword borne before them, where they attended a special service and listened to a sermon on the evils of rebellion.¹⁶ The choice of a sermon to mark the occasion was particularly apposite, because it served to underline the point that the city’s resistance had been an act of piety as well as one of loyalty: that, in addition to fighting for the Crown against ‘treacherous’ rebels, the citizens had been defending the true Protestant faith against the ‘popish’ supporters of the Roman Catholic Church.¹⁷ And indeed, one of the considerations which had prompted the town governors to inaugurate the Jesus Day festivities in the first place may conceivably have been their recognition of the fact that, by inserting an avowedly Protestant celebration into the city’s festive calendar at this particular point in the year, they would be striking a blow at the lingering cult of Exeter’s native saint, St Sidwell, whose body had once lain in the church named after her, outside the city’s East Gate, and whose feast day had customarily been celebrated at Exeter on 1 August.¹⁸

Exeter’s town masters were by no means alone among Tudor urban oligarchs in seeking to memorialise their opposition to insurrectionary forces. Like the South West, East Anglia was convulsed by huge popular demonstrations during the crisis year of 1549, when thousands of countryfolk rose up in arms, under the leadership of the Wymondham yeoman Robert Kett, to demand redress of a host of social and economic grievances. The town governors of Norwich initially tried to resist the insurgents, but unlike their counterparts in Exeter, they were quickly overwhelmed. Norwich was then occupied by Kett’s followers for almost a month until they were at length driven out by a royal army under the command of John Dudley, earl of Warwick, on 24 August. Three days later, Dudley’s forces cut the protestors to pieces in a battle fought nearby.¹⁹ The mayor and common councillors of Norwich – no doubt anxious to underline their abhorrence of the rebels, lest the city’s swift capitulation in 1549 should be thought to betoken any hint of disloyalty on their part – subsequently decreed that 27 August, the day of ‘our deliverance’, should be set aside as an annual day of thanksgiving ‘for ever’.²⁰ From 1550 onwards, 27 August was solemnised in the city as a day of prayer, and in Norwich, just as in Exeter, a special sermon was preached in the cathedral.²¹ Both of these commemorations subsequently proved remarkably enduring. In Norwich, the annual thanksgiving service for the defeat of Kett’s rebels was still being held in the 1660s, while Jesus Day was still being celebrated in Exeter as late as the nineteenth century.²²

The days of thanksgiving which were instituted at Exeter and Norwich are comparatively well known, but these are not the only places in which provincial town governors exploited the memory of 1549 to their own advantage.²³ As Andy Wood has shown, in 1594 the town authorities of Yarmouth in Norfolk petitioned Elizabeth I to assist them in rebuilding their harbour – and justified their request by claiming that it had originally been destroyed by ‘Kett with his rebelles’ in 1549, as an act of revenge for the inhabitants’ refusal to admit them to the town.²⁴ A similar case survives from the South West. In 1595 Elizabeth granted a new charter to the Cornish town of Market Jew, today called Marazion, which stands on the coast opposite St Michael’s Mount. The text of this charter declared that Market Jew had formerly been a place of ‘great repute’, but that this happy situation had been transformed during the reign of Edward VI, ‘when a multitude of rebells … entered and possessed it …. [and] the same was by them … laid waste’. The queen had been informed of this sad history by ‘many’ of her subjects, the charter went on, and had therefore decided to incorporate the town in order to restore its fortunes.²⁵ We need hardly doubt that the leading inhabitants of Market Jew had been prominent among those who had made sure that Elizabeth was ‘informed’ of the town’s tribulations during the Western rising, nor that, like the town governors of Yarmouth, they had added a good deal of spin to their representations. That some damage had been inflicted on Market Jew during the fighting that had occurred when the protestors besieged the loyalist gentlemen who had taken refuge in the Mount in July 1549 seems very probable.²⁶ But that the entire town had been ‘laid waste’ at this time, as the charter asserts, is hard to credit.

The Market Jew charter reminds us that – as well as being officially memorialised through days of thanksgiving and through the deployment of physical objects like Henry VII’s sword – the popular protests of the Tudor period were also semi-officially memorialised through the written word. Charters would have had a relatively small and localised readership, of course, but the many historical chronicles which were published at this time – most of them featuring brief accounts of the main Tudor rebellions – reached a far wider audience. Some printed histories proved enormously influential in shaping the long-term memory of particular insurrections. Thus in 1575 Alexander Neville published a narrative account, in Latin, of the protests in Norfolk in 1549, which was itself based on an earlier manuscript account of those protests written by Nicholas Sotherton, a member of a prominent Norwich family.²⁷ Sotherton’s work was intended partly to minimise the rather ambiguous interactions that had occurred between the town governors and the demonstrators at the height of the protests and partly to warn the local gentry against ever allowing such a rebellion to happen again. Forty years later, the book was translated into English by Richard Woods and reprinted, thus transmitting its message to readers well beyond Neville’s original target-audience.²⁸ As MacCulloch and Wood have shown, Neville’s account gradually came to be accepted as ‘the authorised narrative’ of the East Anglian protests.²⁹ This, in turn, meant that it eventually came to determine, more or less exclusively, how those protests would be viewed by subsequent generations of readers.

This pattern of an individual rebellion increasingly coming to be seen, in retrospect, through the prism of a single ‘master narrative’ is also apparent in the case of the Western rising. Here, it was John Hooker who emerged as the key chronicler of the protests. During the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, Hooker – who had himself helped to defend Exeter against the insurgents – had written a document entitled ‘The description of ye Cittie of Excester’ which survives in several different versions, all of which incorporate brief accounts of the siege of 1549.³⁰ He had then gone on to compose a detailed narrative of the Western rising as whole.³¹ The final version of this text was published in 1587 in the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (of which Hooker was one of the co-editors).³² That volume went on to be enormously influential and widely read, and this, in its turn, helped to ensure that Hooker’s account would become the ‘authorised narrative’ of the Western rising, just as Neville’s account became the authorised narrative of ‘Kett’s rebellion’. Hooker’s narrative, like Neville’s, was designed to warn future generations against the ‘sin of rebellion’. But it also sought, first, to underline the ‘evils’ of Catholicism, which Hooker saw as the rising’s prime motivating force, and, second – like the earlier, shorter works from which it had sprung – to celebrate the fortitude with which Exeter had held out against the insurgents.

Hooker’s narrative was, above all, an expression of civic pride, then, and he surely intended it to reinforce the message which was already being proclaimed to the world at large through the Jesus Day celebrations and though the regular parading of Henry VII’s sword: that Exeter was a preternaturally loyal city. Indeed, Hooker probably did more than anyone else in the city’s long history to advance and strengthen this particular claim. In several of his early works, Hooker implied that the citizens of Exeter had been faithful to constituted authority since the time of the Roman conquest, and it is clear that the town governors specifically cited this remarkable claim when they sought to obtain ratification and augmentation of their civic coat of arms from the queen in 1564, a request which was duly granted.³³ As I have shown in detail elsewhere, moreover, the subsequent decision of the town masters to adopt as their civic motto the ringing phrase Semper Fidelis (i.e. ‘Ever Faithful’) itself seems to have been inspired by the narrative of unbending loyalty to the Crown which Hooker had constructed: a narrative which he had almost certainly been inspired to create in the first place by his own vivid memories of the siege of 1549.³⁴ That motto – which continues to be proudly displayed beneath Exeter’s civic crest – is yet another permanent reminder of the rebellions which occurred in Devon and Cornwall during the Tudor period, therefore – and of the assiduousness with which the town masters sought to memorialise their resistance to those past insurrections.

Elite memories of the rebellions

Having looked at some of the ways in which the rebellions which took place in the Tudor South West were officially commemorated, we may now turn to consider how those events were recalled by individual local gentlemen. Throughout the early modern period, of course, rebellions were depicted by those in authority as both violent and socially disruptive, and gentlefolk were therefore conditioned to remember them with a mental shudder: as episodes which had temporarily threatened their own wealth and power.³⁵ Several fragments of evidence suggest that, in the West Country, as elsewhere, gentlemen never forgot where rebellions had broken out in the past, and worried that those places might well become centres of rebellion again.³⁶ When the Cornish knight Sir William Godolphin heard rumours that a protest against Henry VIII’s religious policies was being planned at St Keverne, of all places, in 1537, for example, he hastened to remind the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, that the people of St Keverne had been ‘the furste that steryd the Cornyshmen to rysse when they came to Blacke Hethe’. For good measure, Godolphin then went on to observe that one of the leaders of that rising, the blacksmith Michael Joseph, had also dwelt at St Keverne.³⁷

Godolphin hunted down the men who had been planning the protest and, perhaps as a result, St Keverne remained quiet throughout the rest of the 1530s. But, as we have seen, a second revolt erupted there in 1548, thus confirming the local gentry in their belief that St Keverne was an intrinsically seditious place. When a local gentleman named John Tregose petitioned Elizabeth I for help against a group of St Keverne men in 1583, he was careful to remind her that this was the ‘place wherin the late insurrexion in Cornewall made in the raigne of your Majesties … brother … had [its] commencement’.³⁸ Here, of course, Tregose was attempting to blacken his enemies’ names simply by stressing that they lived in a notoriously rebellious parish. In the wake of the Western rising, moreover, the protest which had broken out in St Keverne the year before came to be widely regarded as the precursor of the second, far more serious, revolt: a perception which can only have caused the local gentry to eye that parish more nervously still. This tendency to remember St Keverne as the fons et origo of rebellion in 1549, as well as in 1548, is nicely illustrated by the words of the gentleman-antiquary Richard Carew, who observed in his famous Survey of Cornwall, published in 1603, that:

the last Cornish rebellion was first occasioned by … [the inhabitants] of … St Keveren, who imbrued their wicked hands in the … blood of one Mr Body, as he sate in Commission at Helston for matters of reformation in religion, and the yere following it grew to a general revolt.³⁹

Carew was born in 1555, just six years after the Western rising.⁴⁰ His Survey was partly informed by the memories of his social circle, then, and the book provides a number of valuable insights into the way in which Carew – and presumably other members of the Cornish gentry class, too – looked back on the rebellions of the recent past. At one point in his text, Carew supplies his readers with a potted history of Cornwall: a history which ends with three paragraphs discussing the rebellions of 1497–1549. It is tempting to deduce, from this, that Carew regarded those revolts as the last truly significant events to have taken place in his native shire. He devotes a long paragraph to the first rebellion of 1497, and a second, much shorter, one to the rising in support of Warbeck later that year, indicating that he viewed the former protest as the more important of the two. As we have seen, he conflates the risings of 1548 and 1549 within a single paragraph, and makes it clear that he saw them as intimately connected. Carew’s reference to 1497 as ‘the … fatall yeere of revolts’ hints that he regarded the risings against Henry VII with particular regret: perhaps because it was these episodes which had first led to Cornwall becoming saddled with what Carew and his gentry neighbours would surely have regarded as a most unwelcome reputation for rebelliousness.⁴¹ It is worth noting, too, that, throughout his text, Carew lumps together all of those who had taken part in the various protests, referring to them collectively as ‘rebels’ and ‘rakehells’ (i.e. rascals), and making little distinction between the various groups – even though the grievances which had underlain the four risings had by no means been entirely the same.⁴²

The scattered allusions which Carew makes to the way in which the rebels of 1548–9 had treated the local gentry – allusions which were surely based, at least in part, on what he had been told by those who had personal memories of the 1540s – are especially revealing. As we have seen, Carew includes just one short paragraph on the risings of 1548–9 in his history of Cornwall, but he is careful to highlight, within this, the fact that the rebels of 1548 had murdered ‘one Mr Body’ at Helston: the title ‘Mr’ here pointedly underlining Body’s gentry status. Elsewhere, moreover, Carew provides several vivid accounts of how gentlemen and women had been captured, roughly handled and robbed by the protestors in 1549 – and twice asserts that the terrified captives had been lucky to escape with their lives.⁴³ There can be little doubt that Carew’s inclusion of these anecdotes reflects his genuine conviction – partly based on the testimony of his elite informants – that the rebels of 1548–9 had been driven by fierce class animus. Yet at the same time, his decision to highlight the few occasions on which members of the local elite are known to have defied the protestors was surely intended, at least in part, to sidestep uneasy memories of the fact that most Cornish gentlemen had either sat on their hands or fled in 1549 – while several of them, notoriously, had acted as the rebels’ leaders.⁴⁴ It is worth noting, too, that Body is the only gentleman who is known to have been murdered by the Cornish rebels in either 1548 or 1549, so his case is completely atypical – though one would not guess this from reading Carew’s text. Finally, of course, we should note that Carew had a didactic motive for including these particular stories within his Survey. By laying stress on the hardships which some gentlefolk had undergone at ‘rebel’ hands, Carew was pointing up the message of just how terrible rebellions were for his intended gentry readers, just as Neville and Hooker had done before him. Throughout the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, local gentlemen would continue to write about the revolts in very similar terms.

During the 1590s, for example, the Devon gentleman Robert Furse made several allusions to the Western rising in the manuscript history of his family which he wrote for the benefit of his descendants. And, once again, Furse specifically memorialised both the place in which that rebellion had begun, and the fact that local gentlemen had been held captive by the protestors. Looking back on the life of Philip Furse, a gentleman who had lived at Thorverton in Devon, Robert recalled that Philip had been ‘by the rebelles longe a prisoner at Samford, and very evell intreyted & in grett haserd’.⁴⁵ This comment is revealing, in several respects. We may note, first of all, that this was the first time that Furse had referred to the Western rising in his text. His casual allusion to ‘the rebelles’ therefore implies that he expected his readers to know at once to which particular group of insurgents he was referring: further evidence of how far that revolt had remained alive in local memory at the time that he was writing. Robert’s observation that Philip had been held prisoner at ‘Samford’ is more interesting still, for the Western rising had begun in the mid-Devon village of Sampford Courtenay and an inhabitant of that parish, a man named Underhill, had emerged as one of the chief rebel captains. Furse’s allusion to ‘Samford’ therefore demonstrates, not only that the seat of the 1549 rebellion was firmly marked on his mental map, but that he expected it to be firmly marked on that of his descendants too. It is almost superfluous to add that Furse’s recollection of Philip being ill-treated and put in fear of his life by his captors neatly accords with Carew’s recollections concerning the treatment of the Cornish gentry. Those memories are echoed, too, in the memories which Elizabeth Courtenay – the widow of the Devon knight, Sir Piers – long preserved of the time that her husband had been ‘taken prisoner, and in extreme peril to be cruelly handled by the rebels in the Western Commotion’.⁴⁶

Yet while Robert’s account of Philip’s ordeal provides a further example of local gentlefolk remembering the Western rising in the ‘authorised’ manner – as a traumatic episode during which they themselves had been ill-treated by the protestors – another of his anecdotes shows them remembering it in a very different way: as a traumatic episode during which they themselves had been ill-treated by supporters of the Crown. Writing of another forbear, John Furse, Robert recalled that he had been ‘gretelye spoyled in the comoyson in King Edward the VI[’s] tyme, for he was then geven bodye and goods, leke a rebel, and yet during all the time of that rebellyon he was continynuallye in his bed sycke, and not abell to travell’.⁴⁷ What Robert was alluding to here was the fact that, in the wake of the rising, John had himself been accused of being a rebel by the king’s commanders. He had therefore been forced to pay a ransom in order to release both his person and his goods from the clutches of the unnamed loyalist into whose hands he had been ‘given’ as a supposed rebel. Robert went on to recall that John had been forced to lay out the enormous sum of £140 in order to clear himself of this ‘trobell’ – and was clearly indignant on his forebear’s behalf, who, far from being a rebel, he asserts, had in fact lain sick in bed throughout the whole course of the rising.⁴⁸ We will never be able to determine the truth of this claim. But what Furse’s anecdote makes crystal clear is that some local gentry families long preserved vivid memories of their relatives being accused of complicity in the 1549 rising and punished for it afterwards – a fact which underscores the point that, in private, elite recollections of that rising did not always accord with the official narrative, which preferred to portray rebellions as a straightforward contest between ‘loyal’ gentlemen and ‘disloyal’ commons.

A classic example of the way in which memories of the Western rising were later ‘forced into the [official] template’ by a local gentry writer comes from Tristram Risdon’s ‘Survey of Devon’, written in the early 1600s.⁴⁹ Born in North Devon in 1580, Risdon composed this work in such a way as to conduct its readers on a virtual tour of Devon, in the process providing brief accounts of every parish in the shire. Tellingly, when he arrived at Sampford Courtenay, he adjured his gentry readers that ‘this place is to be remembered for the insurrection … begun here … the tenth of June, 1549’.⁵⁰ Here, again, we see how the seats of rebellion past continued to cast a long shadow in elite memory. Risdon then proceeded to give a brief, and altogether misleading, account of the rising itself, claiming that it had been started ‘by two of the inhabitants: the one would have no gentlemen, the other no justices of the peace, intending indeed to destroy all such as were rich or in authority: whereupon one William Hellion, gentleman, persuading them to be obedient to the laws, was by them hewn to pieces’.⁵¹ As I have shown elsewhere, far from being based on genuine memories of what had happened at Sampford in 1549, this passage is simply a mash-up of two brief extracts which had appeared in previous printed accounts of the rising: one of them written by the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, and the other almost certainly written by Sir Peter Carew, the Devon gentleman who had been the protestors’ most bitter local antagonist.⁵² Risdon smoothly imports extracts from these two highly tendentious works into his text in order to present the rebellion as a class rising against the gentry, rather than as the religious rising which almost all of the contemporary sources agree that it was. Just like Richard Carew before him, he places the wholly atypical murder of a single supposed ‘gentleman’ – in this case, William Hellion – at the heart of his account of the Western rising in order to give the impression that the insurgents were blood-crazed class warriors.⁵³

Altogether more helpful, in our quest for genuine elite memories, are the writings of yet another gentleman-antiquary, Thomas Westcote, who, during the 1620s, completed the manuscript text which, long after his death, would be printed under the title of A View of Devonshire in 1630.⁵⁴ Westcote was born in mid-Devon in 1567.⁵⁵ He was thirteen years older than Risdon, then, and grew up at a time when memories of the rebellion of 1549 must still have been relatively fresh. Westcote included several references to the Western rising in his lengthy pen-portrait of Devon, and – like Hooker, Carew and Risdon before him – he made his own distaste for the protestors plain. Westcote twice compared the insurgency to a ‘viper’, for example, he noted that the town records of Plymouth had been burnt by the rebels during ‘the late, [and] I hope last, commotion’, and he brought his account of a key battle between the protestors and the royal forces to an end with the sententious observation that, at length ‘the worser cause had the worst success … [and the rebels] were put to the rout’.⁵⁶ In a general sense, then, Westcote’s retrospective account of the rising – one which was clearly based, in part, on oral testimonies which he had heard himself, as well as on printed sources – may be said to adhere to the ‘authorised’ script, stressing, as it does, that the rebels had been dangerous and destructive and that they had deserved to be defeated.

Yet, intriguingly enough, in a postscript to his text, Westcote goes out of his way to defend himself against several ‘objections’ which he feared that some of his gentry readers might raise about his treatment of the 1549 rebellion. Assuming the voice of one of these putative critics, in an imagined dialogue with himself as the View’s author, Westcote puts the following words into his interlocutor’s mouth: ‘You might have forborne (since your intent was to glorify and ennoble your country and native soil) to have spoken so often of the commotion, which though you palliated [it] under the word commotion, was a plain rebellion.’⁵⁷ Here we see Westcote ventriloquising several opinions that were widespread among the early modern gentry: first, that memories of rebellion were so dangerous that they should not be stirred up at all; second, that simply to mention the fact that a rebellion had taken place in a particular county was to sully its reputation; and third, that the wickedness of past rebellions should not be glossed over by giving them vague and circumambulatory titles like ‘the commotion’. As Daniel Woolf has observed, most early modern antiquaries did, indeed, ‘perform … the function of unofficial censors by leaving such unpleasantries [as rebellion] out of their accounts’. So Westcote was surely right to suspect that – by discussing the rising in his text, and therefore failing fully to implement the ‘filtration process’ which elite custom required – he was running the risk of offending his peers.⁵⁸

Unabashed, however, Westcote goes on to defend himself. First, he observes that, if he is to paint a true portrait of his native county, then he must not conceal its blemishes, ‘for who can draw the counterfeit of Venus and not paint the mole in her chin?’. Second, he justifies his decision to term the rising ‘the commotion’ on the grounds of common usage, pointing out that ‘it is remembered to this day by the name of the commotion, and old men reckone their age from it’: a fascinating remark in itself. Finally, Westcote denies that his allusions to the rising are in any way damaging to his own county’s reputation, for, so he claims, Devon folk have little to reproach themselves with in respect of the rebellion of 1549. ‘That viper’, he avers, ‘was not hatched here but … in Cornwall (though somewhat nourished and increased, as it crept through our country, with a few of the poorer and baser sort; not a man of worth or name [joining them]) and, in fine, the head thereof was crushed chiefly by those of this country’.⁵⁹ Westcote’s claim that the Western rising had begun in Cornwall, rather than in Devon, is interesting, and may well have been based on Carew’s earlier portrayal of the 1548 revolt at St Keverne as the prelude to the much more serious rebellion which had broken out in the following year. Yet it was a false claim, one which was designed to salve Devon’s honour, in the eyes of its gentry governors, by minimising its involvement in the rebellion, as were Westcote’s assertions that ‘few’ of the county’s ordinary inhabitants had joined the rebels, and that not a single Devon gentleman had done so. Here, Westcote may be said to have returned to the authorised script: brushing over the truth of what had really happened in 1549 in order to portray the rising as a contest between ‘hair-brained’ (and preponderantly Cornish) commoners and a royal army made up ‘chiefly’ of Devonian gentlemen and their loyal retainers.⁶⁰

Popular memories of the rebellions

What of the memories of the common folk themselves? How did the ordinary people of the South West – those below the level of the gentry – look back on the rebellions of the Tudor period? That they did remember those episodes it is impossible to doubt. As we have seen, Westcote stated that some local men calculated their own birthdays against the temporal marker of rebellions past and this was clearly no more than the literal truth. In 1583, for example, Thomas Toser of St Mellion in Cornwall, who had been called to give evidence about the boundaries of a local estate, began his testimony by declaring that he believed himself to be in his eighties ‘for as he remembereth his father and mother did saie unto him, that he was borne about Xmas was twelfe monethes after Blackheath field’.⁶¹ A cluster of depositions made by a group of West Devon folk in 1580 shows them calculating the nativity of another child from the date of a particular rebellion – this time the Western rising – in precisely the same way. Thus Philippa Beare of Marystow deposed that she had got married ‘about mydsumer after the commosyon’ when she was in her teens. Her mother confirmed this, recalling that ‘her daughter was likely to be a mother almost as soon as she was a wife, and this was twelve monethes after the commosyon’. When three deponents were asked how old they believed Philippa’s son to be, two of them replied that he had certainly been born ‘after the commosyon’, and the third, more precisely, that he had been born ‘three yeares after the commosyon in Devon’. Finally, a neighbour, Alice Wevell, testified that her own son had also been born ‘after the commosyon’.⁶² A similar mental habit of measuring time past against the date of the Western rising was evident in the testimonies of other local witnesses in legal cases: in 1594, for example, John Richards of Crantock in Cornwall deposed that he had lived in the neighbourhood ‘since the commotion time 45 years ago’, while in 1602, Richard Clannaborough, a yeoman from Lustleigh in mid-Devon, deposed that he had known the surrounding area ‘ever synce the commotion in … the raigne of … Kinge Edward the Sixth’.⁶³

Testimonies like these hint that ordinary men and women in Devon and Cornwall may have recalled the Western rising, in particular, as a crucial watershed in their lives: as an event of such magnitude that it split their own view of the past into the threefold division of time before, during and after the rebellion. West Country folk may well have remembered that rising rather as older members of our own families remembered the Second World War, in other words – and rather as we ourselves remember the Covid-19 pandemic. The specific nomenclature which individual plebeians in the South West chose to adopt when they were speaking of the revolts through which they had lived is also worth pausing to consider. We have already noted Toser’s reference to his own birth a year after ‘Blackheath field’, and other local commoners also used this specific phrase in retrospect to denote the rising of May–June 1497. During the 1530s, for example, the townsmen of Bodmin in Cornwall complained that the prior of Bodmin’s servants had ‘threatened that their master would see them “hanged and wear halters [i.e., nooses] as their predecessors did at Blackheath field”’: clear evidence of how the harsh punishments meted out in the wake of the rebellion had lingered in communal memory for decades to come.⁶⁴ That the first Cornish rebellion of 1497 should have come to be popularly known by the shorthand title of ‘Blackheath field’ is not surprising, for the insurgency had moved swiftly outside the region itself, and the battle fought near London had certainly been its most dramatic – and bloody – episode.⁶⁵ Little evidence has survived about how ordinary folk remembered Warbeck’s rising – apart from in Exeter – and it is tempting to suggest that, in most local communities, popular memories of this revolt may eventually have become conflated with those of the rebellion which had occurred earlier that same year.

A similar process of blurring may well have affected popular memories of the West Cornish rising of 1548. That revolt was referred to in a variety of ways by parish officers in East Cornwall in its immediate aftermath, as they recorded the sums of money which their own communities had laid out to assist in its suppression: as the ‘besynes that was in the west part’, for example, as ‘the … commotion in the west part’ and as the rising of ‘the rebellers of the west’.⁶⁶ (The emphasis laid here on the fact that the rebellion had taken place in West Cornwall was surely intended to absolve the eastern half of the county of any possible blame.) At Launceston, however, the clerk of the guild of All Hallows appears to have termed the 1548 rising ‘the Commotion time’.⁶⁷ This was the name which had already been applied, in 1536, to the great protest in the North against Henry VIII’s religious policies which is today known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, and in 1549 it would go on to be applied, not only to the rebellion in Devon and Cornwall, but also to the much wider series of protests that broke out across much of England during that same year.⁶⁸ Little evidence survives of West Cornish folk drawing a clear distinction between the revolts of 1548 and 1549 in their reminiscences, so it may well be that, through the prism of memory, they eventually came to regard these two protests as having taken place within a single ‘commotion time’.

The unanimity with which local plebeians insisted on referring to the Western rising, in retrospect, as either ‘the commotion time’, ‘the late commotion’ or simply ‘the commotion’ is striking. It seems probable that they chose to employ the word ‘commotion’ partly because, unlike the word ‘rebellion’, it is ‘a conveniently neutral term’, one ‘that … has the merit of acknowledging civil strife without apportioning the blame to any particular party’.⁶⁹ In the divided communities of the post-1549 South West, this would obviously have made routine social intercourse a good deal less fraught than would otherwise have been the case. A closely related reason for ordinary people to have favoured the use of this particular word was surely because it permitted them to avoid making any specific reference to the ‘sin’ of rebelliousness in their public discourse.⁷⁰ Yet, at the same time, when we consider the care which official sources took to apply far more condemnatory names to the rising – and when we recall the ‘objections’ of Westcote’s imaginary gentleman-critic – it is hard not to suspect that some local plebeians may have decided to adopt this particular form of nomenclature as a subtle act of resistance. The fact that there is no evidence of local people subsequently referring to the rising as the ‘rebellion of common welthe’ – the alternative name which was occasionally used by plebeian deponents in the South East to describe the protests which had taken place there in 1549 – is also worth noting.⁷¹ This tends to suggest that Devon and Cornish folk did not remember socio-economic grievances – issues of ‘commonwealth’ – as having been central to the Western rising, as they had certainly been to ‘Kett’s rebellion’ and to the contemporaneous stirs in many other counties. On the other hand, the one overtly subversive comment which is known to have been made about the Western rising in retrospect by a local commoner – the claim of an Exeter tailor, made in 1560, that he had heard ‘dyvers persons’ report that ‘a newe Underhyll would rise upp amonge them agayne’ – does appear to have had a specifically economic application, and to have related to a struggle which was then raging in Exeter over trading rights.⁷²

Returning to the question of nomenclature, I have so far unearthed only a single instance of the word ‘commotion’ being retrospectively paired with another word, indicative of the rebels’ purpose, by a local individual looking back on the Western rising. In a pamphlet published in 1584, John Hooker referred to the protest as ‘the commotion … for religion’.⁷³ This appellation may well have been one that he had invented for himself, of course, and, as Hooker was a gentleman, it does not necessarily tell us anything about how ordinary people remembered the rebellion. It does seem rather curious, however, that Hooker – a zealous Protestant – should have conferred a title, which on the surface of things, has a positive ring to it – evoking, as it does, a sense of genuine and uncomplicated religiosity – upon a protest of which he so heartily disapproved. A scornful reference to ‘the commotion for Popery’, one cannot help but feel, would have been far more in his line. It seems at least conceivable, then, that, at this point in his text, Hooker had absent-mindedly reached for a name for the rebellion which had been in general circulation among the populace at the time: a name which neatly encapsulated the essence of the revolt, and which, for obvious reasons, local people would have preferred to shorten to simply ‘the commotion’ in their dealings with authority figures during the Edwardian and Elizabethan periods. If this was indeed the case, then we can perhaps see hints of a lingering popular attachment to the rebel cause here: an attachment which had been made all but explicit in the whispered predictions that ‘a newe Underhyll’ would shortly arise in 1560.

How powerful was that sense of attachment, and for how long did it persist? MacCulloch has persuasively argued that, when the common folk of East Anglia rose up in support of Mary Tudor and against Jane Grey in 1553, they were acting, at least in part, out of a desire for revenge upon John Dudley: Jane’s puppeteer, and the leader of the royal army which had slaughtered Kett’s followers at Dussindale four years before.⁷⁴ Nor can we reasonably doubt that, when the common folk of Devon pointedly ignored Sir Peter Carew’s summons to rise against Mary in 1554, but rallied to her banner instead, they, too, were taking their revenge upon a man who had incurred widespread popular hatred as a result of his violent and repressive actions in 1549.⁷⁵ Indeed, Carew’s abortive revolt might well be said to present a distorted reflection of the Western rising, with a few former loyalists now turning ‘rebel’, and the local community as a whole coming out in support of the Crown (though this time the town masters of Exeter – displaying a keen sense of self-preservation, as usual – chose to jump with the stronger side). Following the death of Mary, the accession of Elizabeth and the gradual transformation of Devon and Cornwall into ‘Protestant country’ over the next half century, popular affection for the specific religious cause in whose defence the rebels had fought surely drained away. Yet a sense of pride in the valour with which they had fought clearly endured in plebeian memory until well into the early Stuart period.

Turning, once again, to the subject of the Western rising in the manuscript which he wrote during the 1620s, and this time speaking more directly of the ordinary men who had taken part in it, Thomas Westcote assured his genteel readers that ‘if I should relate … what hath been vulgarly reported … of the strength and force and resolution of these commons … you might, peradventure, take it with some doubt, lest it increased … by time or penning’. But such scepticism would be altogether misplaced, Westcote went on to insist, for ‘I intend to gather no more harvest than comes from the seed of truth’.⁷⁶ Here, we catch a precious glimpse of how the protestors of 1549 had still been remembered in ‘vulgar report’ – that is to say, in the common voice of the countryside – some seventy years on: a glimpse which makes it clear that, even after the specific motives which had prompted them to take up arms in the first place had been all but forgotten, a sense of proprietorial pride in their ‘strength … force and resolution’ had lived on among the ordinary men and women who were their descendants.

Conclusion

Like the other witnesses whose testimonies have been examined so far, Westcote was looking back on the revolts of the Tudor period from the perspective of one who remained blissfully unaware of the far bloodier civil broils which were still to come: during ‘the Great Rebellion’ of the mid-seventeenth century. Between 1642 and 1646, everyday life in the West Country was turned upside down as the armies of King Charles I and his enemies in Parliament marched and counter-marched across the region: conscripting men, extorting money and goods and stamping an indelible impression on the minds of everyone who had been unfortunate enough to witness their violent passage. It seems fair to suggest that the intensely powerful and traumatic memories which these four years of internecine conflict left behind them in Devon and Cornwall quickly came to supersede, to overlay and even, in some districts, entirely to expunge, the memories of the past rebellions which had hitherto persisted in the popular consciousness. As the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey once remarked, ‘no suffimen [i.e. no purifying substance] is a greater fumigator … [of oral tradition] than gun-powder’, and the revolts of the Tudor period appear to have been only rarely alluded to in plebeian speech in the South West after 1660.⁷⁷

A few tantalising scraps of information survive, however, to show that those episodes did continue to be remembered by some ordinary people during the late seventeenth and even the early eighteenth centuries. Around 1700, for example, a gentleman from Wendron near Truro referred to the Western rising as ‘the Commotion’, going on to observe that ‘it still retaines that name in this tract’, by which he presumably meant in the district between Truro and the Land’s End.⁷⁸ It was in this same district that the Cornish antiquary William Hals had gathered up several ‘traditions’ relating to the rising a few years before, suggesting that, in the far West of Cornwall, memories of the ‘Commotion time’ had proved especially enduring: perhaps because the events of 1549 had been particularly violent and disruptive there, perhaps because, thanks to its geographical isolation, that district had been less heavily fought over than the rest of the South West during the Civil War.⁷⁹ In a work published in 1712, moreover, a third West Country gentleman – John Blundell of Tiverton in Devon – likewise recorded a clutch of oral traditions relating to the rising of 1549. A rebel band was said to have been defeated in ‘a battle’ fought with the king’s forces at Cranmore Castle, an ancient earthwork just outside Tiverton, Blundell recorded, while, after the fight, some of the captured insurgents had reputedly been ‘hang’d and quartered’.⁸⁰ No contemporary evidence of this engagement appears to have survived, but that is not to say that it did not take place.

More interesting still, Blundell was apparently assured that the revolt as a whole had begun as a result of a dispute ‘occasioned by baptising of a child at Sanford Peverel; [for] the old men were for the Roman Catholic way, the young men for the Protestant, [and] at length they came in to open rebellion’.⁸¹ From this comment, it is possible to conclude that popular memories of the Western rising had become increasingly muddled and confused as time went by. Thus the 1549 Book of Common Prayer – the imposition of which was generally agreed by contemporaries to have been the trigger for the rebellion – appears to have been displaced, in the retrospective vision of Blundell’s informants, by concerns over baptism – an issue which had assumed far less prominence at the time – while Sampford Courtenay, the parish in Central Devon where the revolt had in fact begun, appears to have been similarly displaced in the country people’s memories by the parish of Sampford Peveril, in East Devon, which lies much closer to Tiverton.⁸² (Though it is also possible, of course, that it was Blundell, who, having heard his informants refer to the disturbances at ‘Sampford’, had assumed that it was Sanford Peverill which they had had in mind.)

By the mid-eighteenth century, genuinely popular memories of the revolts of the Tudor period appear to have faded away. But even then those episodes had not been entirely forgotten. On the contrary, as we have already seen, the risings of 1497 and 1549 continued to be officially memorialised, in Exeter at least, albeit in ways which saw the precise message of these curated civic memories changing over time. By the late Stuart period, for example, Henry VII’s sword had clearly come to be regarded primarily as a symbol of the authority vested in the town governors by the Crown, rather than as a specific reminder of Exeter’s loyalty in 1497, and this has continued to be the case ever since.⁸³ The Jesus Day sermons, similarly, were repurposed in the 1700s as occasions for denouncing Catholicism in general, and although a handful of allusions to the events of 1549 occur in the surviving texts, it seems unlikely that those references would have meant that much to most of their auditors.⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the ‘authorised narrative’ of the revolts of the Tudor period remained broadly the same in Exeter from the Restoration right up until the Second World War and, throughout that 280-year period, members of the civic elite continued to look back on those episodes as treacherous insurgencies which their predecessors had loyally withstood. A memorial plaque which was erected on the site of Exeter’s former West Gate in 1815, and which proudly proclaims that the gate had been ‘successfully defended against the rebel attack in 1549’, well encapsulates this attitude.⁸⁵

Yet the ‘loyalist’ mode of remembrance which had prevailed in Exeter for so long – and which had established itself, faute de mieux, as the chief way in which the revolts of 1497–1554 were publicly memorialised in the South West throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – would not remain dominant for ever. From the 1940s onwards, the rise of new social attitudes and cultural fashions led to a crop of altogether different memorials to the rebellions of the Tudor period springing up across the region: this time celebrating those who had defied the authority of the Crown, rather than those who had sought to maintain it. In 1949, for example, a plaque was erected outside the church of the Sacred Heart in the Cornish fishing port of St Ives with a legend commemorating ‘all the men of St Ives who died to defend the Catholic faith in the Western rising’. In 1966 a tablet was set up at St Keverne by members of Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish nationalist party, with an inscription commemorating the ‘leaders of the Cornish host who marched to London and suffered vengeance there [in] … 1497’. In 2000, similarly, a memorial stone was erected by the members of a local history society at the site of the Battle of Fenny Bridges, advising passers-by that ‘here … in 1549 men from Cornwall and Devon fought and died to preserve their traditional faith and … language’.⁸⁶ The key role which feelings of Catholic religiosity, of Cornish ethnic identity and of West Country patriotism more generally, have played in inspiring local people to raise these memorials – and the several others like them which have appeared in recent years – is made plain by the wording of these inscriptions.⁸⁷

What are the chief findings to have emerged from this preliminary survey of the afterlives of the Tudor rebellions in the South West? The first point to make, perhaps, is that here, as in those parts of the country which have been intensively studied by Wood and others, such episodes clearly left long memories behind them. We have seen that the Western rising, in particular, was regarded in retrospect, by local people of all social classes, as a profound moment of rupture for decades to come, while the discovery that oral traditions about the insurgency were continuing to circulate in the South West during the reign of Queen Anne can only be said to support the emphasis which Harriet Lyon has recently laid on ‘the … longevity of local memory cultures’ pertaining to the Henrician and Edwardian periods ‘into the early eighteenth century and beyond’.⁸⁸ Second, this article has pointed out that subversive memories of rebellion – and, especially, memories inflected with a sense of plebeian antagonism towards the local gentry – appear to be harder to find in the South West than they are in East Anglia: something which may reflect differing levels of social tension in these two regions, but which may equally well reflect the fact that no sources quite as deeply revealing of plebeian ‘political’ attitudes as, for example, the depositions preserved in the mayors’ court books of Norwich are so far known to survive for the Tudor West Country.⁸⁹ Third, this article has shed further light on the intimate connections which – as Alexandra Walsham has so powerfully argued – existed between landscape and memory during the early modern period.⁹⁰ Once all of those who could themselves remember the rebellions were dead, it was clearly to places which had witnessed especially pivotal events during the uprisings that inherited memories had tended most tenaciously to cling: to St Keverne, for example, to Sampford Courtenay and, above all, to the city of Exeter.

The central role played by Exeter’s ruling elite in shaping how the risings of 1497–1554 would go on to be publicly remembered in Devon and Cornwall is the fourth key point to have emerged from this article. As we have seen, the city’s experiences during the course of the rebellions had been entirely atypical, but this, in turn, had meant that – unlike the leading inhabitants of other local communities – Exeter’s rulers had had especially good reasons for seeking to perpetuate their memory. And, ironically enough, it was the settled determination with which Exeter’s urban elite had continued publicly to memorialise their own resistance to the revolts which had at length ensured that it was this particular mode of ‘loyalist remembrance’ which would persist in the region, while alternative – and presumably far more representative – ways of remembering the rebellions gradually faded away. Fifth, and last, the present article has demonstrated that it is only in comparatively recent times that this monopolisation of the public memory of the revolts of the Tudor period has finally broken down, thereby making it possible for both the loyalists and those who opposed them, for both the fortunate and the defeated, to be publicly commemorated in the South West in a polyvocal, multivalent and – dare one suggest it? – truly ecumenical fashion.