6 - Obedience and dissent in Henrician England: the Lincolnshire rebellion, 1536

Summary

Any approach to the subject of this essay must begin from the massive and well-known work of the Misses Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536–7, and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538. We still owe to these two historians most of what can be said about the supreme crisis of the reign of Henry VIII, indeed perhaps of the Tudor dynasty. And the merits of their account have lately been recalled by another authority in the same field, Professor A. G. Dickens. There will be widespread agreement that as a work of narrative history their book is unlikely to call for major revision. It is when it comes to the matter of interpretation however that one senses a feeling of persistent uneasiness, which comes through particularly strongly perhaps less in connection with the Pilgrimage of Grace than in the case of its prelude the Lincolnshire movement. Whatever explanations may be offered for the Pilgrimage (and it may be doubted whether here too we are anywhere near finality), events in Lincolnshire baffle by their paradoxical character and the obscurity of their motivation.

Some of the bafflement emerges in The Pilgrimage of Grace. Thus “It was a most curious movement, both in its sudden outbreak and its still more sudden collapse.” Professor Dickens speaks of the events in Lincolnshire as “confused”, and characterized by mob law and meaningless violence, an impression which is shared by Professor Dom David Knowles, who contrasts “the riotous violent character” of the Lincolnshire men with the more creditable behaviour of Yorkshire.