answered by the arrival of a herald from the king with a promise that
parliament should meet in October to consider their complaints, and
that something should be done to redress their grievances, if in the
meantime they would quietly disperse to their homes.
All this was too vague and uncertain for Ket. Not till some definite
step was taken by king or parliament to end the present distress was
he willing to lay down his arms and bid his followers disperse. He had
put his hand to the plough, and no turning back was possible while the
evils he had risen against flourished unchecked.
So Ket put his house in order on Mousehold Heath. The Oak of
Reformation was boarded over “with rafters,” and to this place
of summary justice landowners were brought and tried for making
enclosures. Two men were chosen by the commons from every hundred to
assist in the work of administration, and all the people were strictly
admonished “to beware of robbing, spoiling and other evil demeanours.”
As the army had to be victualled, Ket sent out men armed with his
official warrant requiring the country houses to provide cattle and
corn, “so that no violence or injury be done to any honest or poor
man,” and this requisition brought in guns, gunpowder and money, in
addition to “all kinds of victual.” The smaller farmers sent their
contributions “with much private good will,” while on the landowners a
great fear had fallen, and it seemed that the day of their might was
passed.
A royal messenger bearing commissions of the peace to various country
gentlemen falling into the hands of Ket, he was at once deprived of
these documents and sent on his way. Ket filled in the names of men who
had joined the rising on these commissions, and these new magistrates
gave assistance in maintaining order.
Cod and Aldrich were shocked at the arrest of landowners.
“Notwithstanding were divers gentlemen taken and brought to prison,
some in Norwich Prison, some in Norwich Castle and some in Surrey
Place.”--St. Leonard’s Hill.
In every case the lives of the landowners were spared. Stern and
unmoved by respect of persons was Robert Ket, but there was no taint
of cruelty, meanness or bloodthirstiness in his rule. It was not his
purpose to raise civil war or leave a festering sore of hatred by
putting his neighbours to death. To destroy the power of the landlords
and ensure the right of an evicted people to live on the land was the
aim of the Norfolk Rising.
At the end of the first week relations became strained between Cod and
the army on Mousehold.
It was the custom to have prayers every day under the Oak, and Dr.
Conyers, vicar of St. Martin’s, Norwich, acted as chaplain. “Grave
persons and good divines” would come out from the city and preach under
the Oak, and on one occasion Dr. Matthew Parker, a Norwich man, who
had been chaplain to Anne Boleyn, and who was to become Archbishop of
Canterbury under Elizabeth, filled the pulpit. Parker’s sermon, full of
rebukes on the rising and praise of Edward VI., was so obnoxious, for
“he touched them for their living so near that they went near to touch
him for his life,” that Conyers only prevented a riot by striking up
the “Te Deum” in English, and during the singing Parker withdrew “to
sing his part at home.”
Matthew Parker was a great man in Norwich (his brother Thomas
became mayor), and the incivility he had received at Mousehold gave
great offence. Cod and the aldermen sent off Leonard Sutherton, a
respectable burgess, to report to the king’s council the doings in
Norfolk, and Sutherton brought back from London a royal herald, who
went out to Mousehold and promised the king’s pardon to all that would
depart quietly to their homes.
The people cheered and shouted “God save the king’s majesty,” but to
Ket this talk of pardon was altogether beside the mark. With some
dignity he informed the herald that “kings and princes are wont to
pardon wicked persons, not innocent and just men,” and added, “I trust
I have done nothing but what belongs to the duty of a true subject.”
The herald then called on John Petibone, the sword-bearer of Norwich,
who with other civic notables was standing by, to arrest Robert Ket.
But the thing was impossible. Ket had 20,000 men at his back, and the
sword-bearer was supported by half-a-dozen elderly members of the town
council. All that could be done was to escort the herald into the city,
leaving Ket to his own devices.
There was no more peace between the camp at Mousehold and the city of
Norwich after this. Hitherto Mayor Cod had retained the keys of the
city, and his authority had been respected by Ket. At the same time
Ket’s men had gone freely to and fro throughout the city without let
or hindrance. Now all was changed. First the landowners were being
arrested and despoiled, then the learned doctor, Matthew Parker (was he
not master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge?) had been interrupted
and hooted, and now a king’s herald was contemned! Cod ordered the city
gates to be made fast, commanded Ket’s prisoners to be released, and
placed the city’s ordnance in the meadows by the river. This amounted
to a declaration of war, and Ket replied by bringing up his guns.
The night of July 21st was spent “in fearful shot on both sides,” but
little injury was done. For Ket’s guns brought “more fear than hurt to
the city,” and “the city ordnance did not much annoy the enemy.”
In the morning Ket sought to renew peace by asking permission for the
transport of victuals through the city, “as the custom was of late,”
and warning the mayor that refusal would provoke fire and sword.
Cod refused permission, and Ket opened fire on the city gates. But “for
lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners the ordnance was spent
to small and little purpose.” A desperate encounter followed, with
bows and arrows for the chief weapons of offence. Boys from Mousehold,
“naked and unarmed, would pluck the arrows from their bodies and hand
them to the rebels to fire at the city.” At Bishopsgate a number of men
swam the river and forced their way into the city, and on the night of
July 22nd Norwich was in the hands of Robert Ket.
No reprisals followed. The herald made a last attempt to induce
the insurgents to disperse by promising pardons, and was greeted
derisively. “Depart with a plague on thee!” they cried. “To the devil
with these idle promises. We shall only be oppressed afterwards.”
Forthwith the herald did depart, with eight pounds of gold in his
pocket from the mayor.
Ket retired to Mousehold, the passage through the city having been
secured, and Cod accompanied him, leaving a deputy, Augustine Steward,
who lived in the big house in Tombland, opposite Erfingham Gate, to act
as mayor.
Judgment went on as before under the Oak of Reformation, and people
clamoured for the landowners to be hanged. “So hated at this time
was the name of worship or gentleman, that the basest of the people,
burning with more than hostile hatred, desired to extinguish, and
utterly cut off, not only the gentry themselves, but if it were
possible, all the offspring and hope of them.” (Nevylle.)
But Ket was as strong in his mercy as in his resistance to the land
enclosers. The gentry were imprisoned, and made to pay tribute:
their fences were pulled down, but their lives were spared, and no
hurt befell them. In the city Steward, no friend to Ket, was left
undisturbed in authority.
At the end of July came William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, with
1,500 soldiers, mostly Italian mercenaries, and a number of country
squires with their retainers, to put down the rising. Steward at
once admitted him to the city; but Northampton--Henry VIII.’s
brother-in-law--was neither a soldier nor statesman, and after two
days’ hard fighting he fled from Norwich, utterly defeated.
Ket’s men were badly armed, but they had numbers on their side, and
they fought for freedom and for very life. They swam the river, as
before, and forced an entrance. “Half dead, drowned in their own and
other men’s blood, they would not give over; but till the last gasp,
when their hands could scarce hold their weapons, would strike at their
adversaries.”
Lord Sheffield fell in the fight on August 1st, killed by a stalwart
rebel--one Fulke, a butcher and carpenter by trade--and some hundred of
Ket’s men lay dead. The city suffered. Several houses and city gates
were fired, and only a heavy rain prevented the flames from spreading.
(This same rain drove many of the rebels to take refuge in the
cathedral, much to the annoyance of the dean and chapter.)
And now for three weeks Ket had to take charge of Norwich as well as
of Mousehold camp, for it was impossible to trust Steward. Many of the
wealthier townsmen hastened away to Cambridge and London, leaving their
wives and families behind. Trade was at an end.
The state of the city began to be in most miserable case, so
that all men looked for utter destruction, both of life and
goods. Then the remnant that feared God, seeing the plague
thus of sorrow increasing, fell to prayer and holy life, and
wished but to see the day that after they might talk thereover,
looking never to recover help again, nor to see their city
prosper.
The women resorted twice a day to prayer, and the servants
(except what must needs stay at home) did the same. When Ket’s
ambassadors were sent to any private house they were fain
to bake or brew or do any work for the camp, else they were
carried as traitors to the Oak. As for trading, there was none
in the city, people being forced to hide up their choicest
goods, and happy were they that had the faithfullest servants.
They that did keep open their shops were robbed and spoiled,
and their goods were measured by the arm’s length and dispersed
among the rebels; their children they set away for fear of
fire. I, the writer (who was then above twenty-two years of
age, and an eye-witness) was present after prayer during this
dolorous state, when people met and bewailed the miserable
state they were in. (Sutherton.)
But for all their misery the tradesmen of Norwich were in no fear for
their lives. The city had done its best to thwart the rising, but Ket
treated it generously, allowing neither pillage nor bloodshed--though
he did not scruple to take what goods were necessary for his army.[102]
It was beyond the power of man to prevent all thieving during those
first few weeks of August, for the civic magistracy was gone, and Ket
had large responsibilities on his hands.
The hope that the rising would become general turned to disappointment
in the weeks that passed after the flight of Northampton. In Suffolk
a number of men rose at Ket’s call, and made an unsuccessful attempt
to take Yarmouth. A small camp set up at Rising Chase was dispersed,
but for a fortnight the peasants gathered at Watton, and stopped the
passages of the river at Thetford and Brandon Ferry. For want of
leadership they then came on to Mousehold. At Hingham a rising was
put down by Sir Edmund Knyvett. And while Ket waited, hoping against
hope for better news, the fugitive citizens from Norwich had already
persuaded Somerset to send down an army to crush the revolt.
On August 21st the Earl of Warwick, with 14,000 troops, reached
Cambridge, and three days later was at Norwich.
Warwick, Henry VIII.’s high chamberlain, the son of Dudley, Henry
VII.’s minister, was a man of war and resolution. Sent down to suppress
the rising he did his work, but not till he had tried an appeal to the
peasants to disperse without further trouble.
Halting outside the city, Warwick sent a herald to proclaim pardon to
all who should now return to their homes, and, as before, the people
shouted, “God save King Edward!” Ket himself talked with the herald on
the high ground near Bishop’s Gate.
Negotiations ended abruptly. Some ill-mannered boy gave an indecent
and offensive salute to the herald, and was shot dead by an arrow from
the herald’s escort. At once the cry of “treachery” was raised by the
people, and all talk of peace was at an end. While the herald tried
to persuade Ket to come to the Earl of Warwick under a flag of truce,
the rebels gathered round their leader and besought him not to forsake
them. To Ket there could be sure reliance on royal promises of pardon,
and no surrender of the charge he had undertaken. His reply to the
herald was to retire on Mousehold and prepare for battle.
Warwick at once entered the city, and began the business of
pacification by promptly hanging sixty men in the Market Place,
by Norwich Castle, “without hearing the cause”; and by issuing a
proclamation that all who were out of doors would receive similar
treatment. Then came a mishap, for the greater part of Warwick’s
artillery fell into Ket’s hands. The drivers of the gun-carriages,
entering the city after the soldiers, by St. Bennet’s Gate on the west,
and ignorant of the way, actually passed out at Bishop’s Gate on the
east on the very road towards Mousehold, and were quickly taken. Ket
had now the advantage in ordnance, and there was fighting in the city
all Sunday, August 25th. So uncertain was the issue that the burgesses
feared Warwick would suffer Northampton’s fate, and prayed him to
depart without further loss. But Warwick, waiting for reinforcements,
and knowing that 1,400 German mercenaries were close at hand, was not
the man to beat an ignominious retreat.
The hireling “lanznechts” arrived next day, and on Tuesday, August
27th, came the fatal battle.
Instead of remaining at Mousehold, where a strong resistance might have
been made, the rebels decided to march out boldly from their camp and
meet the king’s army in the open country that lay between Mousehold
Heath and the city. An old song was recalled, which, it seemed,
foretold victory in such a case:
The country gnoffes (churls), Hob, Dick, and Rick,
With clubs and clouted shoon,
Shall fill the vale
Of Dussindale
With slaughtered bodies soon.
But the country churls were to be the slaughtered, and not the
slaughterers.
Warwick marched out by the north-east gate of St. Martin-at-the-Oak,
and for the last time a herald promised pardon to all who would
surrender. But the hangings in the market place had destroyed all
confidence in such proclamations, and the answer to the herald was that
they “perceived this pardon to be nothing else but a cask full of ropes
and halters.”
Ket’s judgment failed him utterly on that last day of the rising. On
the strength of an irrelevant old song he allowed his army to go to its
doom unchecked, and at the very time when good generalship was wanted
above all other things, Robert Ket seems to have lost his nerve, and to
have been struck by some paralysis of the will, as though conscious of
impending ruin.
The peasants poured down into the valley, and into the meadows beyond
Magdalen and Pockthorp Gates, and fought with desperate courage,
but they were simply cut to pieces by the professional soldiery. At
four o’clock in the afternoon it was all over, the defeat utter and
complete, and Robert Ket and his brother were in flight.
The remains of the rebel army laid down their arms, when Warwick
himself offered pardon in the king’s name to those who would surrender.
The rising was at an end. The foreign mercenaries of the crown had
triumphed over English peasants. Robert Ket was taken the same night
at Swannington, eight miles north of Norwich. He had ridden away from
the battle when the field was lost, but horse and rider were too tired
to proceed further. Taking refuge in a barn, he was recognized by some
men unloading a wagon of corn and seized. The farmer’s wife “rated him
for his conduct, but he only prayed her to be quiet, and to give him
meat.” That same night William Ket was taken, and the two brothers were
delivered to the lord lieutenant of the county, and by him carried to
London to be tried for their lives.
At Mousehold Warwick proved the worth of the pardons he had given
by first having nine of the bravest of the peasants hanged, drawn,
and quartered under the Oak of Reformation, and distributing their
bodies in the city; and then by hanging 300 prisoners on trees, and
then forty-nine more at the Market Cross in Norwich. The country
gentlemen of Norfolk, backed by their wealthier citizens, called for
more executions, till Warwick turned with disgust from the vindictive
clamour of these bloodthirsty civilians, and pointed out in impatient
reproof that no one would be left “to plough and harrow over the lands”
if all the peasants were massacred.
And now the king’s authority having been re-established, a public
service of thanksgiving was held in the church of St. Peter, Mancroft,
and August 27th was ordered to be observed henceforth as “Thanksgiving
Day” in Norwich. (This was done by prayers and sermon until 1667.
In the grammar school, during Elizabeth’s reign, an account of the
rising--_De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, written in Latin by Nevylle, and
violently anti-popular in expression--was ordered to be used as a text
book in place of the usual classics, and was so used for some years.)
On September 7th Warwick returned to London.[103] In November Robert
and William Ket, after lying in the Tower for two months, were brought
to trial. They offered no defence for what they had done: for having
borne arms without the king’s permission, and for having striven to
stop the robbery and oppression of the peasant without the authority of
king and parliament.
On November 26th they were found guilty of high treason, their property
confiscated, and they were condemned to death. On November 29th they
were delivered out of the custody of the Tower to the high sheriff of
Norfolk, and on December 1st the Kets were again in Norwich.
It was winter, and hope was dead. The last great rising of the English
peasantry had failed, crushed without pity, and the leaders of the
army of revolt, who had judged it better to give up ease and worldly
honour rather than acquiesce dumbly in the enslavement of their
poorer neighbours, were to die as traitors.[104] On December 7th the
executions were carried out, and Robert Ket was hanged in chains
outside Norwich Castle, while William Ket was taken to Wymondham (where
he held the manor of Chossell--Church lands, bought years earlier from
the Earl of Warwick), and there hanged in chains from the parish church.
The property of the Kets was duly taken by the servants of the crown,
and the bodies of the rebel leaders swung in the wind--to remind
unthinking men of the reward of rebellion, of the fate of all who
challenge, without success, the arms of government.
The Norfolk Rising was the last great movement of the English people
in social revolt. Riots we have known even in our times, and mob
violence, but no such rising as those led by Wat Tyler, by Cade, and
by Ket has England seen since the year 1549.
The country people sunk into hopeless poverty and permanent degradation
under Edward VI. and Elizabeth, and with the rejection by the
government of papal authority, the supremacy of the crown and of the
ministers of the crown was established.
In the nineteenth century, when the working people in town and country
once more bestirred themselves at the call of freedom, their wiser
leaders advised political and not revolutionary methods of action, and
the advice has been followed.
But if the year 1549 marks the end of organized democratic resistance
to intolerable misgovernment, the coming centuries were to see the rise
of the middle class with the insistent demand for the predominance of
that class in the parliament of the nation, and the incurable belief
that in a popularly elected House of Commons resided all the safeguards
of civil and religious liberty.
Eliot, Hampden, Pym, and the Supremacy of the Commons.
1625–1643
AUTHORITIES: S. R. Gardiner--_History of England_, _History of
Great Civil War_, _History of Commonwealth and Protectorate_;
Clarendon--_History of the Great Rebellion_;, John Forster--_Life
of Sir John Eliot_, _Life of Hampden_, _Life of Pym_, _The Grand
Remonstrance_, _Arrest of the Five Members_; Nugent--_Memorials for
Life of Hampden_; _Calendar of State Papers_; _House of Commons’
Journals_.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN ELIOT
(_From a Steel Engraving by William Holl._)]
ELIOT, HAMPDEN, PYM, AND THE SUPREMACY OF THE COMMONS.
1625–1643
John Eliot, John Hampden, John Pym--by the work of these men comes the
supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of England.
All three are country gentlemen of good estate, of high principle
and of some learning.[105] They are men of religious convictions, of
courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Two of
them--Eliot and Hampden--are content to die for the cause of good
government.
The strong rule of Elizabeth left a difficult legacy of government to
James I. The despotism of the queen had been forgiven in the success
of her State policy; and if she had no high opinion of parliament,
Elizabeth had ministers who fairly represented the mind of the English
middle class. Elizabeth’s absolutism in Church and State was the direct
following of Henry VIII., and only at the very close of her reign was
it threatened by the discontent of parliament. With a shrewd instinct
for popularity Elizabeth at once yielded. Like her father, she saw the
importance of retaining parliament on the side of the crown and making
it the instrument of the royal will. There was no idea in the Tudor
mind of parliament sharing the government with the crown. The business
of the House of Commons of Elizabeth was to express its opinion and
then decree the proposals of the crown. “Liberty of speech was granted
in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what
he listed.” (1592.)
In religion Elizabeth had done her worst to exterminate the Roman
Catholic faith, and by the fierceness of her persecution had kindled
undying enthusiasm for the old beliefs and worship. But forty years
of repression did their work, and a generation arose which only
knew Catholicism as the faith of a proscribed and unpatriotic sect,
who denied the absolute sovereignty of the crown and had another
sovereign at Rome--the religion of Spain--popery, in short: a
faith worse than Mahomedanism or heathenism--the scarlet woman of
the Apocalypse--according to the fierce Puritan expounders of the
Bible, and not to be counted as Christianity. That this very Roman
Catholicism--so hateful because the penal laws kept it hidden and
unknown, and because it was the religion of Spain, then the national
enemy--had been the religion of all England for centuries, and that
under it the earliest charters of public liberty had been wrung
from the crown, and the principle of a representative parliament
established, were facts uncontemplated.
But Elizabeth, while persecuting Roman Catholics, had left in the Book
of Common Prayer of the Church of England a sanction for ceremonial
and for episcopal ordination, and a body of doctrine which were to be
interpreted under the Stuarts by certain Anglican divines as witnesses
to Catholicism. Such interpretation was to be found in Elizabeth’s
reign as a pious opinion. With Laud it was an active principle, and
it brought him to the scaffold. The Elizabethan bishops in the main
were thoroughly Protestant, the queen was the head of the Church of
England, and the ritual of the Church prescribed by her was reduced to
a simplicity that average Protestants could accept.
If Elizabeth burnt anabaptists and hanged other nonconformists, her
excuse was that the Church of England was sufficiently Protestant
to include all well-affected persons. The extreme Puritans whom she
persecuted had this in common with the Roman Catholics, that neither
accepted the absolute supremacy of the crown, and the best Puritan
teaching in England, even when it counselled conformity to the
Established Church, was creating a mind and temper that only found
expression in the Commonwealth.