The promulgation of the Book of Common Prayer on Whit Sunday 1549 also marked the end of the first phase of Edward’s reign, for, as the Yorkshire parson Robert Parkyn put it, in a little personal chronicle of the English Reformation, ‘after the said Pentecost... began a commotion or insurrection of people in the south
Parts as Cornwall and Devonshire’. His own north country, unfortunately for the Catholic rebels of the south, remained largely quiescent throughout the turmoil, although a few thousand men took up arms in the vicinity of Scarborough before being dispersed with the offer of a pardon. The north as a whole had learned its lesson back in 1536. Lesser protests against the new Church service were made in many other areas, notably around Oxford, but it was in the south-west that protest assumed the threatening dimensions of a full-scale rebellion. By the beginning of July, the rebels controlled much of Devon and Cornwall, and were laying siege to Exeter. Their demands, which were predominantly religious, focused on the restoration of the Latin Mass and of traditional liturgical ceremonies, but also voiced a particular reluctance to accept fundamental change during a royal minority. A reply to these demands was published in the king’s name on 8 July. Predictably, it takes its stand on the authority of the royal person, and emphasises that this authority is not diminished one jot by the king’s youth:
Be we of less authority for our age? Be we not your king now as we shall be? Shall ye be subjects hereafter, and now are ye not?... We are your rightful king, your liege lord, the sovereign Prince of England, not by our age, but by God’s ordinance, not only when we shall be twenty-one years of age, but when we were of ten years. We possess our crown not by years, but by the blood and descent from our father King Henry the Eighth.
We should probably not imagine that Edward wrote this himself - although by now he was probably capable of it. But at twelve years of age, he would certainly have been capable of endorsing its strongly royalist sentiments and making them his own.
The government’s problems were by no means confined to the south-west nor even to the religious conservatives. For at the same time, social and economic grievances provoked another rising among the countryfolk of East Anglia under the leadership of Robert Kett. This is sometimes seen as a Protestant revolt in contrast to the essentially Catholic revolt of the West Country, largely because leading Protestant clergymen, such as Dr Matthew Parker (later to be Elizabeth I’s first Archbishop of Canterbury) and Dr John Barrett, the foremost Protestant preacher of mid-Tudor Norwich, went out of the city to the main rebel camp on nearby Mousehold Heath, and celebrated Prayer Book services there. It would be safer to see this as a cannier revolt.
In fact, the shock of the Prayer Book probably sparked off all the protests that summer, whether or not their grievances were religious. The East Anglian rebels, like all Tudor rebels, were anxious to emphasise their loyalty - all Tudor rebels laboured under the huge disadvantage that in a true monarchy, as in a one-party state, effective opposition to the regime could only be interpreted as treason - and perhaps felt that their social and economic grievances might be listened to more sympathetically if they were not combined with a challenge to what was in effect the government’s headline policy: religious reform. East Anglia was as yet hardly a hotbed of Protestantism.
One or two towns (such as Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich) had influential and growing Protestant minorities. But the revolt was primarily rural, and Protestantism had made little headway in the countryside. The generally Catholic sympathies of the region were evident a few years later in the massive support it gave to the cause of Mary Tudor in the succession crisis of 1553.
Kett’s strategy was a shrewd one, for Somerset did indeed respond with some genuine sympathy for the East Anglian grievances, and seems to have been reluctant to take the gloves off. But his aristocratic colleagues, fearing for the gains they had made over the last few years, were less squeamish. Lord Russell led a force of German and Italian mercenaries against the western rebels, cutting them down in their thousands in August. Ironically, the mercenaries were themselves Catholics, though the idea that they might have proved sympathetic to the rebel aims had they known them is a trifle naive (the rebels cannot have looked like a promising paymaster). At much the same time, the Earl of Warwick delivered a similar object lesson in the virtues of obedience to the rebels of Norfolk. The government’s victory is no surprise. Without magnate leadership, risings of this kind were doomed to failure, and these risings had nothing like the gentry and noble leadership that had taken over the Pilgrimage of Grace. The two regions which experienced the worst disorder in 1549 were the two regions whose traditional power relationships had been disrupted by the overthrow of their magnate dynasties. East Anglia had been dominated for most of the Tudor era by the Howards, who had been taken down in 1546, and the West Country had traditionally looked to the power of the Courtenays, Marquesses of Exeter, who had been taken down in 1538. Had the traditional leaders been in place, then as long as those leaders remained loyal the chances are that the first stirrings of revolt would have been promptly suppressed. The fact that Howard and Courtenay were both in the Tower meant that there was nobody available either to suppress the risings promptly or to provide them with the organisation and legitimacy which might have made them a real challenge to the regime.
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