The Tudors

Norfolk had invested too heavily in his hopes to put them aside at the mere word of the queen, and retired in dudgeon to consider his options - which included raising the standard of rebellion. In the end, his nerve failed him, but two of his allies, the Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, decided to make their move without his support, calling out their retainers in the name of the old religion and marching southwards with the intention of taking control of the person of the Scottish queen. Their plot was doomed from the moment that Mary herself was whisked away to the safety of the Midlands, and their army melted away as the Earl of Sussex marched northwards at the head of vastly superior forces. The rising of the northern earls was put down with greater cruelty than any other Tudor rebellion. In the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry VIII had demanded the execution of a man in every village north of the Trent, but the then Duke of Norfolk had wisely mitigated his severity in practice. After this much less serious rebellion, Henry’s solution seems to have been implemented by his daughter. Perhaps as many as 800 men were hanged, although Elizabeth claimed ‘we have always been of our own nature inclined to mercy’. Cruelty to the little people, however, was mixed with an astonishing indulgence towards the main culprit, the Duke of Norfolk. His grandfather would never have dared show the degree of disobedience to Henry VIII which he had shown to Henry’s daughter. But equally, Elizabeth herself was far less ready than her father to destroy her greatest subject. For all her insistence that she was every inch as much a monarch as her father, Elizabeth could do nothing about the cultural disadvantage conferred on her by her sex, and the relationship between sovereign and nobility could never be the same under a woman as under a man.

Norfolk, however, pursued his own destruction with unwonted steadiness of purpose. Released from custody in August 1570, he was soon deep in intrigue with Spanish and papal agents once more, still with a view to marrying Mary. Little more than a year later he was back in the Tower, and in January 1572 he was convicted of high treason. Even so, it was four months before Elizabeth could be persuaded to sign his death warrant. Elizabeth was nothing like as ready as her father to set the heads of her nobility rolling around Tower Hill.