The story of an insurrection
1547
Disquiet brews in Devon and Cornwall as proponents of the Reformation challenge religious conservatives.
21 January 1549
The Act of Uniformity establishes the new Book of Common Prayer as the only legal liturgy in England, replacing Latin missals.
10 June 1549
On Whit Monday, parishioners of Sampford Courtenay in mid-Devon decry the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer. Within days, the protests have spread across Devon and throughout Cornwall, with “captains” assembling an army of local men.
c18 June 1549
Lord Russell, the former lord president of the Council of the West, is sent from London to quell the rising – initially with only a small band of troops.
2 July 1549
Protesters outside Exeter, bolstered by volunteer forces – thousands later arriving from Cornwall under the leadership of Humphrey Arundell – begin a siege of the city that lasts five weeks.
c29 July 1549
Having penetrated no farther west than Honiton, Russell is confronted by a rebel advance and wins a pivotal battle at Fenny Bridges just west of the town.
6 August 1549
After finally receiving reinforcements, including foreign mercenaries, Russell’s army arrives in Exeter, where the siege is lifted.
17 August 1549 Having regrouped at Sampford Courteney, the protesters are routed by Russell’s 8,000-strong army in a bloody one-day clash. Hundreds of rebels die in the battle and subsequent repression.
27 January 1550
Leaders of the rising who had been imprisoned in the Tower, including Humphrey Arundell, are hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in London.
The rising is comprehensively crushed.
protesters, whom he dismissed as “Papists” (Catholics); his writings chiefly aimed to celebrate their defeat and to commemorate the role Exeter played in it.
Moreover, because he had spent that summer confined to the city, Hooker was not as well informed as he might otherwise have been about the developments that had taken place elsewhere. His view of the insurrection is very much that of the man on the Exeter city walls, in other words. And because Hooker’s accounts were relied upon so heavily by later historians – including Frances RoseTroup, whose formidable book The Western Rebellion of 1549, first published in 1913, still remains the standard history of the rising – we continue to see the tragic events of that summer through a slightly distorted lens.
In my own recent study of the rebellion,
A Murderous Midsummer, I have attempted to readjust the focus. By pulling together the many new fragments of evidence about the rising discovered during the century since Rose-Troup laid down her pen, I have sought to reduce our reliance upon Hooker and to produce a new history of the “Great Commotion” in the west. My new account not only challenges the traditional narrative in various respects, but also suggests that the protesters posed a far more serious threat to the central regime than has generally been recognised.
In fact, the roots of the rebellion stretched back some time before the outbreak of violence recognised as the Western Rising. Already, two years earlier, a doctrinal dispute had sprung up between a traditionalist Exeter Cathedral canon, Richard Crispin, and Philip Nicolles, a young Protestant firebrand. Crispin, who in 1547 had denounced reformed theology from the pulpit, had been challenged in print by Nicolles, and soon found himself imprisoned in the Tower. For local religious conservatives, this was a clear sign of just how uncomfortable life was likely to be for them under the new, zealously Protestant regime. The resentment sparked by this affair may well have helped to pave the way for the later explosion of violence in 1549.
Cornish commotion
The ire expressed by people in the West Country at the imposition of liturgy in English was particularly virulent in Cornwall. The year before the much larger rebellion that began at Sampford Courtenay, a short-lived popular rising dubbed the “Cornish Commotion” erupted in the far west of Cornwall (for more details, see the box, right). This revolt, which was perhaps triggered by the regime’s imposition of a new “order of communion” in English, reflected the fierce determination of local people to protect both traditional religious practices and Cornwall’s unique cultural identity. Having killed William Body, a royal commissioner who had attempted to implement the government’s religious changes in the district around Helston, the insurgents are said to have declared that: “Whosoever would defend Body, or follow such new fashions as he did, they would punish him likewise.”
Though Cornwall may not (as believed by Rose-Troup) have been where the disturbances of 1549 began, the speed with which its people responded to that event demonstrates the strength of feeling there. The protests that built to become the Western Rising began in Sampford Courtenay on 10 June, spreading to Cornwall in early July. Subsequently, in the space of just three weeks, Humphrey Arundell – a gentleman from near Bodmin – managed to raise a 6,000-strong army in Cornwall and march with it to Exeter. There they joined the Devonian forces in a siege of the city that continued for five long weeks before government forces were able to regroup and drive the rebels back to Sampford Courtenay.
In other words, there was a rapid mobi
lisation of and advance by large numbers of Cornishmen. This would have made the combined forces of the rebellion far more dynamic, assertive and threatening than has previously been recognised. And from the government’s point of view, the rebels’ movements in July 1549 must have looked far more purposeful and menacing than traditional tellings of the rising would suggest.
Conversely, the royal forces under Lord Russell’s command that were initially tasked with subduing the rebels were much weaker than has previously been appreciated. It is now clear that, right up until the end of July, Russell had remained extremely short of men – and, therefore, extremely vulnerable to attack. On or around 29 July, just such an assault had seemed to be in the offing when the rebels advanced in force upon Russell’s camp at Honiton, forcing him to sally out to meet them. The resulting battle fought at Fenny Bridges proved to be a crucial turning point. Russell managed first to defeat the rebel forces that had already assembled at the bridge over the Otter west of Honiton, and also to disperse a “new supply” of 800 insurgents who had hurried up to reinforce them. Specifically described as “Cornish men”, these latecomers probably represented the advance guard of the main Cornish host.
It had been a desperately close thing. If Arundell had managed to bring up more of his Cornishmen to east Devon just a day or two earlier, he might well have been able to force the king’s general into headlong flight. If that had happened, the inhabitants of the restive counties at Russell’s back might well have joined hands with the insurgents, opening the way for the rebellion to catch fire right across the south of England and Wales – and, potentially, for the regime of the Duke of Somerset (the man who led Edward’s government) to be toppled altogether. As it was, Russell himself was reinforced almost at once by the first of the mercenary soldiers for whom he had been pleading for so long, and was thus able to move onto the offensive at last.
What followed, as we’ve seen, was bloody defeat for the rebels on 17 August at Sampford Courtenay. Yet those protesters’ aims came close to being achieved during the factional struggle that then raged in the capital.
Anger in East Anglia
The West Country was by no means the only part of the kingdom to experience serious outbreaks of disorder in 1549. Another huge popular rising, known today as Kett’s Rebellion, was taking place in East Anglia at the same time as the Western Rising, and lesser “stirs” also occurred in a score of other counties. As a result, many powerful figures turned against the Duke of Somerset, believbloody ing that his policies had brought England to the brink of anarchy. In October, Somerset was brought down by an aristocratic coup in London – a coup in which Sir Thomas Arundell, a wealthy Cornish gentleman and cousin of the rebel Humphrey Arundell, played a leading role.
For several months, it was then widely believed that a clique of religious conservatives resistant to the Reformation were on the point of taking power. They would make Edward’s adult half-sister, Mary – a devoted Catholic – the young king’s “governor”, halting the drive towards Protestantism. For Humphrey Arundell and the other captured rebel leaders, by now imprisoned in the Tower, it was a moment pregnant with hope.
Alas for them, the moment passed all too soon. Sir Thomas Arundell and his conservative allies were outfoxed by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who seized power and set up a regime even more strongly Protestant than the one that had been led by Somerset. In January 1550, Humphrey Arundell and the other rebel captains in the Tower were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, thus bringing the story of the Western Rising to an end.
Yet this remarkable episode was never forgotten by those who had lived through it. Lord Grey, one of the royal commanders, subsequently remarked of the rebels that “such was the valour and stoutness of these men… that he never, in all the wars he had been in, did know the like”. Another loyalist similarly marvelled at the courage shown by the protesters in the face of Russell’s mercenaries, later recalling that “the archers of the rebels did so behave themselves with their volleys of arrows against divers… bands [of]… Arquebusiers, Italians and Spaniards, that they drove them from… banks, ditches, hedges and other advantages of ground, to the great mischief of many of those strangers.”
Few of those who had taken part in the rising ever dared to speak of it openly afterwards, for fear of harsh punishment. But at least one piece of evidence shows that the rebels’ courage and determination was remembered with pride by their children and grandchildren. In the early 17th century, the Devonian antiquarian Thomas Westcote wrote of the events of the Western Rising that, if he should record what was still commonly said by the local people about “the strength, and force and resolution of these commons (the archers especially), you might, peradventure, take it with some doubt lest it increased somewhat by time or penning”.
The protesters may have gone down to bloody defeat – but their martial exploits lived long in the memories of their descendants.
Mark Stoyle is professor of history at Southampton University. His new book, A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549, is published by Yale University Press