The Northern Rebellion of 1569

Remarkably, the 1569 rebellion led by the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland has never till now been the subject of a book-length study, though scholars have long recognised that it posed the most serious internal threat to the security of the Elizabethan regime. Thankfully, Krista Kesselring's account of the causes, course and consequences of the rising is an extremely good one, which clears away longstanding misconceptions and allows us to see the failed rebellion as a critical moment in the development of governmental attitudes towards popular protest, in the development of Anglo-Scottish relations, and of English confessional identities. Kesselring's starting-point is that commentators have been mistaken in regarding ‘the Rising of the Northern Earls’ as a neo-feudal rebellion, in which participants acted out of instinctive loyalty—the last gasp of a passing social order. Drawing both on recent scholarship challenging the idea of an essentially passive ‘pre-political’ popular culture in sixteenth-century England, as well as on the doctoral researches of Susan Taylor (who demonstrated how few of the known participants were actually tenants of the earls), Kesselring argues that the 1569 rising, like the Pilgrimage of Grace before it, was a formidable Catholic popular rebellion, in which we should allow both agency and rationality to the rank-and-file participants. Naturally, it was planned at the top, but Kesselring makes a plausible case for an essentially ideological motivation on the part of the earls, and for there being only the most indirect and tenuous of connections between the earls’ plotting and the concurrent plan to marry Mary Queen of Scots to the Duke of Norfolk. Once rebellion was underway, there was no difficulty in attracting support. Recruits were coming forward until the very moment when the earls lost their nerve and fled, and insufficiently equipped volunteers were turned away. The rebel force of 6,000 was an army of well-equipped yeomen, not a rabble, and the earl of Sussex feared there were many sympathisers in the loyalist forces he commanded. Kesselring is surely right to argue that the followers, like the leaders, understood their discontents in terms of religion. After an initial period of ‘tolerant confusion’ at the start of Elizabeth's reign, Protestant Reformation was starting to bite at the local level under the hardline episcopal regime of Bishop Pilkington of Durham. It is an arresting statistic that the rebels and their sympathisers destroyed Protestant books in no fewer than 73 Yorkshire churches, and at least 12 Durham ones, sometimes with great ritual solemnity

Agency (philosophy · Confessional · Faith · Feudalism · Ideology · Loyalty · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Theology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity

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