Chapter XXIV · CONCLUSION

The Pilgrimage of Grace failed completely. Its only result was to hasten the very events which the Pilgrims dreaded. The greater monasteries were suppressed, the north was bridled by the Council of the North, the Poles were all but exterminated. It is not a sufficient explanation of this failure to say that the Pilgrims were contending against the spirit of the age. Although certain revolutions in thought are broadly speaking inevitable, a reaction may have a temporary success, and may delay or modify the operation of the changes. The immediate causes of the Pilgrims’ failure have appeared in the course of this history and may be summarised here:—

(1) The most striking was the Pilgrims’ fundamental misconception of Henry’s character. They believed him to be a weak, good-tempered sensualist, always the tool of some favourite. Consequently they thought that if only the King could be given ministers who shared their own views of public matters, they would be able to guide his policy without difficulty. Henry himself took some pains to hide his despotic temper and his iron will under a mask of careless good humour, and with his northern subjects the deception was completely successful. The Pilgrims never realised that to change the King’s policy they must change the King; on the contrary they professed loyalty to the King’s person and would not countenance pretenders. They saw that it would be more convenient to be able to change the policy of the government by changing the chief ministers, than by the old method of deposing or killing the King, as in the case of Richard II, Henry VI, and Richard III, but the theory of ministerial responsibility had not yet developed, and it did not accord with the facts of the case.

(2) Closely connected with this first blunder is a marked weakness in the opposition to Henry. It had no leader of genius. 330The leaders of the Pilgrimage were honest men and men of ability, but they were nothing more. They had not the unconquerable energy needed to withstand Henry’s determination and the sinister power of Thomas Cromwell. They were brave, they were unselfish, they were lovable, but all that counts for nothing. Henry possessed none of these qualities, but he had that force of character which alone is able to carry through great designs. He stamped himself upon the memory of the nation, while the names of the Pilgrims are forgotten.

(3) These reasons for failure may seem too personal to suit scientific history, but there were other weaknesses in the Pilgrims’ movement of a more general nature. The chief of these was the conflict between the interests of the gentlemen and of the commons.

The gentlemen wanted certain parliamentary reforms. If they could obtain them, they would be able to redress their own grievances. The commons wanted certain social reforms, which they were much more likely to obtain from the King than from Parliament. Briefly the gentlemen wanted higher rents and lower wages, while the commons wanted lower rents and higher wages. It seemed impossible that anything could reconcile these discordant aims.

(4) There was one power strong enough to bring the gentlemen and the commons together, a power which might have so united and inspired them as to carry them through to victory. This was the power of the Church. Yet though the force of religion accomplished much, the clergy of England, as a body, gave little countenance to the Pilgrims. The lower clergy, both regular and secular, devoted themselves to the cause, but the higher ecclesiastics were supine. The bishops who really opposed the King’s innovations, such as Tunstall, fled from the rebels. The Archbishop of York and most of the abbots who were forced to join them were reluctant to share their danger, and gave them no encouragement. The Papacy was inert. Cardinal Pole refused to stir. The Pope was anxious to help the movement, but he was baffled by the passive indifference of the men through whom he might have acted. This inaction to a great extent caused the failure of the most promising attempt to preserve the Church of Rome which was ever made in England.

The reluctance of the higher clergy to take part in the Pilgrimage was due to the principles in which they had been brought up. The Church had always taught that obedience to the King was a duty second only in importance to obedience to the Church. In return the King had protected the Church against heresy. Henry VIII had suddenly broken the old alliance in the most startling manner, 331but ecclesiastics could not all at once throw over their old political theories. The Church of Rome was the church of tradition and authority; her priests preached law and order and submission to the appointed governors temporal and spiritual. They could not suddenly take up the opposite watch-words, and ally themselves with the partisans of freedom and reform. They were dazed and terrified by the overthrow of the old order, and in their bewilderment they stood aside while the Pilgrims marched to death, without attempting to add the weight of the Church to her champions’ cause.

The Papacy ignored the Pilgrims while they lived and forgot them after their death; they were not sufficiently well-born to do her credit. To this day those who are curious in such matters may find recorded in Roman Catholic calendars the death of Bishop Tunstall and of the Blessed Thomas Percy, Sir Thomas’ son, the seventh Earl of Northumberland, but there is not a word concerning Robert Aske, who was more steadfast in his faith than the first, more nearly successful than the second, and morally a better man than either.

The points enumerated were the sources of the Pilgrims’ two great errors, over-confidence in themselves and over-trust in the King. They were over-confident because they had been taught that the Church was irresistible. Hence they had no doubt that their cause must triumph, and they imagined that the victory was theirs when the struggle had scarcely begun. They trusted the King too much because they misconceived his character. They believed him to be weak but well-meaning, whereas he was strong but unscrupulous.

Among the causes of their failure need not be reckoned the lack of foreign assistance. It was an advantage to the Pilgrims that interference from abroad did not arouse national feeling in Henry’s favour. This abstinence on the part of the continental powers was due to accident, not policy. Francis I and Charles V fully intended some time to settle English affairs each in his own way, but the time never arrived. At every crisis in England it happened to be inconvenient for either of the great rivals to stir in the matter, but on every occasion, particularly after the Pilgrimage, they excused their inaction to the Pope by saying that the movement had been premature, but that there would be no difficulty in rousing a fresh revolt at a more suitable opportunity.

Henry knew better than that. He was thoroughly aware that a king is never so powerful as when he has crushed a rebellion. The 332leaders of the opposition are dead, the rank and file are frightened into silence, the waverers are confirmed in their allegiance. Henry took advantage of this interval to put in force all the measures against the Church upon which he had resolved, but when the attempt at revolt was almost forgotten on the continent, Henry began to remember it.

Many influences united to bring about Cromwell’s fall and the religious reaction at the end of the reign. Among these influences should probably be reckoned the numerical strength of the religious conservatives revealed by the Pilgrimage. After the blow which they had received had spent its first effect, they might once more be dangerous. Henry had escaped the first time, but he might not be so successful the second. The memory of his treachery would be against him. Therefore he forestalled opposition by bringing about a small reaction of his own, which he could control. By this means he satisfied all but a few extremists, whom he did not fear. This is not put forward as the sole cause of Henry’s change of policy, but it was probably one of the causes.

After Henry’s death the moderate reaction was swept away by violent religious changes, which oscillated from extreme to extreme. The only effect of the Pilgrimage disappeared, and from that day to this the movement has been regarded as a picturesque episode having no real bearing on national history. Yet if not noteworthy in its effects, it had a political significance, which Henry VIII was the first to perceive. The important feature of the rising was the union between the gentlemen and the commons.

For the previous two hundred years revolts in England had been in character either feudal, that is, led by some great lord for his personal aggrandisement and supported by his relations and dependents, or social, blind outbreaks of the common people, due to general discontent, leaderless and without any definite purpose. Against risings of these types the King’s best ally had been the middle class, the country gentlemen, the burgesses, the professional men, priests and lawyers. The middle class hated equally the tyranny of the nobles and the anarchy of the commons. In return for their constant support the King shared with them the greater part of the executive government. The gentlemen passed laws in parliament and administered them in the country as magistrates; they voted the taxes and assessed them; they called out the musters and commanded them. They were the chief support of the throne, and if they were alienated from the King the royal power would totter.

333The interests of the middle class were so closely bound up with those of a strong central government, and so much opposed to those of the labouring classes, that it seemed impossible for the alliance between King and gentlemen to be weakened. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the first indication of the manner in which this alliance was to be broken. A difference in creed was powerful enough to divide the gentlemen from the King; a similarity in creed was powerful enough to unite a very large proportion of the gentlemen and commons in spite of their previous antagonism. So long as practically everyone in England belonged to the same Church, the common creed was not felt as a bond of union, but now that religious dissensions had inevitably arisen, the aspect of the political world was altered.

Henry quickly grasped the significance of the alliance between the gentlemen and commons, and used all his arts to destroy it. At the time he was successful. The wrongs which the commons had suffered were too recent and bitter for the new-found allies to be able to resist so skilful an opponent as the King. Dissension and suspicion awoke, and the power which might have held them together, the power of the Church, was not employed to help them. The Pilgrimage fell to pieces and ended in disunion. The revolts in Edward VI’s reign, though led by minor country gentlemen, were chiefly social, those in the reigns of his sisters were feudal, and it was more than a century before the gentlemen and commons again united to oppose the King.

In Charles I’s reign the whole face of the nation had changed, but the same forces were at work as those which had produced the Pilgrimage of Grace. Religion was no longer hampered by timidity and tradition. The new creed in which the puritans opposed the throne gave its whole strength to the union and support of its champions. Many of the men who opposed Charles I were lineal descendants of the Pilgrims. Philip and Brian Stapleton, the great-great-grandsons of Christopher Stapleton, both distinguished themselves in the cause of the Parliament. Richard Aske, the great-great-grandson of young Robert Aske, the nephew and namesake of the grand captain, was one of the lawyers who drew up the indictment of Charles I. The great Lord Fairfax was descended on his father’s side from Sir Nicholas Fairfax, an enthusiastic Pilgrim, and on his mother’s from young Robert Aske. Sir William Constable, who signed the death-warrant of Charles I, was the great-great-grandson of Sir Robert Constable. These are not mere genealogical 334freaks. The spirit which had defied Henry VIII overwhelmed Charles I.

Finally, in estimating the value of the Pilgrimage of Grace, its moral importance must be taken into account. The following judgment has been passed upon England in the reign of Henry VIII:—

“The nation purchased political salvation at the price of moral debasement; the individual was sacrificed on the altar of the State; and popular subservience proved the impossibility of saving a people from itself. Constitutional guarantees are worthless without the national will to maintain them; men lightly abandon what they lightly hold; and, in Henry’s reign, the English spirit of independence burned low in its socket, and love of freedom grew cold. The indifference of his subjects to political issues tempted Henry along the path to tyranny.”^[1736]

The Pilgrimage of Grace removes a part of this responsibility from the shoulders of the nation. It was a matter of the utmost moment to her future regeneration that, in an age of selfish cruelty and materialism, there were men who willingly died for justice and freedom, who still cherished the ideal of “England’s ancient liberties,” which were not less inspiring because they had never existed. If the flame of independence burned low, at least their hands were ready to pass on the torch, still unextinguished, and England is not yet last in the race.

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