The Spanish Armada Read Online Free PDF Page B

suspicious absence was a curtain-raiser to rebellion by her Catholic subjects, with him as
their noble figurehead. Inevitably, that October Norfolk was arrested en route to Windsor and carted off to the Tower of London, where so many of his family had been incarcerated before him and
where his father had been executed in January 1547 for conceitedly (and treasonably) including the royal arms of Edward the Confessor in his heraldry. 10
    As in many rural counties, the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 had made little difference to the beliefs of the traditionalist populations of those immediately south of the Scottish
border. Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire were a world way from London and the carefully contrived splendour of the royal court. The much-loved pre-Reformation rituals continued habitually as if
Mary I was still occupying the throne, with holy water, rosaries, images and devotional candles being used in defiance of official Protestant doctrine. 11 It was only a matter of time before the cauldron that was the Catholic north, containing a heady, seething mix of religion, resentment and reaction, finally boiled over.
    On 9 November 1569, Thomas Percy, Seventh Earl of Northumberland and Charles Neville, Sixth Earl of Westmorland, rose in revolt – church bells being rung backwards to warn their tenantry
to muster. They intended to head south to free Mary Queen of Scots from her new prison at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, ‘as next heir, failing issue of Her Majesty’ and return England
to Catholicism. 12 On 14 November they arrived in Durham, marching, with heavy symbolism, behind the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, last
carried by rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace against Elizabeth’s father thirty-two years before. They swept through the eleventh-century cathedral, tearing down any emblem of Protestantism
they could find and triumphantly burnt the English prayer books and Bible in an iconoclastic pyre. They then joyfully celebrated Mass.
    The Lord President of the North, Thomas Radcliffe, Third Earl of Sussex, had only four hundred badly armed cavalry with him atYork and was fearful of facing the rebels on
the battlefield with such a small force of perhaps doubtful loyalty. For Elizabeth, 265 miles (425 km) away in firmly Protestant London, the insurrection was a startling recurrence of the perilous
threats that had persistently haunted her Tudor forebears and siblings. 13 Her grandfather, Henry VII, whose claim to the crown was in reality of
only paper-thin legality, had faced a series of uprisings after his victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485. Her father Henry VIII put down rebellions against the dissolution of the
monasteries in the north in 1536–7, but only with the greatest difficulty. Her teenage half-brother, Edward VI, was forced to hide in Windsor Castle during the dangerous revolts in the West
Country, the south, midlands and in Yorkshire in 1549 over the introduction of the English prayer book, and also had to counter Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk that same year. Further
insurrections followed in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Rutland in 1551, involving ‘light knaves, horse-coursers and craftsmen’. Finally, Mary I had defeated rebel forces in
London in 1554 over her planned marriage with Philip of Spain. Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to face the anger and rude weapons of the commons and, with characteristic Tudor truculence, she
raged at delays in confronting and crushing them on the field of battle.
    In York, Sir Ralph Sadler, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, explained patiently to Cecil why Sussex could not risk fighting the rebel forces immediately. ‘The ancient faith’, he
counselled, ‘still lies like lees at the bottom of men’s hearts and if the vessel is ever so little stirred, comes to the top.’
    There are not ten gentlemen in all this country that favour her [Elizabeth’s] proceedings in the cause of religion.
    The common