Rising of the North

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Rising of the North began with seven hundred soldiers gathering at Brancepeth Castle in 1569, their banners bearing the Five Wounds of Christ, marching south to topple a Protestant queen. Their goal was to replace Elizabeth I with Mary, Queen of Scots, and return England to Roman Catholicism. What followed was one of the most serious domestic threats Elizabeth ever faced. Why did powerful northern nobles risk everything on this gamble? What happened to the ordinary people caught between rebel earls and a furious queen? And how did the failure of this uprising change the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, for good?

• 2. A Queen Disputed

  ›

  Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, succeeding her half-sister Mary I. Her legitimacy was contested from the start. The marriage of her parents, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, had been questioned, and the Act of Succession of 1536 had clouded her legal standing. Into that uncertainty stepped Mary, Queen of Scots, whose claim rested on her descent from Henry VIII's sister Margaret.

  Mary's claim was first advanced by her father-in-law, King Henry II of France. Mary herself pressed it after returning to Scotland in 1561. For English Catholics, who still made up a significant share of the population, her claim offered a path back to Rome. Northern England was especially fertile ground. Several powerful nobles there were Roman Catholics, and the region had a memory of resistance: the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and Bigod's Rebellion of 1537 had both risen against Henry VIII's centralising reforms.

  Elizabeth's own counsellors, particularly William Cecil, pushed hard for centralization of power. That policy stripped the northern nobility of the regional authority they had long held, deepening their grievances. Mary's position strengthened with the birth of her son James in 1566, but collapsed when she was deposed the following July. She fled to England, and at the time of the Rising she was held under the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury, on Elizabeth's orders.

• 3. Earls in Arms

  ›

  Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland, and Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, led the rebellion together. In November 1569 they occupied Durham, and Thomas Plumtree celebrated Mass inside Durham Cathedral, a direct act of religious defiance in a city that had once been a centre of northern Catholic life.

  From Durham the rebels pushed south toward Bramham Moor. They held Hartlepool, hoping for naval support from abroad. When word reached them that the Earl of Sussex was raising a large force, they abandoned plans to besiege York and turned instead to Barnard Castle, defended by George Bowes. The siege lasted eleven days. Some defenders jumped over the castle walls to join the rebels; others opened a gate from within. Bowes eventually surrendered and was allowed to leave with his life but without his possessions, and the castle was thoroughly looted.

  At Clifford Moor the momentum ran out. Popular support, which the earls had counted on, did not appear. Sussex marched from York on the 13th of December 1569 with ten thousand men against the rebels' six thousand, and another twelve thousand men under Baron Clinton followed behind. Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, the rebel earls retreated northward and finally dispersed their forces, fleeing across the border into Scotland.

• 4. Leonard Dacre's Gamble

  ›

  Leonard Dacre had been an early sympathiser of Mary, Queen of Scots, but his role in the rebellion was never straightforward. When the rising began, he travelled in the opposite direction, heading to Elizabeth's court at Windsor to press a property claim. After the death of his young nephew, the 5th Baron Dacre, in 1569, the barony had passed to the nephew's sisters, all of whom had married sons of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. Dacre wanted that inheritance for himself.

  He then returned to the north presenting himself as a loyalist, but his real intentions remained opaque. He seized Greystoke Castle and fortified his own Naworth Castle, gathering three thousand Cumbrian troops while maintaining the appearance of friendship with the Queen. When the royal army under Baron Hunsdon moved against him, Dacre attacked the retreating force at Gelt River. Hunsdon was outnumbered, but he drove his cavalry into Dacre's infantry, killing between three hundred and four hundred men and capturing between two hundred and three hundred more.

  Dacre escaped into Scotland and then to Brussels, where he died in exile. His attempt to play both sides had ended with his army destroyed and his name permanently blackened.

• 5. Fugitives and Fates

  ›

  With the rebellion broken, the two earls and dozens of lesser rebels scattered into Scotland. An English spy named Robert Constable visited castles near the border and spoke with the fugitives. He wrote to Ralph Sadler describing conversations at Ferniehirst Castle and reporting where other rebels were hiding. Regent Mar noted that Agnes Gray, Lady Home, had been actively working to shelter the English rebels.

  The Earl of Northumberland was captured by James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, and handed over to Elizabeth in 1572. She had him beheaded at York. Westmorland fared differently in the short term but worse in the long run. He hid at Ferniehirst Castle before escaping to Flanders, where he died impoverished. His family lost their ancestral homes, and his wife, Jane Howard, fled to the Continent as well, spending the rest of her life under house arrest.

  Jane's brother, the Duke of Norfolk, was first imprisoned and then pardoned, but he was imprisoned again after the Ridolfi plot of 1571 and executed in 1572. His treason charges specifically included comforting and relieving the English rebels after they fled the realm, a charge that connected his fate directly to the northern rising.

• 6. Retribution and Reckoning

  ›

  Queen Elizabeth declared martial law across the Yorkshire Dales, despite the fact that the ordinary people there had shown little support for the earls. She demanded at least seven hundred executions. A contemporary account recorded that the victims were "wholly of the meanest sort of people", so that hardly a village escaped a public hanging. In total, six hundred supporters of Mary were executed.

  George Bowes, who had held Barnard Castle against the rebels, served as Provost Marshal and travelled the region carrying out justice. By February 1570, Bowes, Sussex, and Thomas Gargrave were writing to Elizabeth asking her to grant pardons and allow former rebels to become loyal subjects. A pardon for ordinary husbandmen was issued on the 18th of February, partly to head off a second uprising under Leonard Dacre. A second pardon for Dacre's own men followed on the 4th of March. On the 22nd of March, wealthier rebels were permitted to submit to Elizabeth's agents, provided they attended a sermon, swore an oath of loyalty, and paid a financial penalty calculated on the value of their property. Some of those fines went directly toward paying the soldiers who had suppressed them.

  Pope Pius V attempted to bolster the rebellion by issuing the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis in 1570, excommunicating Elizabeth and declaring her deposed. The document arrived after the rebellion had already been crushed. Rather than helping Mary's cause, it gave Elizabeth fresh reason to treat English Catholics as a security threat and set off a chain of assassination conspiracies, beginning with the Ridolfi plot. Mary, Queen of Scots, was eventually brought to trial for treason in 1587, convicted, and executed.