On September 8, 1549, the 11-year-old Edward VI stood on the roof of the Palace of Westminster and looked down on ten bedraggled, weary West Country men, made to stand where he might see them. A few short weeks before they had led a rebellion that exploded out of Devon and Cornwall and threatened to overwhelm the government. They had hoped to reverse the evangelical radicalism enacted in the boy king’s name by his all-powerful regent — and uncle — Edward Seymour. Perhaps 10,000 rebels had been in the field; 4,000 of them were now dead.
One of the issues was cultural. As Mark Stoyle reveals in A Murderous Midsummer, his gripping, sympathetic account of the Western Rising of 1549, the southwest of England was another country in the 16th century; the western half of Cornwall was wholly Cornish-speaking. Successive injunctions swiftly introduced after Edward came to the throne in January 1547 had targeted the remaining elements of popular worship — rosaries, processions, images in church — and, worse, expanded the use of English in church. It was an affront to their Catholic and Cornish sensibilities. True, the Cornish didn’t speak Latin either, but Latin was the language of God; English was the language of the enemy.
On April 4, 1548, four days after a new English communion was introduced, the man locally responsible for enforcing the will of the “evangelical elite” in power — William Body, a Londoner — was dragged out of his lodgings in Helston and hacked to death. The elite pressed on with advancing the Protestant Reformation. Early in 1549, it passed an Act of Uniformity, imposing a new Book of Common Prayer on every parish in England, to be in place by Whit Sunday.
The Western Rising, also known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, started on June 10. William Harper, the priest of a small village to the west of Exeter named Sampford Courtenay, was preparing to read the newly prescribed service. Two parishioners, William Seagar, a labourer, and the tailor William Underhill, protested. Others joined in. There must, they said, be “no alteration of religion… until King Edward… were come into his full age”.
After the service the crowd refused to disperse. William Hellions, a local gentleman, came to remonstrate. He was descending the steps of the church hall when he was felled by a blow to the neck with a bill, a long-bladed agricultural tool. Like Body, he was torn to pieces.
The government sent two local loyalists, Sir Peter Carew and his uncle Sir Gawen, to quell the unrest. On June 22 they rode out of Exeter to meet the rebels where they were dug in at Crediton, seven miles from the city. Negotiations ended with the Carews setting village houses on fire. Panic erupted across the county. Exeter closed its gates on June 24 and prepared for the worst. On July 6, 2,000 rebels arrived, armed with cannon from ships in harbour, and laid siege to it.
By then Lord John Russell, the greatest landowner in the southwest, had been charged with restoring order, but Russell could get no closer to Exeter than Honiton. He “lived more in fear than was feared”, it was said. A few weeks later he nearly withdrew into Wiltshire. The bellicose Sir Peter Carew talked him out of it. Russell was ordered to “spread abroad rumours of [the rebels’] devilish behaviours”. True, pillaging was widespread. On the surrender of Trematon Castle, outside Saltash, its loyalist defenders “were stripped from their apparel to their very smocks, and some of their fingers broken, to pluck away their rings”, but little blood was shed.
That changed at the end of July. Russell’s small force won a hard-fought victory over some rebels at Fenny Bridges on the banks of the River Otter. Then Lord Grey of Wilton arrived with reinforcements, most of them foreign mercenaries: cavalry from Burgundy and Albania, infantry from Italy armed with arquebuses. The English government had paid for them to help fight the Scots; instead, they turned them against their own people.
On August 4, at Clyst St Mary, this new force met the West Country men. There was a brief moment that day when it seemed that Russell’s men had been routed: a veteran soldier among the rebels named Sir Thomas Pomeroy took a drummer boy and a bugler and concealed them beside enemy lines. When Russell’s troops had all raced forward, Pomeroy commanded them to sound a call to arms. Fearing the attack of a fresh army from the rear, Russell’s men fled.
But they regrouped, razing the village to the ground. Many rebels burnt to death; many drowned in the river while escaping; many were cut down in the streets. After the battle, Russell’s army slaughtered all of its prisoners. By August 20, Devon and Cornwall were in Russell’s hands.
The aftermath was ugly. Loyalists were given rebels, their “bodies, goods and lands”, to ransom. Reprisals, ransoms and naked extortion were widespread. It was a kind of Tudor White Terror, Stoyle says, highlighting the case of Thomas Ennys, an elderly man from St Gluvias who was accused by a loyalist named Stephen Playsted of aiding the rebels. Playsted demanded £400. Ennys refused. Playsted commanded that Ennys’ hands be bound by a rope. The rope was then tightened with a stick until blood spurted out of the fingernails. Ennys still refused to pay. Playsted then had ropes similarly tightened around his head and genitals. Ennys gave Playsted everything he owned.
Might the rising have succeeded? There are suggestions that the rebels were in touch with others in Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Wales. “Such a conjunction,” Stoyle writes, “would have set Edward’s very throne in hazard.” But the labourers, artisans and miners who made up the rebel forces were no match for mercenaries. Lord Grey, as ruthless a soldier as England had, was moved by their courage: “Such was [their] valour and stoutness… that he never, in all the wars that he had been in, did know the like.” It wasn’t enough.
Stoyle, a professor of history at Southampton University, has pieced together the story of the Western Rising with skill and verve. Richly detailed, authoritative and compelling, A Murderous Midsummer is sure to become the definitive account.
This review first appeared in The Times on 6 August 2022.
Read more of Mathew’s reviews here.
Mathew Lyons 