Читать книгу The Northern Question - Tom Hazeldine - Страница 11

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Badlands

The first question of all is how the middle swathe of Britain ended up as the unloved ward of an English state whose centre of operations lay 200 miles to the south, the perambulations of its kings and queens rarely straying beyond Watling Street in all the years until the territory they ruled over had so increased its domestic extent that Victoria and Albert could withdraw to the seclusion of Balmoral in Aberdeenshire.¹ England and Scotland are both so long in the tooth, as political structures go, that state formation on this European outcrop dates back to the Early Middle Ages, superimposed on yet older rounds of uneven cultural development usually operating to the advantage of the island’s southern climes. The greatest Iron Age monumental landscapes lie within walking distance of one another in the Wiltshire countryside, while the civic life of Roman Bath, London and St Albans was leagues ahead of the garrison economy of the border country beyond Chester and York.

True, the more or less complete collapse of social organisation following the legions’ withdrawal in the fifth century temporarily upended this regional hierarchy. A meeting-point of the Saxon and Celtic worlds, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria fused together their cultural elements to light up the Dark Ages and make a signal contribution to the revival of art and letters in the Latin West. The monks of Jarrow and Lindisfarne produced the foundational text in the history of the English peoples and some of the finest decorative manuscripts in the Hiberno-Saxon style, while York’s cathedral school furnished the template for the palace school at Aachen, where Alcuin of York marshalled the Carolingian Renaissance. Alcuin’s paean to ‘York’s famed city’ describes how his own tutor, Ælberht, sought out books in foreign lands, building a library of ‘priceless treasures’.²

But a long North Sea flank exposed Northumbria to the Scandinavian invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries which destroyed Ælberht’s celebrated library and swallowed up York into the Viking world. By a process of elimination, it was left to the kingdom of Wessex at Britain’s southern limit, the only Anglo-Saxon polity to withstand the Norsemen’s advance, to act as nucleus for the English state. Æthelstan of Wessex, self-styled ‘king of all Britain’, seized control of the kingdom of York in 927. After a period of confusion, York’s last Norwegian ruler was felled at Stainmore in the Pennines, at a stroke reducing it from a Viking statelet to an English provincial town.³

Æthelstan’s Anglo-Saxons never fully assimilated their Northumbrian annexe, however, entrusting its governance to resident Anglo-Scandinavian earls. Yorkshire was an unwieldy addition to the Wessex shire system, more than twice the size of any other county. There were no royal sheriffs in the country to its north, nor would the Domesday survey be hazarded in these parts. In Cumbria, an obscure Celtic polity lingered under Scottish lordship for a quarter of a century after the Norman Conquest. Circumstances dictated, therefore, that the prospects for Norman rule in the North wouldn’t be decided by a distant battle at Hastings.

Bending with the wind, the last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of York crowned William of Normandy at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that Ealdred prised an oath from the Conqueror to ‘hold this nation as well as the best of any kings before him did’. Ealdred’s stricture was given short shrift by the king’s lieutenants, Odo of Bayeux and William fitz Osbern, who ‘built castles widely throughout this nation, and oppressed the wretched people; and afterwards it always grew very much worse’.⁴ They brought the ecclesiastical province of York under Canterbury’s sway and initiated a tenurial revolution in the shadows of the fortresses bemoaned by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Domesday survey shows a couple of dozen Continental barons in receipt of more than 90 per cent of Yorkshire manors.⁵ The land was parcelled out into territorially compact baronies, very unlike the jumbling of fiefs in more securely held southern counties. One of Odo’s retainers, Ilbert de Lacy, administered an enormous cluster of confiscated estates in the West Riding from the Norman castle town of Pontefract, which guarded an entrance into the Vale of York and crossing points over the Aire river.

The biggest of the myriad challenges to the onset of Norman rule arose in the North East, among a people accustomed to running their own affairs. According to the Wiltshire chronicler William of Malmesbury, southern England’s nearest equivalent to Bede, the Northumbrians ‘had been taught by their ancestors either to be free or to die’.⁶ The Conqueror initially went down the West Saxon route of appointing native strongmen to the earldom of Northumbria, but his original candidate was no sooner in place than murdered by a member of the house of Bamburgh, and his replacement – Cospatric, a kinsmen of the assailant – absconded to join the party of Edgar Ætheling, English claimant to the throne, affronts which brought a change of tack. William despatched one of his own attendants, Robert Cumin, to the tiny monastic town of Durham with 700 knights. Writing thirty years later a Durham Benedictine monk alleged that Cumin ‘allowed his men to ravage the countryside by pillaging and killing’. Symeon took care to attribute the ensuing revolt not to the Durham townsfolk but to the people north of the Tyne, ‘united in one accord not to submit to a foreign lord’. Early one January morning in 1069, they ‘burst in together through all the gates and rushed through the whole town killing the earl’s companions’. The mob set the bishop’s house ablaze and settled accounts with Cumin as he fled the flames.⁷

The indigenous rebellion spread to York, the only appreciable urban settlement beyond Chester, as forces under Edgar and Cospatric combined with a newly landed Danish army to overwhelm its garrison and capture the sheriff. The possibility glimmered of a breakaway Anglo-Scandinavian polity in this old Viking heartland.⁸ To dispel it, the Normans retaliated against the resident population once the Danes had withdrawn to the Humber for the winter. Devastation of the countryside was a standard component of medieval warfare, but William’s scorched-earth programme appears to have been unusually extensive. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the king ‘went northward with all of his army which he could gather, and wholly ravaged and laid waste the shire’. Symeon alleges that William left ‘no village inhabited between York and Durham’. Another Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, describes how ‘in his anger he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of [the] Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance.’⁹ Seventeen years after the harrying, half of North Riding vills and a third of vills in the East and West Ridings were recorded as wholly or partly waste in the Domesday Book. Yorkshire as a whole had the highest proportion of waste of any surveyed county. Much land may have gone out of cultivation due either to the physical devastation inflicted by the king’s forces or to subsequent estate reorganisation by his tenants-in-chief, abandoning marginal settlements to concentrate the region’s diminished resources on the most viable lowland sites.¹⁰ An unparalleled upset had been met with an infamous and indelible reprisal. William’s son and heir, Rufus, was able to impose shire government on Northumberland and drag Cumbria into the orbit of the English state, establishing a garrison and peasant colony at Carlisle. For the first time, the whole of England sat under one political roof.

Initially this was a flimsy arrangement, vulnerable to the tremors of dynastic strife. Infighting between the Conqueror’s grandchildren during the Anarchy of 1135–54 saw the Border region ceded to the Scottish king David I, consolidating his own realm on Norman lines. David proceeded to hold court and mint coins at Carlisle. A dip in Scottish power after his death, however, tilted the balance of forces back the way of the English monarchy. A Yorkshire chronicler relates how Henry II, with righteous selfinterest, warned ‘that the king of England should not be cheated of so great a part of his kingdom, and that he could not passively endure such an amputation’. The same source adds that the Scots ‘wisely decided that the king of England had the advantage in this matter, on the merits of the case and in the strength of his forces’.¹¹ An agreement struck at Chester in 1157 returned the frontier to the Solway and Tweed. In a later treaty made at York, the Scots quitclaimed Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland to leave only Berwick and a sliver of ‘debatable lands’ in contention.

Viking conquest, regional secession, Scottish annexation – every alternative destiny for the former land of Bede and Alcuin had been closed off. Superior force of arms and feudal settlement had bonded England together at a remarkably early historical juncture compared with other European states, its feudal hierarchy topped by Norman and other French potentates forming part of a cohesive cross-Channel ruling bloc. In France, by contrast, the Capetian dynasty needed several centuries to bolt additional principalities onto its realm, one after the other, while unification of Italy and Germany would have to await the stimulus of modernera nationalist impulses. But just as the Risorgimento, far from uniting the Italian peninsula on an equal footing, subordinated one half of the country to the other, so northern England would languish on the margins of a kingdom which cared little for it. Geoffrey Barrow, a historian of medieval Scotland, writes that

Although the kings from William Rufus to Edward I took very seriously their grip upon Cumbria and Northumbria, they could not spend much time visiting these regions which were remote from the castles, hunting lodges, monasteries and rich trading towns of southern England, Normandy, Maine, the lower Loire valley, Poitou and Gascony whence their power derived and where, one feels, their hearts really lay.¹²

The character of the territory recovered by Henry II remains to be sketched in. Even by medieval standards it was overwhelmingly rural and underdeveloped, too remote to benefit from either the patronage of the royal court or the commercial stimulant of London, which dominated trade with Continental ports a short hop across the Narrow Sea. Urban life was especially slow out of the blocks west of the Pennines, very much off the beaten track and confined to small-time Irish Sea traffic. Ports on the east coast were better situated to access the prime commercial routes pointing to London and Europe, but they never captured more than a fifth of the available trade. York, Hull and Newcastle, together with Penrith, a market centre in Cumbria’s Eden valley, were the only northern representatives among the fifty richest boroughs of pre-Black Death England. York never recovered its Anglo-Saxon prominence but in a regional context it remained altogether exceptional. Nerve centre of the northern church, an inland port prosperous in the wool trade and a county capital surrounded by good farming country, it vied with Bristol, Lincoln and Norwich for the title of England’s foremost provincial city, yet even York had only one-seventh of London’s taxable wealth in the lay subsidies of 1327 and 1332.¹³

What about the countryside? Whereas the richer soils and drier climate of southern counties facilitate a judicious mixture of arable and livestock farming, Defoe found north Lancashire ‘all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast’. Westmorland was ghastlier still, ‘the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales itself’.¹⁴ The standard depiction of English feudalism is taken from the champion country of central and southern England, where in a landscape of common-field agriculture and clustered settlements there was virtually a manor for every village. Here, the strength of feudal lordship told in the preponderance of customary over free rents and tenures. Further north, in lowland areas of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, nucleated villages and customary tenures were also the norm, although taxable wealth was lower. Customary tenures were even more prevalent across the Border counties, where Henry I had established substantial lordships. In boggy and isolated Lancashire, on the other hand, free rents were of higher value than customary ones.¹⁵

The distinction ought to matter, since by the end of the thirteenth century customary tenants had been declared legally unfree. But delayed subdivision of feudal holdings and the dispersed settlement patterns associated with pastoral farming meant that seigniorial supervision was more thinly stretched in the North, certainly in upland areas. Combined with the lighter labour requirements of animal husbandry and an abundance of reclaimable land into which peasants might flee, this made for less onerous feudal exactions, and no automatic connection ever obtained between customary tenure, servile status and compulsory labour services.¹⁶ E. A. Kosminsky cautioned in a classic work that ‘the division of peasants into “villein” and “free”, characteristic of southern manors, can only with difficulty be applied under northern conditions.’¹⁷

Some parts of the North did more closely mirror the intense feudalism of the Midlands and the South. The Boldon Book, a Domesday-like survey conducted on the Bishopric of Durham’s estates in the late twelfth century, provides evidence of wellfunctioning demesnes and villeinage with heavy labour services. But as a rule, whereas profit-minded estate holders in the South East might ramp up demesne production to serve the large London market, labour services were less important to the northern feudal economy than money rents and they decayed earlier, in many cases well before the arrival of the Black Death in 1348–9 when severe labour shortages caused landlords everywhere to pull out of demesne cultivation and become rentiers instead.¹⁸

The burdens of serfdom, then, were generally lighter in the North, but rural benightedness – the absence of towns and literacy – was correspondingly deeper. Musgrove, citing county-by-county statistical studies by Conan Doyle and Havelock Ellis, argues persuasively that the North was historically marked by a much lower quotient of intellectuals – thinkers, writers, artists – than the South. Jewell supplies supporting evidence, pointing out the monopoly of higher education (Oxford, Cambridge, the Inns of Court) held by the South down to the 1820s, leaving the North in a very different situation than Scotland. As Musgrove puts it, ‘highly productive contexts for the intellectual life do not include militarised frontiers or heavily industrialised towns. It was the misfortune of northern England after the age of Bede that its greatness was based on both.’¹⁹

Accounting for no more than one-eighth of medieval England’s population and wealth, the land above the Mersey, Trent and Humber presented too narrow a platform for its magnates to sustain a leading role in the elite revolts which plagued the country’s weaker kings.²⁰ Northumberland and Yorkshire landowners of middling wealth were first to stir against King John, refusing to sponsor or enlist in his attempt to claw back French territories lost to the Capetian monarchy, so that ‘Northerners’ became a tag for the 1215 Revolt as a whole, but estate holders from eastern and southern counties ultimately had the run of the Magna Carta committee.²¹

It required a large inflow of resources from the centre, continued for many years, to put the northern aristocracy on a stronger footing. Conquest of the principality of Wales in 1284 left Cumberland and Northumberland standing on England’s only land frontier with an independent state. The attack on Scottish independence, beginning with capture of Berwick and victory at Dunbar in 1296, opened up opportunities for rising northern dynasties to accumulate estates and offices at the Crown’s pleasure.²² Even after Edward III pivoted English aggrandisement from Scotland to France in 1337, Anglo-Scottish conflict would rumble on for centuries. Wardens of the march were subsidised by the royal court to hold the North against the Scots using private armies recruited from Durham, Yorkshire and the Border counties. Henry Percy, a Yorkshire magnate who had fought at Berwick and Dunbar, acquired the castle and barony of Alnwick from Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, in 1310. The Nevilles, descended from Anglo-Danish thegns in County Durham, also won royal favour through military service on the frontier. In the century leading up to Bosworth, the Percys held the wardenship of the east march for eighty years and there were Neville equivalents in the west for close on sixty.²³ Extra spending power, broad jurisdiction and the prestige of high office provided them with extraordinary numbers of retainers.

The splintering of the Plantagenet dynasty into the cadet branches of Lancaster and York, after defeat in the Hundred Years War turned a rapacious English baronage in on itself, saw unprecedented intrusions into national politics by these bastard-feudal affinities. Richard Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker, controlled the marcher wardenships and other key posts in the border counties, and ruled over north Yorkshire from Middleham Castle in Richmondshire, where he briefly imprisoned Edward IV. But the support networks of such towering figures far outran any one region. Warwick also held a string of strategic commands on either side of the Channel. He was keeper of the seas, captain of the Calais garrison, warden of the Cinque Ports, constable of Dover. Moving against Henry VI in 1460, he exploited his mercantile connections to stir a popular revolt in Kent and London against the Lancastrian regime.

The dynastic struggles of 1455–85 were never, therefore, the cross-Pennine joust that their historiographical framing as a ‘War of the Roses’ implies. But after Warwick was cut down at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, his estates and offices fell to Edward IV’s youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who built up the country’s largest aristocratic affinity on the basis of sequestered Neville assets. Abiding on his estates in preference to spending time at court, Gloucester forged few bonds among the southern gentry – sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, servants of the royal household. Outraged by his coup d’état in 1483, their support leaked across the Channel to the Tudor court-in-waiting. In response, Richard shoehorned a few dozen members of his ducal affinity into forfeited estates, local-government offices and military posts in southern counties, a controversial – and tellingly brief – inversion of England’s normal direction of gravity.²⁴

Gloucester’s demise was sealed by an unexpected brittleness of his northern power base. Thomas Stanley, an officeholder in the Cheshire and Lancaster palatinates involved in multiple demarcation disputes with the prince over the years, would intervene decisively at Bosworth on the side of his stepson, Henry Tudor, receiving the earldom of Derby in thanks. He is even said to have placed the royal coronet on Henry’s head when the battle was won. What the Ricardian interlude shows is that under premodern conditions, not even a member of the royal line could scrabble together quite enough strength in the North to reign in defiance of Establishment opinion. The sine qua non of governing England was to have its southern heartland on side.

Stanley Bindoff of University College London once wrote that ‘Tudor rule meant the rule of the South over the North’.²⁵ It also spelled the rule of London over the rest of the country. A rarity among European capitals for being both a seat of government and a major international port, London swelled to a population of 185,000 in the course of the sixteenth century – a threefold increase – as its merchants gained a stranglehold over the cloth trade with the Continental entrepôt of Antwerp, while an upturn in culture and the arts under court sponsorship culminated in the Elizabethan theatre.²⁶ All but two of the twenty most prosperous Tudor towns were located in a belt of southern England running from Totnes in Devon to Canterbury in Kent, or else in an East Anglian extension between Colchester and Lynn. In the reign of Henry VIII, England north of the Trent accounted for only 8 per cent of taxable lay wealth, sharply down from its medieval peak, whereas the seven counties surrounding London paid 21 per cent.²⁷ ‘The entire economy of England was ruled from London. Political centralisation, the power of the English Crown, the highly concentrated nature of trade, all combined to make the capital great,’ remarked Fernand Braudel.²⁸ It was ‘so superior to other English towns’, a Swiss travel writer opined in 1599,

that London is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London, for England’s most resplendent objects may be seen in and around London; so that he who sightsees London and the royal courts in its immediate vicinity may assert, without impertinence that he is properly acquainted with England.’²⁹

Distant from this ferment, northern England adopted a conservative posture in the seminal contests of the early modern era, unsuccessfully championing a succession of backward-looking causes: traditional religion, baronial privilege, Crown against Parliament. When the Henrician Reformation moved up a gear in 1536 through the Ten Articles of Faith, dissolution of the smaller monasteries and legislation to extinguish the authority of the Bishop of Rome, it set off the biggest revolt of the Tudor age – one significant not just for its size but also for its regional profile. Until this point, popular rebellion had been largely confined to commoners in easy riding distance of London and the royal court at Westminster. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt centred on populous south-eastern counties hardest hit by Richard II’s poll tax and itching to be free of labour laws imposed to prop up seigniorial power after the Black Death. The proto-Protestant Lollard uprising of 1414 barely made any impression north of the Trent: because literacy was less widespread in the region, there were fewer entry points for unorthodox religious ideas. The 1450 Jack Cade rebellion, at the fag-end of the Lancastrian dynasty, sprang out of a self-assertive county community of minor freeholders in Kent as news of defeat in Normandy reverberated along the London-to-Dover highway.³⁰ Popular unrest didn’t become entirely absent from the Tudor South, as the religiously variegated commotion during Edward VI’s minority would attest: the Catholic-enthused Prayer Book rebellion in the South West coinciding with Protestant-inclined unrest closer to the capital. Nevertheless, the worst upheaval was pushed out to peripheral areas, where unprecedented royal interference in parish religion ran up against the combined force of religious conservatism and regional particularism.

The Pilgrimage of Grace began on 2 October 1536 among the artisans of Louth, a Lincolnshire market town sandwiched between the wolds and the fens, as rumours swirled of an impending seizure of church goods. York opened its gates to a rebel force commanded by Robert Aske, a lawyer from Selby, on the 16th. Aske framed the uprising as a pilgrimage for the defence of the church and the upending of heretical privy counsellors.³¹ Richmondshire agitators who spread the rebellion into Cumberland and Westmorland placed greater emphasis on agrarian grievances, despatching polemics in the name of Captain Poverty.

With the exception of Lancashire, where the Stanleys managed to quell the disturbances, control over nearly all of the country above the Ribble and Don slipped to nine rebel hosts, 50,000 strong in total.³² The king guilefully said he found their grievances ‘general, dark and obscure’, so they gathered at Pontefract early in December to approve a petition. Aske sifted through the submissions to compile two dozen articles for debate by the lords and gentlemen present, who bowdlerised the demands of the upland peasantry for a cap on entry fines and statutory intervention to prevent enclosure of the waste.³³ Massively outnumbered by the rebels, the king’s representative, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk – a Tudor loyalist despite personal sympathies for the old religion – went beyond his brief to grant a general pardon and a sitting of Parliament at York to roll back the Reformation. On this basis Aske persuaded the commons to disperse.

An authority on the court and character of Henry VIII suggests that had the Pilgrimage ‘been more aggressive and not trusted the king so readily’, it could have unseated him.³⁴ But outside Cumbria, where antagonistic landlord–tenant relations were particularly strained, there were too many layers of deference – of the rebel hosts toward their landowner leaders, and of the Pilgrims as a body toward the Crown – for a regionally circumscribed movement aiming at religious restoration and tenurial fairness to propel itself forward into regime change. Aske spent Christmas at court only to find himself on the scaffold the following July. The promised Parliament at York never materialised.

The response of the Tudor state to these turbulent months was to strengthen its apparatus and set about eradicating regional autonomies in earnest. Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury and a Cambridge man by education, justified the crackdown by damning northerners as ‘a certain sort of barbarous and savage people, who were ignorant of and turned away from farming and the good arts of peace, and who were so far utterly unacquainted with knowledge of sacred matters, that they could not bear to hear anything of culture and more gentle civilisation.’³⁵ A permanent Council in the North was instituted as a regional enforcement vehicle for the Privy Council, and a store of royal patronage – augmented by expropriated monastic land – dispensed to build up lesser landowners as a counterweight to the old magnate dynasties. ‘For surely we will not be bound of a necessity to be served with lords. But we will be served with such men what degree soever as we shall appoint to the same’, instructed the king.³⁶ Promotion of minor figures to Border offices, and cuts to the grants they received, did nothing to enhance security along the perimeter – foreign mercenaries had to be brought in – but served the more pressing need of safeguarding the monarchy from aristocratic resurgence on the periphery.

The Catholic heads of the great northern dynasties, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmorland, made one final, doomed attempt, early in the reign of Elizabeth, to defend their religion and social primacy. Smarting from loss of position to Elizabeth’s clientele gentry, goaded into action by hot-headed members of their entourage, on 14 November 1569 they entered Durham Cathedral, overturned the communion table and celebrated a Catholic Mass. Shortly afterwards they issued a proclamation complaining of how ‘diverse new set up nobles about the Queen’s majesty, have and do daily, not only go about to overthrow and put down the ancient nobility of this realm, but also have … set up and maintained a newfound religion and heresy, contrary to God’s word’.³⁷

Elizabeth’s pick for Bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, had sermonised against veneration of aristocratic lineages.³⁸ A fierce Puritan, the new broom gathered around him fellow evangelicals such as William Whittingham, appointed dean of Durham Cathedral. Both men had spent part of the Marian interlude in exile in Calvin’s Geneva. Pilkington went down so badly with his congregation that he confessed to William Cecil, leading statesman of the Elizabethan court, ‘I am grown into such displeasure with them, part for religion and part for ministering the oath of the queen’s superiority, that I know not whether they like me worse, or I them’.³⁹

When the uprising broke out, Pilkington fled to London disguised as a beggar while Durham thronged with parishioners eager once again to practise Catholic rites. Despite this enthusiasm, however, only a few thousand turned out to contest the Anglican settlement in arms: yeomen farmers for the most part, some aggrieved by Pilkington and Whittingham’s grasping estate management, along with poorer sorts pressed into service by threat of spoil or the promise of cash reward. Few had tenurial connections to either peer. Although reputed to love their lord better than their queen, Percy tenants in Northumberland stayed at home. After the Pilgrimage of Grace the Crown had leased out Percy manors to clients of the rival Forster clique, accelerating the decay of the family’s seigniorial jurisdiction.⁴⁰ The rebels decided against hazarding an attack on York. Instead a small detachment seized control of the port of Hartlepool, vainly hoping for a landing by Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba, while the main force laid siege to Barnard Castle on the Tees. On 16 December, as royal troops advanced north to Darlington, the earls lost their nerve, fleeing from the jaws of defeat across the Scottish border.

Lawrence Stone characterised the Northern Rebellion as ‘the last episode in five hundred years of protest by the Highland Zone against the interference of London’.⁴¹ To ensure there would be no recurrence, Council of the North president Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, summarily executed 600 rank-and-file rebels under martial law – a body count several times higher than Norfolk had inflicted after the Pilgrimage and comparable to English atrocities in Ireland, where Sussex had served as lord lieutenant. Common law trials of estate-holding rebels provided another windfall of forfeited property to the Crown. Northumberland was sold out by the Scots and beheaded at York, while Westmorland stewed in exile in the Spanish Netherlands on a pension from Philip II, his estates in Durham confiscated by the Crown and later sold to royal courtiers and coal-owning parvenus from Newcastle. Pilkington returned to his diocese triumphant. ‘I am, by the blessing of God, restored to my flock’, he congratulated himself in a letter to Swiss reformer Henry Bullinger.⁴²

The demise of the northern earls was followed, at the end of the Elizabethan period, by a Union of the Crowns, which diminished the strategic significance of the Anglo-Scottish frontier – now ‘the very heart of the country’, observed James I, who did away with wardenships and marcher law.⁴³ The North was reduced to a periphery like any other, and like the others offered James’s successor more support during the Civil War than he ever received from the capital, damned by Charles I’s Secretary at War, Sir Edward Walker, as ‘the head and fountain of this detested rebellion’.⁴⁴

Musgrove dates the emergence of the Royalist North to the fourteenth century, when England’s kings had exhorted the region to take up arms against the Scots as well as the French, and northern clerks, prelates, knights and merchants such as the de la Poles had assumed prominent positions in the departments of state. The Wars of the Roses of the fifteenth century then strengthened the sentimental ties linking the Crown to castle towns such as Pontefract, which would be the very last Royalist holdout against Parliament. Without the modernising impetus that Puritan ideology transmitted to London and East Anglia, northern England remained in thrall to past glories, a region marked out by its ‘backwardness and deep-seated traditionalism’.⁴⁵

Left idling as advanced capitalist agriculture took off in East Anglia and much of the South East, the northern countryside was certainly backward. As far south as Lancashire and Yorkshire, ‘tenant right’ customary tenures persisted that had historically afforded yeoman farmers security of landholding in return for military service on the Border. A post-1603 landlord campaign spearheaded by James I to replace them with commercial leasehold arrangements had become bogged down in legal wrangles. In Cumberland, to cite an extreme case, most farmers still held their land by customary tenure at the close of the eighteenth century.⁴⁶ The continuing weight of agrarian custom may do more to explain the conservativism of the rural North, and the absence of a parliamentary party within it, than the ancient battles invoked by Musgrove.

If the tenant-right controversy tempered the popular reception of the king’s cause in the region, Catholicism afforded a counterbalance.⁴⁷ The old religion survived in gentry households and out-of-the-way upland areas. In Lancashire, unusually, it retained a mass following, particularly in the western fringe of the county which traded with Catholic Ireland.⁴⁸ For its adherents, if neutrality wasn’t a viable option, the choice between Charles’s High Church Anglicanism and Westminster’s intolerant evangelism – the latter, in effect, a super-sized version of the old Pilkington regime in Durham – wasn’t difficult, and the Crown offered a better muster point than a pair of already diminished noble lineages had in 1569.

Charles handed command of the far north to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, a London patron of the arts whose West Riding family had risen up the social ladder through service under Henry VIII, profiting from the dissolution of the monasteries. In circumstances that are obscure, Newcastle quickly raised a ‘papist’ northern army of some 8,000 men after being instructed to enlist loyal subjects without examining their consciences. Two-thirds of gentry families in Lancashire who engaged for the king were Catholic, as were one-third in Yorkshire.⁴⁹ ‘Royalism in the North of England cannot be reduced wholly to religion or economics’, insists Musgrove. But it is altogether inexplicable without them.⁵⁰

In London, by contrast, evangelical merchants operating outside the framework of royal trading companies helped to swing opinion behind Parliament. The affinity of Puritanism with commerce, and the chafing of small clothiers at Crown restrictions on manufacture and trade, also brought growing textile handicraft towns in the North onto Parliament’s side. The country linen weavers around Manchester rebuffed James Stanley, the king’s commander in Lancashire and Cheshire, when he laid siege to the town in September 1642, their resolve stiffened by a Puritan preacher. Stanley was also thwarted in Bolton, ‘the Geneva of Lancashire’, which Prince Rupert would ultimately storm en route to Marston Moor. In keenly contested Yorkshire, Bradford and Halifax gave essential manpower and supplies to parliamentary forces under the Fairfaxes, who were short of backing from their own gentry class. The denizens of the cloth-working parishes were ‘the only well-affected people of the country’, Ferdinando Fairfax advised Westminster.⁵¹

Musgrove highlights the fact that the North provided relatively few men of national standing between Parliament’s execution of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, in the run-up to the Civil War and the return of high Cavaliers with a Wentworth connection after the Restoration. He makes an exception for Thomas Fairfax, son of Ferdinando, commander-in-chief of the parliamentary army. According to Charles I’s Secretary of State, he was ‘the man most beloved and relied upon by the rebels in the North’. Fairfax sat out the Cromwellian interlude in the bucolic surroundings of his Nun Appleton home, a former nunnery seven miles south of York. Andrew Marvell, tutor to Fairfax’s daughter, wrote a poem celebrating its ‘fragrant gardens, shady woods / Deep meadows, and transparent floods.’⁵² To take Fairfax’s place in the new republic, the crowded ranks of Yorkshire’s gentry class offered up John Lambert, a minor gentleman landowner from Calton in the Yorkshire Dales. Lambert, ignored by Musgrove, authored the 1653 Instrument of Government, the original template for Cromwell’s protectorate and England’s first written constitution. It defied Leveller demands for universal manhood suffrage but struck a modern note by redistricting English and Welsh constituencies, the towns of Leeds and Manchester among the beneficiaries. The scheme lapsed under the replacement constitution of 1657, the Humble Petition and Advice, the adoption of which caused Lambert to part company with Cromwell and retire from public life. Another 175 years would elapse before key northern cities regained parliamentary representation.

When the republic imploded after Cromwell’s death in 1658, Fairfax joined the bulk of England’s landed classes in opting to stabilise the social order by reinstating the Stuart monarchy. He raised the Yorkshire gentry to prevent Lambert, ‘inveterate against the king’, from impeding the progress of George Monck’s army from Scotland to London, from which the Restoration would issue. Monck crossed the border into England the day after York capitulated to Fairfax’s troops.⁵³ But although Yorkshire’s outsize county community was an appreciable factor in the national political balance, only London carried decisive weight. By far the most important reserve of popular and financial support for the Roundhead cause, effectively bankrolling the New Model Army, the capital controlled four-fifths of England’s foreign trade and was a magnet for people as well as commodities, on its way to supplanting Paris as Europe’s largest city. John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley, leaders of the Leveller and Digger movements respectively, both migrated from northern England to the City as apprentices in the textile trade.⁵⁴ It was the moderate majority opinion in the City that gave the necessary ballast to Monck’s decision, in February 1660, to settle matters by throwing open Parliament to Royalist opinion. Fairfax joined the delegation sent to invite Charles II back from The Hague, supplying the king with the horse he rode at his coronation. For all the talk of clemency that surrounded the Restoration, Lambert was kept under lock and key until his death in 1684.

The Restoration settlement, even when modified in Parliament’s favour by the Glorious Revolution, created the paradox of a monarchical ancien régime coexistent with a modern capitalist society in the South East. When large-scale industry made its advance in the nineteenth century, a wider contrast would open up between northern economic modernity and southern political archaism. Until then, however, pressure for parliamentary reform proved to be containable. Christopher Wyvill, a wealthy North Riding gentleman landowner and an absentee Essex clergyman, raised the question of reform in 1779 as the American War went from bad to worse, but had to take no for an answer. Unlike the Anti-Corn Law League of the Lancashire mill owners, fifty years into the future, Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association wasn’t based on the emerging factory towns but instead addressed itself to ‘gentleman of weight and character’ in England’s largest county community, drawing the bulk of its support from the lesser gentry and clergy – including the deans of York and Ripon, much to the embarrassment of their archbishop. Through this extra-parliamentary vehicle, a sizeable landed interest threatened with higher taxes sought to impose economy measures on the royal court and on the Tory administration of Lord North.⁵⁵

The Yorkshire Association was the first provincial outfit to wrest the leadership of extra-parliamentary agitation from London, vying for control of the reform agenda with metropolitan radicals active in the Quintuple Alliance of London, Middlesex, Southwark, Surrey and Westminster who urged annual parliaments and universal manhood suffrage. Wyvill wanted more modest changes – triennial parliaments, a purge of Crown placemen from the Commons, additional MPs for the counties and large towns – to clean up politics and reduce royal influence. Much of his campaign work was innovatory, but hitched to an ideology no less traditional than the reverend’s social base: ‘the restoration of national morals’ and ‘the preservation of our Constitution on its genuine principles’. He abhorred the root-and-branch democratic ideals associated with Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and wished to keep the vote restricted to men of property.⁵⁶

Wyvill’s energetic, if fruitless, campaigning moved the Whig reformer Charles James Fox to remark that ‘Yorkshire and Middlesex between them make all England’. A couple of generations later the statement couldn’t stand without alteration. ‘You may add Lancashire,’ advised mill owner Richard Cobden in 1846.⁵⁷ The failure of the Yorkshire Association proved that the aristocrats and merchants who ruled from London’s palaces and counting houses weren’t going to be dislodged by the provincial squirearchy or by curates of advanced opinions. If anyone was going to storm Britain’s constitutional citadel, it would be a task for the industrial classes who were about to take centre stage.