Word spreads. On the farms around, labourers see the chance of a holiday. Faces blackened, some wearing women’s attire, they set off to town, picking up any edged tool that could act as a weapon. From the marketplace you can see them coming, kicking up a cloud of dust.
Old men anywhere in England will tell you about the drunken exploits of harvests past. Rebel ballads sung by our grandfathers need small adaptation now. We are taxed till we cry, we must live till we die, we be looted and swindled and cheated and dwindled …
Farmers bolt their grain stores. The magistrates are alert. Burgers withdraw indoors, securing their warehouses. In the square some rascal sways on top of a husting, viewing the rural troops as they roll in. ‘Pledge yourselves to me – Captain Poverty is my name.’ The bell-ringers, elbowed and threatened, tumble into the parish church and ring the bells backward. At this signal, the world turns upside down.
Morning brings Richard Riche riding from London to Windsor with rumours of assault on officials of the Court of Augmentations. ‘Our men are in Louth, sir – gone in to value the treasures at St James’s church, which you know is a very rich one.’
He pictures the spire rising three hundred feet, holding up the Lincolnshire sky, clouds draped about it like wet washing. It takes two days to ride from here to Lincolnshire, sparing nor horse nor man. Even as Riche is talking, new messengers are bellowing below: rural gawpers, clay on their boots. How did such folk get here, within the castle walls? They call up, ‘Is it true the king is dead?’
He comes down the stair towards them. ‘Who says so?’
‘All the east believes it. He died at midsummer. A puppet lies in his bed and wears his crown.’
‘So who rules?’
‘Cromwell, sir. He means to pull down all the parish churches. He will melt the crucifixes for cannon, to fire on the poor folk of England. Taxes will be tenpence in every shilling, and no man shall have a fowl in his pot but he pay a levy on it. There will be no bread next winter but made of pease flour and beans, and the commons shall be poisoned by it and lie in the fields like blown sheep, with no priest to confess them.’
‘Wipe your feet,’ he tells them. ‘I shall bring you to a dead king, and you may kneel and beg his pardon.’
The messenger is cowed. ‘We do but report what we have heard.’
‘That’s how wars start.’ Somewhere out of sight a man is singing, voice echoing around the stones:
‘Now God defend and make an end
Their crimes to mend:
From Crum and Cram and Cramuel
St Luke deliver such to Hell.
God send me well!’
He thinks, I believe that’s Sexton. I thought the pest was crushed. ‘Who is Cromwell?’ he asks the messengers. ‘What manner of man do you take him to be?’
Sir, they say, do you not know him? He is the devil in guise of a knave. He wears a hat and under it his horns.
As the trouble spreads from the town of Louth throughout the shire, the king demands, without result, the immediate attendance of Sir Thump and Lord Mump, Lord Stumble and Sheriff Bumble. It is still the hunting season, and they cannot be got to his side for three, four days. First, messengers must go and tell them of the disturbances to the peace. Then they must say, ‘Lincolnshire up? What the devil do you mean,
‘Come in, cousin Richard,’ the king calls. ‘I need my family. No one else rallies to me in my need.’
At this point he, Thomas Cromwell, could say ‘I told you so.’ Last year he had argued, if we are closing houses of religion, let us deal with them case by case: no need to frighten the people with a bill in Parliament. But Riche had insisted, no, no, no, we should have the clarity of statute. Lord Audley had said, ‘Cromwell, you cannot do everything as you did it in the cardinal’s time. Would not such a programme take us the rest of our lives?’
He had closed his eyes: ‘My lord, I suggested dealing with the houses individually. I did not suggest “one at a time”. That is different.’
But he was overruled. They beat the drum for their intentions: and now look! The king at Windsor wants familar faces about him. His boys are edged onto benches where the great magnates of the realm are used to sit. When the archbishop comes in, dusty from the road, they are at a loss to find an episcopal sort of chair.
‘Why are you here?’ he asks: politely enough. ‘You were not looked for.’
‘Because of the songs,’ Cranmer says. ‘
‘It is a mystery. Like the Trinity.’
It seems the trouble is not confined to a distant shire. Cranmer says, ‘There are placards hung through Lambeth. I am not safe in my house. Hugh Latimer has been threatened. I hear in Lincolnshire they have attacked Bishop Longland’s servants.’
