Heretics and Believers by Peter Marshall

Author:Peter Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300170627
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

11

SLAYING ANTICHRIST

‘Item, We will have …’

THE NEW PRAYER Book was already in use at St Paul’s and in various London parishes at the beginning of Lent 1549, but its nationwide introduction was scheduled for the end of the Easter season, the feast of Pentecost or Whitsunday, falling that year on 9 June.1 Copies were in the meantime successfully distributed, and the new liturgy was performed in place of the Latin mass on Whitsunday even in remote rural parishes.

One of these was Sampford Courtenay, a small village in mid-Devon, on the northern fringes of Dartmoor; the elderly rector there, William Harper, did as he was required. The following day, Harper was met at the church door by a volatile crowd, demanding to know what service he planned to perform. He answered he would say the new service, as he was obliged by law to do. The protestors insisted he should not, arguing – erroneously but sincerely – that Henry VIII’s will forbad innovations in religion until his son came of age. In the end, Harper ‘yielded to their wills, and forthwith revested himself in his old popish attire, and said mass and all such services as in times past accustomed’.2

It was a small start to a national crisis, and a local cataclysm. The Devon JPs hurried to Sampford Courtenay, but lacked the resolve either to appease or intimidate the mob. A minor landowner called William Hilling remonstrated angrily with the protestors, and for his pains was set upon and hacked savagely to pieces. The rioters buried the body in the churchyard, though they aligned it north–south rather than east–west: the fate of a heretic’s corpse. The domino effect seen in 1536 was once again in evidence. In the days following, contingents from numerous surrounding parishes congregated in the market town of Crediton, just north-west of Exeter, the regional capital.

A bad situation was made worse by the actions of Sir Peter Carew, a local landowner hurriedly returning from his wife’s estates in Lincolnshire, either on Somerset’s orders or on his own initiative. When the rebels refused to treat with him, Carew’s troops set light to barns on the outskirts of Crediton, causing panic and a retreat from the town in which several rebels were killed. Carew was a zealous evangelical, the worst choice for a negotiator with anxious traditionalists. Rebel forces regrouped at the nearby village of Clyst St Mary. Here, the trouble started a few days earlier, when another evangelical landowner, Walter Ralegh senior, berated an elderly woman on her way to church for praying on her rosary. On arrival, the woman told an already overwrought congregation that she had been warned ‘except she would leave her beads, and give over holy bread and holy water, the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil them’. Class hostility rubbed salt into the wounds of religious division.

The authorities’ response was hampered by strategic disagreements, between Carew and the evangelical sheriff of Devon, Peter Courtenay, on the one hand, and less confrontational local gentry on the other, allowing the rebels to encircle Exeter.

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