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CORNISH   REBELLIONS, 1497-1648

500 years after their uprising against Henry VII,   MarkStoyle discusses why the cornish were different - andoften rebellious -   in Tudor and Stuart England.

May 1997 sees the 500th anniversary of the   Cornish rising of 1497, a rebellion which not only came close to toppling   Henry VII from his throne, but which also marked the beginning of a   remarkable series of insurrections in the far south-west. Cornwall was a   county which had never risen in arms before. Yet over the next 150 years no   fewer than five major rebellions were to take place there, while `rebel'   Cornish armies were to march into England on four separate occasions.

Why should this have been so? Few   historians have ever thought to ask. Rather than viewing these periodic   eruptions as part of an ongoing tradition of popular protest, most scholars   have preferred to see them as isolated, almost unrelated, events. Yet, as   this article will show, the frequency with which Cornwall was convulsed by   rebellion during the Tudor and Stuart periods can only be explained in terms   of that county's unique position within the early modern British state.

A country ... whose natural situation is   very strong and apt for defence, being ... enwraps with the sea on all sides,   except towards Devonshire, and there bounded by the River Tamar, which in a   right line runs almost from sea to sea.

These natural advantages had helped to   shape Cornwall's early history. When the Saxons drove the indigenous Celtic   peoples of Britain into the far west of the island during the Dark Ages,   Cornwall had been one of the last bastions of Celtic resistance. During the   930s, however, Cornwall had finally been conquered by King Athelstan.

Athelstan may have brought the Cornish   under English rule, but neither he nor his successors managed to subjugate   them completely. The Cornish retained their cultural distinctiveness,   including their own Brythonic language, and they continued to hold a grudge   against the Saxons. Like their kinsmen the Welsh, moreover, the Cornish   continued to cherish the belief that they would one day be restored to their   ancient inheritance, when King Arthur - the legendary warrior who was said to   have led British resistance against the Saxons during the Dark Ages -   reemerged from the enchantment under which he slept and rode out to give the   final overthrow to the ancient enemy.

When, in 1113, a party of French clerics   who were visiting Cornwall dared to suggest that Arthur might not be   sleeping, but dead, they were mobbed by local people for their pains. Arthur,   who was said to have been born in Cornwall, remained a focus of Cornish pride   throughout the medieval period. The writer of a fifteenth-century poem   commented: `Bretouns & Cornysch sayeth thus, that [Arthur] levyth yet ...   and schalle come and be a kyng [again]'. As this English author clearly   realised, such predictions were not just idle fancies, but reflected the   latent desire of a conquered Celtic people to revenge themselves upon their   oppressors and regain their lost independence.

Uneasily aware of Cornwall's independent   spirit, the rulers of medieval England took considerable pains to mollify the   county's inhabitants. From 1337 onwards the title `Duke of Cornwall' was   conferred on the eldest sons of the kings of England, allegedly as a sign of   their special concern for that county's welfare. In addition, special institutions   known as the Stannaries were set up to govern the local tin-mining industry,   institutions which bestowed remarkable privileges upon thousands of Cornish   men and women. As Philip Payton has observed, the Duchy and Stannary   organisations provided medieval Cornwall with an `aura of semi-independence',   while the county's remoteness, its unique history and its scattered pattern   of settlement all helped to differentiate it still further from the rest of   England. Above all, though, it was language which set the county apart.

English had made little progress in   Cornwall during the early medieval period and in 1350 Cornish was still   spoken by most of the county's inhabitants. Over the following century,   however, that dominance began to ebb away. English was gradually encroaching   from the east, and by 1450 the county's inhabitants were almost equally   divided between Cornish and English speakers. Meanwhile, plays in the Cornish   language had begun to appear. Between 1350 and 1375 an entire cycle of   miracle plays, the so-called Cornish Ordinalia, was composed. These plays   were written at Glasney, a collegiate church near Penryn, in West Cornwall,   which now emerged as the centre of religious scholarship in the Cornish   language. As scholars are increasingly coming to realise, medieval and Early   Modern plays were not just designed to entertain, they usually had a   polemical purpose as well - and it is tempting to suggest that this was true   of the Cornish Ordinalia.

Evidence from later periods reveals that   many Cornish people felt that the loss of their ancient language would bring   about the loss of Cornish identity as a whole. This is apparent from the   words of the parish clerk of St Just, one of the last few native speakers of   the language, who in 1700 commented dejectedly that `[the] tongueless man ...   lost his land'.

The Cornish gentleman William Scawen, who   wrote a spirited defence of the Cornish language in the 1680s, was even more   specific, observing that `the loss of tongue ... [is] an infallible sign of   subjection'. If such sentiments could still be expressed in Scawen's day - by   which time the battle to save the Cornish tongue had, to all intents and   purposes, been lost - then they would surely have been even more strongly   felt 300 years earlier, when the balance between Cornish and English was only   just beginning to tip. So it seems at least possible that the composition of   the Cornish Ordinalia was part of a Cornish cultural counter-offensive   against the creeping tide of Englishness, and that the miracle plays which   were designed to be performed before large crowds -were written with the   express design of upholding and reinforcing the ancient Cornish language.

It is against this background of   encroaching Englishness, and Cornish resistance to it, that Cornwall's   decision to support the pretender, Henry Tudor, against Richard III during   the 1480s, should be seen. Henry, who had been born in North Wales, made much   of his `British' descent; indeed he claimed to trace his lineage from Arthur   himself. This, together with the fact that the pretender was based in   Brittany (still an independent Celtic state at this time) and backed by   powerful interests in Wales, made it plausible to see Henry himself as the   long-promised hero of legend. One of the most famous of Merlin's prophecies   had predicted that Saxon dominance of the British Isles would come to an end   when `the mountains of Armorica [i.e. Brittany] ... erupt'. Wales would be   `filled with joy', the prophecy went on `and the Cornish oaks shall flourish.   The island shall be called by the name of Brutus and the title given to it by   the foreigners shall be done away with'.

In the light of these predictions, it is   hardly surprising that the news that Henry Tudor was in Brittany and   preparing to claim the English crown should have aroused near-millenarian   expectations among the Cornish people. According to later traditions, there   was so much support for Henry in Cornwall that he originally planned to land   there rather than in Wales. Certainly, many of his supporters-in-exile were   Cornishmen, and Henry's eventual triumph in 1485 seemed to herald nothing   less than a golden age for Cornwall.

Those Cornish gentlemen who had supported   the king during his exile received their reward in the shape of prestigious   posts at court and, by the favour which he lavished on these men and their   Welsh counterparts, Henry showed that he was fully alive to the importance of   `Britishness' in underpinning his regime. This point was underlined still   further by Henry's decision to name his first son Arthur, and to grant him   his livery as Duke of Cornwall. The symbolism of this could scarcely have   been better calculated to appeal to Cornish sentiment.

Yet in the end Henry VII let his Cornish   subjects down. The favours which he lavished on the Cornish gentry did little   to help the bulk of the county's inhabitants. Indeed, the drawing of so many   Cornish gentlemen into the orbit of the court may well have encouraged them   to abandon their native traditions, thus widening the cultural divide which   was already growing up between the greater gentry of Cornwall (few, if any,   of whom were Cornish-speakers) and the common people. This was a potentially   dangerous development. The gentry governors were the men on whom the crown   depended to preserve its authority in the county, but as they and, perhaps   even more importantly, their lesser-gentry supporters became increasingly   `anglicised', so their influence over the Cornish-speaking population began   to wane. A gap was opening up within Cornish society, therefore, an   estrangement between rulers and ruled, which could be readily exploited by   those who sought to challenge the established order.

This fact alone undoubtedly helps to   explain Cornwall's subsequent propensity for rebellion, and matters can only   have been made worse by the fact that Henry's accession did nothing to stem   the remorseless advance of Englishness. By the end of the fifteenth century   English had replaced Cornish as the majority language in Cornwall. And it was   at this critical juncture - just as the linguistic balance in the county   finally swung against the embattled native speakers - that Henry struck at   one of the other main pillars on which Cornwall's cherished sense of   difference rested. In 1496, angered by the tinminers' refusal to accept a new   set of regulations, the king suspended the operation of the Western   Stannaries. As a result, the miners lost the ancient privileges which not   only protected their livelihoods, but also symbolised royal recognition of   Cornwall's unique position within the wider British state.

By the mid-1490s, then, the self declared   embodiment of British hopes stood revealed to his Cornish subjects as a   fraud. Not only had Henry failed to bring about the longed-for Celtic   resurgence, he now seemed to be attacking what residual autonomy Cornwall   still possessed. It is only against this background of resentment and   disillusion that Cornwall's sudden explosion into violence during May 1497   can be fully understood. As many historians have observed, it was Henry's   demand for money to finance his Scottish war which sparked off the first   Cornish rising, but without the much deeper cultural tensions which had been   building up for centuries beforehand, the county would never have burst into   flames as it did. It is surely significant that the rebellion first broke out   at St Keverne, in the far west of the county, for it was in this region that   Cornish language and culture remained most vibrant and resentment against the   English most intense.

There is no need to explore the events of   May 1497 in detail, or to follow the 3-6,000 Cornishmen who marched across   the Tamar to their eventual defeat at Blackheath, near London, in June. The   rebel force lost its exclusively Cornish nature once it had moved into   England, in any case, for the Cornishmen were quickly joined by a rag-tag   band of followers whose motives were as disparate as their geographical   origins. The crucial thing to note is that Henry's victory, crushing as it   was, did not bring an end to the disturbances in Cornwall. Instead, the   situation there remained `beyond control' throughout summer 1497 - and   reports soon began to circulate that the Cornish were preparing themselves   for a fresh insurrection.

Such rumours were confirmed in September,   when the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck - who had been invited to put   himself at the head of the original rebellion shortly after it began -   finally landed near Penzance. Warbeck was far too late to take advantage of   the initial rising, of course, but it is symptomatic of the despair which was   gripping late fifteenth-century Cornwall that, despite the recent defeat at   Blackheath, thousands of Cornishmen were prepared to flock to his banner.   Warbeck's rebellion was, in many ways, a reprise of the earlier rising and,   once again, it is hard not to suspect that the rebels' ostensible aims - in   this case, to support Warbeck's claim to the English throne - in fact   concealed more atavistic emotions. In September, as in June, the trouble   began in the far west of Cornwall, and of those who were later charged with   supporting Warbeck, over a third came from the two western hundreds of   Penwith and Kerrier, both of which remained almost entirely Cornish-speaking   at this time.

Warbeck managed to assemble some 3,000 men   and lead them over the Tamar into Devon, but he proved no more capable of   defeating Henry VII than the earlier rebels had been. Warbeck's forces failed   to take Exeter, and quickly melted away when they learnt that Henry himself   was approaching with a powerful army. No further resistance was offered to   the king and by the end of 1497 peace had been restored throughout the   south-west. Henry VII was comparatively restrained in the revenge exacted on   the defeated rebels, probably because he feared that excessive severity might   spark off further trouble. Having once crushed the risings, moreover, and   waited for a decent interval of time to elapse, he restored the Stannary   privileges on payment of a fine.

Nevertheless, the 1497 risings left a   simmering undercurrent of resentment behind them. Recent reinterpretations of   Beunans Meriasek, a play written in the Cornish language around 1504, have   argued that the text contains a thinly-veiled critique of Henry VII, who is   represented - in the guise of `King Teudar' - as a tyrannous oppressor of the   Cornish people. Significantly, Teudar is opposed in the play by `The Duke of   Cornwall', a character who resides at Tintagel Castle (the traditional   birthplace of King Arthur), and who is clearly intended to represent the   spirit of Cornish nationhood.

During the 1530s, Cornish resentment   against the cultural hegemony of England became still further inflamed by the   onset of the Reformation, which heralded an attack on many traditional   religious practices. Some of these practices were associated almost as much with   Cornishness as they were with Catholicism, so by striking at them, the   Henrician government struck at the very roots of local identity. And although   the unprecedented series of risings and near-risings which gripped the West   Country between 1537 and 1549 had a multiplicity of causes - including   religious discontent, economic distress and governmental weakness the   disturbances cannot be fully, understood unless the deep-seated Cornish   hostility towards further assimilation within the British state is also taken   into account. Throughout these turbulent years, it was the Cornish-speaking   district of West Cornwall which was the storm-centre of popular protest.

In 1537, a St Keverne man commissioned a   banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, the religious symbol which had been   adopted by the Northern rebels in 1536, and planned to parade with it through   the surrounding countryside. Local gentlemen, fearing a repetition of the   1497 rising, had him arrested and (probably) hanged. Then, in 1547, the   clergy and churchwardens of West Cornwall took part in a tumultuous   demonstration against the reformist Archdeacon William Body at Penryn. And   when Body embarked on an `iconoclastic tour' of the district in 1548, an   angry mob rose up to resist him. Soon afterwards Body was stabbed to death in   Helston market-place, his killers proclaiming that anyone else who dared to   embrace `new fashions' (might they have been referring to cultural/linguistic   fashions here, as well as religious ones?) would perish in the same manner.

Next year thousands of Cornishmen took   part in the so-called `Prayer Book Rebellion', one of the most serious   popular disturbances of the Tudor century. This insurrection, which swept   over all of Cornwall and much of Devon during the summer of 1549, was primarily   a protest against the Protestant religious policies of Edward VI's regime   (and more particularly against the introduction of a new English prayer book)   but there were signs of an ethnic undertow as well. Certainly, the rebel   statement that:

We wyll have our olde service ... in   Latten, not in English, as it was before. And so we the Cornyshe men, (where   of certen of us understande no Englysh) utterly refuse thys newe Englysh.

suggests the existence of a principled   Cornish resistance to English cultural aggression. The fact that Glasney   College had recently been dissolved may also be significant. Had the   suppression of this ancient cultural centre provoked unrest among native   speakers? And was it mere coincidence that Robert Welsh, the cleric whom Joyce   Youings has identified as the `real leader' of the rebellion, was a Penryn   man?

There are strong suggestions, then, that   the Cornish rebels were in part motivated by a desire to protect their   ancient culture and language, and this lends a particular poignancy to the   fact that their efforts had the very opposite result. A.L. Rowse has   described the 1549 rising as Cornwall's equivalent of the Scottish '45 and   the comparison seems an apt one. The government put down the revolt with   brutal force, killing some 4,000 Devon and Cornishmen in the process, and the   intensification of Protestant reformation which followed saw the end of the   traditional religious practices to which the Cornish people were so attached.   Defeated and demoralised, the Cornish had little choice but to acquiesce in   the new dispensation. There were no further rebellions during the sixteenth   century, and by 1600 Cornwall had become, on the surface at least, a firmly   Protestant county.

This did not mean that the Cornish people   had relinquished their separate identity, however. True, they had adopted   Protestantism, but it was Protestantism of a very conservative sort, almost   untainted by the Puritanism which was so central to the reformed faith in   many parts of England. In religious terms, therefore, the Cornish people had   reinvented their old distinctiveness. And in West Cornwall, at least, they   continued to cling to the other badges of difference as well: to the old   legends, to the old language (though this was by now restricted to the area   west of Truro) and to the old enmities. Writing in the 1580s, Norden observed   that the Cornish, `retayne a kinde of conceyled envye agaynste the Englishe,   whome they yet affecte with a desire of revenge for their fathers sakes', and   similar observations were made by Carew, in his Survey of the county,   published in 1602.

A dark vein of ethnic hatred, then,   continued to run below the surface of Cornish life throughout the late   sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and, as the recent conflict in   Yugoslavia has shown, such hatreds can re-emerge with frightening speed once   established political structures start to collapse. The fragmentation of the   British state which occurred during the early 1640s - as Charles I came into   conflict first with the Scots, then with his own Parliament - resurrected the   ancient ethnic fault-line in the south-west. Most of southern England came   out in support of Parliament, but Cornwall - deeply hostile to the   puritanical, culturally aggressive, strain of Englishness which the Parliamentary   cause appeared to represent - sympathised with the king instead. As a result   the spectre of `a privy insurrection of Cornishmen' returned to haunt   Parliamentarian minds.

Such fears were well-founded. In October   1642 a huge popular rising took place in Western Cornwall. Some 10,000 men   rose in arms, routed Parliament's few local supporters and secured the county   for the king. Roundhead propagandists, spitting with rage, dubbed this   extraordinary rising `Cornwall's second Commotion' (thus drawing a specific   parallel with the events of 1549) and castigated Charles' Cornish supporters   as `rebels'. Soon afterwards a Cornish army marched across the Tamar to do   battle with the Parliamentarians, and for the next four years Cornwall   remained a Royalist stronghold.

Throughout this period the Royalist high   command - sensing that Cornwall's allegiance was a conditional one, founded   on particularism as well as on mere loyalty to the crown - did their best to   accommodate, and to exploit, the Cornish sense of difference. Cornish   soldiers were permitted to serve in wholly Cornish regiments, for example,   while `foreign' Royalist troops were usually kept out of the county. As a   result Cornwall enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy during 1642-45 than is   had done since the brief periods of rebel control in 1497 and 1549.

Yet this period of semi-independence, like   those which had preceded it, was dearly bought. As the Civil War dragged on,   hundreds, possibly thousands, of Cornishmen were killed, while the financial   pressures on the county's inhabitants mounted. By late 1645 the tide had   turned decisively against the king, and Cornwall faced the prospect of a   Parliamentary invasion. At this critical moment, the Cornish Royalist leader   Sir Richard Grenville, brother of the more famous Sir Bevil, proposed that   Cornwall should withdraw from the conflict unilaterally and set itself up as   a semi-independent statelet. Grenville's scheme had little chance of success,   but that it should have been mooted at all -and that Grenville clearly   expected it to be popular among the Cornish troops is intriguing. Alarmed,   the king's local commanders eventually had Grenville imprisoned. A few weeks   later, the rout of the Royalist forces and the advance of the Parliamentary   army across the Tamar put paid to any hopes that the limited degree of   autonomy which Cornwall had obtained for itself as a result of the war might   be retained. By August 1646 the Civil War in the West was over and Cornwall   firmly in Roundhead hands.

During the post-war period, Cornwall was   more firmly subordinated to the central authorities than ever before. Between   1646 and 1649 Parliament launched an all-out assault upon the traditional   Anglican faith which so many of Cornwall's inhabitants espoused. In addition,   Roundhead troops destroyed several of the holy wells and standing stones   which were such a distinctive feature of the Cornish landscape, while local   games and pastimes were discouraged. Nowhere was this cultural offensive more   acutely resented than in the Celtic far west of the county, where the Cornish   language was by now confined to a small group of perhaps thirty-forty   parishes. In May 1648 this last bastion of Cornishness exploded into   violence, with pro-Royalist rebellions breaking out at Penzance, St Keverne and   elsewhere. The rising were hopeless from the start. Outnumbered and   disorganised, the rebels were quickly dispersed by the Parliamentary troops.

Many were taken prisoner, and the   subsequent treatment of these men by the Parliamentarians is of the greatest   interest. Having dragged their sullen captives to Penryn, the   Parliamentarians paraded them through the town in a humiliating public show,   preceded by three Roundhead soldiers who carried, upon the points of their   swords, `three silver balls used in hurling'. Hurling (a form of handball)   was regarded as `a sport peculiar to Cornwall' at this time, so the   significance of the soldiers' action is obvious. By parading violated hurling   balls through Penryn, of all places, they were making the clearest possible   statement about the final defeat of the ancient Cornish culture which had   endured in this region for so long.

The Roundhead soldiers were justified in   their triumph. 1648 was indeed to prove the last stand of traditional   `Cornishness'. The assault on local distinctiveness intensified during the   Interregnum, and by 1660 the Cornish language was dying, even in its last   western strongholds. As it did so, the visceral sense of racial difference   which had lain, like a twisted thread, at the heart of the risings of   1497-1648 gradually faded away.

By the early eighteenth century the   politics of cultural nationalism in the far south-west had become transmuted   into the politics of provincialism. Cornwall was at last part of England, and   the voices of the most neglected victims of English cultural dominance in the   British Isles had finally fallen silent.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Underdog   history? A wall tablet commemorating two of the 1497 rebellion leaders -   erected (significantly) by a Cornish nationalist group in the 1960s.

MAP: Late medieval Cornwall - the shaded   areas show the approximate Stannary or tin-mining districts.

(Below)   Both as claimant to the English throne in the 1480s and after his victory at   Bosworth, Henry VII made much of his British descent and thus connections   with Celtic heartlands, such as Wales and Cornwall, whose Arthurian links   included the ruined castle of Tintagel (below).

(Above)   The Duchy Palace in Lostwithiel, headquarters of the Stannary Court,   ransacked by Parliamentary forces during the Civil War.

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FOR FURTHER READING:

A.L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall (Jonathan Cape,   1941); I. Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 1491-99 (Alan Sutton,   1994); P. Pay" ton, `A Concealed Envy Against the English', Cornish   Studies, New Series, 1, (1993); J. Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry: 1549,   (Routledge and Keegan Pasul, 1977); K.J. George, `How Many People Spoke   Cornish Traditionally?', Cornish Studies, Old Series, 14, (1986);

M. Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War   and Interregnum, (Oxford University Press, 1933); MJ. Stoyle, `Pagans or   Paragons?: Images of the Cornish during the English Civil War', EHR, 111, No.   441, (April 1996).

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By Mark Stoyle

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Of all the counties of southern England,   Cornwall is the most remote and inaccessible. Writing in 1647, Joshua Sprigg   described it thus: