Not everyone was receptive to the changes sweeping across the country. In November that year, John Smyth of Wighton was returning home from London when he happened to meet on the road one Ralph Rogerson, a yeoman farmer employed by Walsingham Priory as a ‘singing man’ or lay chorister.
The two of them continued their journey together, and as they did so bemoaned the cruelties and injustices being perpetrated in the name of religion. Two years earlier Henry VIII, by means of the first Act of Supremacy, had rejected Rome and founded the Church of England, appointing himself its supreme head; yet in 1521 he had been declared ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Pope Leo X in respect of a pamphlet he had published accusing Martin Luther, the seminal figure of the Protestant movement, of heresy.
In 1544, ten years after the first Act of Supremacy, Parliament sarcastically bestowed this selfsame title on its renegade sovereign.
The Act had had a long gestation. Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, had been his late brother’s wife and it had needed a special dispensation from Pope Julius II to allow the wedding to take place. She failed to provide him with a son and heir; in the mean time he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. He wanted to marry her, but Pope Clement VII refused to annul the existing marriage.
Henry VIII, from a portrait by Hans Holbein
The Catholic Church wielded great power in England. It was immensely wealthy and enjoyed privileges denied to the laity. It was also seen as corrupt doctrinally, financially and morally. Such practices as simony did not sit well with those who yearned to go back to a simpler and more faithful adherence to scripture – before Tyndale, personal exposure to the Bible outside the priesthood had been possible only for the minority who could read Latin. The Church had also become tainted by stories of sexual misconduct in religious houses.
Henry’s rejection of Rome was expedient on three levels. He could see the way the Protestant wind was blowing; the wealth of the Church made a tempting target for a monarch who always wanted more; and of course, once free of the Pope’s intransigence, he could marry whomever he pleased.
His policies, as well as other grievances, led in October 1536 to the Lincolnshire Rising, when religious conservatives rioted against the king’s commissioners in protest at the suppression of the monasteries and the looting of their treasures.
Plaque commemorating the Lincolnshire Rising, at St James’s Church, Louth
It was brutally put down, but was followed almost immediately by a far more serious rebellion in Yorkshire involving thirty thousand men at arms. This, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, was likewise quashed and ended in the execution of over two hundred and twenty men.
The unrest was not restricted to Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. It should be understood that the gentry were participating, sometimes zealously, in the dismantling of the Catholic Church in this country and were often made gifts of its land. Together with long-held, simmering economic resentments and the fact that north Norfolk was especially conservative in matters of religion, the threat to Walsingham Priory was provocative in the extreme. Even after 1534 the shrine of Our Lady continued to attract pilgrims, and it had a special place in local people’s hearts.
On that November day in 1536, as John Smyth and Ralph Rogerson decried at length what was going on, they inflamed one another to the point where Smyth is said to have proposed an insurrection against ‘great men’ with himself as its leader – though later he would deny everything. The chief object was to spare Walsingham the fate of other religious houses that had been or were in the process of being broken up.
The proposal was as naive as it was reckless. The conspirators were to seize some of the more overbearing landowners together with their land, and so bring their grievances before the king.
The Walsingham Conspiracy, as it became known, never got beyond the planning stage. Someone reported it to Sir John Heydon of Baconsthorpe, who at once contacted Richard Gresham in London and Sir Roger Townshend at East Raynham. About 25 conspirators were arrested, all from north Norfolk. Three were from Langham: Thomas Manne, a carpenter; John Sellers, a tailor; and none other than the vicar, John Grigby or Grigbie.
Smyth and Rogerson, the original conspirators, escaped with their lives. So did Grigby – how, it is not known. Manne and Sellers were among the eleven men condemned to death. To broadcast the authorities’ salutary message, the executions were carried out at four different places: Lynn, Walsingham, Norwich and Yarmouth. Manne was executed at Norwich on 26 May 1537; Sellers followed him two days later, at Yarmouth.
The mode of execution, hanging, drawing and quartering, was exceptionally barbarous. The condemned man was dragged through the streets behind a horse, with or without the support of an old door or something of that sort. A crowd of spectators would follow, while more would be waiting at the gallows. The convict was hanged but taken down half-alive and, still conscious, emasculated. His abdomen was then slit open and his intestines drawn out. If by this time he had not succumbed to death he certainly did so next, when he was beheaded. Finally his body was ‘quartered’ – cut into four, boiled, and hung up in sundry public places to drive the lesson home.
The executions at Walsingham were performed just outside the town, at a place now called ‘Martyrs’ Field’, in the angle formed by the junction of Egmere Road with Station Road. Today it is just a nondescript bit of pasture populated by rabbits. There is nothing there to commemorate its grisly past, nor to remind us of the tumult that birthed the Church of England.
Related: The Langham Madonna
