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April 2007
Parish History Episode 72- The Council of the North
In last month’s article, we learned how, at the end of 1539, Leigh, Henley and Blythman, the King’s Commissioners, had travelled through the North of England, dealing out destruction to those monastic houses, such as Tynemouth, Finchale and Durham, which had been spared in the first round of dissolutions in 1535. These three Commissioners had been able to act in a much more domineering manner than their predecessors of four years earlier, as the rule of civil, common and canon law had been largely swept away in the course of suppressing the Pilgrimage of Grace. The North was in effect under a state of what would later be called martial law.
Of course, the Palatinate of Durham had never been fully part of the Kingdom of England. The Prince-Bishop had up to now reigned as a sort of sub-king, wielding within his territories almost all the powers of a king, though acknowledging the King of England as his overlord. Durham, like Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and Calais, was subject to the King of England, but was, jurisdictionally, something apart from the Kingdom of England.
In most respects, however, the Palatinate was governed as effectively as any other region of England, and the Bishop’s Courts administered justice impartially and effectively. Much of Northumberland, however, together with the Border districts of Cumberland, was divided up among a maze of feudal “liberties”, tribal territories wherein local lords administered such justice as they saw fit, and frequently feuded with each other. Much the same state of affairs existed along the Welsh Marches, while in Wales itself there were, in addition to six organised counties wherein the King’s writ ran fairly effectively, over a hundred feudal lordships in which the administration of justice was as primitive as in the Northern “liberties”.
Both King Henry and his new Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, wished to regularise the situation, and to arrange for a stronger and less feudal administration to be introduced into Wales and the Northern Counties. With this in view, they prevailed upon the Reformation Parliament, just before its dissolution in 1536, to pass the Jurisdiction of Liberties Act, whereby all such autonomous principalities were abolished, and their lands subjected to the normal county administration. The Courts of the Palatinate of Durham were also stripped of all criminal jurisdiction, and their powers were further curtailed the following year, when the Council of the North was set up.
Henry VIII and the following three Tudor monarchs lived geographically circumscribed lives, residing throughout their reigns in London, and seeing nothing of their domains except for the Home Counties. None of them, to my knowledge, ever crossed the Severn or the Trent. The Plantagenet kings had been rather better travelled. King Edward I had resided for years in Wales or the Marches while waging war upon the Welsh kings. After the defeat and death of Dafydd III in 1283, King Edward then moved North to York, to begin planning the conquest of Scotland. There then followed half a century of Anglo-Scottish wars, from 1296 to 1337, during which the three Edwards resided much of the time, when they were not on campaign in Scotland, in York, engaged in plans for future campaigns against the enemy. (For similar reasons, the Romans, during the later years of their rule in Britain, had tended to administer the Province from York rather than from London.) But then, in 1337, King Edward III had set off for France in the vain hope of securing the crown of that country for himself, condemning England to a full century of strife with France. The seat of English administration moved back from York to London, while the king himself was often absent on campaign in France. There then followed a period of many internal wars, during which the kings of England travelled round the country, fighting wars against rival claimants to the English Throne. King Henry VII had brought that age of strife to an end with his victory over Richard III in 1485. The son and the grandchildren of Henry VII were now able to reign in peace in London, without having to visit the more troublesome parts of the Kingdom.
But they still wished to see effective government exercised within the extremities of their domains. Therefore, in 1537, a decision was made to split the Privy Council, the body of great lords who were entitled to give advice to the King, into three. The traditional Privy Council remained in the South, attending the person of the King, in London or in his palaces around the Home Counties. But two new bodies were set up, to represent the King in the remoter parts of his dominions. One was the Council of Wales and the Marches, based at Ludlow, in Shropshire, and administering the King’s Law throughout Wales and the counties of Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. The other was the Council of the North, based at York, and exercising similar powers throughout the counties of Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland. Both Councils were composed of local lords, who held the rank of Privy Councillors but who were not physically in the King’s presence, communicating with him through correspondence.
They administered his Law, his Justice, his Peace, within their respective territories. By this system, the Kingdom of England and Wales (and from now on, they can, in practice, be spoken of as one kingdom) was divided into two divisions: a more sophisticated South and East, the lowland half of the Kingdom, contrasted with a rougher, hillier, less polite, North and West. As the counties of Cornwall (which then still retained its Celtic speech) and of Lancashire also, at this time became Palatinate Counties, with some of the same aspects of separate administration enjoyed (or suffered) in the lands of the two great Councils, it would seem that the Kingdom of England and Wales was regarded in practice as two different lands, with two different standards of civilisation. (Also, outside England and Wales, the King was sovereign in Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, and Calais, but all those lands were treated more like colonial dependencies.)
With these arrangements, County Durham lost much of the peculiar status it had hitherto enjoyed. Bishop Tunstall still possessed the title of “Prince-Bishop”, but the county was administered much the same as the other four counties subject to the Council of the North. One peculiarity that remained was that the county, as such, was not represented in the parliament (though the Bishop, of course, had a seat in the House of Lords).
Indeed, the inhabitants of all these “upland shires” of England and Wales, those regions subject to special jurisdictions, were, with the exception of Cornwall, very much underrepresented in the English Parliament. Our neighbouring county of Northumberland, for instance, returned two members to Parliament, while the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne returned another two; additionally, Henry “the Unthrifty”, Sixth Earl of Northumberland, sat in the House of Lords. Such meagre representation contrasts with that of many smaller counties closer to London, which returned one, two or three dozen members to the two Houses of Parliament. It was small wonder that when, a century later, civil war broke out between King and Parliament, it would be from those small lowland shires that Parliament would draw its support, while the King would depend for his support on the great, semi-feudal families of the upland shires.
It should be remembered that while it is wholly natural to see King Henry VIII as a tyrant, sweeping away the old order in Church and State, often on little more than a whim, to accommodate his own changing tastes in female beauty, he yet chose to rule according to the already established customs of the Kingdom. He summoned regular parliaments throughout his reign, and bullied, bribed or cajoled them into doing what he required. He did bring Wales and the North more firmly into the Kingdom, and also he abolished such anomalies as the criminal jurisdiction and military powers of the Prince-Bishops of Durham.
As the responsibilities of the Prince- Bishop were reduced, so Tunstall required fewer deputies to run his affairs, and some redundancies occurred among his staff. One man to find himself surplus to requirements was Houghton’s rector, William Franklin. It had been Bishop Ruthall who had (in 1514) invited Franklin to come North, and to serve Durham as Chancellor, and in various other capacities, including that of Military Engineer, responsible for the construction and maintenance of castles and other fortifications along the Scottish Border: and in 1528 Franklin had succeeded Kent as Rector of Houghton-le- Spring (drawing the income of the parish, but neglecting it, while he went on building castles along the Border).
Franklin had always been Ruthall’s man. He probably did not get on so well with Bishop Tunstall, and they were probably both well satisfied to part company. Franklin certainly did not suffer any great financial loss when he left Durham. He moved to Windsor, one of the castles where the King resided, and, through knowing the right people (an advantage possessed by many later Old Etonians), he soon became Dean of Windsor, with responsibilities for services and ceremonies within the Royal Chapel in the Castle. Here he would, in 1537, officiate at the Baptism of King Henry’s only legitimate son, Prince Edward. Thirteen days later, he officiated at the funeral of the little Prince’s mother, Queen Jane Seymour, dead of a fever contracted during childbirth.
It might be thought that by this time Franklin’s connection with Houghton-le- Spring would have ended. But, despite moving from his home on the Durham peninsula to quarters within Windsor Castle, Franklin did not resign most of his posts in Durham. He retained the titles, and, more important, the income, of Archdeacon of Durham, Rector of Houghton-le-Spring, Rector of Easington, Master of Sherburn Hospital, etc., etc. He paid curates or other deputies (including, probably, monks evicted from the recently dissolved monasteries) to perform his duties, while he resided in Windsor, ingratiating himself with the King and the royal family, and the great lords and ladies of the realm.
From 1528 to 1536, Houghton had known an absentee rector, drawing the revenues of the parish, but living eight miles away, in Durham - when he wasn’t riding round the Border, building castles. Now the Rector lived over two hundred miles away, in Windsor Castle.
Dick Toy
