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October 2006
Parish History Episode 66 - The Defence of the North
The Scots had suffered a bad defeat at Flodden in 1513 : thousands of their soldiers had perished in that fight, along with their king, James IV. But the English can be said to have deserved their victory. The kings of the new Tudor dynasty had, from the first, taken steps to secure control of their Northern frontier. They were well aware that, because of the English pre-occupation with France during the Hundred Years’ War, and because of the long years of internal anarchy during which the Houses of York and Lancaster had fought with each other for possession of the Crown, the Borders had, in recent centuries, been in a very disturbed condition.
Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and his successors were determined to remedy this. King Henry began by appointing three Wardens, officers of the Crown who were supplied with military resources, one each to control the East March (the area around Bamburgh, Berwick and Norham), the Middle March (Coquetdale, Redesdale and Tynedale), and the West March (the North of Cumberland). The Scottish kings later made a similar arrangement on their side of the Border : an East March (the Merse); a Middle March (Teviotdale); and a West March (Eskdale, Annandale and Nithsdale). Wedged between the two rival West Marches were some rather peculiar jurisdictions (or rather, lands lacking jurisdiction). These included Liddesdale (around Newcastleton) on the Scottish side of the Border, and the “Waste of Bewcastle” on the English side, neither of which seemed to possess any system of law enforcement; and the thoroughly misnamed “Debatable Land”, around Gretna Green, at the head of Solway Firth, which was disputed between the English and the Scottish Crowns, though not usually through the medium of formal debate.
It was King Henry’s wish that the Prince-Bishop of Durham would hold authority over all three English wardens, and would co-ordinate policy. However, at the time when Henry seized power, through killing Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the Bishop of Durham was John Sherwood, a man who had, before being appointed to Durham, been in the service of King Richard, and whom Henry did not trust. Eventually, however, the new king found a priest, Richard Fox by name, whom he thought he could trust to serve the Crown loyally in so important a position.
Fox’s political commitment began, as far as we know, with Richard of Gloucester’s proclamation of himself as King of England in 1483. It may be recalled that Richard was the younger brother of Edward IV, who had died earlier that year, leaving two sons, boys of thirteen and eleven. The older was, immediately after his father’s death, proclaimed King, as Edward V, while Duke Richard of Gloucester was recognised as Regent, with the title of Lord Protector.
Less than three months later, however, this Lord Protector arranged for the young King to be placed in secure accommodation within the Tower of London, along with his younger brother, known as Richard, Duke of York; then Richard of Gloucester, having locked away young Edward V and his brother, suddenly proclaimed himself as King Richard III.
Many persons associated with the old King, Edward IV, were outraged, and Richard III found himself obliged to behead several of his relatives in order to make his position secure. This seems to have outraged others, including Richard Fox, a hitherto obscure, forty year- old priest, then Vicar of Stepney, just East of London. In 1484 Fox abandoned his parish, and sailed to Brittany, where the exiled Henry Tudor had established himself, and was preparing for an invasion of his native Wales and of England. Perhaps Fox saw opportunity for himself in making this move. He was one of many people who felt that, after such a start, Richard III’s reign would be unlikely to last long, and he perhaps calculated that Henry Tudor was the man most likely to overthrow the tyrant.
When King Richard learned that Fox had been sent by Tudor on a mission to Paris, to negotiate about French royal support for a projected invasion of England, he ordered the Bishop of London to convene an ecclesiastical court which duly “unfrocked” Richard Fox, alleging that he had departed for Brittany, and had conspired “with our great rebell, Henry ap Tudder, the Welch Pretender”.
Fox was certainly guilty of that. In 1485, he accompanied Henry on his landing in Wales, and his march into England, and Fox appears to have fought in the Battle of Bosworth, where King Richard was slain, and Henry hailed as King. The new king, who styled himself Henry VII, assembled new civil and ecclesiastical courts, and Fox was speedily “refrocked”, nominally reappointed to Stepney, and then, in quick succession, made Bishop, first of Exeter and then of Bath & Wells (neither of which Sees does he ever appear to have even visited). He seems to have remained in attendance on King Henry in London, and in 1488 he was in negotiation with Spain over the marriage of King Henry’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, to the King of Spain’s daughter, known as Catherine of Aragon. He was also employed for a while as Governor of Calais, England’s last possession in France, where he rebuilt the fortifications.
King Henry seems to have been impressed by Fox’s work at Calais, and sent him North to look at England’s Northern frontier. At first he held the post of Ambassador to the Scottish Court, and was possibly implicated in the murder of King James III in 1488. Then, in 1494, John Sherwood, Bishop of Durham, conveniently died, and King Henry immediately ordered the Chapter of Durham Cathedral and Priory to “elect” Fox as his successor
In 1496 Fox appeared at his most resolute when he learned that Scotland’s new king, James IV, was playing host to a man whose real name seems to have been Perkin Warbeck, but who claimed to be Richard, the young brother of Edward V, supposedly murdered in the Tower of London some thirteen years before. Fox learned that King James was planning to cross the Border at Norham, and to have Warbeck proclaimed, on English soil, as King Richard IV. Bishop Fox, learning that Norham Castle was almost ungarrisonned, assembled a handful of armed horsemen, and then rode with them hell-for-leather for Norham, and tumbled into the castle only an hour or so before the Scottish vanguard arrived. Although the castle was in bad repair, and the Scots brought up heavy guns with the intention of battering it into submission, Fox and his companions were able to hold out for several days, until a large force of cavalry arrived from London, which was able to drive the Scots back across the Tweed, capturing some of their guns. The English were then able to pursue the Scots, half way to Edinburgh. (King Henry’s attempt to levy new taxes to pay for this campaign led to a great rebellion in Cornwall, the Cornishmen claiming that the “Haliwerfolc” of Northumbria should pay for their own defence : the ruthless suppression of this uprising resulted in the elimination of most of Cornwall’s ancient liberties, and was perhaps the beginning of the end for Cornwall’s ancient language and culture.)
If one result of this Battle of Norham was the greater integration of Cornwall into the Kingdom of England, a more momentous development arose from Fox’s success, when acting, after the war, as English ambassador to Edinburgh, in arranging the marriage of Princess Margaret, King Henry’s daughter, to Scotland’s young King, James IV. Some English people, foreseeing the possibility that the two dynasties, of Tudor and of Stewart, would eventually become one, hailed it as “the Marriage of the Rose and The Thistle”. Some Scots, noticing the Welsh origin of the Tudors, preferred to speak of “the Marriage of the Thistle and the Leek”.
Bishop Fox had negotiated two momentous marriages. The wedding of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon would eventually lead, through the death of Arthur, and the transfer of Arthur’s bride to his brother Henry, to the breach of communion between Rome and the English Church. The wedding of King James to Princess Margaret would eventually lead, when the Tudor line failed, to the House of Stewart inheriting the Throne of England.
In the administration of his own diocese, Bishop Fox perhaps achieved less. He did however install Wardens of the Marches (the King appointed them, but they were responsible to Fox in their military, administrative and judicial duties). Also, Fox noted the general “backwardness” of the parochial clergy in these northern lands, and he encouraged scholars, with university degrees, to come North, and to take over the more lucrative parishes - those, that is, which paid a better income. One such scholar to come North was Robert Kent, who would be Rector of Houghton-le-Spring from 1500 to 1528.
No doubt the existing clergy tended to look on scholars like Rector Kent with some mistrust. They would feel that such men would not understand “the North”, and would be unable even to speak the language.
But Kent was lucky not to need to go any further North than Houghton. Travellers who went up close to the Border, to the regions around the Cheviots, spoke of finding nothing but utter lawlessness and irreligion.
Were there no priests active there, before Bernard Gilpin’s time? Well, yes, there were : too active, it might seem, for in 1497 we find Bishop Fox passing sentence of excommunication on “all the thieving inhabitants of Tynedale and Redesdale”, and “especially upon their vagrant priests”, who were said to ride with the reivers in order to partake of their booty, and to mingle pagan superstitions with the Christian Sacraments. The following year he lifted this sentence on certain named laymen who had done penance for their crimes, but no priests are named in this pardon.
Fox had more sense than to appoint any university men with an “S.T.P.” after their names to these Border parishes. But still, men of learning were, for almost the first time since the fall of the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria, to be seen amid the churches and cloisters of those Northern towns which stood a bit further back from the troubled Border.
Dick Toy
