Mark Stoyle’s A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 is a compelling retelling of the Tudor uprising commonly known as ‘The Prayer Book Rebellion’ which also makes precise, but salient interventions into the relevant historiography. Stoyle, a Professor of history at the University of South Hampton, is an expert in the early modern West Country and Exeter among other subjects. He brings this background to bear to provide an authority and nuanced understanding of the region and the ‘Western Rising’ (Stoyle prefers this term over ‘Prayer Book Rebellion’ as the participants would not have considered themselves rebels).
Stoyle’s principal argument is that the Western Rising was a significant political event motivated by religious discontent which came far closer to directly toppling the Duke of Somerset’s regency and the English Reformation than many scholars have previously acknowledged. These historians often depict the Western Rising as a “quixotic enterprise that was bound to end in failure,” a proposition which Stoyle firmly rejects (Stoyle, 290). Instead, Stoyle makes a series of arguments, the others beyond those discussed below can be found in his conclusion, which illuminate the severity of the crisis for the regime in London, the potency of the uprising and its participants, and embed the Western Rising in a broader historical context. One of these arguments is that the rebellion in Cornwall broke out on July 6 not June 6 (Stoyle, 126). Stoyle uses a variety of evidence to show that the indictment drawn up against Humphrey Arundell and John Winslade, which lists the date as June 6, is false. For example, he points to the accounts of John Killigrew which list a transfer of garrison forces to the Isles of Scilly in June of that year, an event that would suggest no uprising had occurred yet in Cornwall (Stoyle, 127-128). This sub argument is significant to Stoyle’s overall thesis as it places the raising of and march east of the Cornish host to within a shorter three-week period. Such a condensed time frame demonstrates that “Somerset was by no means as hopelessly out of touch with what was going on in the far South-West during the initial stages of the rising as has often been claimed” and that “from the regime’s point of view, the western rebels’ movements must have looked far more purposeful and menacing” (Stoyle, 293). This serves as one example of how Stoyle deftly demonstrates that the Tudor world was one “that the West Country insurgents of 1549 came much closer than is generally realised to turning upside down” (Stoyle, 7).
Another central element of Stoyle’s approach is that he situates the Western Uprising in a larger historical context, both geographically and temporally. He breaks A Murderous Midsummer into three main divisions: Part I The Background, Part II The Rising, and Part III The Aftermath. In Part I Stoyle provides an overview of the geography and society of the West Country, explaining its unique and defining qualities. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, he situates the region in the context of over a decade of religious upheaval preceding the uprising. For example, he recounts the friction and even open opposition which Henry VIII’s first set of royal injunctions in 1536 caused in Cornwall and Exeter describing how a mob of women attacked royal agents sent to enforce the injunctions in Exeter (Stoyle, 29).
In Chapter 2 Foreshocks Stoyle reconstructs another story of religious unrest, this time of a “short-lived uprising” in West Cornwall in 1548. He frames this uprising as “the product of popular outrage at Somerset’s religious polices” (Stoyle, 71). In addition to a general religious traditionalism in opposition to the Reformation and Act of Uniformity, Stoyle also highlights that most of the area’s population still spoke Cornish and therefore were unlikely to have taken kindly to “the message of the Reformation – preached as that message invariably was, in English” (Stoyle, 73). By illuminating these various tumultuous events in the West Country sparked by controversy around the English Reformation, Stoyle places the Western Rising in a lineage of religious unrest and unease. He energetically rejects the notion that the rising had started as a social protest claiming that such an argument “seems to fly in the face of the surviving evidence” (Stoyle, 295). Instead, he further substantiates the position of Frances Rose-Troup and Aubrey Greenwood that the Western Rising was first and foremost a religious matter.
While in Part II of A Murderous Midsummer Stoyle recounts and analyses the actual uprising itself, it is in Part III which he again expands his scope to significantly bolster his argument. In Chapter 8 Aftershocks, Stoyle portrays the complex political maneuvering in the aftermath of the uprising’s defeat in a new light. Rather than just an intrigue which toppled Somerset and decided the new dominant faction at the royal court, he argues that within this struggle “the prospect was at least fleetingly to arise that the cause of traditional religion… might still triumph” (Stoye, 256). Despite their military defeat, Stoyle emphasizes the near success and the seismic impact of the western rebels in this following London centered contest to “reinforce the argument that the insurgents should not be written off as hopeless reactionaries” (Stoyle, 294). Situating the Western Uprising both in a rich preceding context of religious unrest and local peculiarity and in its following reverberations in the center of state power is one of Stoyle’s strongest contributions.
Stoyle employs a variety of sources such as manuscripts, court and county rolls, and correspondence. While he attempts to use a mix of local and state sources, he is limited by a lack of surviving eyewitness accounts, particularly from the perspective of the insurgents. As a result, Stoyle methodologically relies on critical reading and reading against the grain of his many sources to try and overcome the potential biases and shortcomings of the materials which do exist. The most significant example of this are the various accounts of eyewitness John Hooker, a local Exeter man, Reformation evangelical, and one of the besieged in Exeter during the uprising. Hooker’s writings “remain, to this day, the chief primary sources on which all subsequent histories of the rebellion have been based” making them both a key source to Stoyle’s research and other historians he is in conversation with (Stoyle, 83). However, throughout A Murderous Midsummer Stoyle questions, cross references against, and attempts to contextualize Hooker’s accounts to guard against their “biases and distortions” and avoid retelling “his [Hooker’s] vision when reconstructing the story of the Western Rising” (Stoyle, 85). Stoyle applies this critical reading to other sources, such as the indictment drawn up against Arundell and Winslade, and although at times it necessitates ambiguity or speculation, the academic integrity and rigor of his analysis are clear.
Mark Stoyle’s A Murderous Midsummer is a robust monograph which recounts the Western Rising of 1549 in detail and adds valuable contributions to the subject’s historiography. While at times Stoyle’s writing can appear to harbor sympathies for the rebels, this potential bias does not overtake the work. It is also just as likely that the positive presentation of the insurgent cause is as much a product of his thesis and its attempts to refute the notion that they were foolish and doomed from the start. Like any work which seeks to give a greater voice to a less represented group in the historiography, such as Christopher Dyer’s Peasants Making History: Living In an English Region 1200-1540, this monograph emphasizes their importance. In doing so, Stoyle illustrates how unique contributions can be made even to already strong historiographies.