Stoyle – Early Modern England

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.

In his book The Western Rising of 1549, Mark Stoyle explores an event that history has largely overlooked, offering a sympathetic remembrance of the rebels who took part in the rising, which came close to dramatically transforming English history.

Stoyle describes the book’s simple aim as “to provide a new history of the Western Rising, and to consider the disturbances afresh” (p. 3, all based on the paperback version of the book).

Stoyle is eminently qualified to write this book. Born and raised in Mid-Devon, he describes himself as “a proud West Country man.” Early in his career, he conducted archaeological work in Exeter, where much of the story is set. He serves as a professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton and is the author of seven books. For Western Rising, he won the Devon History Society Book of the Year Award in 2023.

Stoyle presents his work as a chronological narrative history. He divides the book into three sections: The Background, The Rising, and The Aftermath. The chapters in these sections include clear signposts for the story’s progression, with titles such as Foreshocks, Escalation, and Retribution.

For sources, Stoyle provides an extensive list of manuscripts, court records, and letters. One of the challenges in writing the book was the limited number of eyewitness accounts. Many of the rebel documents were destroyed. John Hooker provided one contemporary source on which Stoyle relied. Hooker was from Exeter and “the most influential historian” and the “chief primary source on which all subsequent histories of the rebellion have been based.” However, as a loyalist, Stoyle recognizes him as a partisan source (p. 83).

After Hooker, there followed a historical silence, with the exception of William Hal’s history in 1680 (p. 126). The history was picked up again in the foundational work of Francis Rose-Troup’s 1913 book, which Stoyle says “has remained the standard history of the rising.” (p. 126) He supports and amplifies her central thesis “that religion lay at the very heart of the Western Rising.” (p. 294) He also acknowledges Aubrey Greenwood’s 1990 PhD dissertation, which challenged the traditional view that the Western Rising was primarily a “priestly plot”. He argued that Devon and Cornwall residents rebelled voluntarily to defend traditional religious practices.[i]

An example of this relative silence appears in the book by Robert Buchholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England 1485 – 1714, where the Western Rising merits only a few sentences. Summed up with, “At about this time, a second royal army put down the Western rebellion at Sampford Courtenay in a similarly brutal fashion.” [1]

In reviewing The Western Rising, one can argue that Stoyle’s goal is to push back against the historical royalists’ view of the rebellion by offering a sympathetic, almost apologetic view of the rebels and by highlighting the contingency of what almost changed the course of English history.

One can find numerous instances of Stoyle’s sympathetic view of the rebels. Indeed, in many places in the book, Stoyle notes that “writers, both at the time of the rising itself and ever since, have been far more scathing both about the protesters and about their aims.” (p. 289) Instead, in his view, he describes the rebels as “the brave men and women who gather there to defend both their faith and their accustomed way of life.” (p. 297)

For example, Stoyle presents a conflicting view of the Crown’s assessment of Body’s murder as a personal attack by his enemies (p. 71) and of the priest, Harper, as an instigator of the conflict (p. 89). He blames the likely first shots, fired by Carew’s followers, which killed ten protesters, for lighting the match that “supercharged” the confrontation and launched the rebellion (p. 103). At the culmination of the fighting, Stoyle recognizes that “the rebels’ desperate courage had proved of little avail against the superior training and equipment of the royal forces” (p. 200). Finally, during the trial of the rebel leaders, Stoyle rejects the widely promoted claims that the rebellion was class warfare, saying, “there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the West Country insurgents had called for the killing of gentlemen” (p. 279). He insists that their faith was the prime motivator.

In some ways, Stoyle’s sympathetic view of the rebels may have been swimming against the tide of contemporary historical and social opinion. In an interview (starting at minute 26), James Clark describes a prejudice against the Catholic influence in England. He relates that as an undergraduate, he was surprised by the history that portrayed Edward as good, Mary as bad, and Elizabeth as better. He said he was stunned by how this ran through all the historiography and that there were no voices challenging it. He claimed that the contrast reduced the history to an old-fashioned 1950s Western in which the bad guys wear black hats and the good guys wear white hats.[2]

A further theme supporting the rebels and his view of what almost happened is the contingency he sees in the rebellion’s possible outcome. Indeed, the rebel effort “came much closer than generally realized to turning the world upside down.” (p. 7) At the decisive Battle of Fenny Bridges, Stoyle notes that Lord Russell’s army was in an extremely vulnerable position. Hooker notes that a fresh supply of Cornish troops arrived just after the battle. (p.179) If they had arrived just a day or two earlier, Stoyle argues, they might have turned the battle in the rebels’ favor. (p. 293)

For an American audience, the impact of the contingency Stoyle describes is similar to that of the historian James McPherson, who wrote about how the world would have changed if Pickett’s Charge had succeeded at the Battle of Gettysburg.

In the end, there were few, if any, winners in the Western Rising. The rebel leaders were executed, and Somerset’s role was sunset by Dudley. The conflict between Protestants and Catholics would continue. Nevertheless, Mark Stoyle’s retelling and reframing of the faith, suffering, and lives bring them back to life.

[1] Bucholz, Early Modern England 1485-1714.

[2] James Clark: The Dissolution of the Monasteries. YouTube Video.

[i] AI results for Aubrey Greenwood, Western Rising Prayer Book Rebellion.

Stoyle A Murderous Midsummer Review – CHall

Mark Stoyle, A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549