The Lincolnshire Rising is presented as a popular protest against the destruction of monasteries and the transfer of church authority and property to Henry VIII. Its demands joined religious defense to resistance against the king’s advisers, while the scale of the reported mobilization exposed the danger of treating the suppression of religious houses as a matter of administration alone. In Margaret Pole’s account, the rising forms part of a wider northern movement whose hopes of protecting the old religious order briefly seemed capable of changing the course of royal policy.

Causes and Political Background

Resistance grew amid the crown’s assertion of control over the Church and its wealth. When Margaret’s son Montague reported that Jane Seymour had knelt before the king and urged him to restore the abbeys, the news arrived alongside word that Lincolnshire was mobilizing in their defense. The episode links popular resistance to a rare appeal from within the royal household: even the queen, as the report had it, opposed the seizure of the religious houses.

The conflict followed a profound shift in authority. The Church had surrendered to Henry VIII, who would rule it himself, and the Pope’s authority in England was to be disregarded. Thomas More had resigned as Lord Chancellor rather than continue in office under the new order. Margaret understood the change not simply as a dispute over doctrine but as the king taking the Church, its wealth, laws, and courts into his own possession. Against that background, defending the abbeys meant challenging the reach of royal government as well as the closure of religious institutions.

The government’s demands on the nobility reflected the same conflict over who could define lawful allegiance. At Westminster Palace, Thomas Cromwell administered an oath of succession to the peers, even though the Pope had ruled that Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon was valid. Thomas More would not sign the oath as it stood, and Henry failed to honor his earlier promise not to test his friend on the matter. Margaret’s account places such acts of conscience alongside the rising: disputes over church authority, royal commands, and personal allegiance were connected, not separate questions.

Mobilization and Demands

Reports from the North reached Margaret in fragments. A man from Hull warned that townspeople could not endure the taking of their churches: when a monastery was pulled down, he said, the whole town suffered. He described people gathering to defend the monasteries and expel the inspectors sent to close them. His warning conveys the local stakes of the policy. Religious houses were not remote symbols; their removal was understood to injure the communities around them.

London, too, filled with rumors of the rising’s size. Margaret’s steward reported that two young men from Lincolnshire had left her household to join the commons. They were said to have taken an oath that the Church should retain its fees and funds, the monasteries should be restored rather than demolished, and the bishops and advisers responsible for these wrongs should be removed from the king and the kingdom. These were bold demands: they called not only for the preservation of religious institutions but also for a change in the counsel guiding the monarch.

Reports of numbers were striking but uncertain. A cook’s boy returned from market claiming that forty thousand armed and mounted men were marching in Boston. Margaret records this as circulating news, not as a verified count. Its place in her narrative nevertheless matters: the rumor measures the fear and expectation generated by the mobilization, while the departure of the two household servants shows how the call to join it reached beyond the great houses and into ordinary service.

Royal Response and Wider Rising

The crown sent Charles Brandon and Thomas Howard to act against the rebels. Montague understood the dispatch of force as evidence that the king did not consider the unrest easily contained; he also observed that Henry had brought Princess Mary and the young Elizabeth to court for safety. Margaret’s account lets those decisions speak to the perceived danger without claiming that the rising had already reached London or the royal household.

By October 1536, news from the country described thousands marching on destroyed abbeys and rebuilding them while singing the psalms formerly sung there. Margaret also heard reports of a comet over Yorkshire and of the rising having gone underground in Lincolnshire, while the movement appeared in the northern hills and dales. These are the extraordinary stories reaching her in the countryside, rather than a detailed record of military engagements. They connect Lincolnshire’s resistance with the broader Pilgrimage of Grace and show how the movement’s defense of monasteries acquired a larger, increasingly threatening scale.

The royal response was weakened by practical failures and distrust. Margaret learned that Henry’s commanders had too little money to pay their men, that their troops were poorly equipped and short of horses, and that they might desert if confronted by supporters wearing the pilgrims’ badge. Thomas Howard complained that he had been left to hold Yorkshire with inadequate resources while other commanders received the money and troops. The king’s inability to coordinate or reward his servants thus compounded the challenge posed by the rebels.

Truce and Aftermath

The wider rising ended in a truce secured through the king’s pardon to the pilgrims. Thomas Howard carried the pardon north in freezing weather and waited outside Doncaster while it was offered to the assembled northerners. Robert Aske, the movement’s leader, knelt before the pilgrims, told them they had won a great victory, and asked to be released from his command. Once they agreed, he removed the badge of the five wounds and promised that they would wear only the king’s badge. The gesture marked a turn from collective religious protest toward an accommodation with royal authority.

Margaret kept the badge given to her by Tom Darcy as a private sign of loyalty, then kissed it and put it away, believing the pilgrimage over and her sons soon to return. Her hope reveals the personal stakes the political settlement carried for her household, but it does not establish that the monasteries had in fact been restored or that the underlying dispute was resolved.

London’s celebrations gave the truce a public, ceremonial meaning. During the Christmas court procession from Westminster to Greenwich, the court crossed the frozen river amid church bells, torches, bishops, and crowds. The people acclaimed Henry and his queen, but the loudest welcome was for Princess Mary, whom the government had demoted to Lady Mary. Margaret saw the crowd’s reception as evidence that many still regarded Mary as the princess and expected her restoration. The procession did not reverse the king’s policies; rather, it made visible the gap between the crown’s official settlements and popular loyalties. In this account, the rising’s significance lies both in its challenge to religious change and in the hope it briefly gave people that resistance might protect the Church and restore a disinherited princess.