Seminar Overview:

This seminar examines a particular ‘moment’ in the reign of Elizabeth I: a period of intense crisis precipitated by the arrival in England of Mary Queen of Scots in 1568 and culminating in a full-scale rebellion the following year. We will crucially assess different scholarly views of the significance of the 1569 rebellion, as well as address its immediate and medium-term consequences.

Questions for discussion:

- How serious a threat to the political and religious order was the Northern Rising of 1569?

- What changed after the events of 1569-70?

 

Seminar Reading:

Aston, Margaret,The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, 1993)

Busse, Daniela, ‘Anti-Catholic Polemical Writing on the “Rising in the North” (1569) and the Catholic Reaction’, Recusant History, 27 (2004)

Cross, Claire, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (London, 1969), pp. 37-47

*Fletcher, Anthony and MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Tudor Rebellions (4^th or 5^th edsn, 1997, 2004), chap. 8

Guy, John My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004)

James, Mervyn, ‘The Concept of Order and the Northern Rising of 1569’, Past and Present, 60 (1973)

*Kesselring, Krista, ‘“A Colde Pye for the Papistes”: Constructing and Containing the Northern Rising of 1569’, Journal of British Studies 43 (2004)

Kesselring, Krista, ‘Mercy and Liberality: The Aftermath of the 1569 Northern Rebellion’, History 90 (2005)

*Kesselring, Krista, The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics and Protest in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke, 2007), read a chapter of your choice or the 'Introduction'

MacCaffrey, Wallace, Elizabeth I (London, 1993), chaps 9-12

MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘Catholic and Puritan in Elizabethan Suffolk: A County Community Polarizes’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 72 (1981)

*Marcombe, David , ‘A Rude and Heady People: The Local Community and the Rebellion of the Northern Earls’, in id., ed., The Last Principality: Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham 1494-1660 (Nottingham, 1987)

Muller, Aislinn, The excommunication of Elizabeth I: faith, politics, and resistance in post-Reformation England, 1570-1603 (2020), especially Introduction, and Chapter 1.

Oates, Rosamund, ‘Catholicism, Conformity and the Community in the Elizabethan Diocese of Durham’, Northern History, 43 (2006)

Parkinson, Anne C. ‘The Rising of the Northern Earls’, Recusant History, 27 (2005)

Pollitt, Ronald, ‘An “Old Practizer” at Bay: Thomas Bishop and the Northern Rebellion, Northern History, 16 (1980)

Pollitt, Ronald, ‘The Defeat of the Northern Rebellion and the Shaping of Anglo-Scottish Relations’, Scottish Historical Review, 64 (1985)

Rex, Richard, Elizabeth I: Fortune’s Bastard (Stroud, 2003), chap. 7 [PM]

Williams, Neville, Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk (London, 1964; republished 1989 as A Tudor Tragedy: Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk)

 

Documents:

‘Cecil’s Short memorial of the State of the Realm, 1569’, EHD, pp. 193-203

‘Letters between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, 1568’, EHD, pp. 205-7

‘The Manifesto of the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland’, EHD, pp. 210-11

‘Sir George Bowes to the Earl of Sussex, Nov 1569’, EHD, pp. 212-13

‘Proceedings Against Durham Clergy’, Cuthbert Sharp, ed., The Rising in the North: The 1569 Rebellion (1840, reprint, Durham, 1975), pp. 252-63

‘Extract from Thomas Norton, A warning agaynst the dangerous practises of papists’ (London, 1569), sigs B1r-C1r. SEE HERE

‘Papal Bull of Excommunication, 1570’, in Robert S. Miola, ed., Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Oxford, 2007), pp. 486-8