Rebellion of 1569 which infuriated Queen Bess remembered
AN uprising which shook Queen Elizabeth I will be marked this weekend at the County Durham castle where it all began 450 years ago.
The Rising of the North, in November 1569, was the most significant armed domestic rebellion the Queen faced during her long reign.
But few people in the North – and even fewer in the rest of England – have any knowledge or awareness of what was an important historical event.
Brancepeth Castle, near Durham, was one of the homes of Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland, which amid religious upheaval became the centre of meetings of discontented Catholics and gentry, and the starting point for a march south of thousands of men.
The rebellion against the Tudor state was led by Neville and Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland. It ended in savage reprisals in the North by Elizabeth.
The rising will be remembered by a series of events at the castle. Tomorrow, at 7.30pm, there will be an Elizabethan concert featuring an evening of period music, song and poetry. Tickets for the event, organised by Brancepeth Archive and History Group, cost £12.50.
It will be followed next Saturday by a talk at 7pm by Dr Diana Newton, titled The Reluctant Rebels, which will explore the events leading up to the rebellion and the part played by Brancepeth. Tickets are £6.
The Muster, recalling the night of the uprising, will take place on November 13 at 7pm with church bells, weaponry, cannon fire and a call to arms. Tickets for this are £12.50. Book for all events on 0191 378 0974 or at the castle tea room.
Some taking part in the uprising wanted to free the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots and set her on the throne, some were unhappy with the Protestant church services and ministers, while some resented the interference of the Tudors and the loss of traditional feudal rights and authority of the northern aristocracy.
“At what was a time of great religious strife, a lot of ordinary people wanted their traditional ways back again,” said Brancepeth History Group secretary Vivienne Lowe.
“Elizabeth took the uprising very seriously and was concerned that it could turn into a major civil war.
“It was a major historical event in her reign and her reprisals were severe.”
John Tomaney, professor of urban and regional planning at University College London, sees the uprising as another example of an enduring North-South divide.
“We talk today about the divide but it has been in place for centuries. It has been evident for a long time and the uprising is an example of that,” said Prof Tomaney, who studied for his PhD at Newcastle University and was director of the university’s centre for urban and regional development studies.
On why such a major event is little known, Prof Tomaney said: “People are not taught about it. The principal place for that should be in schools but it doesn’t happen. I think it should.
“We have a national curriculum which teaches national history, and local and regional history gets left out.
“Although the uprising was an important event in the history of Tudor England, there have been no films and no popular histories about it, so it is not surprising that people don’t know about it.”
The 1569 uprising was not the first time that the North had revolted. It had been at the centre for the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536; a rebellion which opposed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries on which sparsely populated northern society was highly dependent.