The European World, 1500-1700
Naomi Pullin
Week 18 – Rebellions
Key case studies:
1525 – German Peasants War
1536 - Pilgrimage of Grace, England
1562-1580 – Huguenot Wars, France
1566-1609 – Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule
1594-1603 – Tyrone’s Rebellion in Ireland (‘Nine Years War’), against English rule
1647-8 – Neapolitan rebellion against Spanish rule.
1. Politics and Popular Politics
Wayne Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics 1500-1700: ‘it is useful to regard
politics as an ongoing bargaining process between those who claim governmental authority in a given
territory (rulers) and those over whom that authority is said to extend (subjects)’.
Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England: ‘Politics will be understood to
occur where power is reasserted, extended or challenged. Politics is therefore the product of
deliberate, human agency and is pre-eminently about conflict and change. In this analysis, politics does
not occur where the distribution of power remains static and unchallenged.’
2. Different types of early modern rebellions
Aristocratic revolts
 Reaction against royal programmes for administrative standardisation and political uniformity
Spain:
 1560s – Netherlands rebel after attempt to impose Inquisition. Catholic Dutch aristocrats start
to petition court of Madrid – felt interests undermined by centralisation.
 1630s - main reaction lay in reforms under Philip IV and Count Olivares (‘one king, one law,
one coinage’).
 1640s – Portugal breaks from Spain – led by house of Braganza
Britain:
 Tudor centralisation projects in Ireland provokes unrest from aristocratic families
 Kildare Rebellion (1534) and Desmond Rebellions (1570s and 1580s) led by Fitzgerald family
– Lord Lieutenants of Ireland
Popular revolts
Naples revolt, 1647-48
• Led by merchants, tradesmen and apprentices - planned and organised by Tommaso Aniello
• Demanded abolition of taxes and reform in administration of the city – declared city a republic
and asked for support of France
Social Protest
 Link between poverty, vagrancy and social unrest encapsulated in ‘many-headed monster’
 Christopher Hudson (Lancashire magistrate), 1596: the poor ‘always apt to rebel and mutiny ...
on the least occasion.’
 Food riots in England - 1586, 1594-7, 1622 and 1629-31, after succession of bad harvests
 Agrarian revolts – issue of enclosure, dispossession of common resources; marginal
community as a result of property rights claimed by the crown or private landowners.
 Anti-enclosure riots can spark minor regional revolts e.g. Midland Revolt, 1607; Western
Rising 1626-32.
 German ‘Peasants War’ begins as a response against enclosure > sparks revolt across SouthWest Germany.
3. Rhetoric of Riots and Rebellion
The moral economy of the crowd (George Rude and E. P. Thompson)
 Popular protest stimulated by more than purely material concern.
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The European World, 1500-1700
Naomi Pullin
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Food rioters not just upset about loss of resources, but identifying what customs and practises
violated
Crowds see themselves authorities because authority had been corrupted.
‘Law of custom’ seen in food riots in 1626 at Essex ports, England; 1647 Naples rioters impale
loaves of bread on stakes
Grievances of major rebellions and protests cut across social classes:
1536 Pilgrimage of Grace
• Major revolt against Henry VIII following Protestant Reformation. Revolts spread from
Lincolnshire, to Yorkshire. Drew 30,000 men.
• Grievances of rebels covered local and national concerns and issues affecting gentry and
ordinary people, e.g. religion, inheritance rights, food prices, sheep tax’
Conservative rebellions?
• Rebels often declare allegiance to the King, but claim he has been corrupted by bad council
• Pilgrimage of Grace - protested against the ‘evil counsellors’ who had misled the king.
• Naples rebellion 1647 – ‘down with the government’ combined with ‘long live the King’ – want
to restore old forms of governance under which Charles V had ruled.
• Can be seen as an act of negotiation– seek good government, not no government
• Claimed restoration, rather than revolution - linked to humanist project of recovering
greatness from the past
4. The escalation of rebellions
Factors that can enlarge/ transform/ radicalise rebellions
1. Representative Institutions
 Support for representative institutions as a check upon the crown gives rise to alternative
conceptions of how a kingdom should be governed.
 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace re-establish ‘Council of the North’.
 1562-1580s – Huguenot Wars –Protestants protest against French rule. See regional
parlements as preserving their religious liberties.
 1560s – Dutch revolt against Spain. Invoke rights of 17 provincial assemblies in Netherlands.
2. Invoking regional identity
 Engenders new conceptions of national identity
 Dutch revolt shapes mythology of a nation (anthem, the Wilhelmus);
 Language of Irishness created in opposition to English crown policy and in invoking
association between Catholicism and Gaelic culture (works of Geoffrey Keating).
3. Religion
• Many rulers ruling over populations of mixed-religious composition. Faithful have a duty to
overthrow ungodly rule > tensions of conscience – to whom should obedience be owed?
• John Knox (Scottish Calvinist, 1544): Questioned ‘whether obedience is to be rendered to a
magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion’.
• Regnans in Excelsis (1570): issued by Pope Pious V. Declares Elizabeth I a heretic and
Catholics commanded to orchestrate overthrow
• German Peasants War 1524-25: followed Protestant Reformation – stress on individual faith
and attack clergy abuses in Twelve Articles.
• Pilgrimage of Grace, England, 1536: Full of religious imagery, e.g. ‘pilgrims’, banner with five
wounds of Christ; rooting out of heresy, restoration of monasteries and convents, renunciation
of royal control over the church
4. Winning outside support can transform rebellions into political revolutions
• Involvement of foreign powers escalate conflicts, e.g. Neapolitan Rebels of 1647
• Often exacerbated by religious affiliation: Irish Rebellion against English rule centred on
appeal to foreign Catholic powers: 1596 Spanish troops brought into Ireland
• Dutch revolt – English and German states support Dutch rebels, in hope of destabilising
Spanish dominance in Europe.
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