This blog is written by Maggie Moorhouse, volunteer researcher.
Charterhouse monks caught up in rebellion
Today, visitors to Charterhouse, Coventry will be sure of a warm welcome.
However, there was someone, indeed a man of the cloth, who was not so well received. Thomas Kendall, vicar of Louth, went on to lose his head.
Kendall had been caught up in the Lincolnshire rising of October 1536, a reaction to King Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534. Henry had wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon, his wife of 24 years and a staunch catholic. As dispensation was not granted from the Pope, Henry decided to form his own church. By creating the Church of England and becoming its head he was able to divorce Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn. The breaking with the Catholic church, and so Rome and the Pope, was met with a huge back lash from all parts of society.
Monasteries were a reminder of the power of the Catholic Church which, according to Henry, needed to be destroyed, leading to the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Subsequently over a quarter of all the land in England and a huge amount of wealth went straight to Henry, not only from this land and its revenue but also the vast amounts of silver and gold that the Church had owned for centuries. The Dissolution also meant the loss of a large amount of charity which the poor people of society relied upon and left a lot of monastic servants without employment.
The Lincolnshire Rising was a mass protest of an estimated 22,000 people led by the monk and shoemaker Nicholas ‘Cobbler’ Melton against religious reforms that began in Louth and spread to neighbouring towns converging on Lincoln cathedral.
In 1536 the town of Louth was flourishing and prosperous, rich in successful guilds which brought wealth and security to many workers and their families. Although there had previously been huge loyalty towards Henry VIII, when the Abbot of Louth Park Abbey was pensioned off and the site given to Lord Burgh with anything of value taken for the King, rumours spread that the king intended to strip the local parish churches of their treasures and close them down.
The vicar of Louth, Thomas Kendall, preached a sermon against the changes to the Church that the King was making and against the commissioners that were due to visit Louth. This, on top of the current rumours, resulted in Melton seizing the keys to Louth’s St James Church and a watch being set up to ensure nothing was stolen from it.
The ensuing uprising was put down by the Duke of Suffolk, the King’s best friend and brother-in law, who came to Lincoln with 5000 men, highlighting the level of threat that the uprising was seen to pose. In an effort to keep the peace, he issued pardons to everyone and ordered all weapons to be left at Lincoln. However, unrest rumbled on throughout the year and into 1537.
Thomas Kendall escaped to Coventry where he was sheltered at Charterhouse, claiming that he wanted to be received into their religion. Rather than revealing that he’d been accused of complicity in the Lincolnshire rising, his story was that he was from Oxford and beneficed near Colchester. The Carthusians declined to receive him into their order but he managed to stay in Coventry practising physic, sometimes lodging with them. However, without their knowledge he had been sending letters to Louth, leading to him being hunted down in Coventry and arrested on the night of Christmas Eve 1536. Kendall was taken to the Tower of London where he was later hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 25th March 1537.
Ten of the implicated Charterhouse monks sent declarations of their innocence in a statement forwarded to Cromwell. Kendall supported these, accepting that the Carthusians would not have received him had he admitted to being from Louth.
There were ‘batches’ of hangings at Lincoln, Horncastle and Louth during March 1537, totalling 32 deaths. The fears of the men of Louth came true over the years following on from the Lincolnshire rising.
