In the fall of 1569, a rebellion broke out in the North of England against the government of Queen Elizabeth I. The original intention of the active leaders of the rising, the Earl of Northumberland and Westmorland, and of the potential leader (who in the event did not actually participate), the Duke of Norfolk, were obscure, unclear, and perhaps ultimately contradictory.
In the event, however, the rising of the North took a markedly religious coloration. On November 14, 1569, the rebel force entered the city of Durham. Proceed to the city cathedral, they burned the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and other Protestant books, and celebrated the Catholic Mass there, the first time since the end of the reign of Bloody Mary and the accession of Elizabeth that a public Mass had been said in England.
The rising proved to be the last effort to restore English Catholicism from within by mass force, and it soon failed utterly. The rebels rode south to Tutbury, where Mary Queen of Scots was reported to be held, but she was moved further south to Coventry well before they arrived. Within a few weeks most of the rebel army had melted away, and it never came to blows with the royal force sent to quell it. The only pitched battle of the campaign, fought by the river Cleth the following February, pitted the Queen's forces not against the original rebels, but a cavalry force headed by Lord Dacre -- who had originally gone north as part of the body raised to put down the rising. His reasons for doing so are obscure. In the wake of the failed rising, some hundreds of executions were carried out, mainly upon people of "low estate" who had been swept up in the rebellion. For these reprisals Elizabeth has been taken harshly to task by some modern historians, though it is not clear that those who carried them out were actually following her orders.
The Northern rising of 1569 was the last domestic revolt of the Tudor era, and the...