Kevin Dixon: Reformation, rebellion and repression in Tudor Torbay

Today around 30 per cent of Torbay folk believe in God, with 5 per cent attending a church service.

Five hundred years ago the Bay’s scattered communities were very different.

Christianity played a core role in society. Everyone was expected to go to church, where they heard Mass each Sunday and celebrated the many saints’ days and festivals interwoven with daily life and the agricultural year.

Few were literate, so they relied on the priest to read the Bible to them and tell them the key messages it contained.

The church was an essential meeting place. People would go to hear news and share stories, the church being where key events in people’s lives, such as baptisms, marriages and funerals, were conducted.

In every way, Torre Abbey and our local parish churches dominated the spiritual and physical landscape of ordinary people.

So, when any, even minor, alterations in religious practice took place, it inevitably affected everyone’s life.

What changed everything was a massive restructuring of society caused by Henry VIII's Protestant Reformation. This was a revolution which severed ties with Rome and the Catholic Church. In its place came the establishment of the Church of England with the monarch at its head.

So began decades of persecution, violent religious conflict, and even civil war, when many would kill and die for their interpretation of the same faith.

Our most visible local reminder of the Reformation is Torre Abbey, the current much-loved building being a victim of Henry’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.

The Dissolution involved a series of administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541 that disbanded Catholic religious institutions, seized their wealth and disposed of their assets.

This was one of the most transformative events in our history. The population of England and Wales was only about 3 million at the time. There were nearly 900 religious houses with around 12,000 of the population in religious orders, so many were left without a role in a new society.

Torre Abbey had been founded in 1196 by the reformed Augustinian canons called Premonstratensians and was a very rich and powerful institution. When it was closed in 1539, it was the most valuable house of the monastic order in England. All that wealth and property was seized, and much of it left the Bay.

After the Dissolution the cloister ranges were converted into a residence for Sir Hugh Pollard. The Catholic Cary family then bought the Abbey in 1662, remaining in possession until 1930, when it was sold to Torquay Borough Council.

The Abbey is well worth a visit. Within the garden are the remains of the medieval church, including its great tower, now collapsed, the cloister and the Chapter House with its Norman arch.

Alongside the closing of the great religious institutions came the transformation of local churches.

It was once believed that the Protestant Reformation involved a general rejection of Roman Catholicism, with the population generally welcoming religious reforms and the closing of supposedly corrupt institutions.

Over the past few decades, however, historians have started looking at Henry VIII’s changes as more of an elite-led cultural revolution imposed on England from above.

Indeed, rather than being hostile to the Catholic faith, many English folk, particularly in the remote rural areas of the South West, were clearly devoted to the old faith and its community traditions.

In Devon and Cornwall Protestant instructions from Parliament and Lambeth Palace were often ignored, and churches continued to use Catholic ritual long after the 1534 split from Rome.

However, from the late 1540s a stronger state began to be more insistent that change had to be made. Then in 1547 the Protestant Edward VI came to the throne, supported by evangelical advisers determined to eradicate Catholicism once and for all.

Royal injunctions stripped out of the visual fabric of Catholic life. In the churches so valued by local communities, statues, shrines and stained-glass windows were smashed or removed; this is why so many medieval churches still show signs of alteration and destruction.

We can still see these changes in the abandoned St Michael’s Chapel and the much-altered medieval churches of Cockington, Torre and St Marychurch.

Discontent was further caused by increased tax demands. Then in 1549 the Act of Uniformity replaced the Latin liturgy with Archbishop Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer.

This was the trigger that caused widespread unrest in the far South West.

In June 1549 the peasants of Cornwall and Devon rebelled. A volunteer army marched eastward, captured castles and destroyed enclosures. By July 1549, the Prayer Book rebels numbered several thousand and laid siege to Exeter. Their demands were a return to the medieval Catholic mass, the revival of traditional religious rituals, the execution of heretics, and a reduction in taxes.

Edward VI reacted without compromise. Using foreign mercenaries, the Prayer Book revolt was crushed. On August 5th at Clyst St Mary, east of Exeter, 4,000 poorly armed rebels were slaughtered.

No mercy was given to those that surrendered. Nine hundred bound and gagged rebel prisoners had their throats slit in ten minutes, while another thousand were hanged afterwards, representing approximately one in ten of the population of Cornwall.

Their captured leaders were left hanging on gibbets from Dunster to Bath. One Cornish rebel, “bedecked in Popish apparel”, was left suspended from a church tower to die from exposure, and his body reportedly remained there for three years.

In total, over 5,500 people lost their lives in the rebellion. We don’t know if Torbay folk were amongst the rebel dead, but many locals would have been sympathetic to the lost cause.

The rebellion of 1549 was the last major act of resistance of a popular culture resisting Protestantism and the centralising state.

The rebellion never had any real chance of forcing the government to make concessions in its religious policy. In reality, the rebels only got so far because the King was busy with other problems, such as rebellions in the Midlands and East, while war was declared by France on August 8th.

Catholicism was temporarily restored only as a result of Mary’s accession in 1553, which brought an attempt at a counter-Reformation with over 280 Protestant religious dissenters burned at the stake, forever earning the new queen the title of Bloody Mary.

A peculiarly English form of Protestantism was reinstated when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558.

Much of Devon’s history of religious conflict has now been forgotten. We do, however, have another reminder of the Bay’s turbulent past in the name of a Torquay school.

After the Reformation there was always the fear of invasion and of a return to Catholicism. In response, the government hunted down those they suspected of treason. ‘Forty Martyrs of England and Wales’ were subsequently convicted and executed for promoting Catholicism between 1535 and 1679.

Among those to lose their lives was Cuthbert Mayne. The Catholic priest was drawn and quartered in 1577 on a gallows erected in the marketplace at Launceston.

To ensure that the message that religious dissent was not to be tolerated was understood, instructions were given that a “quarter” of Cuthbert Mayne’s body should be put on a pole at 'Torquay‘. Presumably the now-ruined abbey site was chosen to make a point.

This is the first time we see a place called Torquay recorded by that name.