AD 1500-1750 Early modern

Distant from the centres of power, conservative, and Catholic, northern England was the scene of uprisings under the Tudors. Henry VIII’s Ten Articles of religion and his dissolution of the monasteries provoked a rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace in AD 1536-7. The rebellion ultimately failed and was brutally put down. When the northern earls rebelled again in 1569, their defeat was followed by executions, exile, and confiscation of their lands.

During the Civil Wars the north was loyal to Charles I (reigned 1625-49). The defeat of the Royalists at Marston Moor near York in 1644 neutralised opposition to Parliament from the north-east. The Royalist northern cavalry, led by Sir Marmaduke Langdale, continued as a ‘flying brigade’, inflicting defeats on Fairfax’s regional Parliamentarian forces, until the Royalists were crushed in 1645 at the Battle of Naseby, near Northampton.

During the abortive Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 the northern earls joined the Scots and were beheaded as their predecessors had been in 1569. By the time of the second rebellion, of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, neither lords nor commons in northern England showed any great enthusiasm to support either the Stuart prince or the Hanoverian king, George II (reigned 1727-60).