Cornish Rebellions, 1497-1648
500 years after their uprising against Henry VII, Mark Stoyle discusses why the Cornish were different - and often rebellious - in Tudor and Stuart England.
May 1997 sees the 500th anniversary of the Cornish rising of 1497, a rebellion which not only came close to toppling Henry VII from his throne, but which also marked the beginning of a remarkable series of insurrections in the far south-west. Cornwall was a county which had never risen in arms before. Yet over the next 150 years no fewer than five major rebellions were to take place there, while 'rebel' Cornish armies were to march into England on four separate occasions.
Why should this have been so? Few historians have ever thought to ask. Rather than viewing these periodic eruptions as part of an ongoing tradition of popular protest, most scholars have preferred to see them as isolated, almost unrelated, events. Yet, as this article will show, the frequency with which Cornwall was convulsed by rebellion during the Tudor and Stuart periods can only be explained in terms of that county's unique position within the early modern British state.
Of all the counties of southern England, Cornwall is the most remote and inaccessible. Writing in 1647, Joshua Sprigg described it thus:
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