Uprisings and rebellions have been sparked by all kinds of different grievances over the centuries—but among the most peculiar has to be a short-lived rebellion in the far southwest corner of Tudor England, which was essentially sparked by nothing more than the publication of a prayer book.
The seeds of this particular rebellion were sown during the reign of the infamous English King Henry VIII. Henry’s desire to father a male heir to succeed him and maintain the Tudor name famously led to his increasingly bloody string of marriages and consorts. But not only that, by the time he did secure a male successor—who eventually ascended to the throne as Edward VI; Henry’s behavior had seen him fall foul of the Pope, sever England’s ties to the Catholic Church, ransack England’s monasteries and claim their treasures as his own, and in the process, he stoked violent pockets of resentment and unrest all across his kingdom.
Worsening the situation, when Henry died in 1547, his heir, Edward, was just 9 years old and was already in very poor health himself. As a result, the increasingly disgruntled population of England found themselves ruled not by a powerful and unifying new king, but by a regency panel of warring advisors and clerks, who were left to take decisions on Edward’s behalf.
As if this absence of a new national figurehead wasn’t bad enough for the English people, the fallout from Henry’s departure from the Catholic Church continued to have repercussions in the early years of King Edward’s reign. In 1549, Edward’s advisors decided that the newly-emerging Church of England, with the English monarch now as its figurehead, should firmly signal its progressiveness and modernity by adopting English, not Latin, as the language of its services. As a result, in 1549 a new Book of Common Prayer was published and sent to every church parish in England, ultimately transforming the words and prayers of every church service in the country overnight. The response among the English people to the change was one of shock and immense discontent.
The fallout from the introduction of this Book of Common Prayer was felt especially in the counties of Devon and Cornwall, in the far southwest corner of England. Not only were there religious and liturgical questions to be answered (the Book of Common Prayer demonstrated a noticeable shift towards Protestantism, which did not go down well in the predominantly Catholic counties of the southwest), but in Cornwall in particular there was a cultural problem too. The main language of Cornwall at the time was not English but Cornish—a Celtic language, closer in structure to Welsh, Scots, and Irish. Being forced to hold church services in English, ultimately, was seen as an uncomfortable and unwanted imposition on the people of Cornwall, and as a result, the county quickly rose in protest.
The unrest in Cornwall soon spread to the neighboring County of Devon and by July 1549 a combined force of Cornish and Devonian rebels, believed to number as many as 6,000 people, besieged and took control of the city of Exeter, the largest town and de facto capital of the region. For more than a month the protestors controlled the city, and held back repeated attempts by King Edward’s troops to expel them and quash the rebellion.
Eventually, however, after more than six weeks’ unrest, Edward’s forces successfully cut off food supplies to the city. Facing starvation, the protestors were compelled to surrender. With many of those who had sparked the uprising now killed or imprisoned, what became known as the Prayer Book Rebellion—and yet another curious chapter in the history of England—was finally over.