This work offers the first full-length study of the only armed rebellion in Elizabethan England. Addressing recent scholarship on the Reformation and popular politics, it highlights the religious motivations of the rebel rank and file, the rebellion's afterlife in Scotland, and the deadly consequences suffered in its aftermath.

Using a wide range of legal, administrative and literary sources, this study explores the role of the royal pardon in the exercise and experience of authority in Tudor England. It examines such abstract intangibles as power, legitimacy, and the state by looking at concrete life-and-death decisions of the Tudor monarchs. Drawing upon the historiographies of law and society, political culture, and state formation, mercy is used as a lens through which to examine the nature and limits of participation in the early modern polity.