As Tory writers reflected on the safe passage of the Stuart dynasty through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an anonymous author urged contemporaries to learn the lessons of English history. The Rebels Doom (1684) offered some thumbnail sketches of various unsuccessful rebellions and attempted revolutions that had threatened the monarchy since the reign of Edward the Confessor, in order to show ‘the Fatal Consequences that have always attended … Disloyal Violations of Allegiance’.

The writer paused especially over one Tudor insurrection from 1549, in which 10,000 rebels from Devon and Cornwall took up arms against the administration of Edward VI and besieged the city of Exeter, but were ultimately crushed by forces led by Lord John Russell. For the anonymous writer the episode was clearly of national rather than regional or West Country importance; when the ringleaders of the revolt were ‘splendidly Hanged’, their bodies offered his own ‘Wavering Age … [an] Admonition to the Restless and Impatient’ who sought to ‘spurn the Lawful authority of their Sovereign prince’.

This admonitory event in Tudor history, known as the Prayer Book Rebellion or, less pejoratively, the Western Rising, is the subject of Mark Stoyle’s authoritative new book. Like the author of The Rebels Doom, Stoyle claims national significance for the events of midsummer 1549, showing how a series of parish-level protests, resisting the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer that began in the Devonshire village of Stampford Courtenay, swiftly became an insurrection that gravely imperilled the regime of Edward VI and ultimately contributed to the toppling of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, as Lord Protector and head of the child king’s administration.

In meticulous detail, Stoyle demonstrates how the official forces of English Protestantism ruthlessly triumphed over groups of West Country men and women from all points on the social scale. Led by two of Cornwall’s wealthiest men, Humphrey Arundell and John Winslade, as well as another rebel captain with the inauspicious surname Coffin, this was no thoughtless artisanal rebellion – despite the attempts of contemporary detractors to paint it thus – but a broad-based, strategic and carefully articulated rejection of the ways in which Protestantism was being imposed on communities still fiercely committed to the Roman Catholic faith.

By depicting the tenacious regional loyalty to traditional religion, Stoyle’s book issues a reminder that the Reformation, even in its earliest years, was never the wholesale done deal that its Tudor ideologues maintained. The West Country insurgents’ demands centred on doctrinal or religious matters – the reaffirmation of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the reinstitution of weekday baptism for children, the withdrawal of the new service book – rather than the economic concerns, such as enclosure or land reform, which animated the orchestrators of Kett’s Rebellion, suppressed in Norfolk in the same year.

There was a regional and linguistic dimension to the rebels’ grievances, too. The imposition of Protestantism in the form of a new English prayer book and liturgy was especially inflammatory in west Cornwall, where a significant proportion of the populace did not even speak the language.

Thus, some of the most memorable passages in Stoyle’s study demonstrate that the Reformation was never secured by the light, logic and beauty of vernacular scripture alone, but was always accompanied by terrifying, programmatic state-sanctioned violence and intimidation. Between 14 and 27 priests, only some of whom were rebel combatants, were killed by the authorities in their suppression of the Western Rising, their corpses hung up in chains from church towers, market crosses and gallows as community reminders of the powers of the new faith and the evangelical state.

Once the uprising was quashed, with at least 2,000 rebels dead, according to a conservative contemporary estimate, some West Country churchmen who were suspected of sympathising with those executed were ‘given’ to local Protestant grandees and forced to pay punitive ransoms for their lives and property. This practice extended beyond the clergy, and those who refused to pay such ransoms faced torture for their support of the rebellion. Such was the case of a septuagenarian called Thomas Ennys who, wrongly suspected of being a rebel, had ropes twisted and tightened around his ears and genitals until he agreed to give a local loyalist everything he possessed.

Stoyle’s arguments are always well evidenced and carefully weighed and, ultimately, nuance and enrich familiar narratives of the Western Rising rather than overturn them. For instance, one of his central claims is that the Cornish insurgency began a month later than traditionally argued, on 6 July rather than 6 June. This seemingly negligible shortening of the rebellious midsummer by just four weeks actually enables us to appreciate how the insurgency would have appeared particularly sudden, menacing and purposeful to the regime, and helps explain why the authorities reacted with such uncompromising force.