inspectors who descended on the eight hundred or so monasteries
and nunneries in England and duly discovered what they were sent to find. Laziness, greed and sexual peccadilloes: it was
not difficult to unearth — or indeed, invent — evidence that some of the country’s seven thousand monks, nuns and friars had
been failing to live up to the high ideals they set themselves. Cromwell’s inquisitors gleefully presented to their master
plenty of examples of misconduct, along with some improbable relics — the clippings of St Edmund’s toenails, St Thomas Becket’s
penknife. Their hastily gathered dossiers provided the excuse for the biggest land grab in English history, starting in 1536
with the dissolution of the smaller monasteries.
But the destruction of the country’s age-old education, employment and social welfare network was not accomplished without
protest. The monasteries represented everything that, for centuries, people had been taught to respect, and in October 1536
the north of England rose in revolt. Rallying behind dramatic banners depicting the five wounds of Christ, some forty thousand
marchers came to the aid of Mother Church in a rebellion they proudly called the Pilgrimage of Grace.
The‘pilgrims’ set about reinstating the monks and nuns in sixteen of the fifty-five houses that had already been suppressed.
They demanded the legitimisation of Queen Katherine’s daughter, Mary. They also called for the destruction of the disruptive
books of Luther and Tyndale, and for theremoval of Thomas Cromwell along with his ally Thomas Cranmer, the reforming Archbishop of Canterbury. The rebels had a fundamental
faith in the orthodoxy of their monarch — if only King Henry’s wicked advisers were removed, they believed, he would return
to the good old ways.
This loyalty proved their undoing when Henry, unable to raise sufficient troops against them, bought time by agreeing to concede
to the‘pilgrims’ some of their demands; he invited their leader, Robert Aske, to come down to London and present his grievances
in person, under safe conduct. But once the rebels were safely dispersed back home in their villages, Henry seized on the
excuse of new risings in the early months of 1537 to exact revenge.’Our pleasure,’ he instructed his army commander, the Duke
of Norfolk,‘[is] that you shall cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of every town village and hamlet
that have offended as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others hereafter that would practise any like matter.’
Norfolk carried out his orders ruthlessly. Some seventy Cumberland villagers were hanged on trees in their gardens in full
sight of their wives and children; the monks of Saw-ley, one of the monasteries reopened by the pilgrims, were hanged on long
timber staves projecting from their steeple. Aske was executed in front of the people who had so enthusiastically cheered
him a few months earlier.
The rebels had not been wrong in their hunch that Henry was at heart a traditional Catholic — the King believed in the miracle
of transubstantiation to the day he died. Even as the Reformation progressed, he burned the reformers who dared to suggest
that the bread and wine of the communionwere mere symbols of Christ’s body and blood. But he needed to fill his coffers. By 1540 England’s last religious house, the
rich Augustinian abbey of Waltham, had been closed and the royal treasury was richer by £132,000 (more than £50 million today)
from the sale of the monastery lands.
Even richer in the long term were the squires, merchants and magnates who had been conscripted into the new order of things,
picking up prime monastic acres all over the country. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was Henry’s payoff to the landed
classes, and it helped make the Reformation permanent.
But to this day we find corners of the English countryside curiously sanctified by the
and nunneries in England and duly discovered what they were sent to find. Laziness, greed and sexual peccadilloes: it was
not difficult to unearth — or indeed, invent — evidence that some of the country’s seven thousand monks, nuns and friars had
been failing to live up to the high ideals they set themselves. Cromwell’s inquisitors gleefully presented to their master
plenty of examples of misconduct, along with some improbable relics — the clippings of St Edmund’s toenails, St Thomas Becket’s
penknife. Their hastily gathered dossiers provided the excuse for the biggest land grab in English history, starting in 1536
with the dissolution of the smaller monasteries.
But the destruction of the country’s age-old education, employment and social welfare network was not accomplished without
protest. The monasteries represented everything that, for centuries, people had been taught to respect, and in October 1536
the north of England rose in revolt. Rallying behind dramatic banners depicting the five wounds of Christ, some forty thousand
marchers came to the aid of Mother Church in a rebellion they proudly called the Pilgrimage of Grace.
The‘pilgrims’ set about reinstating the monks and nuns in sixteen of the fifty-five houses that had already been suppressed.
They demanded the legitimisation of Queen Katherine’s daughter, Mary. They also called for the destruction of the disruptive
books of Luther and Tyndale, and for theremoval of Thomas Cromwell along with his ally Thomas Cranmer, the reforming Archbishop of Canterbury. The rebels had a fundamental
faith in the orthodoxy of their monarch — if only King Henry’s wicked advisers were removed, they believed, he would return
to the good old ways.
This loyalty proved their undoing when Henry, unable to raise sufficient troops against them, bought time by agreeing to concede
to the‘pilgrims’ some of their demands; he invited their leader, Robert Aske, to come down to London and present his grievances
in person, under safe conduct. But once the rebels were safely dispersed back home in their villages, Henry seized on the
excuse of new risings in the early months of 1537 to exact revenge.’Our pleasure,’ he instructed his army commander, the Duke
of Norfolk,‘[is] that you shall cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of every town village and hamlet
that have offended as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others hereafter that would practise any like matter.’
Norfolk carried out his orders ruthlessly. Some seventy Cumberland villagers were hanged on trees in their gardens in full
sight of their wives and children; the monks of Saw-ley, one of the monasteries reopened by the pilgrims, were hanged on long
timber staves projecting from their steeple. Aske was executed in front of the people who had so enthusiastically cheered
him a few months earlier.
The rebels had not been wrong in their hunch that Henry was at heart a traditional Catholic — the King believed in the miracle
of transubstantiation to the day he died. Even as the Reformation progressed, he burned the reformers who dared to suggest
that the bread and wine of the communionwere mere symbols of Christ’s body and blood. But he needed to fill his coffers. By 1540 England’s last religious house, the
rich Augustinian abbey of Waltham, had been closed and the royal treasury was richer by £132,000 (more than £50 million today)
from the sale of the monastery lands.
Even richer in the long term were the squires, merchants and magnates who had been conscripted into the new order of things,
picking up prime monastic acres all over the country. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was Henry’s payoff to the landed
classes, and it helped make the Reformation permanent.
But to this day we find corners of the English countryside curiously sanctified by the
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