Such radical developments did not go unresisted. Most famously, Thomas More and the saintly Bishop John Fisher went to the block rather than renounce their spiritual allegiance to Rome. Yet most of the country seems to have acceded to changes prompted more by political than by religious considerations. The mood of England may have been far from the revolutionary zeal of the continental Protestants, but a profoundly anti-clerical prejudice had long since taken hold, particularly in the south where such reforming scholars as John Colet and Desiderius Erasmus gave a sharper intellectual edge to popular feeling. A pamphlet of the time, titled The Supplication of the Beggars, shows how little respect remained for arrogant abbots, ill-educated priests, and the church courts that governed, taxed, and often oppressed the domestic lives of the populace. Its author, Simon Fish, had won popular acclaim by impugning the greed and licentiousness of the abbots, priors, friars, and Summoners, and urging the King to seize the wealth of these puissant and counterfeit, holy and idle beggars. So Cromwell had the climate of the times his Cromwell’s side when, having stripped the Roman church of its judicial authority, he moved to put its riches at the disposal of the King’s hard-pressed exchequer.

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The seizure of church property for state purposes was not in itself a new idea. Two centuries earlier, at the height of the Hundred Years War, Henry V had ordered the closure of all priories owing allegiance to a mother house abroad, though he put the wealth he took from their coffers put to charitable uses. Cromwell must also have learned much about the business of appropriating ecclesiastical property from Cardinal Wolsey, who had himself dissolved 29 religious houses in the previous decade. So Cromwell’s agents went out well prepared with searching questionnaires, knowing just what to look for. They turned in damning reports. So beggary a house I never see, nor so filthy stuff was their verdict, for example, on the great abbey that had been founded at Battle outside Hastings by William the Conqueror nearly 500 years earlier. At the Cistercian Abbey of Hailes, they examined what had been treasured for centuries as one of the holiest relics in the land–a vial containing some of the precious blood of Christ–and declared it to be mere honey, clarified and coloured with saffron. Such hostile testimony gave the King all the evidence he needed to break up communities that might otherwise constitute an effective papal garrison in England, while at the same time providing himself with revenue from the sale of huge landed estates owned by the monasteries.

Hoping to minimize resistance, Henry closed the smaller houses first. Statutes of 1536 dissolved 327 establishments, transferred their estates to the Crown, and pensioned off the displaced monks. But when the conservative Catholics of the northern counties saw the priories closing they rose up in revolt. Robert Aske, a pious lawyer with a following of 35,000 yeomen and monks, seized York and then marched south under a banner depicting the five wounds of Christ. Hurriedly assembling the King’s forces against the rising, the Duke of Norfolk met Aske at Doncaster and delayed the advance of his Pilgrimage of Grace by apparently acceding to his demands. These included the dismissal and punishment of Cromwell, the restoration of papal jurisdiction, and a Parliament free from royal interference. Trusting assurances given on the King’s behalf, Aske persuaded his followers to disperse, but his trust was misplaced. Within months he had been summarily tried and executed at York. The abbots of Kirkstead, Whalley, and Jervaux and many other leaders of the rebellion were publicly hanged all across northern England.

The southern counties gave no significant support to the uprising, giving Henry the confidence to proceed with the dissolution of the larger monasteries. Alarmed by the consequences of rebellion, Furness Abbey had already surrendered voluntarily to the King, but Cromwell ordered the trial and execution of the Abbot of Woburn for refusing to accept the King’s supremacy. Having set this stark example of what resistance might bring, he sent his agents out to the remaining houses carrying a prepared document of surrender. In most cases frightened abbots gladly signed, accept the honours and pensions offered in return for submission, but three great monasteries tried to make a stand against closure.

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