the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething under the silence of the people.”  That silence was a silence of terror.  To use the figure by which Erasmus describes the time, men felt “as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone.”  They stopped writing, gossiping, going to confession, and sending presents for the most thoughtless word or deed might be tortured into treason against the king by the command of Cromwell.

The rebellion which followed the first attack upon the monasteries was not caused wholly by religious sentiments.  The nobles regarded Cromwell as a base-born usurper and yearned for his fall, while the clergy felt outraged by his monstrous claims of authority in ecclesiastical affairs.  In a sense the conflict that ensued was but a continuation of the long-standing struggle between the king, the barons, and the clergy for the supreme power.  From the reign of Edward I., the people had commenced to assert their rights and the struggle had become a four-sided one.

These four factions were constantly shifting their allegiance, according to the varying conditions, and guided by their changing interests.  At this time, the clergy, the nobles and the people in northern England, particularly, combined against the king, although the alliance was not formidable enough to overcome the forces supporting the king.

The secular clergy felt that they were disgraced and coerced into submission.  They felt their revenues, their honors, their powers, their glory, slipping away from them; they joined their mutterings and discontent with that of the monks, and then the fires of the rebellion blazed forth in the north, where the monasteries were more popular than in any other part of England.

The first outbreak occurred in Lincolnshire, in the autumn of 1536.  It was easily and quickly suppressed.  But another uprising in Yorkshire, in northern England, followed immediately, and for a time threatened serious consequences.  Some of the best families in that part of the country joined the revolt, although it is noteworthy that these same families were afterwards Protestant and Puritan; the rebel army numbered about forty thousand men, well equipped for service.  Many prominent abbots and sixteen hundred monks were in the ranks.  The masses were bound by oath “to stand together for the love which they bore to Almighty God, His faith, the Holy Church, and the maintenance thereof; to the preservation of the king’s person and his issue; to the purifying of the nobility, and to expel all villein blood and evil counsellors from the king’s presence; not from any private profit, nor to do his pleasure to any private person, nor to slay or murder through envy, but for the restitution of the Church, and the suppression of heretics and their opinions.”  It is clear, from the language of the oath, that the rebels aimed their blows at Cromwell.  The secular clergy hated him because he had shorn them of their power; the monks hated him because he had turned them out of their cloisters, and clergy and people loathed him as a maintainer of heresy, a low-born foe of the Church.  The insurgents carried banners on which was printed a crucifix, a chalice and host, and the five wounds, hence they called themselves “Pilgrims of Grace.”  The revolt was headed by Robert Aske, a barrister.