Suddenly and unexpectedly the storm burst. On May 2, 1536, the king sent Anne to the Tower, and charged her with misconduct with several members of his household. Protesting her innocence and amazement to the last, the unhappy young wife was tried, condemned, and executed, within a space of less than three weeks from her arrest. Her own father and uncle sat on the bench of peers which declared her an adulteress; but the fact witnesses to their shame and cowardice rather than to her criminality. In all probability she was guilty of nothing more than unwise levity; her real crime was not adultery, but standing in the way of Henry's lawless desires. With the most unseemly haste, the king wedded Jane Seymour, the lady who had already attracted his notice, the moment that his wretched second wife had breathed her last.
Rebellion in Ireland and the North.
But he had small leisure to spend on his wedding, for the year 1536 was one of great peril to him. A rebellion in Ireland, led by the Fitzgeralds, the greatest of the Anglo-Irish nobles, was already in progress. A still more dangerous phenomenon was the stir which was arising in the North of England. The Northern counties were always a generation behind the rest of England in their politics. There the monks were more powerful and less disliked than in any other part of the land, and the nobles still retained much of their old feudal power over their vassals, and some of their old turbulence. The North had beheld the breach with Rome with dismay and dislike, and remained strongly Papist in its sympathies. The dissolution of the monasteries moved it to an active protest against the king's religious action.
The Pilgrimage of Grace.
Rioting suddenly broke out in Lincolnshire, and then in Yorkshire. The insurgents gathered in great bands, and at last no less than 30,000 men mustered at Doncaster, under Robert Aske, a lawyer, and Lord Darcy. They called themselves the army of the Church, raised a banner displaying the five wounds of Christ as their standard, and demanded a reconciliation with the Pope, the restoration of the religious houses, and the dismissal of the king's impious minister Cromwell, and the "heretic bishops" who had favoured the breach with Rome. The gentry of the North and the priors and abbots of the great abbeys of Yorkshire joined the rising, which men called "the Pilgrimage of Grace," because the rebels wished to go to meet the king, and to submit their demands to his personal judgment. Henry was caught unprepared, but he managed to extricate himself from the peril by his unscrupulous double-dealing. He sent the Duke of Norfolk, whose dislike of Protestantism was well known, to treat with the rebels. Norfolk pledged his word that the king would pardon the insurgents, and take all their demands into favourable consideration. The simple Northerners dispersed, trusting to Henry's good faith; but the king employed the time he had gained in raising an army, and getting together a great train of artillery. He then marched into Yorkshire as an invader, and made no further pretence of listening to the claims of the insurgents. In consequence, the more vehement of the partisans of the old faith again took arms. This was as Henry desired, for he wanted an excuse to terrorize the North. He easily put down the second rising, and hung all the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace: Aske, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, and the abbots of all the greatest monastic establishments of the North—Whalley, Fountains, Jervaulx, Barlings, and Sawley (March-May, 1537).
Execution of the Marquis of Exeter and Henry Pole.
This fearful blow cowed most of the partisans of the papacy, and no more open revolts followed. But a little later the last representatives of the house of York were detected in paths which the king suspected to be treasonable. They thought, it seems, that the indignation of the Catholics against the king's doings might be turned into a dynastic revolution in favour of the old royal line. Edward Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, a grandson of Edward IV., and Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, a grandson of George of Clarence, were the persons implicated in this intrigue, which never got beyond the stage of treasonable talk. Nevertheless, the king beheaded them both, though the evidence against them was most imperfect; but Henry never stayed his hand for want of legal proof, and slew all whom he suspected. He even imprisoned, and some years afterwards executed, the aged mother of Lord Montagu—Margaret of Clarence, Countess of Salisbury, sister of the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, whom his father had slain forty-one years back.
The Irish rebellion crushed.
The insurrection in Ireland, which had been raging at the same time as the Pilgrimage of Grace, ended in a way no less profitable to the king. Not only did he capture and hang well-nigh the whole family of the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, the heads of the rising, but his armies, under Lord-Deputy Grey, pushed out from the English Pale, and compelled most of the chiefs of Munster and Connaught to do homage to the Crown, though the king's writ had not run in those provinces for two centuries. This was the first step towards the conquest of Ireland afterwards carried out by Queen Elizabeth.
Growth of Protestantism. Tyndale's Bible.