In the same year a much more serious rising took place in Yorkshire and soon spread to all the northern counties. This was called the Pilgrimage of Grace: Men complained that their abbeys had been destroyed. Their kind landlords, the abbots, had been turned adrift; and now there was no one to build them bridges and highways and provide meat for strangers. The men of the North hated heresy and image-breaking, and loathed Cromwell and his men, but they stated that they were thoroughly loyal to their king.

These pilgrim rebels wore as a badge the Five Wounds of Christ. They lit beacons all over the wolds, and rang the church bells to tell their friends of their rising. Led by a brave young lawyer named Robert Aske, they marched through Yorkshire, York and Hull opened their gates to them, and with an army of thirty thousand men they reached Doncaster. Here they were met by the king's forces, and after some discussions, pardons were offered them.

But the faithless king did not keep his word, and there wasp a second rising. A terrible and barbarous revenge was now taken. The king told his officers that the people of every rebel town, village, and hamlet were to be hanged up on the trees, and their heads were to be set up in every town. They were to do this without pity or respect. Abbots, friars, landowners—all the leaders of this religious crusade, were executed. Seventy-four rebels were hanged in Carlisle alone. Some of the finest abbeys, including the magnificent Furness Abbey in Lancashire, were now destroyed by the king's orders.

Henry VIII had thus, in his cruel and heartless way, crushed out the first serious rebellion in England since the days when the Cornishmen marched to Blackheath some fifty years before.

The men of the North had taken up the cause of the monks, and Cromwell and his master now decided that the larger monasteries must share the fate of the smaller. The Long Parliament had specially, spared them because of their "good conduct," Yet it was now given out that they were to be destroyed because of the "slothful and ungodly lives of the monks." Most of the, monks submitted; those who did not were accused of wickedness or treason.

The brave and noble abbots of Reading, Colchester, and Glastonbury would not give in to the cruel king. They were accused of treason, and a sham trial was held.

In reality they were murdered by the king and Cromwell. We can still see Cromwell's notebook, in which he had written "The Abbot of Glaston to be tried at Glaston, and to be executed there." This saintly old abbot, whose only offence was that he had obeyed his conscience, was actually tied to a hurdle and dragged past his abbey, and then beheaded on the hill near the village.

Some six hundred and sixteen abbeys were handed over to the king. In lands and rents they were worth about twenty million pounds, reckoned in our money. Men hoped again that taxes would not be wanted, that the poor would be provided for, and that new schools and bishoprics would be founded. The Navy was indeed strengthened, and half a dozen new bishoprics were founded. But, as before, most of the wealth went to the king and his courtiers, and new nobles and landlords grew fat on the property of the monasteries. Such men would take care that the English Reformation should never be undone. The thirty-one mitred abbots no longer sat in the House of Lords, and for the first time the other nobles had a majority in that House.

And this was the end of the monastic system in England. There is scarcely a town or village in this land where we cannot still find traces and sometimes beautiful remains of the splendid abbeys of the Middle Ages. The monasteries had done a great work in the land. The destruction of the larger abbeys was one of the blackest deeds in this cruel reign, and many noble men and women were made to suffer terrible hardships through no fault of their own.

On account of Henry's treatment of the Church, the Pope expected that France, Scotland and the Emperor would combine to attack England. The terrible Henry replied to the Pope by destroying the family and relatives of the man who was trying hard to bring about this European invasion. This was Cardinal Pole, once Henry's friend and now his bitterest foe. Pole's aged mother, the Countess of Salisbury, was thrown into prison, and two years later she was beheaded without a trial—perhaps the most wicked and cruel crime of this reign.

The king also beheaded Anne Boleyn, the mother of Elizabeth, and the very next day he married Jane Seymour. Jane died soon after the birth of her son, Prince Edward. Cromwell then persuaded Henry to marry a German princess, Anne of Cleves, who was a follower of Luther. The famous artist, Holbein, had painted a flattering picture of her, but Henry disliked her from the first, and soon got her to retire.

Although Cromwell had only just been made Earl of Essex for getting rid of the abbeys, he was now condemned for treason and heresy. The king had him executed without a trial—in the same way as others had been executed.

Both at the beginning and the end of Henry's reign there was war with France and Scotland. His most successful martial achievement was the invasion of France in 1512, when he routed the French cavalry at the Battle of Spurs. That was in his young days, when he took great delight in manly and warlike exercises. He was then fond of tennis and archery and skilled in the use of the sword; armour that he wore is still in existence.

Scotland was humbled at the Battle of Flodden. The French king later tried to secure the friendship of Henry, but the famous meeting between the two kings at the gorgeous Field of the Cloth of Gold  came to nothing. It is to Henry's credit that throughout his reign he kept England free from the horrors of civil war and from foreign invasion—at a time, too, when there was very real danger of both. This had a beneficial effect on the trade of the country, and in spite of his many acts of cruelty, Henry retained his popularity to the end of his days.

But Henry's reign was very wasteful. It is said that he took more money from the realm than all his predecessors on the throne. He plundered no less than six hundred monasteries, ninety guilds, and one hundred and ten hospitals. He took pensions from France, he issued coins which were not up to standard value, and he made poor men suffer thereby. He raised forced loans and made men pay "free-will offerings" or benevolences; and yet he was always in want of money.

We may all agree with a great historian that Henry VIII was a man of iron will and determined purpose, and a man who would have been infinitely greater and better and more fortunate if he would have lived for his people and not for himself. That he was able to retain the respect of his people, and even the love of many of them, was due to the fact that in a great measure he was like themselves—free, open, and merry, with a hearty friendly manner towards rich and poor alike.

"The habits of all classes," says Froude (a famous modern writer on this period), "were open, free, and liberal. We read of 'merrie England' of these days and of the glory of hospitality, by the rules of which all tables, from the table of the freeholder to the table of the baron's hall and abbey refectory, were open at dinner-hour to all comers, without constraint or reserve. To every man according to his degree there was free beer and free lodging; bread, beef, and beer for his dinner; for his lodging perhaps only a mat of rushes in a spare corner of the hall, with a billet of wood for a pillow, but freely offered and freely given; the guest probably fared much as his host fared, neither worse nor better. There was little fear of abuse of such licence; for any man found at large, and unable to give a sufficient account of himself, there were the ever-ready parish stocks or town gaol.

"The hour of rising, winter and summer, was four o'clock, with breakfast at five. In the country every unknown face was challenged and examined; if the account given was insufficient, he was brought before the justice. Thieves were then hanged so fast, Sir Thomas More tells us, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet. If the village shop-keeper sold bad wares, if the village cobbler made 'unhonest' shoes, if servants and masters quarreled, all used to be looked after by the justice. At twelve the country gentleman, the justice of the peace, dined; after dinner he went hunting, or to his farm."

Throughout all the changes of this and the succeeding reigns the country gentleman remained a power in the land. It was he who chiefly benefited from the material destruction wrought by the Reformation. Some of the old abbeys, in the hands of their new owners, were transformed into luxurious mansions. While the Reformers pulled down Gothic churches and monasteries, the country gentlemen built palatial houses for themselves in a new style derived from Italy.