[Sidenote: =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. [Sidenote: =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). [Sidenote: =Execution of the Marquis of Exeter and Henry Pole.=]