The Act of Parliament was immediately carried out. The earl of Sussex, Sir John St. Clair, Anthony Fitzherbert, Richard Cromwell, and several other commissioners, travelled through England and made known to the religious communities the statutory dissolution. The voice of truth was heard from a small number of monasteries. 'Assuredly,' said the Lincolnshire Franciscans, 'the perfection of Christian life does not consist in wearing a gray frock, in disguising ourselves in strange fashion, in bending the body and nodding the head,[214] and in wearing a girdle full of knots. The true Christian life has been divinely manifested to us in Christ; and for that reason we submit with one consent to the king's orders.' The monks of the convent of St. Andrew at Northampton acknowledged to the commissioners that they had taken the habit of the order to live in comfortable idleness and not by virtuous labor, and had indulged in continual drunkenness, and in carnal and voluptuous appetites.[215] 'We have covered the gospel of Christ with shame,' they said. 'Now, seeing the gulf of everlasting fire gaping to swallow us up, and impelled by the stings of our conscience, we humble ourselves with lowly repentance, and pray for pardon, giving up ourselves and our convent to our sovereign king and lord.' [Sidenote: SORROW AND DESPAIR.] But they did not all use the same language. It was the last hour for the convents. There was a ceaseless movement in the cloisters; bursts of sorrow and fear, of anger and despair. What! No more monasteries! no more religious pomps! no more gossip! no more refectory! Those halls, wherein their predecessors had paced for centuries; those chapels, in which they had worshipped kneeling on the pavement, were to be converted to vulgar uses. A few convents endeavored to bribe Cromwell: 'If you save our house,' said the abbot of Peterborough, 'I will give the king two million five hundred marks, and yourself three hundred pounds sterling.'[216] But Cromwell had conceived a great national measure, and wished to carry it out. Neither the eloquence of the monks, their prayers, their promises, nor their money could move him. Some of the abbots set themselves in open revolt against the king, but were forced to submit at last. The old halls, the long galleries, the narrow cells of the convents, became emptier from day to day. The monks received a pension in proportion to their age. Those who desired to continue in the religious life were sent to the large monasteries. Many were dismissed with a few shillings for their journey and a new gown.[217] 'As for you,' said the commissioners to the young monks under twenty-five, 'you must earn a living by the work of your hands.' The same rule was applied to the nuns.