The year 1537 saw the Tower full of prisoners, the result of the rising in the North, called the Pilgrimage of Grace. Thomas Cromwell’s crusade against the religious endowments of the country, his spoliation of the monasteries, his wholesale butchery of the monks and friars, had stirred up a violent feeling of resistance in the north of England. A report had been spread that as soon as the monasteries had been ruined and destroyed, it would be the turn of the parish churches, and the people of Lincoln and Yorkshire took instant alarm. A zealous Roman Catholic, named Robert Aske, headed the rebellion, bearing a banner emblazoned with the five wounds of Christ. The peril became so great that Henry found it necessary to send an army against the insurgents, the Duke of Norfolk being appointed its general. But Norfolk hesitated to bring matters to a crisis, and temporised. He promised that the grievances of the people should be heard, and a Parliament was summoned in the North to consider their complaints, and mend or end them. However, in 1537, Henry, breaking faith with the Pilgrimage of Grace, seized the ring-leaders, and established a Council in the North, which was a precursor, in cruelty and bloodshed, of Jeffreys’ Bloody Assize in Devonshire, a century and a half later. Cromwell instituted a reign of terror. His commissioners tore down, among others, such incomparable buildings as Fountains, Rievaulx, and Jervaulx Abbeys; the sacred fanes were gutted, their roofs torn off, and the holy shrines abandoned to the bats and owls, serving as quarries for anyone who cared to cart away the materials. The Abbots and heads of these, and many other religious houses, were either hanged out of hand, or sent in droves to London, and placed in the Tower. Among many others, the Abbots of Rievaulx, Fountains, and Jervaulx, and the Prior of Bridlington, after being imprisoned in the Tower, were hanged as traitors at Tyburn. Two peers, Lord Darcey and Lord Hussey, who had taken part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, were beheaded, the former on Tower Hill, and the latter at Lincoln; Sir Robert Constable, Sir Francis Bagot, Sir Thomas Percy, the brother of the Earl of Northumberland, Sir Stephen Hamilton, William Lumley, Nicholas Tempest, Robert Aske, and Sir John Bulwer, also suffered death, and, horrible to relate, the wife of the last was burnt at Smithfield. [Illustration: _The Block and Axe_]