Note (back) — Chapter XIII

Henry was thus left to deal with the great domestic crisis of his reign without intervention from abroad. The dissolution of the monasteries inevitably inflicted considerable hardship on a numerous body of men. It had been arranged that the inmates of the dissolved religious houses should either be pensioned or transferred to other monasteries; but, although the pensions were adequate and sometimes even generous in scale,[983] and although the commissioners themselves showed a desire to prevent unnecessary trouble by obtaining licences for many houses to continue for a time,[984] the monks found some difficulty in obtaining their pensions, and Chapuys draws a moving picture of their sufferings as they wandered about the country, seeking employment in a market that was already overstocked with labour, and endeavouring to earn a livelihood by means to which they had never been accustomed.[985] They met with no little sympathy from the commons, who were oppressed with a like scarcity of work, and who had looked to the monasteries for such relief as charity could afford. Nowhere were these feelings so strong as in the north of England, and there the commissioners for dissolving the monasteries were often met with open resistance. Religious discontent was one of the motives for revolt, but probably the rebels were drawn mainly[986] from evicted tenants, deprived of their holdings by enclosures or by the conversion of land from tillage to pasture, men who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by a general turmoil. In these men the wandering monks found ready listeners to their complaints, and there were others, besides the monks, who eagerly turned to account the prevailing dissatisfaction. The northern lords, Darcy and Hussey, had for years been representing to Chapuys the certainty of success if the Emperor invaded England, and promising to do their part when he came. Darcy had, at Christmas 1534, sent the imperial ambassador a sword as an intimation that the time had come for an appeal to its arbitrament; and he was seeking Henry's licence to return to his house in Yorkshire in order to raise "the crucifix" as the standard of revolt.[987] The King, however, was doubtful of Darcy's loyalty, and kept him in London till early in 1536. It would have been well had he kept him longer.