With The Act Of Supremacy Getting Passe Essay

Submitted By dmcg97
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With the Act of Supremacy getting passed in 1534, the Protestant Reformation and England was commencing, and many people were disagreeing with the policies that were being established by High Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, which involved new taxes, the expansion of royal power in Northern England, the dissolution of monasteries, and the confiscation of Catholic Church lands. The public staged armed protests and demonstrations, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, that allowed to voice their concerns for the parliament to revert back to the Catholic Church, and to end the policies that were distributed by Cromwell. The government, led by King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, tried to restore the order of the nation while implementing the new rules and remain the leaders of England. According to the marchers in York in October 1536 in The Oath of Honorable Men (Doc 1) ,the marchers wanted England to know that this was not a revolt in order to achieve a rise in social ranking, but was a pilgrimage to have England go back to the Catholic faith that had been implemented before the Act of Supremacy was passed. As one marcher stated, “You shall not enter into our Pilgrimage of Grace for worldly gain. Do so only only for the love of God, for the Holy Catholic Church militant, for the preservation of the King and his heirs, for the purification of the nobility, and to expel all evils.” The marchers also believe with this statement that they want King Henry VIII to remain king, but they feel the government as a whole has negatively influenced their king. The main goal of the marchers was to rid England of this corrupt Parliament and to do away with the new policies established by this parliament. An anonymous writer, believed to be Sir Thomas Tempest, who was a former member of parliament, wrote in An Anonymous Pamphlet attributed to Sir Thomas Tempest, former member of parliament for Newcastle, December 1536 (Doc 6), “The king should grant our petition against the traitor Thomas Cromwell and his adherents, or at least exile them from the realm… The current Parliament has no authority or virtue. It is little more than a council for the King’s appointees.” It makes sense that the anonymous writer, believed to be Sir Thomas Tempest, wishes that the Parliament should consist of less corrupt members than Cromwell and his followers because is a participant in the Pilgrimage of Grace and they believed that Cromwell’s new policies of more taxes, dissolution of monasteries, and the confiscation of Catholic lands were unacceptable. During the pilgrimage, a petition written by Robert Aske that, in selected articles from the petition (Doc 5), states demands such as “To have the heresies of Luther, Wycliffe, Huss, and Tyndall annulled and destroyed; to have the supreme head of the Church be the Pope in Rome as it was before; to have Thomas Cromwell... punished as a subverter of the good laws of this realm”, and also demanded that the policies that were made by Cromwell be forgotten. Robert Aske spoke of why the policy of dissolving the monasteries, in particular was unacceptable in his testimony given shortly before his execution in April 1537 in Lincoln, England. (Doc 11) Aske states, “Once the monasteries in the north gave great service to men and laudable service to God. Now no hospitality is shown to travelers…. Sea walls, dikes, bridges, and high walls that were once maintained by the monasteries for the good of the commonwealth are now left unattended.” He outlines the good that the monasteries once brought to England but no longer can after being dissolved due to Cromwell’s dissolution of them. The King’s Council had a different view on how Cromwell’s reign was going and opposed the Pilgrimage of Grace, as it was very chaotic and made it difficult to restore order in England. Richard Morrison, who is a writer for Cromwell, writes in the Remedy for Sedition (Doc 7) that “Those that are of