Pilgrimage of Grace Document Analysis
Desiring marriage to his mistress Anne Boleyn, and a subsequent male heir to the throne, King Henry VIII of England stood before the pope with a plea. He wanted to divorce his then wife Catherine of Aragon, who he had come to despise for failing to produce a male heir, and instead marry Anne. However, this request was met with adamant refusal by the pope, who deemed the divorce unholy as it was against the Catholic faith. Upon hearing that his request was denied, Henry became livid and, in with the Act of Supremacy, ordained himself the head of the Anglican Church. He then proceeded to divorce Catherine and take Anne as his new bride. But Henry’s actions against the Catholic Church did not stop there. Enlisting the aid of Thomas Cromwell, he proceeded to implement high taxes, expand royal power, dissolve monasteries, and confiscate Catholic Church lands. Many English citizens took offence to these measures, and as a response embarked on the Pilgrimage of Grace. Although the protestors claimed that the march was solely to preserve English Catholicism, there were many different reasons for it. Some aimed to return God’s supremacy in England, others wanted protection from marauding thieves and Scots, and many wanted better treatment for the poor. The King and his fellow Protestants, on the other hand, saw the march as a rebellion, and set out to crush it. They argued that this opposition to the king’s power would bring chaos and anarchy to all of England.
A handful of fervent Catholics who looked to the Pope for guidance joined the Pilgrimage of Grace to save the face of Christianity in England. They believed that the king had given himself too much power, and therefore wanted to redistribute his additional power to the church, thereby placing his power back into the hands of God, where it belonged. At York, these marchers took