Had no new factor supervened, it is possible that Cromwell would have spent some years in realizing the profits from the smaller monasteries. The suppression of these houses had, however, been in train for less than six months when, with a sudden and ubiquitous upheaval that had almost the character of a seasonal change of nature, the whole of the north of England rose in revolt. This insurrection, so swift alike in its outbreak and in its complete collapse, has only in recent decades attracted the notice it deserves from historians, and even now, as happens with all unsuccessful reactionary causes, its significance has not been wholly laid bare. Unlike any other revolt in the Tudor period, its spearhead was directed by men of high principles and intelligence, entirely without personal ambition and unwilling to use violence save as a last resort, and who were capable of giving a reasoned explanation of their actions. In the words and manifestoes of the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace we hear, for the only time in the reign of Henry VIII, the free expression of opinion of a large body of men unmixed with any element of official propaganda and unaffected by considerations of a purely personal or sordid kind. The present pages are not directly concerned with the course of the revolt or its more general aims, but as the suppression of the lesser monasteries was in large part its occasion, and the dissolution of many of the larger ones its immediate consequence, something must be said of the fortunes of the religious during the troubles, and of the hopes that inspired the leaders of the discontented.