In 1537 the visitors began to go to the larger monasteries, and intimidate their inmates into surrender, mainly by threatening them with punishment for complicity in the rebellion which had just been put down. An excellent example of the way in which this was done, is given by the story of the suppression of the two large Cistercian abbeys in Lancashire, Whalley and Furness[408]. John Pasleu, Abbot of Whalley, had been executed in March, 1537, by the Earl of Sussex for his treason in taking part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Earl was commended for this action by the King, who further desired him with ‘good dexteritie’ to ‘laye unto the charges of all the monkes there their grevous offences, ... and therwith assaye their myndes, whither they woll conforme themselfes gladly for the redubbing of their former trespaces to goo to other houses of their cote ... or rather take capacities and soo receyve seculer habite[409].’ The Abbot of Furness was doubtless threatened with death if he refused to surrender his house, for a month after the execution of his brother at Whalley, he signed a document, by virtue of which he handed over to the King his abbey, and all its lands and possessions, ‘knawyng the mysorder and evyll liff both unto God and our prynce of the bredren of the said monasterie[410].’
Another method of intimidation was to threaten punishment for superstition and image worship. Against the latter Henry’s minister was particularly zealous. Some of the images were very valuable, and could be sold for a high price. Two of the most extraordinary of the venerated relics found in the ‘defacement’ of the monasteries have become famous to posterity, under the names of the Rood of Grace, and the Blood of Hailes. The former was a wonder-working crucifix, held in great veneration at Boxley Abbey, which Geoffrey Chambers[411], an agent of Cromwell’s, found full of ‘certen ingynes and olde wyer wyth olde roton stykkes in the backe of the same, that dyd cause the eyes of the same to move and stere in the hede thereof lyke unto a lyvelye thyng[412].’ It was seized and exhibited, first in Kent, and then in London, and the ‘abusion thereof dyvulged.’ The Blood of Hailes was a phial of liquid, which a tradition of three centuries asserted to have been the blood of the Saviour[413]. The head of the monastery brought it to Cromwell in great perplexity, swearing that he was willing to suffer the most shameful death, if the phial had been meddled with in his day. A commission, appointed to inquire into it, took the liquid out of the phial, and found it to be a thick, red, sticky substance. They then gave it back to the abbot, to keep until he heard the King’s pleasure concerning it. Meantime Bishop Hilsey had preached a sermon in denunciation of the fraud, in which he asserted that a former abbot had told his paramour that the phial contained only drake’s blood; but he was later compelled to take back this last statement, as a result of the Commissioners’ inquiry. What ultimately became of the Blood of Hailes has remained a mystery, but it is noteworthy that Cromwell was so annoyed, at having unearthed a relic which proved valueless from a financial point of view, that when the ‘bluddy abbot,’ as Latimer called him, came to consult him about it, he was forced to pay £140, his best mitre, cross, and ‘another thyng or two,’ to make good the amount which Cromwell had expected to obtain from the relic. The iconoclastic zeal of the Vicar-general varied in proportion to the value of the image[414].
