The Pilgrimage of Grace, if it has found the right leader, might have overthrown the government if it had marched on London. It is my understanding that it was only faith in Henry himself that prevented it from becoming a civil war.
Well, Richard Aske was a pretty good leader, and, yes, the Pilgrimage nearly toppled Henry from his throne, but Henry VIII was duplicitous, making promises to the men assembled that he did not keep, and butchering thousands of them in the end.
. . . . The Pilgrimage of Grace was about the maintenance of community. It sought a recognition of regional integrity, and broadly identified the new heresy with the disruption of the social order. It sought to preserve the structural integrity of a society in which a sacramental understanding of the world retained considerable vitality, and for which religious institutions remained “a constellation of sanctuaries, the points of material contact with the unseen world.” It originated at the popular level, in village after village, were faith had its deepest roots. Here, the people took their stand. In the largest sense, the Pilgrimage of Grace was a defense of “Christ’s faith” as expressed so simply in Lincolnshire by ordinary men. Whether they understood it or not, it was also a pilgrimage in the truest sense of the medieval pilgrimatio ideal. It was a living supplication of brave men taking up the cross against the destruction of what they considered to be beautiful and sacred, a valiant defense of what was familiar, and of what was loved, of the Abbeys as the patrimony of the poor, and of Heaven, as it was sacramentally perceived.