the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and signed the letter to Pope Clement VII in that regard. He was placed second to the King at the Privy Council at which Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was charged with treason and signed the documents for his prosecution. He served as a commissioner for the formal deposition of Catherine in 1533. During the preparation of his Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII granted to Courtenay the stewardship of several monasteries in 1535, which placed him in a key position for the forthcoming process. In 1536 Courtenay was a commissioner at the trial of Anne Boleyn, the king's second wife who had been accused of adultery, incest, and high treason. Courtenay and Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk were sent into Yorkshire to put down the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Roman Catholic uprising that broke out on 15 October 1536. Courtenay failed in this task and retreated to Devonshire. On 15 May 1537, he served as High Steward at the trial for treason of Thomas Darcy, 1st Baron Darcy de Darcy, charged with being a leader of the rebellion. Downfall and death By the late 1530s, Courtenay was an influential figure at court and was administering most of western England in his own name and that of King Henry VIII. He was also a political rival of Thomas Cromwell and the two men reportedly had little sympathy for each other. Following the Reformation, Courtenay's second wife, Gertrude Blount, remained a Roman Catholic. She had supported Elizabeth Barton to her downfall and continued to maintain correspondence with the Catholic former queen Catherine to her death. Her father had served as Queen Catherine's chamberlain, and a stepmother had been one of her Spanish attendants while she was Princess of Wales. Cromwell used these connections to point suspicion at Courtenay's loyalties. Being a powerful landowner in the west country did not make him blind to the sufferings of his tenants. Many lay and clerical alike were turned out of their lands and homes by the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Courtenay came to hate Vicar-General Cromwell and his Protestantism, whose "measures ... became so obnoxious to him that he drifted into a treasonable conspiracy with the Pole family". He joined the Catholic Poles in the Western Rebellion during 1538 and endeavoured to raise the men of Devon and Cornwall. At St Keverne on the Lizard