Agnes Strickland’s The Pilgrims of Walsingham or Tales of the Middle Ages: An Historical Romance (1835) is a three-volume historical novel written in emulation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and designed to capitalize on the success of Walter Scott’s historical novels. Strickland, best known for The Lives of the Queens of England (1840–1848), anticipates the themes of her later historical writing in The Pilgrims of Walsingham with her skepticism about the moral effects of the Reformation in England. While not entirely sympathetic to Catholicism, in The Pilgrims of Walsingham Strickland is also dubious about Protestantism’s historical disruptiveness and potentially radical sociopolitical effects. The novel imagines a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, in which the extensive frame narrative dramatizes the impending collapse of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon in the face of his joint desire for Anne Boleyn and a male heir. The inset prose tales address the potential consequences for the nation of the King’s behavior.