On 14 July 1538, on the order of Thomas Cromwell, royal commissioners removed the statuary of Our Lady of Walsingham as well as all the gold and silver in the chapel. Within a few days, the Marian items were taken to London along with other images of the Virgin from various churches in order to be burned (the metal valuables went straight into the royal coffers). By 4 August, the chapel and priory would be completely shut down, surrendered to King Henry VIII. Within a year, the entire site had been sold on into private hands. Soon scant ruins remained.

The loss was keenly felt by those devoted Christians who had gone on pilgrimage to Walsingham; ‘its memory was long a-dying’, Dickinson writes. Around the end of the sixteenth century, when any hope of a successful counter- reformation had long ago died out, an anonymous poet ‘poured out the bitterness which the deed had brought to those to whom the cult of Our Lady stood as an ennobling force in a crude society’:

Indeed, farewell not only to blessings and holy deeds, but also to precious evidence of an important chapter in a nation's own religious history. The shrine at Walsingham's medieval cultural heritage, dispersed and destroyed in the waves of the English Reformation, can never be fully known or recovered. Some short weeks of iconoclastic fever devastated nearly five centuries of sacred art, artefacts and manuscripts. Martin Luther rejected extreme iconoclasm such as this, writing, ‘no one who sees the iconoclasts raging thus against wood and stone should doubt that there is a spirit hidden in them that is death-dealing, not life-giving’.

While religious institutions all over England and Europe suffered similar annihilation, those connected to the Virgin Mary experienced a particularly targeted desecration, due to the Virgin's problematic position for the Reformers. Widespread beliefs in Mary's power to intercede with Christ, her elevated position as Queen of Heaven, her real presence in her statues, her focus for pilgrimages and her ability to effect miracles were all seen as dangerous heterodoxies by Protestant thinkers.