A history of England

by Charles Oman

Now Henry VIII. to the end of his days stood firm to the mediaeval doctrine of the sacrament, and fully accepted Transubstantiation, though he denied the deduction which the Roman Church had drawn from it—that by it the Pope and clergy are the despotic masters of the souls of men. He merely desired to place himself in the position which the Pope had hitherto held, as head of the spiritual hierarchy of England. With the pliant Cranmer and other bishops of his own to serve him, he wished to become as despotic a sovereign over the souls of Englishmen as he already was over their bodies. To a great extent he succeeded, and for the last twelve years of his reign he exercised a hateful spiritual tyranny over his subjects, drawing a hard-and-fast line of submission to his own views, which no man was allowed to overstep in either direction. Roman Catholics who denied his power to supersede the Pope's authority were hung as traitors. Protestants who refused to accept his theory of the Sacraments were burnt as heretics.

The monasteries.

The turning-point of Henry's reign was the turbulent and boisterous year 1536-7. In pursuance of his plan of a campaign against the papacy, disguised under the shape of a reform of abuses, Henry had resolved to attack the monasteries. The monks had long been an unpopular class: the impulse towards monasticism, which had been so vigorous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had long died away, and ever since the time of Wicliffe men had been asking each other what was the use of the monasteries? There were no less than 619 of them in England. They were enormously wealthy, and they did little to justify their existence; they had long ceased to be centres of learning or of teaching. Beyond going through their daily round of mechanical Church services, their inmates did absolutely nothing. Their wealth had led to much luxury, both of splendid building and of high living. To this day the traveller who measures the ruins of enormous and sumptuous abbeys planted in the wilderness—like Tintern or Fountains—and learns that they served no public or spiritual end save the sheltering of a few dozen monks, wonders at the magnificence of the husk which contained so small and withered a kernel. But the monasteries were worse than useless—they were absolutely harmful; their worst habit was to acquire rich country livings, draw all the tithes from them, and work them with a vicar on starvation wages. If we see a poor living in modern England, we generally find that the monks sucked the marrow out of it in the Middle Ages, to rear their colossal chapels and their magnificent refectories. It was the monasteries, too, which by their indiscriminate doles and charities, reared and fostered the horde of itinerant beggars who, under the name of pilgrims, tramped from abbey to abbey all the year round. Worse than this, there is no doubt that a considerable amount of evil living prevailed in some of the monasteries. Before the Reformation had been heard of, we find Archbishop Warham and Cardinal Wolsey storming at the immorality of certain religious houses. It was but natural that idleness, luxury, and high living should breed such results among the grosser souls in the monastic corporations. In public esteem the better houses suffered for the sins of the worse.

Inquiry into their condition.

The monks had always been the faithful allies of the Popes, and Henry determined to suppress this "papal militia," as they have been called, and at the same time to fill his pockets from their plunder. Accordingly, he sent commissioners round England, to report on the state of the religious houses. These officials—as the king had wished—drew up a very gloomy report. They declared that they found nothing but idleness and corruption among the smaller monasteries, and that many of the greater were no better. There can be no doubt that they grossly exaggerated the blackness of the picture, knowing that the king would welcome all possible justification for the action which he was meditating. But it is equally certain that in most parts of England the monks were deservedly unpopular, and that the commissioners' report only reflected the nation's belief.

The lesser monasteries suppressed.

Henry laid the report before his Parliament, and at his suggestion an act was passed suppressing the lesser monasteries—all such as had an income of less than £200 per annum. Their goods were confiscated to the Crown, but an allowance was made to such of the monks as did not find places in the surviving monasteries of the larger sort (1536).

Henry and Anne Boleyn.

The year of the dissolution of small monasteries was notable for a tragedy in the palace, which shows Henry's unlovely character at its worst. He had been growing cold to the fair and ambitious queen who had brought on him his quarrel with Rome. She had disappointed his hope of a male heir—only the Princess Elizabeth had sprung from the marriage. Henry had tired of her voluptuous airs and graces, and was beginning to feel vexed at the want of dignity and decorum which she displayed among his courtiers. Anne's light words and unseemly familiarity with many of the gentlemen of his household roused his anger. But what was most fatal to the unfortunate queen was that his eye had caught another face about the court, which now seemed to him more attractive than his wife's.

Anne's execution.—Marriage with Jane Seymour.