Hardly less violent was the fate of the monasteries during Henry’s Reformation. By the early sixteenth century the Church owned one third of all land in England, and had an annual revenue of £270,000, which was substantially more than the crown itself enjoyed. The monasteries alone controlled property worth £136,000 a year, making their confiscation and sale not only immensely profitable to Henry but also an excellent way of binding their purchasers – a great swathe of landed society, from noblemen down to yeomen – to the new religious order. Masterminded by Cromwell, the Dissolution would initiate the most sweeping change in land ownership in England since the Norman Conquest. But this was incidental to its main purpose, which was to endow the crown with a large enough landed income that it could govern and defend the realm without recourse to unpopular prerogative levies such as the Amicable Grant.
Financially and politically the Dissolution made considerable sense; culturally, however, it was the greatest tragedy in modern British history. Between 1536 and 1540 about 800 monasteries and convents in England, Wales and about half of Ireland were suppressed in what amounted to a campaign of state-licensed vandalism. Religious artworks were plundered; whole libraries, including irreplaceable early English manuscripts, were destroyed or sold for toilet paper; and some of Europe’s finest church buildings were auctioned off and demolished. The Dissolution may have begun as a reformist initiative, a campaign to eradicate these hotbeds of traditional worship, opposition to the royal supremacy, and, so it was claimed, ‘beastly buggery’.8 But it ended as out-and-out asset-stripping.
Besides the evangelicals at court and the purchasers of monastic lands, few had cause to welcome the Reformation. The reformist, anticlerical elements in Henrician religious policy appealed to some members of that small, educated elite influenced by humanism, while the evangelicals gained converts among England’s medieval dissenting community, the Lollards. The reformists’ attack on religious flummery and clerical ignorance, and their skill in using sermons and printed polemic to get their message across, certainly widened their appeal. Nevertheless, the evangelicals and their sympathisers remained firmly in the minority during Henry’s reign, and were largely confined to the two universities, the larger towns, and to those parts of the country, notably the south-east, with comparatively high literacy rates and strong commercial contacts with London and the Protestant communities on the Continent.
The prevailing response to the Reformation ranged from bewilderment to outright hostility. Katherine’s supporters and the defenders of traditional religion were strongly represented among the clergy, in Parliament, and even on the king’s council, and it needed all of Henry’s menace and Cromwell’s guile to overcome their resistance. In the end, enough people put loyalty to their terrifying yet charismatic king before loyalty to the papacy. But there were notable exceptions. Sir Thomas More, who had replaced Wolsey as lord chancellor in 1529, was executed in 1535 for steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the royal supremacy. Although sometimes seen today as a martyr for freedom of conscience, More had been a determined persecutor of evangelicals. Heresy, he had insisted, bred sedition, and must be ruthlessly cut out to prevent ‘infeccyon of the remanaunt’.9
The Reformation – and in particular the suppression of the monasteries – provoked the biggest rebellion in Tudor history: the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace. Wearing badges of the Five Wounds of Christ, and bound by an oath to defend the Catholic Church, the pilgrims mustered more than 30,000 strong in northern England, outnumbering the army that Henry hastily raised to confront them. But anxious to avoid a civil war, the pilgrims agreed to disperse on (false) assurances from Henry that he would reverse his religious policies and show mercy to the rebels – over two hundred of whom were executed. One of the condemned leaders of the rebellion pleaded not to be dismembered before he was dead, and therefore Henry had him hung in chains – in other words, gibbeted until he died of thirst. Subsequent attempts to revive the Pilgrimage were put down by noblemen rewarded with monastic lands and using troops paid for from the proceeds of the Dissolution.
The struggle between reformers and traditionalists divided many parishes in the south-east, while much of northern and western England remained altogether resistant to the new religion. The Reformation was to be greeted with even greater hostility in Ireland, where it represented an extension to the religious sphere of early Tudor efforts to impose English government and ‘civility’ – that is, English laws and cultural values. Protestantism thus became fatally bound up with the long-standing English attack on Gaelic Irish identity and way of life. Gaelic Wales and Cornwall remained solidly Catholic until well into the Elizabethan period, but Gaelic Ireland would never succumb to Protestant evangelisation.
The Reformation continued apace during the later 1530s despite the loss of its most influential patron at court, Queen Anne (Boleyn), who was executed in May 1536. She had been tried on charges of adultery and incest, although whether she had indeed been unfaithful to Henry or was the victim of court intrigue is not clear. Her racy reputation and the flirtatious behaviour of her entourage had certainly not helped her cause. But it is possible that the king would have been less easily persuaded of her guilt if she had given him a healthy son. Instead she had suffered two miscarriages since the birth of Elizabeth. The day after Anne’s execution, Henry was betrothed to the woman that the religious conservatives had been dangling before him as his next queen, Jane Seymour (1508/9–37), and ten days later they were married. She provided Henry with a healthy son at last, Prince Edward, but the king’s joy was mingled with grief when she died shortly afterwards of post-natal complications. His fourth wife, whom he married early in 1540, was Anne of Cleves (1515–57), the so-called ‘mare of Flanders’. Her brother, the duke of Jülich-Cleves on the lower Rhine, shared Henry’s Erasmian reformism, and enjoyed close links with the Schmalkaldic League: the alliance of evangelical princes in the Holy Roman Empire. Henry was desperately in need of allies on the Continent by the late 1530s, for the spread of Lutheran ideas in France had so alarmed Francis I that he had distanced himself from England’s schismatic king and sought a rapprochement with Charles V. Besides strengthening Henry’s hand against potential foreign enemies, the marriage to Anne of Cleves may have been part of Cromwell’s attempts to consolidate the Reformation by putting another patroness of reform into the royal bedchamber: a second Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately for Cromwell, and for Anne of Cleves, Henry was put off by the ‘looseness of her breasts … and other parts of her body’, and could not consummate the marriage, which was quickly annulled by the obliging archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.10 Henry consoled himself with one of Anne’s maids of honour, the young and flighty Katherine Howard (c.1524–42), and in July 1540 she became his fifth queen. There was no lack of royal ardour this time round; indeed, Henry doted on his teenage consort. Katherine had a sexual history of her own, however, and may have taken another lover after becoming queen. It would be understandable if she had, for after years of over-indulgence the golden youth of 1509 had become a raddled, bloated monster with suppurating ulcers on his once shapely legs. When her indiscretions came to light late in 1541, Henry was overcome with self-pity, and lamented ‘his ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’.11 Katherine, like Anne Boleyn, paid for her alleged infidelity with her head. Henry’s sixth and final marriage was in 1543 to the graceful, intelligent and evangelically-minded Katherine Parr (1512–48). She had the unenviable task of comforting the uxoricidal Henry in his declining years, and only narrowly avoided execution herself.
As wives came and went and the pressures – dynastic, sexual and political – that had pushed Henry into schism abated, he shifted back towards religious orthodoxy. The Pilgrimage of Grace had troubled him greatly, highlighting the unpopularity of his reformist policies, while the rapprochement between Francis I and Charles V in the late 1530s had left him dangerously isolated on the Continent. One casualty of Henry’s efforts to appease the Catholic powers was Thomas Cromwell, who fell terminally from royal favour for having promoted the Anne of Cleves marriage. Charged with treason and heresy, he begged Henry for his life, ending one letter with the plea: ‘Most gracyous prynce I