Some examples of British food through the ages
Roman Britain: Dormice fattened in jars of nuts
Norman Britain: Suckling pigs’ trotters and ears in onion sauce
Tudor Britain: Roasted peacock served in its feathers, with a gilded beak
Eighteenth century: Udders stuffed with veal
Nineteenth century: Roasted ortolans (tiny songbirds), eaten whole
Second World War rationing: ‘Apricot’ flan, made from carrot, jam and mashed potato
The Dissolution of the Monasteries
Between 1536 and 1541 Henry VIII set about destroying the power of the Catholic Church in England by closing down its monasteries. The process was one of the most important acts of the English Reformation. It created the biggest social and political change in Britain since the Norman Conquest.
Thomas Cromwell was the epitome of Tudor success. He was born in Putney in about 1485, the son of a brewer and blacksmith, and rose to become the King’s Chief Minister and Earl of Essex. He was one of the new men of sixteenth-century Britain. In his youth he seems to have fallen out with his father and worked abroad, perhaps as a soldier for a while, visiting Venice, Florence and Antwerp. On his return he found work with Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, who may have recognised similar qualities as his own in his young employee because they came from similar social backgrounds: he himself was the son of a butcher from Ipswich. When Wolsey fell, Cromwell survived, and a few years later he became Secretary to Henry VIII, a position which made him the political architect of the King’s break with Rome. There is a famous Holbein portrait of Cromwell at the height of his career – a great bulk of power with a broad, fleshy face, his eyes narrowed and watchful. Tough, clever and cosmopolitan he was the man who drove through the administrative and ecclesiastical reforms that broke the power of the Church and strengthened the Tudor monarchy. They profoundly changed the future course of British history. They were, in their way, a revolution.
The court of Henry VIII must have been a bewildering place. The King himself was a man of virulent energy. He loved music and learning as well as physical pastimes such as hunting, tennis – and the pursuit of women. This energy was controllable while it was confined to the enhancement of his social life, but once it spilled over into the affairs of state it was violently disruptive. Henry was self-willed. He did not make nice distinctions between his own wishes and the wider policy of the state: as far as he was concerned they often amounted to the same thing. By the late 1520s he had decided that he needed to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. She had failed to produce a son which he felt the Tudor dynasty would need if it were to survive and anyway he wanted to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. He asked the Pope, Clement VII, to annul his marriage. The Pope refused, but his reasons were as much pragmatic as moral. He was under the control of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, whose mutinous troops had sacked Rome in 1527. Charles was Catherine of Aragon’s nephew and the Pope dared not offend him by granting Henry’s wish. Henry became impatient. He dismissed his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, for failing to persuade the Pope of his requirements – Wolsey died before he could be brought to trial and almost certainly executed – and, under the influence of Thomas Cromwell and his newly appointed archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, began to organise a break with the Roman Catholic Church.
These events took place against a background of great religious change in Europe. The attack on the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church led by reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin had taken root and Protestantism was developing fast as a new, coherent form of religious worship. Henry’s attack on papal authority was seen in Britain as a natural part of this process, but it was not at this stage a Protestant movement: far from it. The ideas of Luther and his followers were increasing in popularity, but they were still a long way short of demolishing people’s belief in the Roman Catholic Church which had been at the centre of their lives for centuries. After he dismissed Cardinal Wolsey, Henry turned to Sir Thomas More to be his Lord Chancellor. More was a devout Catholic. He disapproved of Lutheran teachings which he regarded as heresy – he ordered Lutheran preachers to be burnt at the stake during his time in office – and he wanted to suppress Protestant translations of the Bible into English. Henry VIII was supportive of More’s policies: for him the issue of the power of Rome was a matter of state business, not religious controversy.
The Church was a nuisance. It interfered with the smooth running of the British state.
What the Protestant reformers had succeeded in doing was to generate strong antipathy against the Church and clergy in general. It was the priesthood as much as Catholicism which was disliked. The Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century enjoyed extensive powers, and had the right to exact money from ordinary men and women through its own courts. It was also enormously rich. People eyed its splendid churches and beautiful abbeys with envy and resented its ownership of the vast lands it had been able to acquire during the long period of clerical expansion during the Middle Ages. The fact that their King could not get his way because the Pope was embroiled with a hostile foreign power only served to intensify these feelings. The Church was a nuisance. It interfered with the smooth running of the British state. It was too wealthy and too powerful: it needed to be brought under control.
In 1531 Henry VIII announced that he wished to be recognised as the Supreme Head and Sole Protector of the Church in England. Parliament acquiesced. Three years later in 1534 it passed the Act of Supremacy proclaiming that he was ‘the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England’ and that the English crown was now due ‘all honours, dignities, preeminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity’. Henry, having achieved the power he wanted, then proceeded to exercise it and began his attack on the Church’s land and property. By this time Thomas Cromwell was his principal lieutenant. He was a brilliant administrator, mercilessly efficient in his management of the state’s affairs. During his time as Henry’s chief minister, the machinery of government was tuned to a higher level of performance than before. Cromwell gathered around him a small council of administrators loyal in their service to their crown. They were bureaucrats – a sort of very early, primitive prototype of the civil service – and they provided the monarchy with the means to get things done. The Tudors developed as a powerful dynasty because they took full control of all aspects of the affairs of state. To do this they worked with strong, capable advisors and, to a large extent, through Parliament. As a result the growth in their power was accompanied by a growth in the power of the country as a whole: in sixteenth-century Britain dynastic ambition and nationhood went hand in hand.
The attack on the Church’s property was devastating. The abbeys, monasteries and nunneries of Britain were suppressed, their land confiscated and their inhabitants thrown out. The monks on the whole seem to have been well treated – many took livings as local priests, or were given pensions – although some who resisted were executed. The dissolution of the monasteries was a ruthless operation, but its real effects were felt, not in terms of individual human misery, but in the wholesale change to land ownership which it created. For those with money, the dissolution was a bonanza. Henry decided to sell confiscated property to raise money for the Exchequer. In the space of a few years he brought on to the market estates and buildings which had been out of the public domain for centuries. Many of the buyers were gentry and merchants whose families had grown wealthy in the stable climate of early Tudor Britain. A new landowning class began to appear, proud men of property whose successors would have a profound effect on the future direction of the country. This was one of the unforeseen side effects of the English Reformation. The destruction of the power of the Catholic