At Glastonbury, a sacred site so ancient that its spiritual authority had once rivalled that of Rome, Cromwell’s agents tried Abbot Richard Whiting for treason, then dragged him through the streets and onto the Tor where they hanged him and dismembered his body. The abbots of Reading and Colchester also chose to die rather than submit, but their martyrdom achieved nothing, and with the surrender of Waltham in March 1540 the last monastery closed. The stones of the abbeys were carried off for building elsewhere, their libraries scattered, the choirstalls chopped up for firewood, their icons smashed, their paintings defaced. Around 5,000 monks, 1,600 friars, and 2,000 nuns were pensioned off, while others who had depended on the monasteries for welfare simply joined the ranks of sturdy beggars.

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An act of 1539 had secured the estates of the dissolved houses for the Crown, and if the King had been less pressed for cash he might have kept more of their revenues for himself. Instead, he sold the bulk of them at knock-down prices. Men such as the Duke of Suffolk, who acquired the lands of 30 monasteries, made huge fortunes from the spoils. Jack Horner entered folk-memory by the way he pulled out a plum from the Glastonbury estates. The King’s own treasury profited by about one and a half million pounds. At the same time, the dispersal of the great monastic holdings earned the Crown the loyalty of a grateful squirearchy who now had their own sound economic reasons for supporting and maintaining the break with Rome.

That break left the English church in confusion over theological issues, however, and Henry’s court remained a battleground between the radicals, led by Cromwell, and a more conservative faction that gathered around the Duke of Norfolk. As a commoner governing noblemen, Cromwell had made powerful enemies, and when he lost favour with the King after arranging the disastrous marriage with Anne of Cleves, his position became dangerously exposed. The last English abbey had been closed for only four months when this shrewd, self-made man who had become the revolutionary architect of the Anglican schism, was arrested and condemned on charges of treason and heresy. Cromwell went to the scaffold in July 1540, claiming that he would die in the Catholic faith.

This article was written by Lindsay Clarke and originally published in June/July 2002 British Heritage Magazine.

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