Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIX

Bonner's Cathedral of Saint Paul's

London--this cathedral was 

destroyed in the Great Fire of 

London in 1666 and replaced by 

Christopher Wren's masterpiece.

Another bishop on whom Mary depended in her program to restore England to the Catholic faith was Edmund Bonner.  Bonner had pretty humble beginnings.  His father was a woodsman or a lumberman in Worcestershire.  He studied law—not at the Inns of Court, which was common for a person who intended to follow a career in law, but at Oxford, earning degrees in both the Civil and Canon Law.  He was ordained quite young—perhaps as young as 22.  He was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and loyally stayed with him when he was arrested and accompanied the Cardinal on his trip to London to face the wrath of Henry (a wrath fanned into fury by Anne Boleyn who resented Wolsey’s attempts to break her ambitious relationship with the King.) It was a dangerous thing to do—to stay with the Cardinal in his time of disfavor.  Wolsey was fortunate enough not to make London but to die on the way—at Leicester Abbey, an Augustinian foundation just about halfway from Wolsey’s See at York to London where Henry—and the Tower—awaited him.  Bonner was with the Cardinal when he died. 

Cromwell scavenged the remnants of Wolsey’s service for what talent could go for the King’s work and Bonner found himself in the royal employ.   He was sent to Rome in 1532 to try to forestall action against Henry in the Roman Curia and in a 1533 meeting with Clement VII at Marseilles (where the Pope was conferring with Henry’s current foe, Francis I of France) Bonner threated the Pope with appealing over the Pope to a General Council for an annulment for Henry.  Clement was furious and Henry never got around to the appeal, choosing schism instead.  Bonner served Henry on embassies both to Charles V and to the French court and he made contact with the German Lutherans with whom he showed some doctrinal sympathy.  As an ambassador, Bonner could be quite abrasive and his tendency to get in altercations with his hosts did not help him achieve his diplomatic goals.  Yet this didn’t displease Henry who had a particular antipathy for the French.  Bonner also went out of his way to alienate Stephen Gardiner who had preceded him as ambassador in Paris and about whom he, Bonner, filed a highly critical report. 

Bonner oversaw the printing of “The King’s Great Bible” at Paris while ambassador to the French Court.  Myles Coverdale, later Bishop of Exeter and strong proponent of Protestant doctrine and worship in the reign of Edward VI, had provided this English translation under the sponsorship of Henry for use in the services of the Church of England.  (Henry had retained the Latin Mass throughout his reign, but much like the first introduction of the vernacular in the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council, the custom of reading the Epistle and Gospel in English—after they had been read in Latin—was to pave the way for greater changes yet to come.)  Henry (and his Protestant-leaning minion, Thomas Cromwell) were quite impressed at Bonner’s performance with getting the Bible printed and rewarded him with the Bishopric of Hereford.  As he was still in France, however, he could neither be consecrated or take possession of his see and Henry moved him to London in 1540 where he was consecrated according to the old rites which would remain unaltered in the time of King Henry. 

Bonner had been trained in law, not theology, and he had never shown much interested in the finer points of doctrine. Indeed, if anything he seemed to lean towards a version of Lutheranism.  Yet once in his diocese he became an implacable religious conservative.  When the wind blew in a more traditionalist direction after the execution of Thomas Cromwell, and Parliament passed the Six Articles, Bonner began an earnest persecution of all those in his diocese who did not adhere strictly to Catholic Doctrine on Transubstantiation, on purgatory, and on the cult of the saints. 

The death of Henry and the accession of King Edward changed everything.  Within a few months of the new King’s accession a set of injunctions had been drawn up for reform in the Church and the bishops were entrusted with the task of seeing that they were carried out in their cathedrals as well as in the parishes of their diocese.  The injunctions required

1.    all images were to be taken down

2.    stained glass, statutes, and shrines were to be dismantled

3.    rood screens, their lofts, and the rood beam with its cross and figures of John the Apostle and the Virgin Mary were to be destroyed

4.    vestments were abolished and were to be burned or sold

5.    sacred vessels were to be melted down and replaced by pewter or silver cups and tankards

6.    processions were banned

7.    the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday, Palms on Palm Sunday, and candles on Candlemas was done away with

8.    chantries (mortuary chapels) with endowed masses for those buried there were abolished

9.    masses for the dead were abolished.   

The bishops were responsible to see that these directives were carried out in their respective dioceses, but the Council appointed visitators to go around the kingdom to make sure the changes had been carried out.  Bonner refused to implement the changes and resisted the idea of visitors coming to his diocese.  As London was the national capital, the Council could not afford dissent there. He was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Fleet Prison.  There he changed his strategy and gave in to the visitation so as to be released and take his seat in Parliament where he could fight the new laws.  His resistance to the Prayer Book of 1549, however,  led to his being deprived of his see and imprisoned for the remained of King Edward’s reign.

Mary, on her accession, freed him and restored him to this See.  Bonner vigorously sought to restore Catholic doctrine and practice but had a rough time of it.  During his imprisonment, Edward’s Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, had pretty thoroughly destroyed what elements of Catholicism were left.  Not only had the stone altars been smashed in the London churches, the crosses and crucifixes torn down, the images of the saints ripped from their niches, but more important, Londoners had been well catechized in the Reformed Religion. 

Protestantism appealed to the merchant class and London was a merchant citu.  Protestantism was a religion that showed an appreciation for critical thinking and intellectual pursuits.  It was not a matter of blind authority and ancient traditions that no longer made sense.  Protestantism was rational, a thinking man’s religion.  There was no room for superstition.  Moreover it was economically rational. One didn’t put good money into silk vestments or silver crosses or gold chalices.  One gave to the poor.  One endowed schools.  And one re-invested one’s money for greater profit.  This was a religion for Londoners.  And when Bonner came back to his diocese after an absence of six years, the damage had been done.  Bonner did what he could do to repair the churches for Catholic worship again but he never won the confidence of the Londoners.  Even worse, he undertook a fierce persecution of Protestants, searching them out, trying them in ecclesiastical courts, and subjecting them to torture and being burned at the stake.  He was responsible for some of the worst excesses of “Bloody Mary’s” reign. 

Unlike Gardiner who predeceased Mary, Bonner lived well into Elizabeth’s reign.  He refused to swear to her supremacy over the Church.  Although he sat in her first Parliament where he spoke against her policy of reintroducing Protestantism, he was deprived of his See and imprisoned by the end of her first year on the throne.  Although many called for his death in retaliation for those martyred under his authority for their Protestant faith, he was never executed.  He remained imprisoned under somewhat genteel terms and every four months was given a new opportunity—which he always refused—to swear to the royal supremacy.  He died eleven years into Elizabeth reign. 

I notice that I have quite often used the term “Protestant” here and I need to clarify that term as I am not using it in the somewhat generic sense that we use to cover everything from a Swedish Lutheran to a Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite.  The problem is that the other-than-Catholic movement in the Church of England was not stable through this period.  Phase I which might be thought to be 1520-1540 leaned towards Lutheran thought.  Phase II, which we shall mark as 1540 to the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 leaned more to the Swiss model but I wouldn’t say “Calvinist.”  It was sort of a generic Swiss/Strasbourg variety influenced heavily by Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg reformer who had taken refuge in England between 1549 and 1551, but also drawing on Bucer’s friends among the Swiss, especially Zwingli.  Phase III which will be the reign of Elizabeth will see a real struggle between the Puritan party who are definitely Calvinist and the more moderate party which would have favored the more middle of the road sort of theology typified in the reign of Edward VI.  The Puritan party was to win out, though Elizabeth herself was definitely a theological moderate.  But all that is still away off in our entries. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXIII

The Shrine of St. Frideswide at

Christ Church, Oxford

The despoiling of the monasteries was the most important part of Henry’s scheme to get the Church’s wealth into the royal pocket, but it wasn’t his only one.   In 1538 he undertook an attack on many of the shrines that adorned English cathedrals and churches.  The most significant of these was the dismantling of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

Canterbury Cathedral with its tomb of Becket was one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Europe, surpassed in popularity only by the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome and the shrine of Saint James at Compostela in Galicia, (today’s north-western Spain).  Of course, Henry was no devotee of Thomas Becket, the embodiment of the Church’s independence from the Crown.  This may have been the riskiest part of Henry’s entire re-organization of the Church of England.  Becket was an immensely popular saint among the English and his cult was of immense economic significance to many not only in Canterbury itself but along the pilgrimage roads that led there.  Yet such a symbol of Church resistance to royal authority could not be allowed to remain in the English consciousness.  In September 1538 the shrine containing Becket’s body was destroyed and the votive offerings—jewels, gold, silver, candelabra, and other ornaments were confiscated.  It took 21 carts to carry the treasure up to London from Canterbury.

Becket’s shrine was not the only one dismantled by Henry’s commissioners.  During the negotiations for a marriage between Henry and the German princess, Anne of Cleves, there was some ambiguous signs of Church reform in the direction of Lutheran theology.  (Anne was Lutheran.)  Some historians put too much emphasis on this and one has to be careful in analyzing what exactly was happening.  Henry was never a fan of Lutheranism.  He had written his book Defense of the Seven Sacraments in 1521 defending traditional Catholic theology against Luther and Henry was not one to backtrack and admit that he might have been wrong.  He would stay quite theologically orthodox (by Catholic standards) for the remainder of his life though he neither made plans to keep the Church faithful to its Catholic roots after his death nor did he seem to exercise much vigilance over his theological advisors even in his lifetime, allowing sympathizers with the “new ideas” to occupy key positions in his government and, in the case of Cranmer, in the Church.  What I mean to say is that by the early 1530’s Henry had pretty much delegated oversight of religious matters to Thomas Cromwell who did have Lutheran leanings and used his position to further the careers of other crypto-protestants.  Moreover, Cromwell worked closely with Archbishop Cranmer, who also had strong Protestant sympathies, though both Cromwell and Cranmer were wise enough not to push publicly against the King’s conservative policies.  Nevertheless, by 1538 and with the negotiations proceeding over the Cleves marriage, there was the opportunity for some minor reforms.  These were mainly the suppression of shrines, images, and roods. 

In July 1538 the image of Our Lady was taken from the shrine dedicated to her at Walsingham in Norfolk along with the votives that the faithful had left there.  This was a particularly popular shrine and had been for several centuries.  The shrine of Saint Frideswide in the Oxford priory named after her (and now Christ Church Cathedral in the College of that same name) was destroyed about the same time.  The shrines of Saint Swithin at Winchester, St Hugh at Lincoln, St. Cuthbert at Durham, and St Ethelredea at Ely we all destroyed between 1538 and 1539 with their treasure confiscated by the royal treasury. 

The same time that the destruction of the shrines and various spurious relics was carried out, some took advantage of the situation and used the opportunity to destroy various statues and images.  This was not done on a wide scale, but neither was the destruction confined to one or two isolated incidents.  Much valuable religious art was lost in this period as windows were smashed, statues burned or smashed, gold and silver melted down; but it would be nothing akin to the destruction that would happen after Henry’s death when there was a systematic attack on images by the more extreme policies enacted under Henry’s son and successor, Edward VI. 

The reaction to the destruction of the shrines and images resulted in the Act of the Six Articles which reaffirmed belief in

1.    the doctrine of transubstantiation

2.    communion in one kind

3.    clerical celibacy

4.    observance of religious vows of chastity

5.    private masses

6.    auricular confession

This was a step back from Protestantism and the remainder of Henry’s reign would see the preservation of Catholic practices such as the Traditional Liturgy/Latin Mass, Eucharistic Worship, cult of Mary and the saints, the practice of seven sacraments, maintenance of traditional church vestments and ornaments, the use of crucifixes and images.    Meanwhile, however Cranmer and other secret Protestants devoted themselves to research and study to prepare for the day when the Church of England could be openly Protestant.  Thomas Cromwell, meanwhile, was attainted for treason and beheaded at the Tower of London on July 28^th 1540.  Remarkably, he who had used his offices to destroy the monasteries and to further the Protestant cause, professed to die “in the traditional faith.” 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXI

Peterborough Abbey Church,

raised by Henry VIII to Cathedral

status for a new diocese the King

established. 

Well, let’s leave Pope Francis and his critics for awhile and travel back to Merry Old England and the adventures of Good King Hal.  Or maybe not such a good fellow.  Where we left off the saga was in the middle of the closing of the monasteries. Just to recap:  If you remember, in the 1520’s, before Henry’s break with Rome, Cardinal Wolsey had closed down a number of smaller religious religious houses, transferred their members to more successful communities, and appropriated the endowments and lands of those closed houses to establish Cardinal College (now Corpus Christi College) at Oxford and a grammar school in his native Ipswich.  This was not a new tactic—the Crown had, with permission of the Holy See, suppressed a number of failing monasteries in the 14^th and 15^th centuries and diverted their revenues to other projects.  Wolsey’s right-hand man and leading disciple, Thomas Cromwell, had noticed the profits of this strategy of the Cardinal and after Wolsey’s fall had suggested this strategy to his new master, Henry VIII, in order to replenish the royal funds.   Henry was a spend-aholic. He was taking England from a back-water feudal monarchy into one of the leading Nation States of Europe, competing with both the Empire and France.  Henry was building up the Royal Navy—a task which centuries later would pay off in spades.  He used funds copiously as bribes and rewards to expand his influence on the continent.  He was pushing England into international trade and exploration for new markets and new sources of raw materials.  He also was relying more and more on the gentry and the mercantile classes for civil service and had to find funds with which to pay them or lands which to ennoble them.  Henry was very much the one who laid the foundation for the great Empire England was to become in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  And it cost money.  At the same time he was spending lavishly on himself and his succession of queens.  Henry was into building palaces.  Some he would seize (York Place which became Whitehall, and Wolsey’s Hampton Court along with the Hospital of Saint James which still retains its name today as St. James Palace.  In fact, the Royal entourage is still called “The Court of Saint James.”)  Others he bought and refurbished such as Beaulieu and Oatlands Place.  Some were existing royal residences he rebuilt, remodeled, or refurbished  such as Eltham Palace, Hatfield House, and Greenwich,   Still others he built from scratch such as Bridewell, Chelsea Manor, and Nonsuch Palace.  Henry was also given to magnificent spectacles such as his meeting with Francis I of France in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold because of the extravagance of the two monarchs trying to outdo each other in display of wealth.  Henry regularly traveled in great state—often by a flotilla of royal barges on the Thames.  He loved clothes and armor and tournaments.  In fact, there was probably no European monarch so spendthrift until in the following century Louis XIV, the Sun King, ascended the throne of France.  All this extravagance, whether personal or political, had to be paid for and the English Crown was particularly poor.  The sentiment in England was that “The King should live off his own”—which meant that the King should use the revenues from his own lands to pay not only for his private expenses but even for the Army, the Navy, and other government projects.  The Crown could not impose new taxes without the consent of the House of Commons and the Commons believed, as I wrote, that the Crown should live off its own.  So where was Henry to get money?  The Church had money—more money than the Crown, much more money.  How was the Crown to get that money?   Cromwell remembered the trick of suppressing monasteries.  In 1536 he went after the small monasteries—some of which were quite wealthy in land and revenues, despite their small numbers.  Monks and nuns were given the choice of secularizing with a small cash settlement or of transferring to larger monasteries.  The following year Cromwell went after some of the larger monasteries and gave handsome settlements to those who voluntarily surrendered their property.  This time monks and nuns were not given the option of transferring to other monasteries (Cromwell had determined to pick the monastery tree fruitless) but were given the settlement of an annual pension, sufficient for the monks to live comfortably.  Abbots and priors were given pensions far more generous than that granted to ordinary monks, pensions that enabled them to live as gentlemen of means, and this assured their cooperation in closing down their houses.   (The nuns had a smaller pension that was not quite enough for them to do the same, though it was presumed they would return to their families where the allowance would be sufficient for their maintenance.)  Neither monks nor nuns were released from their vows and thus were not free to marry (though some, especially among the nuns, did).  They also were expected to retain their religious garb (though few did).  Monasteries that did not voluntarily surrender were visited by royal commissioners and shut down.  By 1539 there were still a considerable number of monasteries operating, but these were either in more remote corners of the kingdom or they were some of the great monastic houses with ties to the Crown.  But even these were to fall.    Before we get to that, however, we need to look at a particular type of monastery and how Henry dealt with them and these are the Cathedral priories.
The medieval Church of England had a particularly unique tradition in which several cathedrals did not have the usual dean and chapter of canons but a monastic community that followed the Rule of Saint Benedict and was governed by the Prior (the Abbot being, in theory, the Bishop.)  Canterbury, Winchester, Ely, Carlisle, Durham, Rochester, Norwich, and Worcester were all such arrangements.  (Carlisle was not a Benedictine foundation, but one of the Arrouaisian Canons who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine.)    Typically in such situations, the Prior was named as dean of the newly constituted chapter of secular canons that replaced the monks.     Thomas Goldwell was prior of the Benedictine monks at Canterbury—a large house of 69 monks.  He signed the assent to the royal supremacy in 1534 which acknowledged Henry as head of the Church.  Monastic life continued as normal until 1539 when the monastery was suppressed.   Goldwell was given an annual pension of £ 80 and named a prebendary (canon) of the Cathedral.  (1539 £ 80 equals about $60,000 in modern currency, but approximately five times that in actual buying power.)  Winchester Priory had 45 monks and the last prior, William Kingsmill, was appointed dean of the Cathedral.  Robert Steward had been prior of Ely since 1522.  Although he had supported the validity of the Royal Marriage to Katherine of Aragon, he soon switched sides to Henry and supported the Royal Supremacy as well as playing an active role in convincing monasteries to surrender to the King.  When his own monastery was suppressed in November 1539 he was given a handsome pension.  Two years later he was appointed first dean of the new Cathedral.  Hugh Whitehead was Prior of the monks at Durham from 1519.  Like the others, he acceded to Henry’s supremacy.  The monastic community was dissolved in 1540 and he was pensioned but then appointed first dean of the new secular chapter.   Under Edward VI he was imprisoned in the Tower of London along with his bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, for refusing to go along with the Protestantization of the Church of England by Archbishop Cranmer.     
Henry was not only into dismantling the monasteries—he was also into building up the Church.  While his primary goal in suppressing the monasteries was to enrich the royal coffers, he not only provided for the monks and nuns out of the revenues of the suppressed houses, he also used the monastic endowments to establish a number of new dioceses to provide good pastoral oversight for the Church.  Most of these dioceses were founded on, and from the revenues of, suppressed monasteries.  Dioceses were founded at Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough and Westminster.   Henry also moved the See of Coventry to Lichfield.    Other than Lichfield, the new sees were all established in former Benedictine abbeys, except for Oxford which was originally established in the former Augustinian Osney Abbey and later (1545) transferred to Saint Frideswide’s Priory (Augustinian) which had been suppressed and then incorporated into Wolsey’s Cardinal College in 1525.  Peterborough Abbey was the site of the grave of Katherine of Aragon who had been buried there only five years before and so was saved from being destroyed or deconsecrated.  Henry was faced with an even greater conundrum in what to do with Westminster Abbey which had been the site of English coronations for almost five centuries.  Henry may have been willing to break continuity with the papacy, but not when it came to his Crown and its traditions.  He had a superstitious urgency to preserve any and all symbols of Royal legitimacy and Westminster Abbey was central to this.  Westminster Abbey was also the second wealthiest religious house in England.  The monastic community was suppressed in 1539 and in 1540 Henry took the city of Westminster and the county of Middlesex from the Diocese of London to create the Diocese of Westminster.  Thomas Thirlby, a churchman loyal to Henry was named bishop and William Benson (sometimes Boston), the former monastic prior, was named Dean of a chapter of 12 canons drawn mostly from the monks.  The idea of a Diocese of Westminster was only to preserve a reason for the Abbey Church to be preserved and was neither pastorally useful nor economically feasible.  The Diocese was suppressed in the reign of King Edward VI.  The Abbey was left impoverished of its revenues and almost destroyed by the greed of the Duke of Somerset, the uncle of King Edward VI and “Lord Protector of England” in the King’s minority.  The Church was restored to abbatial status during the reign of Mary and then under Elizabeth became a “royal peculiar”—directly under the Crown who appoints the dean and canons.  It remains that way today as a Collegiate Church (a church with a college of canons led by the dean) under the Crown.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church LX

Selby Abbey in Yorkshire: when

the Benedictine Community was

suppressed, the Abbey Church

became the parish church

As mentioned in the previous posting, Henry did not find much opposition to his break with papal authority from the religious orders, save for the Carthusian monks and the Observant Franciscan Friars.  The Observants are the group known today as the OFM’s or “Brown Franciscans.”  These were the two strictest religious communities in England at the time, but even among these the majority of monks/friars seem to have gone along with the king in the matter of the supremacy.  All in all eighteen Carthusian monks and lay brothers were martyred, all for denying the Royal Supremacy.  I can’t come up with a reliable number of Observant Franciscans but it was less than that, perhaps a half dozen who stood firm after imprisonment and other scare tactics. 

Although most of the 15,000 religious in England went along with the royal supremacy and took the required oath that they recognized Henry as head of the Church, the King determined to suppress religious life in his realm.  It seems above all to have been a matter of finance rather than theology or even politics—the king saw the religious houses as a new source of revenue to expand his royal programmes without having to request the Commons for new taxes.  He had learned from Wolsey’s suppressions that there were vast amounts of wealth—primarily in land—to be gained by closing down the monasteries.  Henry’s agent in the work was Thomas Cromwell.  You might want to look at the posting for October 14^th to learn more about Cromwell, but Cromwell was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and learned well from Wolsey on how to please the King at any cost and without conscience.  When Wolsey fell, Cromwell rose to power.   It was Cromwell who designed most of the legislation by which Henry separated the English Church from the Roman Communion.  And it was Cromwell who moved to suppress the monasteries.

With the first suppressions in 1536 it appeared that this was simply the sort of reorganization that Wolsey had employed and for which even good Catholics had been calling in order to reform the Church.  Small houses with little income and few members were first to be targeted.  Monks and nuns were transferred to larger houses that could support them.  Royal Commissioners would visit the house, interview the community, inventory the assets and make a report back to Cromwell.  Not all houses were immediately suppressed—some were allowed for the time being to continue.  Those marked for suppression were visited a second time where the visitators would actually close down the house, transfer the religious, and dispose of the property.  In the disposal of the properties—the seizure of the assets in the King’s name or their distribution to the King’s friends—the commissioners were very careful to make sure all debts were first settled, those owned a pension given their rights, and matters settled amiably with tenants.  Properties were not just seize outright for the King.  Those religious—a minority—who wanted to secularize rather than transfer to a new foundation—were also given a cash settlement from the monastery assets.  As fair as the royal commissioners were, the canons of the two houses that resisted their suppression—were treated quite brutally, some with imprisonment and others with death. All of these foundations closed in the first wave of suppressions were either monks (Benedictine, Cistercian, or Carthusian), nuns of the same orders, or Canons Regular.  About eighty houses were suppressed in this first wave—most having less than a half dozen religious.  The Carthusian houses were larger communities but due to the resistance their now martyred colleagues had shown to the royal supremacy, came into particular focus for suppression. 

The second phase—in 1537—was accomplished by encouraging larger communities to voluntarily surrender their property and assets to the crown.  The Cistercians at Furness Abbey voluntarily surrendered their monastery because Henry was about to move against them for their involvement in the Pilgrimage of Grace—a popular uprising against Henry’s break with Rome.  Jervaulx, also Cistercian, surrendered for similar reason.  Lewes Priory (Benedictine), Titchfield Abbey (Premonstratensian) Bardsey Abbey (Augustinian), Eye Priory and Easby Abbey all voluntarily surrendered.  A new policy was put into practice with the religious not being allowed to transfer to other houses, but being given a modest pension on which to live on their own.  Monastic pensions averaged around £5 a year—at that time the income of a modest gentleman.  Nuns were less fortunate as their monasteries were usually less well endowed than those of the monks or canons and received about £3 per annum.  Henry required that monks and nuns, though no longer living in their cloisters, maintain religious garb and he forbad them a release from celibacy which prevented their marriage.  For nuns this mean they usually had to return to their families, but the pension due them provided them with the ability to contribute to the family income.  Abbots and priors usually received more handsome—and often more handsome by far—pensions.  They also were more likely to be offered Cathedral deaneries or even bishoprics, in which case their new position paid them a salary in lieu of any pension. 

Cromwell set up the Court of Augmentations to make sure that the disposal of monastic property was done in such a way as not to leave debtors, tenants, or the religious themselves in undue distress.  This was a very wise policy as the sudden collapse of these houses without providing for the religious or their employees or their creditors would have done serious economic damage that would have made the King and his policies very unpopular. As it was, with people able to get their hands on monastic wealth through royal grant or purchase, the dissolution was well received in most circles.  Indeed, when Mary came to the throne and investigated the possibility that such properties would be returned to the re-founded monasteries there was great alarm.

By 1538 many of the larger monasteries, seeing where the wind was blowing, were applying for permission to hand over their properties to the Crown in return for pensions.   Also by 1538 Cromwell had gotten the dissolution process down to a science and was closing down religious foundations quite quickly and with his usual efficiency.

To this point we have spoken of the monks and canons—both of whom had massive endowments.  The mendicant orders—the Augustinian Hermits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites—did not have extensive endowments but lived from their work and from alms.  Their convents were also closed down but the religious—not having the assets from which to provide pensions—were not pensioned off.  Their buildings were sold or given to clients of the King in return for services done the Crown.  This created some hardship for the friars.  The priests could seek work as secular clergy—and many having degrees in theology were often rewarded with decent posts—but the lay brothers had no choice but to enter the workforce as common laborers.  Like the monks and nuns, the friars—clergy and lay—were not release from the obligations of celibacy. 

Thus by 1539 most—but not all—of the religious foundations of England and Wales had been suppressed.  Only a few great abbeys remained. Vast amounts of land were in new hands and huge amounts of wealth were in the royal treasury.  At the same time, Henry was not releasing the religious from their vows and especially from celibacy.  England was in many ways still very Catholic but the elimination of the religious removed one very important bulwark of religious orthodoxy and in time that would tell.