Monasteries Destroyed

The Shrine of our Lady of Caversham was destroyed on September 14, 1538 as part of the royal campaign to end monasticism in Great Britain. This pilgrimage destination for over 500 years was dismantled, and the venerated statue of Our Lady was sent to Thomas Cromwell in London where it was burned. Henry VIII's 1534 Act of Supremacy declared the Church of England independent from Rome and brought him face to face with the powerful Catholic institutions of English society which had dominated for a thousand years. Starting in 1536, more than 800 monasteries, priories, convents, and religious shrines were destroyed and their property was confiscated to enrich the royal coffers (and when Anne Boleyn had her way, to help the poor). Was the dissolution (also called “suppression”) of monasteries a greedy act of a maniacal king, or was Henry wanting to alleviate Roman Catholic strong holds after his break with the pope? Henry, who remained Catholic in practice all his life, late in life lost confidence in the invented doctrine of purgatory that had a grip on medieval Christian thought. The King’s Book (1543), Henry’s final doctrinal statement, rejected the idea of a middle state between this life and the next, a time of purging of sin after death, and forbade the use of the word “purgatory.” “He remained convinced that he had done God’s work in destroying shrines and images which were the objects of devotion and pilgrimage, and he annotated his personal copy of the psalter with self-congratulatory notes when he felt that the Psalms of David were endorsing his action” (Diarmaid MacCulloch). The English reformer and preacher Hugh Latimer famously said, “The founding of monasteries argued Purgatory to be, so the putting them down argueth it not to be.” The suppression of the monasteries transformed many aspects of English church and state, and further moved the church in England towards the Edwardian and Elizabethan Reformation.