'Some great men pulled down churches and built palaces': the Conformist critique of the Dissolution of the Monasteries

In his sermon 'The Faith and Patience of the Saints; Or, the Righteous Cause Oppressed' - part of the second volume of the Golden Grove series - Jeremy Taylor addressed the dissolution of the monasteries:

We know that when, in Henry the Eighth, or Edward the Sixth's days, some great men pulled down churches and built palaces, and robbed religion of its just encouragements, and advantages; the men that did it were sacrilegious; and we find also that God hath been punishing that great sin, ever since; and hath displayed to so many generations of men, to three or four descents of children, that those men could not be esteemed happy in their great fortunes, against whom God was so angry, that he would show his displeasure for a hundred years together.

This is the type of comment that might be taken as an example of - to use Peter Lake's terminology - 'maximalist' Laudianism. Here, after all, was a critique of a not insignificant aspect of the English Reformation. Was Taylor, therefore, providing an example of a 'maximalist' Laudian understanding, pushing far beyond the bounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Conformity, indicating a dangerous, shocking avant-garde willingness to criticise an important feature of the Reformation in England?

The answer is no. There was nothing new or innovative about Taylor's critique of the dissolution of the monasteries. In fact, it was a standard reference found within pre-Laudian Conformist thought. Lancelot Andrewes, in his Easter Day sermon in 1615, preached before James I/VI, had similarly addressed this matter, referring to Christ's cleansing of the Temple:

But even very now He purged it, and did He purge it to have it pulled down? That were presposterous. Now it was purged, pull it down? No, pull it down, when it was polluted; now it is cleansed, let it stand. To reform Churches, and then seek to dissolve them, will be counted among the errors of our age. Christ was far from it. He that would not see it abused, would never endure to have it destroyed.

The language used here - "pulled down", "reform Churches", "the errors of our age" - would have made it abundantly clear to Andrewes' hearers to what he was referring. Hence, at Andrewes' funeral in 1626, Bishop Buckeridge's sermon returned to this theme, giving it even wider application across Christendom:

The third and greatest was sacrilege, which he did abhor as one principal cause among many of the foreign and civil wars in Christendom, and invasion of the Turk. Wherein even the reformed, and otherwise the true professors and servants of Christ, because they took God's portion and turned it to public profane uses, or to private advancements, did suffer just chastisement and correction at God's hand; and at home it had been observed, and he wished some man would take the pain to collect, how many families that were raised by the spoils of the Church were now vanished, and the place thereof knows them no more.

We might note two things from Buckeridge's words. Firstly, the implication is that such sacrilege - the taking of lands that belonged to the Church - was not a confessional feature. Yes, it is found "even" amongst "the reformed" - but that "even" is significant. Hence the declaration in the first sentence that "Christendom" - not merely Protestant lands - has experienced "civil wars ... and invasion of the Turks".

Secondly, the conclusion of this extract from Buckeridge's sermon is, of course, very closely echoed in Taylor's words. As over two decades separates Taylor's sermon during the Interregnum from that delivered by Buckeridge at Andrewes' funeral, this suggests a well-established Conformist view that the sacrilege associated with the dissolution of the monasteries in England had led to those who particularly profited experiencing divine wrath.

What is more, there is an earlier high profile expression of such a Conformist view. Richard Bancroft's 1588 St. Paul's Cross sermon was the most significant defence of Conformity delivered from the pulpit in the Elizabethan Church. In the sermon, Bancroft compares the Disciplinarians seeking to overthrow the episcopal and liturgical order of the Elizabethan Settlement to those who profited from the dissolution of the monasteries:

Whilest they heare us speake against Bishops and Cathedrall Churches (saith the author of the Ecclesiasticall Discipline) it tickleth their eares, looking for the like praie they had before of Monasteries: yea they have in their harts devoured alreadie the churches inheritaunce. They care not for religion, so they may get the spoile. They coulde be content to crucifie Christ, so they might have his garments. Our age is ful of spoiling souldiers, and of wicked Dionysians, who will rob Christ of his golden coate, as neither fit for him in winter nor sommer. They are cormorants, and seek to fil the bottomles sacks of their greedy appetites. They do yawne after a pray, and would thereby to their perpetuall shame, purchase to themselves a field of blood.

That Bancroft became Bishop of London in 1597 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1604 indicates how such a critique of the dissolution was hardly an 'advanced' view: it was certainly no obstacle to ecclesiastical preferment. The fact that he included this comparison in his assault on the Disciplinarians certainly suggests that he was aware it would not shock wider Conformist opinion or provoke Elizabeth's disapproval. In other words, it was unlikely to have been a view first aired in his sermon.

Part of the reason why this critique of the dissolution of the monasteries was a standard Conformist perspective was precisely because - as indicated above in Buckeridge's words - the dissolution was not viewed as a confessional act. It was not understood as a Protestant act, particular to the Reformation. Instead, it stood in continuity with pre-Reformation practices by secular authorities, which remained post-Reformation in Roman Catholic kingdoms and principalities. The Royalist counsellor and theologically aware Episcopalian layman Edward Hyde articulated this in a 1648 essay, 'On Sacrilege':

No man must imagine that this monstrous sin is contracted to, or in any one climate or region, and affected only by those of any one religion; it is equally spread amongst all nations, and more practised and countenanced amongst those of the catholic, than of the reformed religion; at least was first introduced and practised by them, before it was by these. Emperors and kings contrive and permit it; and popes themselves no otherwise contradict it, than that they would not have it committed without their special license and dispensation; by which it was first planted in England, and as warrantably propagated afterwards by him, who had as much authority to do it himself, as with the consent of the pope. They who know how many abbeys, and other ecclesiastical promotions, are at present possessed by laymen, and what pensions are daily granted upon bishoprics, and other revenues of the church, to laymen and other secular uses, throughout the catholic dominions of Germany, Italy, France, and Spain, will rather wonder that there is so fair revenues yet left to the church in protestant countries, than that so much hath been taken away.

It is noteworthy that Hyde, following Buckeridge and anticipating Taylor, also highlighted the fate of those who had profited from the dissolution of the monasteries: "the observation of the misfortunes which have often befallen the posterity of those who have been eminently enriched by those sacred spoils". Such language, then, was clearly very well-established within Conformist circles. Hyde is also witness to the fact that such discourse could also be embraced by Conformist laity.

Hyde's assessment is further evidence that a Conformist critique of the dissolution of the monasteries was not a critique of the Reformation. It was addressing the English expression of a much wider phenomenon, of church lands and revenues being claimed for secular use, a phenomenon that pre-dated the Reformation and which was not peculiar to Protestant polities. This explains why Conformists in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline Church, into the Interregnum, had no qualms about offering a harsh assessment of the dissolution, for it was not a distinctively Protestant act but, rather, sacrilege which occurred across Protestant and Catholic Christendom. 

Understood in such a manner, this aspect of Conformist discourse also points to a frame of historical and ecclesiastical reference which was broader than the Reformation: in other words, a sense of European Christendom, pre- and post-Reformation, in which continuities - both in terms of virtues and vices - were evident. This coheres with a wider Conformist understanding that the Reformation was not a rupture with Christendom. Something of this is also suggested by Jeremy Taylor, during the same sermon quoted at the outset, saying of Henry VI (d.1471) "that age saw none more pious and devout". 

This view of the dissolution of the monasteries, known within Conformist circles since the reign of Elizabeth, does not act as a criticism of the Reformation. Instead, it reinforces a Conformist understanding of the Reformation as a renewal within Christendom, because sacrilege - the use of church lands and revenue for secular ends - was as much a feature of pre-Reformation times at it was of the Reformation, and found as much in post-Reformation Catholic kingdoms as it was in Protestant polities.