Page "Dissolution of the Monasteries" Paragraph 25

It is inconceivable that these moves went unnoticed by the English government and particularly by Thomas Cromwell, who had been employed by Wolsey in his monastic suppressions, and who was shortly to become Henry VIII's chief minister.

However, Henry himself appears to have been much more influenced by the opinions on monasticism of the humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, especially as found in Erasmus's work In Praise of Folly ( 1511 ) and More's Utopia ( 1516 ).

Erasmus and More promoted ecclesiastical reform while remaining faithful Catholics, and had ridiculed such monastic practices as repetitive formal religion, superstitious pilgrimages for the veneration of relics and the accumulation of monastic wealth.

Henry appears from the first to have shared these views ; never having endowed a religious house, and only once having undertaken a religious pilgrimage ( to Walsingham in 1511 ).

From 1518 Thomas More was increasingly influential as a royal servant and counsellor, in the course of which his correspondence included a series of strong condemnations of the idleness and vice in much monastic life ; alongside his equally vituperative attacks on Luther.

Henry himself corresponded continually with Erasmus ; prompting him to be more explicit in his public rejection of the key tenets of Lutheranism, and offering him church preferement, should he wish to return to England.