Dissolution

obtain a clerkly post in this little town. We are happy, and I begin to feel a peace I have not known since my cousin died, though whether the world will allow us rest in these times I do not know.

There is no reason, sir, why you should care for any of this, but I wished you to know it was a bitter thing for me to have to deceive you, who protected me and taught me so much. I regret it, though I do not regret I killed that man; he deserved to die if ever a man did. I do not know where you will go in the world, but I beg Our Lord, Jesus Christ to watch over and protect you, sir. Alice Poer. The twenty-fifth day of January, 1538

I folded the letter and stood looking out over the estuary.

'They do not mention me at all.'

'It was from her to me. They were not to know I would see you again.'

'So they are alive and safe, pox on them. Perhaps now my dreams will stop. May I tell Mark's father? He was sore grieved. Just that I have secret word he is alive?'

'Of course.'

'She is right, there is nowhere safe in the world now, no thing certain. Sometimes I think of Brother Edwig and his madness, how he thought he could buy God's forgiveness for those murders with two panniers of stolen gold. Perhaps we are all a little mad. The Bible says God made man in his image but I think we make and remake him, in whatever image happens to suit our shifting needs. I wonder if he knows or cares. All is dissolving, Brother Guy, all is dissolution.'

We stood silent, watching the seabirds bobbing on the river, while behind us echoed the distant sound of crashing lead.

HISTORICAL NOTE

The dissolution of the English monasteries in 1536-40 was masterminded throughout by Thomas Cromwell as vice regent and vicar general. After conducting a survey of the monasteries, during which much damaging material was collected, Cromwell introduced an Act of Parliament dissolving the smaller monasteries in 1536. However, when his agents began carrying it into effect the result was 'The Pilgrimage of Grace', a massive armed rebellion in the north of England. Henry VIII and Cromwell put it down by tricking the leaders into negotiations until they had time to build up an army to destroy them.

The assault on the larger monasteries came a year later with pressure, as described in the story, being placed on vulnerable larger houses to surrender voluntarily. The intimidation into surrender of Lewes Priory in November 1537 was crucial and over the next three years, one by one, all the monasteries surrendered to the king. By 1540 there were none left; the buildings were left to decay, the lead stripped from the roof by the Augmentations men. The monks were pensioned off. If they resisted, as a few did, they were dealt with savagely. The average abbot and monastery official was undoubtedly more frightened of the commissioners, who were indeed brutal men, than the monks of Scarnsea are of Shardlake. But then Scarnsea is not an average monastery, and nor is Shardlake an average commissioner.

It is generally accepted that the accusations of multiple adultery against Queen Anne Boleyn were fabricated by Cromwell for Henry VIII, who had tired of her. Mark Smeaton was the only one of her alleged lovers to confess, probably on the rack. His father was a carpenter; I have invented his previous occupation as a swordsmith.

The English Reformation remains controversial. The view of older historians, that the Catholic Church was so decayed that some sort of radical reformation was necessary if not inevitable, has recently been challenged by a number of writers, notably C. Haigh, English Reformations (Oxford University Press, 1993), and E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale University Press, 1992), who paint a picture of a thriving, popular Church. I think Duffy especially over-romanticizes medieval Catholic life; it is interesting that these scholars hardly mention the Dissolution, the last major study of which was by David Knowles in the 1950s, The Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age (Cambridge University Press, 1959). In this exceptional work Professor Knowles, who was himself a Catholic monk, acknowledges that the easy living prevailing in most of the larger monasteries was a scandal. While deploring their forcible extinction, Professor Knowles considers that they had become so remote from their founding ideals that they did not deserve to survive in their existing form.

Nobody really knows what the English people as a whole thought of the Reformation. There was a strong Protestant movement in London and parts of the south-east; the north and the West Country remained strongly Catholic. But the country in between, where most people lived, is still largely terra incognita. My own view is that the bulk of the common people probably saw the successive changes imposed from above in the same way as Mark and Alice; just that, changes ordered from above by the ruling classes, who told them what to do and how to think, as they always had. There were so many changes – first to an increasingly radical Protestantism, then back to Catholicism under Mary Tudor and back again to Protestantism under Elizabeth I – that people can hardly have failed to become cynical. They kept quiet, for of course nobody was interested in what they thought, and while Elizabeth may not have wished to make windows into men's souls, her predecessors did, with fire and axe.

Those who benefited most from the Reformation were the 'new men', the emerging capitalist and bureaucratic classes, men of property without birth. I think there were many Copyngers in mid-Tudor England; the Reformation was about a changing class structure as much as anything. That is an unfashionable view nowadays; it is naughty to mention class when discussing history. But fashions have changed, and will again.

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