-- __________________________________________________________________ R.F. McDonald rmcdonald@upei.ca Home E-mail: mcdonald@isn.net "What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course; for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of the same God?" - Voltaire, from Treatise on Tolerance, 1763 __________________________________________________________________ Path: rQdQ!remarQ70!remarQ60!supernews.com!remarQ.com!nntp-relay.ihug.net!ihug.co.nz!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!news.demon.co.uk!demon!arxana.demon.co.uk!Sophia From: Sophia Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if Subject: A different Reformation (no Dissolution of the Monasteries) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 01:54:19 +0000 Organization: The Hanseatic League Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: arxana.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: arxana.demon.co.uk:193.237.43.175 X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 947555709 nnrp-12:8118 NO-IDENT arxana.demon.co.uk:193.237.43.175 X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 X-Newsreader: Turnpike (32) Version 4.01 Xref: rQdQ soc.history.what-if:183384 Here's a what-if that I've been thinking about for a while, but haven't been quite sure how to write. One of the most important side effects of the English Reformation was that it bankrolled the monarchy effectively for two generations: the huge landed wealth (in addition to the cash, gold and jewels and valuable raw materials) which the Crown acquired by despoiling the Church in the period 1536-1550 (ish) provided the Tudor Kings with a massive float which enabled them, to some extent, to fund their government without recourse to getting Parliament to raise taxes. Parliament held the purse strings, even then, but if you don't need the money you can tell them to fuck off - as Elizabeth I - did in a way that her successor Charles I could not. Most of the money came from the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The abbeys and priories of England collectively owned great wealth and controlled a substantial fraction of the GDP. The monasteries varied, many were major corporations, whose heads sat in the Upper House of Parliament and were great temporal lords, many more lived in poverty and obscurity. In 1535, having broken from Rome over his divorce from Queen Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII, as head of the new Church of England, instituted an inspection (Visitation) of all the monasteries of England. On the strength of the findings of his commissioners (who knew very well what they were expected to find) in 1536 he abolished the lesser monasteries (those worth less than £200 per year) and confiscated their assets on grounds of immorality. This action gained him substantial revenues, and he needed money - being at war with Emperor Charles V (whose niece he had dishonoured) and Francis I of France - but only a tiny fraction of the total monastic wealth. The great abbeys and their cash remained untouched, for the moment, and Henry actually founded several new abbeys in 1536-37. The turning point was this. In 1536 there was a very serious uprising called the Pilgrimage of Grace, which aimed to oppose Henry's religious and social policies and restore the suppressed monasteries. Government forces crushed the revolt but it had two important consequences: Henry found the abbeys a centre of opposition to him (which he could not brook) and also a way legal way of abolishing them without having to go through the legislature. He attainted those abbots who had been involved in the revolt (and many who were not) of treason, allowing him to seize their goods on conviction, which, by a twisting of legal principle he extended to include their abbeys. Thenceforth, the subsequent threat of attainder for treason (Henry had made it treason to say anything bad about his religious reforms, or fail to report anyone else who did so), and concomitant threat of being hung, drawn and quartered, induced the abbots of the remaining monasteries to surrender to the Crown over the next three years. However, it was a close run thing: Henry's vision of the church seems to have been basically Catholic but with him as boss rather than Pope Clement VII: also, as mentioned, he was founding new abbeys while dissolving others. It could be that if there was no Pilgrimage of Grace he wouldn't have destroyed the greater monasteries, alternatively, if it had been stronger, and he won less easily, he would not have dared to destroy the great abbeys, many of which were in the North, where the revolt occurred. Some Consequences If there's no dissolution of the greater monasteries there's a number of possible results. The monarchy doesn't have the huge stack of cash it needs to pay for the wars of the mid-16th century, which means that its effectively bankrupt by the reign of Elizabeth. Lizy can't afford to be as autocratic as she wants and will have to pay more attention to the wishes of the legislature. The issues which caused the English Civil War are going to come up a lot sooner, however, memory of the Wars of the Roses is much closer, which may mean that the crown receives much more support than in OTL. Does the Crown win? In that case America gets colonised earlier and in more force. Much of the Tudor nobility and gentry (still with us today) made their fortunes in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Without these guys the character of English society (particularly without the personal investment of the elite in Protestantism) is going to be radically different. Seeing as many of these new rich provided the leadership of the Parliamentary faction in our civil war, that's going to be radically different too, if it happens... More liberal penal system. The Dissolution threw a lot of people on the streets, both through direct effects and the new landlords taking a far more ruthless attitude to their rights and property (which is to some extent dissolved the mediaeval social contract). The Tudors initiated an increasingly harsh policy against these unemployed, who they called 'sturdy beggars', the resulting crime wave, as people were thrown off the land was met by increasing penalties, by 1650 England had around 200 capital crimes. Also lost was the dole/flophouse and social security payments that many abbeys provided in their areas. Possibility: A much more Anglo-Catholic (Catholic without the Pope) feel to society until the late 16th, but a second, puritan reformation similar to that in Scotland. The puritans, already powerful in the commons in the late 16th OTL, face Elizabeth I who is the greatest politician of her age, cunning, intelligent and determined to uphold her mediaeval monarchy. She's broke though, howeve