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				The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Geoffrey Moorhouse Edition: Paperback Price: $14.95 Availability: In Stock		40 used & new from $8.25
An excellent look at the Reformation from the perspective of the losers., July 29, 2012 This review is from: The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (Paperback) The Last Office by Geoffrey Moorhouse examines a bit of history usually overlooked by historians and the popular media - the experience of the Catholic victims of the Protestant Reformation. Use a search tool to web search "persecution + catholics," you will end up with links to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The impression often left by most history books is that Europe was waiting for the Reformation with bated breath and that once it was on offer, Europeans moved forward into their destiny, except for those areas where the reactionary Catholic Church prevented them from realizing their destiny. What is largely missing from most accounts is any sense of the social dislocation that the Reformation must have caused to those who were quite content with their religion unreformed. Moorhouse fills in this hole by examining the Dissolution of the Monasteries from the perspective of one of the oldest and most powerful and prestigious of the monasteries, the Benedictine Priory of St. Cuthbert's in Durham ("Durham.") Moorhouse divides his book between the history and working life of Durham and the Dissolution of the Monasteries; both are very interesting and well done. Durham housed the remains of St. Cuthbert and Venerable Bede, the father of English Church history. Durham had roots pre-dating the Norman Conquest, but after the Conquest, the Normans built the imposing structure of the Durham Cathedral by which the English monarchs consolidated power in their northern regions. Durham Cathedral was the nominal seat of the Bishop of Durham who uniquely exercised temporal power as the "Prince Bishop" in a "County Palatine." Moorhouse spends substantial time on the development of the architecture of the cathedral, the cult of St. Cuthbert, the life of the monks and other practical dimensions of life that makes history a lived experience. The second part of Moorhouse's book watches the dismantling of a system that had existed for over a thousand years and which had been thoroughly integrated into the life and economy of the country. In this section, the machinations of Thomas Cromwell who wired the Dissolution is fascinating. Cromwell initially went after the smaller monasteries - those making 200 pounds or less in income - before going after the larger monasteries. In fact, by the time that Cromwell got to the larger monasteries, the system had degenerated into a simple shake-down/protection racket where the holders of monasteries were "suggested" to simply hand their benefices over to the King. Since the monks had already seen Henry's willingness to liquidate those who stood in the way of his greed, they usually succumbed to the suggestion. The backdrop of the Dissolution was Henry's greed and willingness to use violence. Moorhouse points out that Cromwell was probably the mastermind behind the idea of appropriating the "untapped" wealth of the property of the Catholic religious orders. As a result, Cromwell became the second most powerful man in England, until he fell from power and was executed by Henry, allegedly for fouling up Henry's fourth marriage, but pace Machiavelli, tyrants often find it advantageous to eliminate those who do their dirty work. Henry comes out of this book as a real villain. Henry's greed and his willingness to judicially murder and extort his subjects for his financial gain is breath-taking. Likewise, the greed of those who did the dirty work, or simply wanted their piece of the action, nobility who because of their connections were able to appropriate a nice monastery that had belonged to a monastic order since the 8th Century is an unedifying spectacle. One gets the image of hyenas swarming to pick clean a carcass, not a great religious "reform." Moorhouse also discusses the often overlooked "Pilgrimage of Grace" which was a mass movement against Henry's "reformation." The Pilgrimage of Grace developed in the North and became a huge mass movement in opposition to Henry's break with traditional Catholicism. As is all too typical of such movements, the leaders were sweet talked into putting down their arms, which then permitted Henry to round up 700 or so of its leaders and have them executed. Other descriptions of the transition suggest how traumatic the transition must have been. Royal Commissioners desecrated the tomb of St. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede in their search for valuables. Icon-busting Calvinists priors destroyed ancient art in a destructive fury as senseless as the Taliban's dynamiting of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. These incidents must have been horrifying and incomprehensible to the monks who had begun their lives with the expectation that the routine of a thousand years would continue on unabated for another thousand. Moorhouse ends with Durham today. The monks are gone. The Cathedral remains. The last bishop and prior of Durham were able political players who managed to stay alive and generally in power despite the shifting religious tides. As other reviewers have noted, Moorhouse seems to find such pragmatism to have been a virtue in that it permitted the institution to salvage something of itself. It seems, though, that ultimately what it salvaged was only a shadow of what it had been, but as Moorhouse points out that "may be the genius of the Anglican way of dealing with awkward situations: the belief that if you patiently tried not to force a potentially divisive issue it just might run out of energy and cease to be troublesome." (p. 240.) This is an excellent book that I recommend for those interested in pre-Reformation English Religious History as well as an under-examined aspect of Reformation history.