How did the English Reformation happen?
This is a huge question with a seemingly simple answer: Henry VIII and his need for a divorce. Everyone knows this. Tudor history is a mainstay of school curricula in Britain and of popular TV costume dramas. Indeed, the advantage for writers and producers of setting a drama in the 16th century is that the backstory and many of the main characters are so well known.
It may be surprising, therefore, to realize that the causes and the consequences of the English Reformation are a matter of fierce historical debate among specialists. Was traditional Christianity moribund by the early 16th century? Or vibrant and popular? We know that people were willing to die (and kill) for religion but equally if religion was so central to the identity of early modern Englishmen and women, why were so many willing to change their faith according to who was in power? How rapid or gradual was the process of Reformation? How long did the Reformation take? Was it ever “completed”?
One way to make sense of this tangle of questions is to revisit a very basic question: What was the political economy of the English Reformation? This is what I try to do in a new paper with Desiree Desierto and Marcus Shera.
As this quote from Patrick Collinson (the historian, not the tech entrepreneur) indicates, the Reformation was a truly transformative event.
“England, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century seems to have been one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, became, by the seventeenth century, the most virulently anti-Catholic, and the almost dominant ideology of anti-Catholicism fueled the civil wars that engulfed all parts of the British Isles in mid-century and later provoked the Bloodless Revolution, from which what passes for a British constitution derives” (Collinson, 2004, p 10).
We think that focusing on the Dissolution of the Monasteries provides crucial insights into the political economy of this transformation.
This will be the first of a two posts describing the gist of our argument.
Part (1) below will examine how the allocation of land following the Dissolution created a vested interest opposed to Mary’s policies of restoring Catholicism in the 1550s. Part (2) will demonstrate that the political economy interests created by the Dissolution remained important into the late 17th century and will focus on the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s.
How did the Dissolution Affect Religious Policy?
In our paper we take up and explore an old but in my view quite neglected idea. The Dissolution of the Monasteries undertaken by Thomas Cromwell between 1536-1540 created a group of prominent and wealthy individuals who had a vested interest in keeping that property and hence in the success of the Protestant Reformation in England. It was these individuals who provide the key to understanding the political economy of the Reformation from Mary I’s reign (1553-1558) all the way up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
England’s monasteries were tremendously wealthy. The Valor Ecclesiasticus commissioned by Henry VIII in 1535 gives an indication of the extent of monastic land holdings and is the basis of the data used by scholars studying the consequences of the Dissolution. And these monastic lands were scattered far and wide.
We actually don’t know much about the precise motivations for the Dissolution. But the scale of this monastic wealth must have been important in tempting Henry and Cromwell to move from the goal of dissolving the smaller monastic houses to the ultimate policy of eradicating monasticism in its entirety. Once the Dissolution took place, the land, however, did not stay in royal hands for long. Through the Court of Augmentations it was rapidly sold off to courtiers and aspiring elites. Historians since Robert Tawney have debated the role that this played in creating a new class of “gentry” but the modern consensus emphasizes that this process was less discontinuous than once thought. Existing elites were the ones most likely to augment their landholdings. Religious affiliations don’t seem to have mattered for who bought that land: traditional Catholics and evangelicals alike did not want to miss out.
What we then explore in our paper is how possession of these former monastic lands could have shaped the incentives English landowning elites had to back certain religious policies thereafter. We formally model the idea that individuals care about both money and their religion and that they also want to pass these things down to the next generation.
The key thing about our model which makes it quite different to anything else we are aware of is that we explicitly model the political economy of Tudor and Stuart England. The monarchy sets policy, but elites can decide whether to support or oppose that policy and their opposition raises the costs of enforcement.
Put simply: we show that possession of monastic lands shifts an individual elite’s incentive towards supporting more “Protestant” religious policies.
Reginald Pole’s Credible Commitment Problem
Does the data support this hypothesis? Before we get there, it is worth pointing that there is compelling evidence for the mechanisms described above in the historical record.
Consider the reign of Mary I and her decision to return England to Rome. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this would not last. Mary’s reign is seen as an unsuccessful interlude marked by bloody persecution. But contemporaries did not know that. Mary was 37 when she became Queen; had she lived as long as her younger sister her reign would have lasted until 1586, plausibly long-enough for Catholicism to have fully restored.
A major barrier to a Catholic restoration, however, was the loss of Church wealth and income and the destruction of the monasteries. Rex Pogson writing in 1974 put the dilemma facing Mary’s chief minister, Archbishop of Canterbury Reginald Pole clearly:
“If the Roman Church was to recover its traditional authority in England, it had to recover also the wealth which it had surrendered in the schism . . .. His letters and the decrees of his synod reveal that he aimed at a restoration of traditional Roman order, custom and discipline in the English Church rather than a vigorous, new-style Counter- Reformation campaign of preaching. He wanted to inspire affection and respect for Roman ritual and law by reviving Catholic ceremonial, providing highly-qualified clergy for the parishes, restoring the monasteries, and removing the financial abuses which had aroused anti- clericalism. But he could not bring back the beauty of holiness in the Catholic ritual without the vestments which had been removed and the ornaments which had been sold or stolen during the schism. He could not re-endow many monasteries without the confiscated monastic lands'' (Pogson, 1974 pp. 250-251)
But how could this be achieved? While committed Protestants had already begun to flee England, the majority of elites in Parliament and the House of Lords were prepared to return to Rome (or at least appeared to be so, there were many like William Cecil, later Elizabeth’s chief minister who concealed their true opinions -there was a lot of preference falsification in Tudor England). The sticking point, however, was the return of former monastic properties. This the English landowning elite were not prepared to countenance.
Mary was willing to give up Crown lands to set a precedent. But this policy backfired! According to her leading biographer, its created a "fear that the queen’s surrender of her property was but the first step towards a general restoration: the Venetian envoy said that some men believed that they might be forced by virtue of the statute to make a similar cession of their own former church property at a later point" (Loach, 1986, p 137). In total only four (small) monastic houses were in fact restored.
What about Rome? Pope Julius III was prepared to make major concessions in order to return England to the fold:
“Mary had interceded for the holders of monastic property, and the Pope announced that he would place reconciliation with England before quibbles over money. This time Pole was empowered to absolve Englishmen for their sins of holding both land and ornaments, and dispense them to continue to do so. But a saving clause was added, by which those cases which seemed to Pole of great importance and requiring a higher authority could be referred to Rome. This prevented the new brief from easing English fears, for it held out the daunting prospect of a tribunal at Rome which might decide the fate of lands which English families had come to think of as their own” (Pogson, 1974 pp. 253)
This was the nub of the issue. Parliament distinguished between movable goods (which they allowed could be returned to reendow the Church) and immobile goods such as land; for the latter they required a guarantee that their property rights would not be impinged upon.
Parliament rejected the first Papal Bull in July 1554 on these grounds. Only in December of that year was an agreement struck on the basis of an assurance that monastic lands were secure. As Pogson (1974, p 253) notes “many councillors seem to have been quite prepared to shelve the reconciliation until they had organized the full reassurance that the land was safe in lay hands."
This was agreed. All well and good. Then disaster nearly struck. England had formally accepted Papal terms for the restoration of Catholicism in February 1555, dispatching an envoy to Rome. But before the envoy arrived, Julius III died, and then his immediate successor Pope Marcellus II died just 22 days later. The Papacy then passed to Cardinal Carafa who became Paul IV. Carafa was a hardliner - he had been crucial in founding the Roman inquisition — and was a personal enemy of Pole (he would later instigate an inquisitorial investigation into him). Paul IV’s initial reaction was to denounce any agreement based on the alienation of Church lands.
Only after it was explained that this would jeopardize England’s reconciliation, did Paul IV relent and it took until October 1555 for a second Papal Bull to be read in Parliament. This seemingly trivial episode, had lasting consequences, however: it made salient the possibility that a promise made by one Pope might be reneged upon by subsequent Pope.
Here our argument connects to long standing debates about the security of property rights in early modern England.
In a celebrated article, Douglass North and Barry Weingast argued that property rights were insecure before 1688. Of course, they were reviving arguments made by historians such as Thomas Macaulay. They provoked a critical reaction from economic historians, notably Greg Clark who found no evidence of such insecurity in land rents. This consensus is summed up by Geoffrey Hodgeson who notes that "In England, property rights (of a kind) existed and were relatively secure long before 1688".
But I actually think economic historians have been too quick to dismiss at least parts of North and Weingast’s argument. Property rights over land were for the most part secure in England from the 13th century onwards. Financial property rights were less so as instances of forced loans and defaults attests.
And when it comes to property rights over former monastic lands, English elites clearly were very concerned about the security of their property. They took seriously the idea that Catholics believed that promises made to heretics were worthless. As I’ll discuss in Part (2), the possible insecurity of former monastic property remained a concern in the long run, which seems to have been reactivated whenever there was the prospect of a Catholic revival.
Monastic Lands and the Opposition to Mary’s Policies
Drawing on a newly created dataset of members of Parliament (MPs) based on the History of Parliament website, we establish a clear link between the boroughs that had more monastic land and whether MPs supported Protestantism or opposed Mary’s policies in the 1550s.
MPs were drawn from the gentry and they were expected to represent the interests of nearby landholders. We therefore expect MPs from boroughs with more monastic lands to be more attuned to the threat of a possible Catholic restoration. This is indeed what we find.
To see how we substantiate this econometrically you’ll have to read the full paper. Here is a visualization of our baseline results.
These results are at the Parliamentary borough level, but our results also hold when we look at the biographies of individual MPs. MPs whose biographies mention monastic lands were about 2.7 times more likely to be supporters of Protestantism.
Next we will consider how these political economy incentives persisted through the 17th century
Interesting. What a wealth of information that I had no idea of. Thanks for doing this.
Yes, one can tell the story of Henry's divorce causing the English Reformation. But could he have pulled that off without the other events occurring in Europe? Do you have Cromwell without Luther? Did Luther somehow prove that defecting from Rome was now a viable strategy?