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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The Last Office

The dying of the light

Calre Asquith on Geoffrey Moorhouse's new book

Wealth spectacularly squandered, rather than husbanded, is the theme of part two. While intricate account books were being carefully balanced up in Durham, Ely and Glastonbury, Henry VIII was spending millions on extravaganzas such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and still more on preparations for war. Moorhouse’s twinned portrayal of the slow increase of monastic wealth and the sudden, disastrous drain on the royal exchequer makes the persuasive case that it was the King’s need for cash just as much as his need for an heir that triggered England’s momentous break with Rome.

Here Moorhouse sets spurs to his narrative and takes us with admirable clarity and pace through the mechanics behind the royal assault on the monasteries, exposing the fear and greed that drove its chillingly efficient key players, its revolutionary legislation, and its lightning creation of highly effective new state ‘organisms’. In no time the lead from monastic roofs was stockpiled as bullets in the royal armouries and millions of pounds’ worth of religious property was sold on or given to crown servants like the royal barber, who received the Augustinian hospital in Burford ‘for his deftness with the razor’. Priors and abbots who resisted — and even some who did not — were imprisoned or executed.

My only reservation about this otherwise excellent book comes towards the end, when Elizabeth I makes her appearance and a familiar golden mist descends over the prose. Everything, it seems, was for the best. In spite of the wholesale damage done to the inner fabric of Durham by first two non-Benedictine deans, both of them vigorous Puritan iconoclasts, in spite of the loss of ornaments, cells, mass, sacraments, altars and monks, somehow the result is continuity. The renewal of the house arrest to which the Bishop of Durham was sentenced under Edward VI is re-christened ‘custodial hospitality’. Condemning him to die in confinement for refusing the Oath of Supremacy is described as ‘dealing gently’ with the old man. Though the Bishop and Dean of Durham both died refusing to budge on the Mass and the Oath of Supremacy and under threat of charges of treason, Moorhouse unaccountably praises their prudent ‘compromise’ on religious belief. And instead of being seized by the state, which needed the buildings as much as it did in Norman times, it now appears that Durham ‘bent obediently to a powerful wind of change that came rushing through the Church.’ The old Dean, Moorhouse concludes, might have been ‘puzzled’ by some of the things that had happened in his old priory ‘but he would still have felt at home.’ I’m not so sure.

Clare Asquith is the author of Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare.

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