A tale of religious upheaval

That religious upheaval during the 1530s is the matter of Geoffrey Moorhouse's elegant narrative, "The Last Divine Office."

His account begins with an image as haunting as Shakespeare's - the Benedictine monks of the cathedral monastery at Durham filing out of the darkened church after Compline, the last office of the day on the last day of December 1539.

The monks, he writes, "left their church to brood upon itself and its place in the divine order of things" for as "the great silence began [and] the night candles guttered and swayed in the place they had just left," an era of some 460 years was ending and "nothing would ever be the same again."

The "cataclysm" began with the Catholic reaction to Henry's divorce of his queen, Katherine of Aragon - the first of what would be his six wives - and the separation from Rome.

It sparked a popular rising, the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536-37, which was the subject of Moorhouse's eponymously-titled 2002 "Pilgrimage of Grace."

Its forces were thwarted as they marched toward London, and the rebellion was put down with harsh severity, with many of its leaders hideously executed.

In its wake, Henry and his chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, began the closing - the dissolution - of monasteries. They were seen not only as the focus of Catholic resistance, but as the source of funds - and even of lead from their roofs for the making of bullets, and of timber from their walls for the building of warships.

Durham was loosely implicated in the rebellion with its richly ornamented banner of St. Cuthbert being taken by the rebel army to flaunt at the King's troops. But it would itself survive, even after the dissolution of its monastic community, as one of the great Gothic cathedrals for the reformed English church.

At Durham, "all appeared to be as it so familiarly had been for centuries," writes Moorhouse, even as "in the world outside, the religious life was subsiding into chaos."

The first to go were the smaller houses, often on the basis of evidence of religious laxity and sexual improprieties. And defiant abbots at some of the greater establishments were executed, "[leaving] behind them . . . gaunt and broken reminders of what had so splendidly stood for enduring faith."

Durham would not have survived, Moorhouse argues, but for its two leaders. Both of whom, he writes, possessed "a powerful instinct for survival."

Cuthbert Tunstall, the prince-bishop, was not only "a national figure," an influential figure at Henry's court, but also "an essentially moderate man whose principles were liable to bend if sufficient pressure was applied."

Hugh Whitehead, the monastery's prior, had gone out of his way to be accommodating to Cromwell and the king's agents. "A calculating man," Moorhouse writes, "who played his limited number of cards deftly from first to last."

By 1539, voluntary surrender had become the normal method for the crown to acquire the monasteries. And a few hours before that last divine office on the New Year's Eve of that year, Prior Whitehead and his community agreed to surrender Durham.

Prior Whitehead would become dean of the new establishment and of his community, 25 would remain and 27 pensioned off, many of them becoming parish priests in the new English church.

The document enumerating the properties, from the cathedral itself down to the fairs, markets, and fishponds that Durham would deliver to the king was "a surrender in the grand manner," Moorhouse writes, "both abject and comprehensive."

And when all the closings and surrenders were completed in 1540, they represented "the biggest transfer of wealth from one section of the population to another that the country had ever known."

But the dissolutions, Moorhouse writes, "produced no great spasm of anguish," even at Durham. The realization had set in, he writes, that Henry had chosen not to abolish the Catholic establishment, but to transform it, with "the continuity of Durham" as part of a master plan for a reformed church.

Roman Catholicism survived, for some two centuries as an underground church. Benedictine monks did not return to England from exile in France until 1794.

Michael Kenney is a Cambridge-based freelance writer.