It has taken Cromwell four years to…
1539 CE
It has taken Cromwell four years to complete the dissolution of the monasteries.
He moves in 1539 to the dissolution of the larger monasteries that had escaped earlier.
Many houses give up voluntarily, though some seek exemption by payment.
When their houses are closed down some monks seek to transfer to larger houses.
Many become secular priests.
A few, including eighteen Carthusians, refuse and are killed to the last man.
Henry VIII personally devises a plan to form at least thirteen new dioceses so that most counties have one based on a former monastery (or more than one), though this scheme is only partly carried out.
New dioceses are established at Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough, Westminster and Chester, but not, for instance, at Shrewsbury, Leicester or Waltham.
The abolition of papal authority had made way not for orderly change, but for dissension and violence.
Iconoclasm, destruction, disputes within communities that have led to violence, and radical challenge to all forms of faith are reported daily to Cromwell—developments which he had tried to hide from the King.
Once Henry knew what was afoot, he acted.
Thus at the end of 1538, a proclamation had been issued forbidding free discussion of the Sacrament and forbidding clerical marriage, on pain of death.
Henry had personally presided at the trial of John Lambert in November 1538 for denying the real presence.
At the same time, he had shared in the drafting of a proclamation giving Anabaptists and Sacramentaries ten days to get out of the country.
Parliament in 1539 passes the Six Articles reaffirming Roman Catholic practices such as transubstantiation, clerical celibacy and the importance of confession to a priest and prescribed penalties if anyone denied them.
Henry himself observes the Easter Triduum in this year with some display.
Cranmer, as Archbishop of Canterbury, promotes the Reformation theologically, supporting the English Bible translation of 1537-40, but opposes Henry VIII's Six Articles; the actual author is probably English bishop Stephen Gardiner.