The great enterprise of the suppression of the monasteries, which intimately affected the lives of thousands of the educated men and women of the land, which transferred a large fraction of the wealth of the country from the possession of religious corporations to that of the king, which brought about the rifling and demolition of so many churches, and which eliminated from England a traditional way of Christian life, went forward during four years with a minimum of personal violence. Few revolutions of comparable importance, whether in the sixteenth or in later centuries, have been accomplished with so little bloodshed or judicial barbarity. Indeed, throughout the process little or no animus was displayed against the religious as such. It was their wealth that Henry and Cromwell wanted, not primarily or professedly the extinction of their order, though this was soon seen to be an inevitable consequence. The apologists of die monks, therefore, who have written of the reign of terror, or of the cruel tyranny of Cromwell, have misread the situation, or transferred to the sixteenth century in England the mentality of reformers and revolutionaries of other lands and times. It would be almost permissible to say that the king and his minister had no more ill-will towards the monks than the gay highwayman of legend had towards his victims.

Yet it is equally unhistorical to treat the Dissolution as no more than the first scheme of nationalization in English history.