Whig plunderers

"In May, 1539 Parliament’s passage of the Second Act of Dissolution declared all the church property confiscated since 1536 ... and all church property to be confiscated in the future to be lawfully the property of the Crown. ... It speeded the completion of the greatest redistribution of English land and wealth since the Norman Conquest in 1066. The whole suppression worked to the direct and immediate advantage of the king, who rather abruptly became richer than any other monarch in Christendom. By the spring of 1540 not a single monastic establishment remained in existence in England or Wales. Hundreds if not thousands of the monks and nuns expelled from them had become itinerant beggars, wandering from village to village in search of work or charity. The number of England’s schools, hospitals, and institutions for the care of the aged and indigent had undergone an abrupt collapse from which it would not recover for centuries.

Under Henry VIII, “the institutions of government became tools of the plunderers, and their aim, when it was not to pull in still more plunder, was to make sure that no one threatened the bounty that Henry’s revolution had funneled to them.” ...

His son Edward, a child of nine who was tutored to be stridently evangelical and anti-Catholic, succeeded Henry. ... By statute, endowments of chantries (small chapels established for offering prayers for the dead) and assets of guilds that provided burial insurance and funded schools and charitable activities were transferred to the Crown. (Also by statute, anyone found guilty of vagrancy could be branded and enslaved.) Then the Crown confiscated most endowments of the dioceses...

Over time the plunderers covered their booty with a veneer of civility. “If it took two centuries to turn the descendants of looters and speculators into the ladies and gentlemen of Jane Austen’s novels,...”