The Last Office: 1539 and the dissolution of a monastery, By Geoffrey Moorhouse

This superb book begins quietly, taking us through the daily offices of the Benedictine order in the monastic cathedral of Durham in the Middle Ages. With consummate lucidity Geoffrey Moorhouse explains the minutiae of medieval monasticism. Although St Benedict had intended his monks to live in poverty – they were meant to imitate the anchorites and desert fathers – human nature had asserted itself and the Benedictine communities were really an early form of business corporation, with the priors and abbots functioning as huge landowners, pastoralists and agriculturalists of the "agribusiness" type.

The political situation was more complicated, as the Lord Prior had overlapping ecclesiastical powers with the bishop of Durham, who was third in the English hierarchy after the archbishops of Canterbury and York. The bishop had military power as the castellan of Durham castle. On the other hand, the very wealthy Prior had almost equal prerogatives, since the cathedral at Durham was a monastic cathedral – only one of nine in the kingdom.

Nevertheless, until the 1530s the Benedictines lived a generally idyllic existence; the monasteries were in general an oasis of order in the midst of the usual medieval chaos. The elegaic picture Moorhouse paints of the last days of the monastic order is that of the calm before the storm: analogous, perhaps, to Russia before the Mongol invasions, Japan before the advent of the "barbarians" or the Americas before the coming of the white man.

Suddenly all hell breaks loose. As Moorhouse explains, the causal line that led to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s was Henry VIII's lust for Anne Boleyn and his desire to divorce Catharine of Aragon – the so-called "Great Matter". It was the evil genius of the king's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, that devised a plan whereby the English religion would be punished for the Pope's refusal to give the king the divorce he wanted, and at the same time the monarch and his minions would be enriched. Because Henry was vain, mean and venal, as well as lustful, cruel and psychopathic, the assault on the wealth of the regular clergy satisfied him at every level.

But like all good Machiavellians, Henry and Cromwell pretended that they were proceeding with their barefaced expropriation "only reluctantly". Their unwilling hand was allegedly forced because of the moral turpitude and sexual laxity in the monasteries and priories. Cromwell instituted an entirely new layer of bureaucracy to "inspect" the monasteries, run by that notorious scoundrel Sir Richard Rich, whose perjury had helped to condemn Thomas More. As Moorhouse explains, the few examples of monks and nuns living in sin uncovered by the inspectorate were the exception not the rule, and at Durham, the author's principal concern, the most rigorous moral standards were still in place.

Again like master Machiavellians, Henry and Cromwell masked their rapacious greed under a raft of legal forms and statutes – the Act of Succession, the Act of Supremacy, the First Suppression Act of 1536, the Second Suppression Act of 1539, the Act of Treasons, the Bishoprics Act, and so on – though everyone knew that anyone opposing Henry in the slightest way was already a dead person.

The extirpation of the monasteries followed a threefold chronology. From 1534 to 1536, the smaller religious houses were targeted and any with an annual income of less than £200 were wound up on grounds of "efficiency". The failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537 – it failed largely because the rebels were stupid enough to trust the lying, double-crossing Henry – gave Cromwell the excuse to proceed against the larger monasteries in the north of England. Then, until 1539, he sidetracked to mop up the establishments run by the mendicant orders, scooping the Franciscan and Dominican friaries into his maw. Finally, in 1539 he moved against the big ecclesiastical beasts left in the arena, including Durham. As a crowning insult, Cromwell's thugs desecrated Cuthbert's shrine in the cathedral; the bishop of Durham was forced to be present to witness this humiliation. The surrender of the Augustinian priory of the Holy Cross at Waltham in Essex in March 1540 brought the entire inglorious episode of the Dissolution of the Monasteries to an end.

The story Moorhouse tells with his customary elegance is a harrowing one. Few have employed terror so systematically as Henry, and there is something emetic about his use of a petrified Parliament to give his acts of piracy and vandalism a legal cover. The dictators of Latin America had nothing on him, and not even the Nazis managed the madness contained in the Act of Treasons, whereby an entire community was made responsible for the "treason" (having a different opinion from Henry) of any one of them; or the proviso that anyone who had had sex with a woman the king later went to bed with was ipso facto guilty of treason. Moorhouse rightly, given his own brief, spends most of his time with the micro features of Church wealth. But it was the macro aspects that were more important historically. Historians claim that the inflationary impact of the stolen "Abbey Lands" on England was as great as that of the treasure of the Indies on contemporary Spain. Not the least important consequence of the Dissolution was that it disgorged tens of thousands of lay workers, employed by the monks to perform menial tasks, on to a labour market that had no use for them. And so we can see another causal line, this time stretching from the Dissolution to Elizabeth I's Vagrancy Laws.

Geoffrey Moorhouse, a writer of great distinction, came late in his career to Tudor History but this, the third in his studies of Henry VIII's reign, has all the qualities one has come to expect from him. This is a book that both the scholar and the "intelligent reader" should ponder deeply.