What did Henry VIII do with money?

Answer 1

Henry VIII, like monarchs before and after him, was personally responsible for most of the expenses we would nowadays expect to be paid by "the government". He had to maintain his palaces, the civil service, and the military out of his private pocket. There was no clear line between what were Henry's expenses and what were England's expenses. The dissolution of the monasteries made Henry very rich but a lot of this money was paid out to courtiers and other powerful people in the country to help with the political fallout of the Reformation. Even more was frittered away in the wars against France which characterized the last years of his reign. Henry was, of course, fond of pomp and finery to a much greater extent than his parsimonious father, but this was not where the bulk of his great wealth went.

Answer 2

Henry needed money because he spent all the country's money on fine clothing, buildings, paintings and gambling and hunting. He also spent money on the wars against Scotland and France. Henry made England bankrupt but he knew the church was rich. The monastries in England owned 25% of the good land and the wealth from these buildings could solve his financial problems.

Answer 3

He wasn't very good with his money. He was bankrupt, which was one of the reasons why he became head of the church. He knew the church had lots of money, valuables, wealth and land and he wanted to get hold of it. He spent a lot of money on foreign expensive wars across Europe. His yearly pay is £500,000 but when he closed down the monasteries he got £140,000 more yearly!

Answer 4

The question should be what did Thomas Cromwell do, as he was empowered to defray the monies involved. Bearing in mind that Protestantism was iconoclast at this time, the priceless statues and images found in the monasteries, oftentimes the devotional work of an entire lifetime, were not sold but destroyed, however the land belonging to the monasteries (sometimes thousands of acres as its agricultural produce was used to feed a whole community of monks or nuns), was sold cheaply to surrounding farmers and townspeople to generate popularity for the closure of the monasteries, thought to be fomentors and hotbeds of dissent from the protestant crown. Of the 376 monasteries closed in 1535, the 'properties' pertaining therefrom, were considered not the property of individual monks or nuns who had taken vows of poverty, but the property of the Catholic Church - therefore seizable. However, devout Catholics saw the ensuing extreme poverty and mistreatment - sometimes killings - of monks and nuns who had spent their lives in the service of God and the community, and were incensed enough to form an army, known as the 'Pilgrimage of Grace' which amassed ready for battle in Yorkshire. To stave off this threat, Cromwell put the Duke of Norfolk in funds to raise an equal and opposite force, using the proceeds of what had been sold from the sacking of the monasteries in part, and from the wealth generated from the forfeiture of lands. This enable the Duke of Norfolk to persuade the Yorkshire faction to put their grievances to parliament in an attempt at peaceful resolution to avoid further bloodshed in what was a stand-off. However Cromwell had no intention of allowing any consideration of the monks' plight in parliament, and as his coffers ran dry three years on in 1538 he ordered the shrines of pilgrimage be shut down, and their offerings (often jewels and gold) and relics become property of the crown. This included the desecration of the shrine of St Thomas A Beckett - for which Henry VIII was excommunicated. In retaliation for Henry Tudor's excommunication, the rest of the monasteries and convents were shut down over the subsequent two years; around 850 in total between 1335 and 1340. While the amounts in question would today be reckoned in their billions - at the time England was experiencing massive inflation, reducing the real-terms value of what was seized. Cromwell did permit the concession of a pension to those nuns and monks who converted to protestantism, however because of this inflation, it was worthless and they lived out their lives in extreme poverty. The loss that many people overlook in terms of the marginal cost of this political undertaking, was the burning of libraries - the monasteries were centres of learning - but their heavily illuminated texts were deemed idolatrous and destroyed. This cost echoed down through the ages in terms of the ontological loss, and was truly too high a price for the people collectively to pay, for Henry's political survival.