With the disgrace and death of Wolsey there began, for the Church in England, a period of stress and revolution without parallel in the past. Though the waters of domestic discontent and imported revolution had, throughout the cardinal's long lease of power, been mounting against the dykes, and far-sighted observers had long been anticipating a catastrophe, no one dared to prophesy what form it would take. No mortal prevision, indeed, could possibly have embraced those two imponderable forces, the will of the king and the genius of his new minister, which gave to events in the decade 1530–40 the particular impulse which determined their direction.

Throughout the changes of those years, in which there occurred a breathless sequence of events so pregnant with consequence, we are here concerned solely with the attitude and behaviour of the religious. To what extent was their conduct in the supreme crisis from the autumn of 1535 to the end of 1539 predetermined, or at least predisposed, by their action in earlier years? To answer this question it is necessary to begin our review some months before the death of the cardinal.

The precise degree of causal relationship between the king's ‘great matter’ of the divorce and the subsequent ecclesiastical revolution has always been a controversial topic, but it can at least be said that some relationship of cause and effect existed.