Why did Henry VIII close the monastries?

Answer 1

Because he wanted to close the catholic church down in England so he could build his own church, the church of England.

Mostly because he wanted a divorce and the pope wouldn't give him one.

Answer 2

Henry VIII needed to reinforce his assumed authority as head of the Church of England, and he needed money.

By 1532 Henry VIII had gone through a tremendously complex series of maneuvers to divorce his first queen, Catherine, and marry Anne Boleyn, on the pretext that Catherine had failed to provide him with a male heir, considered essential at the time. But he encountered very strong resistance from the Pope and many Catholic princes of Europe, especially Spain because Catherine was Spanish. Henry was not a man to suffer resistance. The upshot was the 1534 Acts of Supremacy which made Henry the supreme head of the church in England, but this move proved unpopular with a significant percentage of the English populace, which remained staunchly Roman Catholic. (Ironically, to his dying day, Henry considered himself a good Catholic. He just no longer recognized the authority of the Pope at Rome.)

But Henry felt it necessary, indeed essential, to once and for all break the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope in England. His assumption of Papal authority in England was proving unpopular, in part because of the unpopularity of his questionable divorce/annulment and subsequent remarriage to Anne Boleyn, who was herself not popular (and also failed to provide the essential male heir). One way to break the Church was to attack and dissolve the monasteries, thereby eliminating their ability to continue to try to persuade the populace that the king had done wrong by putting aside Catherine and marrying Anne, which the Church considered adulterous. By dissolving the monasteries the King would literally reign supreme.

Another powerful motivation was money. Henry and his prime minister Thomas Cromwell convinced themselves that monastic income had in the first place been improperly diverted from the Crown. Henry and Cromwell argued that they were merely redressing ecclesiastical theft. They had the precedent of the European princes who were doing the same thing on the continent, and crowned heads were always looking for more money because there was always a war or a rumor of war, and war is expensive. Armies and navies have to be equipped and manned. Fortifications have to be built. Monastic wealth was an obvious target.

With the dissolution and acquisition of the monasteries, by 1540 Henry had obtained huge amounts of church land and property, much of which he cleverly handed on to his nobles. Thus Henry removed the greatest centers of Papal authority over his people, while simultaneously creating a powerful incentive to his nobility to support Henry's claim to be head of the Church in England.

Answer 3

Yes The main reasons being That most monasteries where taking everyone's money by selling bones of sheep, pieces of wood and saying that it's something special and the money didn't even go to the church it went to the bishops the priests and the pope to spend on luxuries