The Big Question--One that I am almost afraid to ask--is, I see, fairly popular on Google:

What if Henry VIII had not dissolved the Monasteries?  And what if, therefore, the Reformation had never come to England?  Would the Inquisition have stayed away? Could Science and Copernicanism (and Keplerism) have flourished? Might the Puritans and Pilgrims have gone their several fecund ways, without destroying the fabric of Society?  Most of the answerers seem to opine that English Catholicism, and monasticism, was so steadfastly English a phenomenon that (had it not been destroyed in the only way that it could have been destroyed, from the top down) it would have preserved its humanist equilibrium and ridden out the doctrinal tempests that  overwhelmed religion in the Empire of Charles V.  I agree.  It's not, mind you, that I think so highly of the Catholic religion, as such; but, in fact, English Roman Catholicism, and concomitant monasticism, was, from its beginnings, as much a peculiarly, through-and-through English humanistic cultural/political institution as it was ever a body of dogma.  English Roman Catholicism, and monasticism, was, if ever a religion were, the expression of a way of life adapted to the needs and exigencies of a whole people's lives in the sheltering circumstance of a "Scepter'd Isle, a green and pleasant Land."  Buddhist/atheist that I am, I find its humanity, its music (those odd, jerky rhythms, those strangely moving "false relations"), its "Perpendicular" Gothic architecture, too beautiful and in their way too true to discredit. When we think of Chaucer, of Thomas More, of Erasmus, do we doubt that Shakespeare, Milton, Hobbes and Locke are on the horizon?