It is inconceivable that these moves went unnoticed by the English government and particularly

by Thomas Cromwell, who had been employed by Wolsey in his monastic suppressions, and who
was shortly to become Henry VIII's King’s Secretary. However, Henry himself appears to have been
much more influenced by the opinions on monasticism of the humanists Desiderius
Erasmus and Thomas More, especially as found in Erasmus's work In Praise of Folly (1511) and
More's Utopia (1516). Erasmus and More promoted ecclesiastical reform while remaining faithful to
the Church of Rome, and had ridiculed such monastic practices as repetitive formal religion, [citation
needed]
 superstitious pilgrimages for the veneration of relics, and the accumulation of monastic wealth.
Henry appears from the first to have shared these views, never having endowed a religious house
and only once[citation needed] having undertaken a religious pilgrimage, to Walsingham in 1511. From 1518,
Thomas More was increasingly influential as a royal servant and counsellor, in the course of which
his correspondence included a series of strong condemnations of the idleness and vice in much
monastic life, alongside his equally vituperative attacks on Luther. Henry himself corresponded
continually with Erasmus, prompting him to be more explicit in his public rejection of the key tenets
of Lutheranism and offering him church preferment should he wish to return to England.