Elizabeth Zouche

She signed the deed of surrender on 23 March 1539 which brought the 650 year life of the abbey to an abrupt end and granted all its property and wealth to Henry VIII.

When the dissolution process began in 1536, as one of the larger abbeys, Shaftesbury was not immediately affected, but there was some impact as the abbess took in the prioress and two nuns displaced from a small Benedictine house in Somerset.

[5] When the noose started to close on the larger houses like Shaftesbury in 1538, Elizabeth Zouche at first tried to negotiate, offering the sum of 500 marks to the king and £100 to Thomas Cromwell to allow herself and her nuns to remain in their abbey, "by some other name and apparel".

[11] It was also authorised in 1552 that the full value of her pension could pass on her death as an annuity to Sir John Zouche of Ansty, who is presumed to have been a relative and subsequently served as the MP for Shaftesbury.

[13] Elizabeth Zouche appears also in The Mirror & the Light, the final part of Hilary Mantel's trilogy covering the life of Thomas Cromwell, published in 2020.