Read The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy's splendid book. The Reformation in England was imposed top-down on a largely unwilling populace, which reacted with great unhappiness to the destruction of their churches, monasteries and religious foundations. The bourgeoisie of London supported it, but it got away from them. Revolutions so often do.
Surely you realize that Elizabeth I's Poor Law was a stop-gap attempt to fill the vacuum left when all the charitable works of the Church were destroyed? Henry took the money and abandoned all the poor, sick and disabled that the Church had cared for.
How could the populace "react with great unhappiness to the destruction of their churches and monasteries"? They weren't theirs to start off with. The monasteries were, in general, remote and exclusivist places. They divided people. Sure a lot of the monasteries helped the poor, but the point is that they had created a lot of the poor themselves in the first place by concentrating wealth,(a lot of which was shipped overseas). As for the churches, they were still there. It was all the finery and images and relics that the reformers got rid of. Kind of like an iconoclasm (incidentally, personally I think they went over the top with that).