Rex reason1/2/2024 The debacle of the matrimonial tribunal in summer 1529 spelled the end of Wolsey’s ascendancy in English politics. But circumstances were not right, and as news came through of the defeat of the French army that had been campaigning to break Charles V’s hold on Italy (and thus on the pope), Campeggio acted on instructions to revoke the case to Rome. Their work was partially successful, in that Cardinal Campeggio came to England as papal legate with the power, under the right circumstances, to annul Henry’s marriage. Legal and theological opinions on the case abound, along with business papers such as the correspondence of the envoys who went to Rome to lobby for the annulment hearing to be held in England. The earliest among them are some scrappy pages recording a fruitless church court hearing about the marriage in May 1527 and a letter to the king from his chief minister Cardinal Wolsey in June 1527, enclosing a Latin letter from John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and England’s premier theologian, giving his preliminary opinion on the conflicting biblical texts dealing with marriage to a brother’s wife or widow. The State Papers for the most part house less splendid documents. One of the treasures of the Vatican collection is a petition of support for the king signed by his nobility, addressed to Pope Clement VII and adorned with dozens of fine wax seals dangling on cords. For example, it was only in the late twentieth century that the formal statement of the king’s case was properly identified in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The State Papers contain sheaves of paper arguing for and against the validity of Henry’s marriage, though some of the most important papers are elsewhere. 1502), Henry had contravened a divine law, and that therefore the pope who issued a dispensation for that marriage had exceeded his lawful authority. Although his real motive was most probably infatuation, the justification from the start was the claim that, in marrying the woman who had previously been married to his elder brother (Prince Arthur, d. The ‘King’s Great Matter’ was Henry’s decision to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to be free to marry Anne Boleyn. Although the story unfolded with what seems like tragic inevitability, there was nothing inevitable about Henry VIII’s ‘Break with Rome’ when what contemporaries called his ‘Great Matter’ began to reshape the English and European political scene in 1527.
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