Henry VIII - King's Great Matter: 1525–1534

King's Great Matter: 1525–1534

Henry became impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the heir he desired. Henry wanted a male heir to consolidate the power of the Tudor dynasty, and Catherine was now past the age of child-bearing. Henry had three options: legitimise Henry FitzRoy, which would take the intervention of the pope and would be open to challenge; marry off Mary as soon as possible and hope for a grandson to inherit directly, but Mary was an undersized child and was unlikely to conceive before Henry's death; or somehow reject Catherine and find someone else. The third was the most attractive possibility to Henry.

Around this time, Henry conducted an affair with Mary Boleyn, Catherine's lady-in-waiting at some point between 1519 and 1526. There has been speculation that Mary's two children, Catherine and Henry, were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proved and the King never acknowledged them as he did Henry FitzRoy. In 1525, as Henry grew more impatient, he became enamoured of Mary's sister, Anne Boleyn, then a charismatic young woman in the Queen's entourage. Anne at first resisted his attempts to seduce her, and refused to become his mistress as her sister Mary Boleyn had. It is commonly believed that Anne, by refusing to become Henry's mistress, pushed Henry into the course of action he later undertook; this story was widely used by Protestant supporters of Anne and may be exaggerated. It is clear that by 1528 Henry was infatuated by her and was beginning to plan a second marriage. It soon became the King's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to Catherine. When Henry confronted Catherine in 1527, claiming that their marriage had never been valid – the Old Testament forbade marrying the wife of your brother in Leviticus 20:21 – all hope of tempting Catherine to retire to a nunnery or otherwise stay quiet were lost.

Henry appealed directly to the Holy See, independently from Wolsey, from whom he kept his plans for Anne secret. Instead, Henry's secretary, William Knight, was sent to Pope Clement VII to sue for the annulment. The grounds were that the bull of Pope Julius II was obtained by false pretences, because Catherine's brief marriage to the sickly Arthur had been consummated. Henry petitioned, in the event of annulment, a dispensation to marry again to any woman even in the first degree of affinity, whether the affinity was contracted by lawful or unlawful connection. This clearly had reference to Anne.

However, as the pope was at that time imprisoned by Catherine's nephew, Emperor Charles V, Knight had difficulty in getting access to him, and so only managed to obtain the conditional dispensation for a new marriage. Henry now had no choice but to put the matter into the hands of Wolsey. Wolsey did all he could to secure a decision in the King's favour, going so far as to arrange an ecclesiastical court to meet in England, with a representative from the Pope. The Pope had never had any intention of empowering his legate. Charles V also resisted the annulment of his aunt's marriage, but it is not clear how far this influenced the pope. It is clear that Henry saw that the Pope was unlikely to give him an annulment. The pope forbade Henry to proceed to a new marriage before a decision was given in Rome, not in England. Wolsey bore the blame. Convinced that he was treacherous, Anne Boleyn maintained pressure until Wolsey was dismissed from public office in 1529. After being dismissed, the cardinal begged her to help him return to power, but she refused. He then began a plot to have Anne forced into exile and began communication with Queen Catherine and the Pope to that end. When this was discovered, Henry ordered Wolsey's arrest and had it not been for his death from illness in 1530, he might have been executed for treason. His replacement, Sir Thomas More, initially cooperated with the king's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament and proclaiming the opinion of the theologians at Oxford and Cambridge that the marriage of Henry to Catherine had been unlawful. As Henry began to deny the authority of the Pope, More's qualms grew.

A year later, Queen Catherine was banished from court and her rooms were given to Anne. With Wolsey gone, Anne had considerable power over political matters. She was an unusually educated and intellectual woman for her time, and was keenly absorbed and engaged with the ideas of the Protestant Reformers. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne had the Boleyn family's chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, appointed to the vacant position. Through the intervention of the King of France, this was conceded by Rome, the pallium being granted to him by Clement.

Breaking the power of Rome in England proceeded slowly. In 1532, a lawyer who was a supporter of Anne, Thomas Cromwell, brought before Parliament a number of acts including the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church. Following these acts, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister.