On January 5, 1531, Pope Clement VII sent a letter to King Henry VIII of England forbidding him to remarry on pain of excommunication. Henry, who was looking for a way out of his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, ignored the pope’s warning. He then married Anne Boleyn (and four subsequent wives), which led to his excommunication and one of the most significant schisms in the history of Christianity.
READ MORE: How Henry VIII’s Divorce Led To Reform
Catherine was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and the aunt of the Germanic Roman Emperor Charles V, in addition to being the widow of Henry’s brother, Arthur. Increasingly concerned about his inability to produce a legitimate heir – despite publicly acknowledging an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy – Henry sought a way to end his marriage in a manner consistent with his Catholic faith. This was necessary for political reasons, because a monarch violating Catholic doctrine risked the disgrace and condemnation of the Pope. Henry was also generally believed to be a fairly pious Catholic. He was a known opponent of the Protestant Reformation taking shape on the continent, earning the title of Defender of the Faith from Pope Leo X for a treatise he wrote attacking Martin Luther.
Henry sent emissaries to the Pope in hopes of having his marriage annulled, and even convinced Clement to establish an ecclesiastical tribunal in England to rule on the matter. Clement, however, had no plans to call off the wedding. In addition to his doctrinal objections, he was more or less a prisoner of Charles V at the time, and he was powerless to oppose Charles’ insistence that the marriage be maintained. Already infatuated with Anne Boleyn, who was known to have a keen interest in Luther and the Reformation, Henry had exhausted his options for remarriage in the church and decided that the excommunication was a fair price to pay for the independence of the Pope and the potential of a father. An heir.
Henry banished Catherine from his court and married Anne (secretly in 1532, and publicly the following year). In doing so, he profoundly changed the course of Christian and European history. Following his remarriage, Henry issued a series of decrees that removed his kingdom from papal rule, ending the supremacy of the Catholic Church and creating the Church of England. Although the new church was, at first, extremely similar to Roman Catholicism, these movements made Henry and his successors absolute rulers who did not answer to the Pope. England joined a number of German states, as well as Sweden, in rejecting Catholicism, drawing battle lines for centuries of religious, political and military strife to follow.
