History and the author   Vai alla press-room prodotto   Il tribolato caso matrimoniale di Enrico VIII Ask for information about this work  Edizione Speciale bilingue (italiano-inglese) dell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Una prima mondiale presentata ufficialmente in Vaticano il 23 Giugno 2009 alle massime Autorità Vaticane, ai membri del corpo diplomatico presso la Santa Sede, ai professori delle Università Pontificie, ad esponenti illustri di istituzioni Militari, politiche, associazioni ed ordini professionali.

Preface to the work -  His Excellency Monsignor Sergio Pagano, Bishop of Celene – Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives.

  Marital love, succession to the throne, the hope for a male heir as a guarantee of safe posterity, genuine or sometimes calculated religious deference, compliance with the human weakness and pride of blood, the merits of Tudor princes and the corruption of their court, the slavish devotion and, on the other side, the respectable conduct of nobles and clergymen, the impudent ambitions of a lady and the bitter disappointment of a proud queen, all these elements are entwined in a setting, worthy of Shakespeare (who actually described those facts in a historical drama), which was the background to king Henry VIII’s “Great Matter”, i.e. the sovereign’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the feverish attempts to achieve a sought-after new marriage with Anne Boleyn, who, he hoped, would finally give him a male descendant that his legitimate wife was no longer able to produce.
  
   Since 1530, the Vatican Secret Archives have been preserving the document which, in some ways, can be regarded, though not as the most important, at least as the most impressive and representative of the English sovereign’s dogged determination throughout that intricate and much debated affair (A.A., Arm. I-XVIII 4098A). It is the address of the peers of England to Clement VII, dating 13 July 1530, to persuade the pontiff to acknowledge the nullity of Henry’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon, according to what the subscribers believed to be right canonical reasons, otherwise long discussed in England and among the legates and diplomats in Rome, and with the authoritative opinions of the universities in Cambridge, Orléans, Oxford, Angers, Bologna, Bourges, Padua and Paris. As much as 83 noteworthy personalities signed the plea ( a large parchment document in a nice cursive style) and almost each of them (with rare exceptions) added their seal or the seal at their disposals to such a binding document, whether the subscribers agreed with the reasons to be explained to the pope pro parte Henrici or they were forced to accept the content of the letter (as some of them undoubtedly were) by the violent reaction of the sovereign; , at that point he was weary enough to make jurists and clergymen study the law codes and to run a difficult relationship with the Holy See since April 1527, ( a crucial year for Clement VII, victim of the imperial troops during the terrible Sack of Rome) and he was resolved, whether the “Supreme See” liked it or not, to get married with Anne Boleyn whom he had fallen in love with during the February 1526 carnival feastings.

  It is well known that other documents, less imposing but equally (or rather more) important, preceded and followed our “Plea”, from both English and Roman sides, and, despite all political efforts and the moral struggles in conceiving and writing it, we could say that, after all, the letter was greatly fruitless.  The pope assessed that, neither in our document nor in the previous ones, any reasonable solution to the controversy about the divorce (in the sense of divortium quoad vinculum) could be found, he suspended the Causa Anglica and warned the king ( on January 5, 1531) not to proceed with a new marriage; by then, the king was deaf to the all the arguments presented by Rome, or, in some way, he was too convinced of his own reasons, and on January 25th 1533 he married Anne Boleyn. Clement VII couldn’t but declare the marriage invalid and to issue an excommunication against Henry on July 11th of that same year, whose effects would however be suspended until the next September, to allow the king, in case of his desirable reconsideration of the matter, to leave Anne and to reconcile himself with his real and legitimate wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Clement VII had just the time to declare invalid the marriage between Henry and Anne Boleyn on 23 March 1534, before the end, on 25 September 1534, of his over ten-year long pontificate, saddened by a succession of political and religious difficulties. The following year, other (and now brutal) deaths took place in England: the executions of cardinal John Fisher (22 June 1535) and of Thomas More, Henry’s incorruptible and trustworthy Chancellor until 1532, who had resigned to be true to his moral principles and had been jailed inside the Tower of London and then sentenced to death, like a new John Baptist, by his king who wanted to stop his reprimands against the dissolute “affair” with Anne Boleyn and the invalid marriage – and also his silence which actually had sounded like an open disagreement. Paul III Farnese, pope Medici’s successor, issued a new excommunication against Henry VIII on August 30 of that year. Early in 1536, Catherine of Aragon, unfortunate and admirable queen, passed away (on January 7), long consumed and nearly banned from the court and the world.  
  

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