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.


What followed in England was a chapter of accidents for the hot-tempered king: Anne Boleyn failed (or, as we should say, the nature made her fail) in the main purpose which Henry had married her for: she was never able to give him a male heir and she unfortunately underwent two abortions. She was put to death at the Green Tower on 19 May 1596, a victim of right the same court plots she had so much relied on; Henry was then forced to a new marriage, and his new wife, Jane Seymour, could finally give him the long desired male heir, Edward, born on 12 October 1537, though she then died of delivery.
Henry after many vicissitudes and three new marriages, finally died in 1547. His persistence on the matrimonial case had brought about a break with Rome (the Anglican Church, precisely) which is still unhealed today. The calculated designs of Henry VIII to put a male successor on the throne of England, for a clear nemesis of history, overturned into the events which followed his death: his successor, Edward VI, who had ascended to the throne in 1547, died of tuberculosis a few years later, in 1553, and the crown finally passed to a woman, the queen Mary.
