Emperor Charles V pushed his troops toward Rome and, in May, wreaked havoc in the city. Henry's request came at a tumultuous time in European history. In early 1527, Henry instructed his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, to institute proceedings to resolve the issue of the validity of his marriage to Catherine. Whether out of concern for his soul or for his sex life, Henry set in motion a process that would change the face of Europe. Even the least skeptical historian, of course, has considered the possibility that lust, together with a desire to father the healthy son that Catherine-now past her child-bearing years-could not, might have influenced his interpretation of the Bible chapter. Reviewing Leviticus, Henry began to question the lawfulness of his marriage to Catherine. But then in early 1526, however, King Henry's affection turned from Catherine to the beautiful Anne Boleyn. ![]() Seventeen years passed without questions being raised about the Pope's dispensation. The dispensation was deemed necessary because Catherine had been briefly married to Henry's older brother, Arthur, raising the question of whether Henry's marriage violated Leviticus 20:21: "If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing.they shall be childless." The fact that Arthur remained ill throughout the six-month-long marriage until his death, and that therefore the marriage-if Catherine is to be believed-was never consummated, doubtless made the case an easier one for Pope Julius than it otherwise might have been. In 1509, when the new eighteen-year-old King, Henry VIII, married a young Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon, the marriage came with the blessing of Pope Julius II, in the form of a dispensation from an injunction found in the Bible's Leviticus. Swept along with More, in this fateful confluence of writings, events, and people, was nothing less than the Reformation. ![]() More's road from his post as Lord Chancellor of England to the Tower of London owes its course to a Bible passage, a marriage of a long-dead prince, and the consuming desire of lustful and vain-glorious King Henry VIII to marry Anne Boleyn. Few people in history have faced their trials and deaths as squarely, calmly, and with as much integrity as did More. There is much to learn from the story of how the head of one of the most revered men in England, Sir Thomas More, ended up on the chopping block on London's Tower Hill in 1535. If there had not happened to be that particular man at that particular moment, the whole of history would have been different." For he was above all things historic he represented at once a type, a turning point and an ultimate destiny. He may come to be counted the greatest Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in English history. "Blessed Thomas Moore is more important at this moment than at any moment since his death, even perhaps the great moment of his dying but he is not quite so important as he will be in about a hundred years' time. ![]() "I die the king's good servant, and God's first."-Thomas More
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