This is somewhat misnamed. It should be Codename "Little Bald Man": Gregorio Casali and the Adventures of a Renaissance diplomat. When Henry VIII was still just a wanna-be in the scale of European monarchies, he employed an envoy to the Pope to handle his and Wolsey's business. Quickly, this regular business was entangled in the war between and papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as complicated by the king's demands for an annulment, and then a divorce from Catherine of Aragon (who was the Emperor's aunt). Fletcher encountered Casali as a minor part in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, and tracked him back to a rich family archive in Italy, and from these papers, reconstructs not just the Vatican Machiavellian end of the Great Divorce, but also the mechanics of Renaissance diplomacy from bribes to banquet menus to appropriate dress when chasing the pope across the war-destroyed countryside.