Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The sack of Rome in 1527 had important consequences, many of which remain with us today. In England it is best known because it derailed King Henry VIII’s plans to annul his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s ministers submitted the request for papal dispensation to divorce while Clement was languishing under effective house arrest in Rome in the autumn of 1527; because Catherine was Charles’s aunt, there was no way the request could be granted. As a result, a bullheaded Henry charged down another, far-more-destructive path: as we have already seen, he withdrew England from the Roman Church, announced his own supremacy in matters of both church and state, and allowed Lutheranism into a realm where previously it had been forbidden. A page was turned in English—and eventually, British and Irish—history, and Henry’s reign still marks the boundary between the medieval and early modern worlds.