Rome

Rome is both a physical city and a contested source of jurisdiction in the novel. The English effort to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon depends on the Pope and the Roman Church, yet Roman decisions are constrained by money, diplomacy, and imperial force. As the crisis deepens, the city’s vulnerability and the distance between English political aims and papal authority help drive the transfer of religious and legal power into England.

The city and the marriage case

Early in the dispute, Thomas Cromwell warns Thomas Wolsey that a mission to Rome cannot be treated as a discreet inquiry. Papal spies will discover its purpose, he argues, and cardinals and secretaries will have time to set their prices. Any envoy, including Stephen Gardiner, would need substantial ready money rather than promises. Cromwell’s advice reflects his experience of Rome as a place where diplomacy must reckon with financial interests as well as formal religious authority.

Wolsey instead proposes beginning the king’s suit within England, using a local court to force Henry to confront the implications of his own demand. The desired outcome would still require the dispensation to be revoked, in Rome or through other means, but the initial proceedings could test whether the king truly intends to pursue the annulment. Rome therefore stands behind the English legal maneuvering from the outset: it is the distant authority whose judgment the king seeks, and whose capacity to grant that judgment Cromwell doubts.

The personal stakes are made plain when Henry speaks to Katherine in June 1527. He presents their marriage as contrary to divine law because she had been his brother’s wife, while Katherine insists on her rights and status. The novel places the Roman question within this dispute over marriage, conscience, and legitimate authority: the king’s desired freedom cannot be secured by domestic persuasion alone while the validity of his marriage remains subject to the papacy’s judgment.

The Sack of Rome and the diplomatic opening

As the English inquiry is nearing a pause, news arrives that the unpaid Spanish and German troops of Charles V have turned on Rome. The city is plundered, its religious and artistic institutions violated, and Pope Clement VII taken prisoner. Because Charles is Katherine’s nephew and is nominally responsible for the troops, the disaster sharply reduces the likelihood that Clement will favor appeals from the English legatine court. The sack thus turns a legal and marital controversy into an international crisis: the Pope’s captivity makes an independent judgment harder to obtain.

Wolsey responds by imagining a diplomatic route around the emergency. He proposes crossing to Calais, speaking directly with the French king, and proceeding to Avignon, where he could invite cardinals to assemble a council and continue church government while Clement remains in captivity. If the council heard Henry’s marital case and issued a ruling, Wolsey reasons, the Pope might later ratify its decision. The plan reveals how the crisis in Rome can be treated both as danger to the papacy and as an opening for English policy. It is not carried through in the supplied episode; the proposal instead underscores the precariousness of any settlement that depends on a captive Pope and on the consent of powerful European actors.

The narration also distinguishes Cromwell’s practical response from More’s account of the violence. More claims that the troops roast infants; Cromwell doubts the story, reasoning that soldiers are occupied with taking goods they can turn into money. The contrast does not lessen the devastation described, but it shows Cromwell testing reports against material incentives. Rome’s crisis is not merely an emblem: it is a political fact whose details shape what can plausibly be done next.

Rome as a warning and a memory

Later, Rome’s fall remains part of the political imagination of England. Chapuys, who was not present at the sack, dreams of its destruction as though he had witnessed it. The city’s ruined streets, churches, and ancient remains become a measure of what Christian civilization has already lost. The narration traces the destruction backward as well, recalling the rebuilding of St Peter’s under Pope Julius and the excavation of old burials for its foundations. Rome is presented as a place where religious continuity and material rupture occupy the same ground.

This memory informs the fear that England’s own religious changes might break the walls of Christendom. Thomas More asks why the English king would create another breach when Christian territories face external threats. The question gives Rome a double significance: it is the seat of papal authority, but also the devastated center of a Christian world that political conflict has failed to protect. The novel sets that inherited unity against the consequences of imperial rivalry and the English king’s effort to secure control over his church.

From papal jurisdiction to English law

The weakening of Rome’s authority becomes explicit in disputes over who may judge the king’s marriage. Katherine refuses to attend the court at Dunstable because she regards her case as still awaiting the Pope in Rome. She calls Thomas Cranmer a heretic and warns that excommunication would place Henry outside the Church. Cromwell urges her not to foreclose the possibility of reconciliation, but their exchange exposes the conflict between two claims: a domestic court acting under royal authority and a case Katherine believes belongs to the Pope.

Cromwell’s later arguments make that institutional divide part of a broader account of sovereignty. He tells Gardiner that Rome has no legitimate voice in England and proposes that Parliament enact and the country endorse the succession settlement. His insistence on a public oath is meant to make the decision binding through English institutions, not dependent on a foreign jurisdiction. The conflict is therefore not simply between individual opinions about religion; it concerns which legal order can define marriage, succession, and the king’s authority.

The distinction is tested in Thomas More’s conversation with Richard Riche. More accepts that Parliament could make a temporal change, even naming Riche king in a hypothetical case, but argues that Parliament cannot legislate spiritual jurisdiction because it lies outside the realm. Cromwell recognizes the political consequence: if More denies Parliament’s competence over the Church, he may also be seen as denying the king’s title. Rome’s authority persists in this argument not through a ruling delivered in the scene, but as the jurisdiction More claims remains beyond Parliament’s reach.

Narrative significance

Rome’s role changes as the plot moves from seeking a papal decision to contesting whether that decision-making power belongs in England at all. At first, the city is the destination of envoys, petitions, money, and appeals; after the sack, it is also a center whose dependence on imperial power obstructs the king’s cause. Later, it becomes the jurisdictional boundary invoked by Katherine and More, against Cromwell’s claim that English institutions can decide matters within the realm.

The novel consequently ties political change to practical mechanisms: diplomatic missions, financial leverage, parliamentary acts, courts, and oaths. Rome remains consequential even when the English government acts against its authority. Its distance is not absence; it is the condition that makes the struggle over who may speak for the Church, and whose judgment can alter a marriage or succession, so urgent.