Levitical law prohibiting marriage to a brother’s wife

The Levitical law prohibiting marriage to a brother’s wife is central to the novel’s account of Henry VIII’s effort to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Set against Deuteronomy’s instruction that a man should marry his deceased brother’s wife, it supplies a scriptural argument on which the king, the papacy, and the English political order make competing claims.

The scriptural contradiction

In conversation with Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wolsey identifies Deuteronomy as a text that recommends marrying a dead brother’s wife, as Henry had done. Leviticus, by contrast, forbids that union and is understood to say that the couple will not have children. The passages therefore offer conflicting answers to the question the king wants settled: whether his marriage to his brother Arthur’s widow was permissible under divine law.

The conflict cannot be resolved simply by citing one passage and ignoring the other. Cromwell observes that the contradiction had already been considered in Rome, where leading prelates decided which law took priority when issuing the dispensations for Henry’s marriage. The dispensations were delivered under papal seal. The marriage thus rests not only on scriptural interpretation but on a prior exercise of papal authority to reconcile the texts.

Henry’s use of Leviticus

Wolsey tells Cromwell that Henry dislikes the Deuteronomic answer. The king instead takes Leviticus to heart, treating its prohibition as grounds to question a marriage that had lasted for years. The dispute is sharpened by the fact that Katherine and Henry have a living daughter, Mary: Wolsey notes that Henry’s concern rests on the scriptural understanding that “children” means sons. The law’s relevance is therefore inseparable from the king’s desire for a male heir.

Henry describes himself as having lived under a mistake for eighteen years and tells his confessor that he has eighteen years of sin to expiate. Wolsey’s account makes clear that his present interpretation is not a neutral return to scripture: doubts about the dispensation had been raised earlier, but, as Wolsey says, “They were quashed and quashed.” The king’s changed need for a son gives the old textual question new political force, and he now seeks an annulment declaring that the marriage never existed.

From church judgment to royal jurisdiction

The argument over Leviticus belongs to a wider contest over the authority to decide what marriage law means. Katherine insists that her case remains at Rome and rejects the authority of the English court convened to hear it. She argues that Pope Clement was misled and that Thomas Cranmer is a heretic; she warns that Henry risks excommunication and invokes the principle that outside the Church there is no salvation. The dispute over the scriptural prohibition is thus also a dispute over whether Rome or the English king has the final jurisdiction.

The novel later places that jurisdictional conflict beside an account of Marsiglio of Padua’s political propositions. Cromwell presents Henry with the argument that princes, rather than popes, possess authority over marriage, legitimacy, and the laws governing their subjects, and that the king’s power is derived through Parliament. In this political framework, the question raised by Leviticus can be translated from a matter for papal dispensation into a matter for English government. The movement does not erase the contradiction between Leviticus and Deuteronomy; it shifts who claims the right to settle it.

A private marriage question with public consequences

The law’s force in the story comes from the way it joins intimate history to succession and sovereignty. Henry’s effort to invalidate his marriage places Katherine’s status, Mary’s legitimacy, and the prospect of a male heir at stake. The same dispute also helps drive a break with Roman authority: a question once addressed through papal interpretation becomes an occasion for asserting the king’s power over the English Church and its legal order.

Leviticus is therefore more than a proof text in the annulment case. Its prohibition, in tension with Deuteronomy and the dispensation previously granted, reveals the instability of appeals to a single scriptural answer when rival institutions claim the right to interpret it. In the novel, the unresolved biblical conflict becomes a lever for political change, while its consequences fall on the people whose marriage and inheritance the law is invoked to govern.