Papacy

The Papacy is the institution whose claims to govern the church and determine spiritual law become the central counterweight to Henry VIII’s expanding authority in England. In the novel, the conflict is neither a single declaration nor a simple contest between king and pope: it proceeds through parliamentary bills, the clergy’s submission, a contested marriage judgment, and competing accounts of where lawful power comes from. Its consequences reach from national government to the conscience of prisoners who refuse to accept Parliament’s authority over spiritual matters.

Jurisdiction and the English Church

The break with the Papacy begins to take institutional form through legislation. In the spring of 1532, Parliament considers measures that would cut revenues flowing to Rome and make the king’s supremacy in the church more than a formula. A Commons petition challenges the church courts’ jurisdiction and even their existence, while Henry’s government seeks to establish that the clergy are his subjects rather than a separate body owing obedience to the Pope. The struggle is therefore about the reach of law as much as religious doctrine: whether church courts can act independently within England, and whether Rome can claim authority over them.

The confrontation is made concrete by the demand that the clergy pay more than one hundred thousand pounds after they are declared complicit in the offence for which Cardinal Wolsey had been accused under the praemunire laws. Katherine calls the demand extortion rather than a benevolence. She distinguishes her opposition to attacks on the bishops from her personal history with Wolsey, who had been her enemy, and insists that hostility to one cardinal does not diminish her loyalty to the church. Her resistance exposes the political effect of treating a challenge to royal jurisdiction as a means of compelling the clergy to submit and pay.

The Commons’ division on the bill suspending annates makes parliamentary procedure part of the contest. Members are physically separated into those for and against, while Henry watches and learns who supports him. The tactic does not work in the Lords: the king has to attend in person three times to argue his case, and old aristocratic families aligned with the Pope and Katherine are still willing to speak against him. The division both advances the measure and reveals opponents whom the crown may seek to isolate. At the same time, it shows that the institutional contest is uneven: royal influence can shape a vote, but it does not instantly dissolve the old loyalties that sustain resistance.

Submission, Appeals, and the Marriage Case

On 15 May, the bishops sign a submission to Henry. They agree not to make new church legislation without the king’s licence, to submit existing laws to review by a commission that includes laymen, and not to meet in Convocation without royal permission. The agreement places ecclesiastical lawmaking under royal oversight, translating the larger dispute into concrete restrictions on the clergy’s legislative independence. It is one step in a process that is still being negotiated, rather than a final settlement accepted by every party.

A further step is the proposed law against appeals to Rome. Thomas Cromwell works through the night with Rafe Sadler and Thomas Wriothesley on amendments to the Commons petition, while Anne Boleyn presses him about the bill that will prevent appeals to the Pope. The stated aim is to stop the king’s marriage case from being carried beyond England. Thomas Cranmer explains the consequence: once the measure takes effect, the Pope will no longer be the appellate authority in such matters, and Cranmer himself can decide the king’s cause in English courts. The law thus links the marriage dispute to a broader transfer of jurisdiction from Rome to the English crown and its courts.

That transfer collides directly with Katherine’s position. At Ampthill, she tells Cromwell she will not attend the court at Dunstable because she does not recognize it; her case, she maintains, is at Rome and awaits the Holy Father. She regards Cranmer as a heretic and Henry as a schismatic, while Cromwell urges her not to close every possibility of reconciliation. Their exchange makes the competing legal systems explicit: the king wants his affairs settled by his own court, but Katherine regards the Roman forum as the legitimate place to judge her marriage. Her refusal is not a procedural detail. It rejects the authority on which Henry’s settlement depends.

The novel also shows the practical and political instability surrounding the attempted transfer. Before Cranmer can hear the king’s case as archbishop, the Pope’s appointment is still required; English delegates in Rome are empowered to promise what is necessary to secure approval. Cranmer privately acknowledges that he cannot officially know the king’s new marriage has already taken place, since he is to judge the earlier one. Meanwhile, Henry objects to the expense of the papal bulls and Cranmer’s installation, while Cromwell promises that this will be the last money sent to Rome if it rests with him. The procedure depends, for the moment, on the very institution whose authority the government intends to end.

Competing Accounts of Sovereignty

Cromwell presents a theory of royal and parliamentary authority drawn from Marsiglio of Padua. In his account, Christ came as a subject rather than a ruler and did not commission the Pope or the clergy to make laws or levy taxes. Priests, like other people, are subjects; the secular prince governs citizens and determines matters such as marriage, legitimacy, and law. The prince’s authority, Cromwell argues, comes through a legislative body acting on behalf of the people, so the king derives his kingship from Parliament rather than from the Pope. This argument gives the political rupture a constitutional form: it claims that English institutions possess the authority Rome has exercised or asserted.

The theory also supports a transfer of church wealth and temporal privileges into secular hands. If vows of poverty leave monks without property rights, Cromwell reasons, monks cannot properly be landlords; grants of land, offices, and monopolies belong to secular power. Henry leaps ahead to the possibility of breaking shrines and removing their riches. Cromwell had meant to guide him through a legal process of dispossession and repossession, but accepts the king’s more direct thought. The exchange reveals that a dispute about jurisdiction can lead to material consequences: who owns church wealth, who may direct it, and whether it can be used for public purposes.

Katherine and Mary answer this account by appealing to a different source of authority. Mary insists that the Pope is head of the church everywhere and that the lawfulness of government flows from the throne of Saint Peter. Cromwell argues that the king cannot simply be led, though he may be enticed, and points to the qualification that his supremacy operates as far as the law of Christ allows. Mary asks whether what has been defined can later be redefined; Cromwell agrees that it can. Their exchange leaves the qualification deliberately unsettled: for Cromwell it makes room for negotiation, while Mary recognizes that its meaning depends on who will have power to interpret it.

The dispute reaches a sharp legal boundary in Thomas More’s account of the king’s supremacy. When Richard Riche reports a conversation with More in the Tower, he says More distinguishes between Parliament’s temporal jurisdiction and spiritual jurisdiction. Parliament might make Riche king, More concedes, but cannot make God cease to be God; for the same reason, he argues, Parliament cannot exercise spiritual jurisdiction that lies outside the realm. Cromwell sees the statement as a possible denial of the king’s title, but recognizes the difficulty of proving that More spoke maliciously rather than hypothetically. The episode shows why the Papacy remains more than a foreign political opponent: for those who hold that spiritual authority is not Parliament’s to command, the royal settlement trespasses on a law beyond the state.

Resistance, Conscience, and Consequences

The costs of the struggle appear in the treatment of religious dissenters. Cromwell fears that visiting James Bainham, imprisoned and awaiting execution after publicly professing his faith with Tyndale’s Bible, could give Thomas More ammunition against him. Bainham had recanted under pressure and been released, but his conscience would not let him remain silent; he returned to a crowded church with the Bible in his hand and spoke openly. The account does not reduce this conflict to an abstract difference between Rome and the crown. It shows a person caught between the threat of death and the inability to live with a recantation he does not believe.

The novel places that peril beside accusations that heretics may be tricked into confession, deprived of silence, tortured, or burned, and beside a report that a Commons group has spread the claim that supporters of the king’s divorce will be damned. Such arguments make the divorce a public test of religious allegiance, not merely a royal domestic matter. Yet the legal machinery of the royal cause also depends on persuasion and votes: Henry’s government identifies its opponents in Parliament, while More denies that a vote can settle spiritual jurisdiction. The conflict is thus fought through both coercion and competing claims to legitimate authority.

For the Papacy, the consequence is a gradual displacement rather than an uncomplicated disappearance. Royal control over Convocation and the review of church law, the effort to halt appeals to Rome, and the argument that Parliament authorizes the king collectively narrow the Pope’s place in English government. But Katherine continues to regard Rome as the proper court, and More maintains that spiritual jurisdiction cannot be transferred by statute. The institution’s narrative significance lies in this unresolved boundary: the crown can make laws and enforce obedience within England, but the novel keeps alive the question of whether political authority can make itself the final judge of religious truth and conscience.