Thomas Cranmer’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury is presented as both a costly ecclesiastical ceremony and a decisive transfer of jurisdiction: the new archbishop is to judge Henry VIII’s marriage case at home, while the Crown still needs papal bulls to install him. The contradiction captures the moment’s political logic. England is not yet wholly severed from Rome, but the machinery for making the king’s will effective within the realm is already being assembled.

The Appointment and Its Immediate Purpose

Cranmer returns from diplomatic service abroad to take up the office intended for him by Henry VIII. At dinner in Cannon Row, shortly before he can move into Lambeth Palace, he and Thomas Cromwell discuss the king’s marriage and the legal work awaiting the new archbishop. Cromwell says that Anne Boleyn is already having a child; Cranmer responds that, as the marriage is legitimate, God may bless it with an heir. The expectation of a child gives the appointment an immediate dynastic stake, but Cranmer’s office also has a direct legal purpose: after Easter, an appeal to the Pope in the king’s case will be unlawful, and Canterbury’s own courts can decide it.

Cranmer’s appointment is therefore not merely an honour. It places the judgment of Henry’s marriage within an English jurisdiction, where the king’s cause can proceed without awaiting a Roman decision. Cromwell recognizes that the matter has been long in coming; the archbishop’s elevation makes a domestic forum available for a dispute that had been entangled with papal authority.

Papal Bulls, Royal Finance, and the Cost of Legitimacy

The transition is incomplete when the appointment is arranged. Because England’s separation from the Vatican has not yet been finished, the Crown cannot install a new archbishop without the Pope’s appointment bulls. English delegates in Rome are authorized to promise what is necessary to secure Clement VII’s agreement. Henry complains at the cost of the bulls and the installation, while insisting that the ceremony must be done properly, with nothing omitted or withheld.

Cromwell answers that, if the matter rests with him, this will be the last money the king sends to Rome. Cranmer has no money of his own to contribute, so Cromwell borrows the required sum on the Crown’s behalf from a wealthy Genovese, Salvago. To persuade Salvago to lend, he sends him an engraving he knows he covets: a young man holds a book shaped like a heart beneath an empty window. The image serves a practical financial purpose, while the loan helps make the appointment possible. The new authority is built through both ecclesiastical procedure and the Crown’s credit.

Cranmer’s Work and the Marriage Case

The appointment puts Cranmer at the center of the king’s legal argument. He sits on committees in Westminster and writes for Henry that even if Arthur’s marriage to Katherine was not consummated, the intention to marry created affinity; he further argues that their intention to have children matters to the case. Committee members imagine possible circumstances of consummation in order to support the competing claims without making either Henry or Katherine a liar. The narration emphasizes the bodily indignities hidden beneath this abstract legal reasoning: Cranmer’s formal description of Katherine as the most serene queen stands apart from the committee’s speculation about her private life.

Katherine refuses to accept Cranmer as a legitimate judge. At Ampthill, she tells Cromwell that she will not attend the court at Dunstable because her case remains at Rome. She calls Cranmer a heretic, while Cromwell urges her not to close every possibility of reconciliation. Her refusal makes plain that an appointment can establish an office within the new order without winning the former queen’s recognition of its jurisdiction. The conflict is not only over the marriage’s validity, but over which court—and which religious authority—can decide it.

Public Authority and the Unfinished Break with Rome

When Eustace Chapuys challenges Cranmer’s conclusions, Henry calls him “my archbishop,” underscoring that the appointment has become a claim of royal authority as well as an ecclesiastical fact. Henry rejects the word dispensation and insists that the Pope cannot make incest licit. He presents his pursuit of a new marriage as a duty to secure a son for the country, and his argument turns the marriage dispute into a question of dynastic survival and national government.

The appointment’s wider constitutional meaning is made explicit in Cromwell’s discussion with the king of Marsiglio of Padua. Christ, Cromwell argues, did not give the Pope or priests the right to rule, make laws, or levy taxes; secular government belongs to the prince, whose kingship derives through Parliament. Henry listens, and the discussion extends from jurisdiction over marriage to the church’s property and political power. Cranmer’s appointment thus sits within a larger effort to make the English Crown, rather than Rome, the final authority in English affairs. Its formal dependence on papal bulls exposes the incompleteness of the break; its intended role in deciding the king’s case shows the direction in which that break is moving.