Henry Viii Of England Quotes

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.

Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money.

Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.

In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that ‘queen Katherine is the true queen of England

The credulity of crowds is never-ending.

Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman. During his lifetime he earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar and occupied many public offices, including that of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516. He is chiefly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be supreme head of the Church of England, a decision which ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, More was canonized in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen. He shares his feast day, June 22 on the Catholic calendar of saints, with Saint John Fisher, the only Bishop during the English Reformation to maintain his allegiance to the Pope. More was added to the Anglican Churches' calendar of saints in 1980. Source: Wikipedia

a leading humanist scholar and occupied many public offices, including that of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516. He is chiefly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be supreme head of the Church of England, a decision which ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, More was canonized in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen

News of the death of James V on 14 December gave even further cause for rejoicing, because his heir was a week-old girl, the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. Scotland would be subject to yet another weakening regency—it had endured six during the past 150 years—and should give no further trouble.

worshipped was that of Mammon. It is difficult to estimate the size of monastic occupation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land, but it may be safe to presume that the monks controlled one sixth of English territory.

Since arriving in England, Katherine had come to know a freedom she had never dreamed of in Spain, where young women were kept in seclusion and forced to live almost like cloistered nuns. They wore clothes that camouflaged their bodies and veiled their faces in public. Etiquette at the Spanish court was rigid, and even smiling was frowned upon. But in England, unmarried women enjoyed much more freedom: their gowns were designed to attract, and when they were introduced to gentlemen they kissed them full upon the lips in greeting. They sang and danced when they pleased, went out in public as the fancy took them, and laughed when they felt merry.

Henry VIII, for example, who was king of England from 1509 to 1547, ended his days surrounded by a great many young people for the simple reason that he’d had most of his old courtiers exiled or executed. Between the years 1532 and 1540 alone, Henry ordered 330 political executions, probably more than any other ruler in British history. If you worked for Henry VIII, then you really didn’t need to worry about putting money into your pension fund as you probably wouldn’t live long enough to spend it.

(Demanding interest on loans was not permitted anywhere in Europe until 1545, when Henry VIII legalised it in England.)

Indeed, no sultan or Muslim ruler in Islamic history ever kneeled to ask forgiveness before a grand mufti in the way that Henry IV was forced to do before the pope in 1077 in Canossa for challenging papal authority on some key secular matters. Henry VIII of England had to break with Rome entirely simply to secure the divorce he sought from his wife. Thus, intimate linkage between religious and state power marked most of Christian history in a way that has had no parallel in Islam.

Marriage, despite the ability of King Henry VIII to achieve divorce twice, and the fact that clergymen could marry after the English Reformation, remained for life. Divorce was frowned upon and incredibly difficult to achieve in Protestant England.

The Commons then made their customary request for freedom of speech as well as liberty from arrest. She granted the request with the significant comment that 'wit and speech were calculated to do harm, and their liberty of speech extended no further than "ay" or "no".

the ballad written hundreds of years ago in England told of heartbreak experienced then, and now, in Sophie’s own heart. It was universal, being cast away; it surpassed time and space. It was said that Henry VIII composed the song for Anne Boleyn. Another discarded wife.

The whore or the saint: these seemed to be the prototypes set up by the Church's historic misogyny. But was there no alternative model to follow? Yes, for Anne had seen for herself that it was possible to be an independent thinker, set free from the pattern of sinful Eve or patient Griselda. She had been in the company of clever, strong-willed women like the Regent Margaret of Austria and Margaret of Navarre. The influence of evangelism had enabled women of character to take an alternative path, one that offered Anne Boleyn a different future.

Three portraits by Hans Holbein have for generations dictated the imagery of the epoch. The first shows King Henry VIII in all his swollen arrogance and finery. The second gives us Sir Thomas More, the ascetic scholar who seems willing to lay his life on a matter of principle. The third captures King Henry’s enforcer Sir Thomas Cromwell, a sallow and saturnine fellow calloused by the exercise of worldly power. The genius of Mantel’s prose lies in her reworking of this aesthetic: Look again at His Majesty and see if you do not detect something spoiled, effeminate, and insecure. Now scrutinize the face of More and notice the frigid, snobbish fanaticism that holds his dignity in place. As for Cromwell, this may be the visage of a ruthless bureaucrat, but it is the look of a man who has learned the hard way that books must be balanced, accounts settled, and zeal held firmly in check. By the end of the contest, there will be the beginnings of a serious country called England, which can debate temporal and spiritual affairs in its own language and which will vanquish Spain and give birth to Shakespeare and Marlowe and Milton.

Of special significance was the action of Henry VIII of England. Not content with ordering Luther s writings to be publicly burned in London, he also turned theologian and wrote a book of 78 quarto pages dedicated to the pope, denouncing Luther and defending the Catholic positions on the sacraments. Henry's book so pleased the pope that he issued a special bull declaring that it was written with the help of the Holy Spirit, granting an indulgence of ten years to everyone who would read it, and bestowing upon Henry and his successors the title 'Defender of the Faith.

Henric a fost un individ complex, impulsiv si schimbator, care se pricepea sa ii deruteze pe cei din jur atunci cand incercau sa afle motivele pentru care facea un lucru sau altul. In plus, este greu de crezut ca el insusi era suficient de lucid pentru a intelege de ce facea ceea ce facea.

Then it all came together—every particle of discontent, nostalgia, and resistance in England—fusing in the North. The North: two words to describe a territory and a state of mind. England was conquered and civilized from the South upwards, and as one approached the borders of Scotland—first through Yorkshire and then Durham and finally Northumberland—everything dwindled. The great forests gave way first to stunted trees and then to open, windswept moors; the towns shrank to villages and then to hamlets; cultivated fields were replaced by empty, wild spaces. Here the Cistercian monasteries flourished, they who removed themselves from the centers of civilization and relied on manual labour as a route to holiness. The sheep became scrawnier and their wool thicker, and the men became lawless and more secretive, clannish. Winter lasted eight months and even the summers were grey and raw, leading Northumberland men to claim they had “two winters—a white one and a green one.” Since ancient times these peripheral lands had gone their own way, little connected to anything further south. A few great warrior families—the Percys, the Nevilles, the Stanleys—had claimed overlordship of these dreary, cruel wastes, and through them, the Crown had demanded obeisance. But

I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman,” she told her troops as the Spanish Armada sailed for home in 1588, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” Relishing opposites, the queen was constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination—a requirement for pivoting—never to be pinned down. 38 Her hopes for religion reflected this. Knowing the upheavals her country had undergone—Henry VIII’s expulsion of the pope from English Catholicism, the shift to strict Protestantism in Edward VI’s brief reign, the harsh reversion to Rome under Mary—Elizabeth wanted a single church with multiple ways of worship. There was, she pointed out, “only one Jesus Christ.” Why couldn’t there be different paths to Him? Theological quarrels were “trifles,” or, more tartly, “ropes of sand or sea-slime leading to the Moon.” 39 Until they affected national sovereignty. God’s church, under Elizabeth, would be staunchly English: whether “Catholic” or “Protestant” mattered less than loyalty. This was, in one sense, toleration, for the new queen cared little what her subjects believed. She would watch like a hawk, though, what they did. “Her Majesty seems to me incomparably more feared than her sister,” Feria warned Philip—which was saying something since that lady had been “bloody” Mary. “We have lost a kingdom,

Monday, September 17, 1945 We all drove to the airfield in the morning to see Gay and Murnane off in the C-47 /belonging to the Army. Then General Eisenhower and I drove to Munich where we inspected in conjunction with Colonel Dalferes a Baltic displaced persons camp. The Baltic people are the best of the displaced persons and the camp was extremely clean in all respects. Many of the people were in costume and did some folk dances and athletic contest for our benefit. We were both, I think, very much pleased with conditions here. The camp was situated in an old German regular army barracks and they were using German field kitchens for cooking. From the Baltic camp, we drove for about 45 minutes to a Jewish camp in the area of the XX Corps. This camp was established in what had been a German hospital. The buildings were therefore in a good state of repair when the Jews arrived but were in a bad state of repair when we arrived, because these Jewish DP's, or at least a majority of them, have no sense of human relationships. They decline, when practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relive themselves on the floor. The hospital which we investigated was fairly good. They also had a number of sewing machines and cobbler instruments which they had collected, but since they had not collected the necessary parts, they had least fifty sewing machines they could not use, and which could not be used by anyone else because they were holding them. This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large wooden building which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about half way up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England, and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General. A copy of Talmud, I think it is called, written on a sheet and rolled around a stick, was carried by one of the attending physicians. First, a Jewish civilian made a very long speech which nobody seemed inclined to translate. Then General Eisenhower mounted the platform and I went up behind him and he made a short and excellent speech, which was translated paragraph by paragraph. The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted, and actually about three hours later, lost my lunch as the result of remembering it. From here we went to the Headquarters of the XX Corps, where General Craig gave us an excellent lunch which I, however, was unable to partake of, owing to my nausea.

The branch of *Protestantism associated with the Church of England, beginning with Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy (1534), which officially launched the *English Reformation. During the reign of Elizabeth I, ministers such as John Jewel and Richard Hooker wrote important defenses of the Church of England, forging a middle way between Catholicism and the continental Reformation. Through

many of those still loyal to the Roman Catholic Church regarded her as Henry VIII’s only legitimate child since they considered his first divorce invalid and his subsequent children illegitimate as a result. The same view was held by many Catholic rulers on the continent; with Protestantism on the rise, they would have liked to see a staunch Catholic ruling England.

Unfortunately for Henry, Pope Clement VII was at the time imprisoned and under the direct control of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was Queen Catherine’s nephew and unsurprisingly was ardently opposed to Henry’s attempt to dissolve the marriage with his aunt. Henry was now compelled to ask Wolsey to effectuate a solution, and Wolsey obliged by convening an ecclesiastical court to resolve the annulment question. It remains unlikely that the papal legate ever was empowered by the Vatican to grant the annulment. The Pope rejected the authority of such a court to grant Henry his annulment and ruled that a decision would be given only in Rome, where Henry’s hand-picked jury could not pre-ordain a result in his favor. But before the Pope issued such a decision, Queen Catherine’s polite, respectful, formidable and defiant plea before the court secured for itself a place in the legends.  She played deftly the part of a woman wronged and scorned by a philandering, lying husband. It also earned Catherine permanent isolation from the King and her daughter Mary. Henry VIII’s means of extortion were that only if Catherine would accept that her marriage to the King was invalid, she might regain her access to Mary and vice versa. Both refused. Catherine died in 1536, probably of cancer.

England may have never come to exist were it not for this one man, and it is with good reason that Alfred is the only English king to be known as “the Great.”2 He fought off the Danes; he unified England (well, sort of); he helped found a common law for everyone; he built towns for the first time since the Romans left; he introduced a navy; and most of all, he encouraged education and the arts in a country just emerging from centuries of illiteracy. Having learned to read in adulthood, King Alfred personally translated Latin texts into English and was the only king to write anything before Henry VIII, and the only European ruler between the second and thirteenth centuries to write on the philosophy of kingship.

From Switzerland in the south, throughout central Europe and Germany, and as far north and west as England, where Henry VIII burned a dozen Anabaptists at the stake, thousands of men and women were subjected to the most terrible persecution. Many of the more moderate leaders who abjured violence were martyred, leaving a gap in the leadership that was often filled by men of little education but much passion.

I spent what seemed like hours listening to the mind-numbing details of life in Tudor England. The only fact that stays with me is King Henry VIII was definitely a serial killer. Several headless queens can vouch for that.

Sadly, I know more about the War of the Roses in medieval England and Henry VIII and his six wives than I do about Korean history, especially in the twentieth century. I have been colonized by the white gaze, white standards, white expectations.

(Henry VIII became king of England in 1509, Francois I became king of France in 1515,

From that day on there existed an animosity between the Britons (Welsh) and the papacy that was to ferment throughout the early to late Middle Ages, only to culminate in the eventual expulsion of the papal authority from the realm of England under King Henry VIII, who was significantly himself of Welsh Tudor stock.

She was only 24 years old when a crown was placed on her head, signifying the start of her reign as queen. Her father, Henry VIII, had served as king in a tumultuous rule that saw the beheading of not only Elizabeth’s mother, but of another of his wives as well. When Elizabeth attained her rightful place as queen, following the death of her half-sister, Queen Mary I, she made a purposeful decision to remain single. Despite multiple efforts by advisors from within and royal leaders from without to connect her in a marriage of political convenience, Elizabeth stood her ground. In fact, one time when Parliament was pushing yet again to persuade her to marry and bear an heir to the throne, Elizabeth replied in a stately manner, “I have already joined myself in marriage to a husband, namely, the kingdom of England.” Well aware of her personal convictions, power, and influence, and how those might be jeopardized by marriage, Elizabeth embraced not only her singleness, but also her celibacy. She is recorded as having said to Parliament, “It would please me best if, at the last, a marble stone shall record that this queen, having lived such and such a time, lived and died a virgin.

Coffee has long been a subject of controversy for humanity. King Charles II of England, Murad IV of the Ottoman Empire, and even Henry Ford have sought to banish coffee from their empires and enterprises, while Pope Clement VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, and President John Adams championed the beverage.

Wolsey and Henry VIII, it has to be said, were not exceptional in their love of the table. The English of Tudor times had a reputation throughout Europe for gluttony. Indeed, overeating was regarded as the English vice in the same way that lust was the French one and drunkenness that of the Germans (although looking at the amount of alcohol consumed in England, I expect the English probably ran a close second to the Germans).

By the middle of Henry VIII's reign, the white meats — that is, dairy products — were considered common fare and people from all classes would eat meat whenever they could get it.

I think that all of them must have lost their minds and have forgotten everything we were to each other. I said that they were no sisters to me, that I would forget them. But they have gone further than this: they have become my enemies.

It is important to understand this period of Irish rebellion, not least because of the light it throws on events in Ireland ever since. England persists in occupying and claiming dominion over Irish soil, and the Catholics of Ulster continue to resist. It may seem that the policies of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth are quaint echoes of the past, but the spirit of courage and defiance that animated rebels such as Hugh O’Neill and Grace O’Malley still lives in countless Irish hearts today.

Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour’s death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe—Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise.

The church, so long a brake on progress in other European countries, no longer controlled the economic life of the country. Henry VIII, monarch from 1509 until his death in 1547, had set in train a process which was drastically to curtail the power of the church. The Catholic Church had owned as much as 33% of the land of England; Henry confiscated this land, selling most to the aristocracy. The economic power of the church was destroyed. The legal power of the Catholic Church similarly was terminated. Henry established a protestant church, the Church of England, which became the leading religion. The monarch remained head of the Church of England but Parliament was separate legally from the Church. The Civil War and the Glorious Revolution were in part about religion; the constitutional outcome to these events included the separation of church and state.

While Henry VIII is widely credited with founding the Church of England, and thus establishing the Protestant faith in England, Henry was not a Protestant. His break with Rome was political in both motivation and intention, meant to free him from the authority of the Pope and give him control of the church hierarchy in England, but from a doctrinal standpoint, Henry remained quite Catholic.

The dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII and the subsequent reorganization of agriculture was another step that altered the balance of power in rural England. The slow growth in the real incomes of the English peasantry before the beginning of the industrial era was a consequence of this type of drift.

As they consolidated their conquest, the sovereigns summoned Colón to Málaga. The Talavera commission’s conclusion did not surprise them but, as King João, they were reluctant to dismiss him entirely. Castile’s opportunities for overseas expansion were limited and, if they dismissed him, Colón might sail for another sovereign, including Henry VII of England, Charles VIII of France, or even João.

Renard was obliged to report ruefully to his master that the laws of England were so unsatisfactory that it was impossible to have people executed unless they had previously been proved guilty.

In the course of history, kings have welcomed more and more people to their courts, which became more and more brilliant. Is it not obvious that these courtiers and the "officers" were stolen from the feudal lords, who just lost at one fell swoop, their retinues and their administrators? The modern state nourishes a vast bureaucracy. Is not the corresponding decline in the staff of the employer patent to all? Putting the mass of the people to productive work makes possible at any given moment of technical advance the existence of a given number of non-producers. These non-producers will either be dispersed in a number of packets or concentrated in one immense body, according as the profits of productive work accrue to the social or to the political authorities. The requirement of Power, its tendency and its raison d'etre, is to concentrate them in its own service. To this task, it brings us so much ardour, instinctive rather than designed that in course of time it does to a natural death the social order which gave it birth. This tendency is due not to the form taken by any particular state but to the inner essence of Power, which is the inevitable assailant of the social authorities and sucks the very lifeblood. And the more vigorous a particular power is a more virile it is to the role of vampire. When it falls to weak hand, which gives aristocratic resistance a chance to organize itself, the state's revolutionary nature becomes for the time being effaced. This happens either because the forces of aristocracy opposed to the now enfeebled statocratic onslaught a barrier capable of checking it, or, more frequently, because they put a guard on their assailant, by laying hands on the apparatus which endangers them; they guarantee their own survival by installing themselves in the seat of government. This is exactly what did happen to the two epochs when the ideas of Montesquieu and Marx took shape. The counter-offensive of the social authorities cannot be understood unless it is realized that the process of destroying aristocracy goes hand in hand with a tendency in the opposite sense. The mighty are put down - if they are independent of the state; but simultaneously, a statocrcy is exalted, and the new statocrats do more than lay a collective hand on the social forces - they laid them on the lay them each his own hand; in this way, they divert them from Power and restore them again to society, in which thereafter the statocrats join forces, by reason of the similarity of their situations and interests, with the ancient aristocracies in retreat. Moreover, the statocratic acids, in so far as they break down the aristocratic molecules, do not make away with all the forces which they liberate. Part of them stays unappropriated, and furnishes new captains of society with the personnel necessary to the construction of new principates. In this way, the fission of the feudal cell at the height of the Middle Ages released the labour on which the merchant-drapers rose to wealth and political importance. So also in England, with a greed of Henry VIII had fallen on the ecclesiastical authorities to get from their wealth, the wherewithal to carry out his policies, the greater part of the monastic spoils, stuck to the fingers of hands, which had been held out to receive them. These spoils founded the fortunes of the nascent English capitalism. In this way, new hives are forever being built, in which lie hidden a new sort of energies; these will in time inspire the state to fresh orgies of covetousness. That is why the statocratic aggression seemed never to reach its logical conclusion - the complete atomization of society, which should contain henceforward nothing but isolated individuals whom the state alone rules and exploits.

The War of the Roses had begun. For over thirty years, the Lancaster and York families battled each other for the throne of England. The name of the war is a poetic reference to the emblems of both parties: the red rose of the Lancasters and the white rose of the Yorks.

Henry VIII was famous not only for his six marriages but also for his mistresses. He flaunted Bessie Blount and others, including Mary Boleyn, his mistress of the early 1520s, openly at court. It was not, of course, acceptable for a woman to take a lover.

The White Falcon by Stewart Stafford Trampled pomegranate underfoot, Fervent ascent of anatine steps, To the alabaster falcon's chamber, Viperine slither as a king's retinue. Roman breakage for a concubine, Stillbirths piled on a spiral staircase, Skewered tongues spitting smears, Spurious sparks fanned to an inferno. Denounced in the toxic public mind, Cast into a wolf pit by kangaroo court, Blood money to the Gallic executioner, Her headless ghost in a centuries' limbo. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

Fear of unwanted pregnancy existed in all classes of people. Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, was famously reported to have said ‘a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself.

Courtly love enjoyed a revival at Henry VIII’s court. Look but touch not the Lady. Courtly love may even have contributed to Queen Anne Boleyn’s undoing since she played the game of love too well.

Henry VIII frequently took baths and had a new bathhouse constructed at Hampton Court for his personal use as well as a steam bath at Richmond palace. This new bath was made of wood but lined with a linen sheet to protect his posterior from catching splinters.

Both Francis I and Henry VIII were avid mirror collectors and vain monarchs, and always competitive. During their meeting on the Cloth of Gold in 1521 a parade of wealth was displayed to ensure an alliance between France and England (and England’s safety). A later painting of this majestic occasion shows the two kings holding gloves, wearing flat caps decorated with feathers, badges and buttons, with parures – jewellery that matched their clothing. Henry’s codpiece is outlined by the rings on his index finger pointing towards it.

> *where Anne Boleyn had been executed.* > > …*The stones beneath the altar were prised up. Jane Boleyn and Catherine Howard were buried quickly next to the mouldering remains of Lady Salisbury, Thomas More, Jane’s husband, and another queen of England…. The few attendees walked out of the little church into the courtyard, where the scaffold still stood. The body of Catherine Howard was left to a vast silence. In all probability, she had not yet reached her twenty-first birthday.

I'ma get medieval on your ass

Weddings usually followed a month after the betrothal. The priest called banns three times to ensure there was no reason why the couple could not marry. A bride would be dressed in her best clothes, not necessarily white and often crimson or green. White only became popular for wedding gowns during the nineteenth century. The following description of a Tudor wedding is based on a novel written by Thomas Deloney called The Pleasant Historie of Jack Newbery.15 Written during the late sixteenth century, it tells of Jack’s second wedding during Henry VIII’s reign. He says that the bride was led to the church between two young boys who had bride-laces and rosemary tied on their silken sleeves. A bride-cup of silver and gilt hung with colourful silk ribbons was carried before her holding a posy of rosemary. Musicians led the procession. Maidens followed carrying bride cakes. Other maidens carried garlands of wheat.16

a revised version of the Book of Common Prayer was authorised, which was to form the basis of the present Anglican liturgy; it was heavily influenced by the teachings of the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, whom the King much admired. Meanwhile, numerous

73. Cromwell’s love of all things Italian was highly unusual for a Londoner. Andreas Franciscius had been aghast to discover on his visit to the capital that its inhabitants ‘not only despise the way in which Italians live, but actually curse them with uncontrolled hatred’. This was corroborated by another Italian visitor of the period: ‘The English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world than England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say that “he looks like an Englishman” … They have a great antipathy to foreigners, and imagine that they never come into their island, but to make themselves master of it, and to usurp their goods.

England's King Henry VIII initially opposed Luther, but he rejected Catholicism in 1534 after the pope refused to allow him to divorce his wife, Catherine ofAragon.

In Protestant countries, the Reformation removed the anointing (and the excommunicating) of secular rulers from the jurisdiction of Rome. The doctrine of the divine right of kings was invented to enable kings to be anointed by bishops they had themselves appointed, rather than by appointees of the Pope. The interests of national kings and their peoples were certainly closer than those of popes or emperors. But however much the interest of kings and their peoples might seem close at a time of national peril—as at the time of the Spanish Armada—at other times they might be in the harshest conflict, with ensuing revolutions and civil wars. The national Church of England, established by Henry VIII's break with Rome, had as its most fundamental doctrine that of passive obedience to the king, under all circumstances and at any cost. But such a doctrine could not survive the contingency of the King himself becoming Catholic. In the Glorious Revolution of 1689, the Church of England itself was converted from the divine right of kings to popular sovereignty, exercised in and through the Parliament.

The Reformation became notorious for two fat men. The first, Martin Luther, we have already met. The second, King Henry VIII of England.

Jack Horner was the last steward of Glastonbury Abbey, and that he was sent to Henry VIII to offer him the deeds to ten manors as a peace offering. The deeds were hidden inside a pie in case of highwaymen, until Jack put in his thumb and pulled out ‘the plumb’ for himself - Mells Manor.

Francis asked his sister Margaret, Duchess of Alençon, to do the honours in her place, but she flatly refused to meet ‘the King of England’s whore’.