The Pope had made some overtures of reconciliation; but as the first condition was the dismissal of Lady Anne, and the recall of queen Catherine, they necessarily remained without result. The brief which excommunicated at the same time the king and Anne Boleyn, was signed on the 15th of November, but without being immediately promulgated, Henry VIII. had drawn closer his alliance with Francis I. during an interview which they had at Calais, and the King of France had undertaken to intercede with the Pope for his ally; but Anne Boleyn had not waited so long to seal her victory. On the 25th of January, 1533, one of the chaplains of the king, Dr. Lee, was summoned to celebrate mass in a small chamber in Whitehall Palace; there he found the king, Anne Boleyn, two noblemen, and a lady. Henry commanded the astonished prelate to celebrate his marriage. It is related that the chaplain hesitated; but the king asserted that he had in his closet the authorization of the Pope. The ceremony being completed, the party dispersed in silence; the court of France alone was informed of the marriage, which Henry promised to keep secret until the month of May, in order to give time to Francis I. to use his influence with the Pope.
Meanwhile the Parliament, under the influence of Cromwell, had suppressed the "annats" or first-fruits, a considerable portion of the revenues paid to the Pope in Catholic countries; the authority of the clergy in convocation had been abolished and conferred upon the crown; Cranmer, with strange inconsistency, had recently accepted the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, not only of the king, but of the Pope, who had signed, on the 22nd of February, 1533, the bull which confirmed his election, and had sent him the pallium. The prelate had therefore made an oath of obedience to the pontiff which he counted upon violating, since he had been raised to this dignity with another object. The question of the divorce immediately took another flight; Parliament being assembled, voted the "Statute of Appeals," forbidding all recourse and appeal to Rome. At the same time, and by another act, the title of Queen of England was withdrawn from Catherine, who henceforth was to be called the Dowager Princess of Wales, in the character of widow of Prince Arthur. A court of the bishops was convoked on the 8th of May, at Dunstable, near Ampthill, where Catherine resided; she was called upon to appear there; but it was carefully concealed from her that the judgement was to be definitive. The queen did not appear, and was declared contumacious; during a fortnight the summons was repeated, then, on the 23rd of May, Cranmer solemnly declared the nullity of the marriage. On the 28th of May, he proclaimed the union already contracted between King Henry VIII. and the Lady Anne Boleyn, who was crowned at Westminster, with great pomp, on the 1st of June. The task was accomplished and the king had secured his wishes; he had worked unceasingly for this object during six years past.
The consequences were not long in manifesting themselves; on the 11th of June, the Pope annulled the sentence of Cranmer, and published the excommunication of Henry and Anne, not without contriving another possibility of reconciliation; the decree was only to be definitive in the month of September; in the interval an interview was being prepared between Clement VII. and Francis I. at Marseilles. But the conduct of Henry VIII. was hesitating and inconsistent; the English ambassadors admitted to the conference at Marseilles, had no power to negotiate. Francis I. demanded that the question of the divorce should be again laid before a consistory, from which the Imperialist cardinals should be excluded; but an emissary of the king of England, Bonner, who arrived on the day upon which the term fixed by Clement expired, solemnly appealed from the Pope to a general council. The negotiations were interrupted, and the interview had no other result than the fatal treaty of marriage between the Duke of Orleans, the son of the King of France, and Catherine of Medicis, the niece of the Pope. Being renewed for a moment at the instance of Francis I., but by a new turn of the wishes of King Henry, the relations were definitively broken off on the 23rd of May, 1534, by the solemn declaration of the Sacred College assembled in consistory, loudly affirming the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII. with Catherine of Aragon. The king was requested to recall to his court his legitimate wife. The daughter of Anne Boleyn, she who was one day to be Queen Elizabeth, was already six months old; she had been born on the 7th of September, to the great disappointment of her father, who upon the prophecies of all the astrologers had hoped for a son.
While the Pope was hurling from the Vatican his spiritual thunders, and before the news could have arrived in London, Parliament had completed the severing of the bonds which for so long a time had connected England with the court of Rome. All payments as well as all appeals to the Pope were interdicted; the king was recognized as the Supreme Head of the Church, he alone being entrusted to bestow the bishoprics or to decide ecclesiastical questions. The royal assent was given on the 30th of March to these acts, as well as to that which excluded from the succession to the throne, the Princess Mary, the daughter of Catharine of Aragon, as illegitimate, in favour of the children of Queen Anne. All the subjects of the crown of the age of discretion were to take the oath in favour of the new order of things; every word, deed, or pamphlet against the second marriage was placed among acts of high treason.
All these precautions and prohibitions did not prevent public opinion from being favourable to the repudiated wife. Two monks of the order of the Observants even dared to reprimand the king publicly; the popular movement encouraged the revelations of a young prophetess, Elizabeth Barton, who was called the "Holy maid of Kent," and who had hitherto predicted future events without danger to her person or her friends. She had numerous partisans, dupes or intriguers, and her rhapsodies soon bore upon State matters. She had been much opposed to the divorce, declaring that if the king should repudiate Catharine, he would die within seven months a shameful death, and would be replaced upon the throne by the Princess Mary. The prophecies were printed and published; Elizabeth Barton and a certain number of her partisans were arrested and compelled to confess their imposture, on a Sunday in November, 1533, at St. Paul's Cross. Since then they had remained in prison: but on the 25th of April, 1534, by order of Parliament, the holy maid of Kent, her confessor, and five other persons compromised in her cause, were executed and quartered at Tyburn. "I was but a poor woman without knowledge," said Elizabeth Barton while proceeding to execution, "but people persuaded me that I spoke through the Holy Ghost, which drew me into vanity and confusion of mind, for my ruin and that of the persons who are going to suffer with me."
These obscure victims did not suffice for the absolute power and despotic tyranny of Henry VIII. Everything had bent before his will, and the isolated opposition which he encountered in two illustrious persons astonished as much as it exasperated him. Sir Thomas More, formerly chancellor of England, and Fisher, bishop of Rochester, were called upon to take the oath of allegiance to the children born and to be born of Queen Anne. Neither had any objection to the political part of the oath; they willingly recognized the Princess Elizabeth as heiress to the the throne, to the exclusion of Mary; but neither one nor the other could consent to declare unlawful the marriage of Catharine of Aragon, nor to legitimatize that of Anne Boleyn. Both refused the oath, explaining their reasons with more or less tact and humility, and both were sent to the Tower. Fisher was seventy-five years of age; he was ill; he was denied medical assistance and clothing. Sir Thomas More was not alone in the world like the old prelate; his daughter, mistress Margaret Roper, ministered to his wants, while all classes of society, rich or poor, humble or great, frightened at the fate which awaited the two prisoners, unhesitatingly made the required oath, as modified by the king, and rendered more than ever adverse to the previous instructions of the clergy. At the same time, and as though for compensation, Henry VIII. caused the trial of "those people who are vulgarly called heretics," sending to the stake with indifference the Lollards, Lutherans, and Anabaptists, melancholy witnesses of the royal orthodoxy. Some monks who had refused to take the oath of supremacy were executed and quartered at Tyburn. Acts of Parliament succeeded each other, tending to make the king a kind of lay Pope, whose office it was to define and prosecute heresies, and assigning to the crown all the revenues formally collected by the court of Rome, while entrusting to the royal wisdom the care of foundling and supporting the ecclesiastical government which should seem suitable to him. Amidst the general adulation, Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher were shortly to suffer for their courageous resistance.
The old prelate was accused of having "maliciously and treasonably affirmed that in spiritual matters the king could not be the Head of the Church." The new Pope, Paul III., had recently sent him a cardinal's hat. "Ah!" cried Henry, angrily, "I will take care that he shall not have a head to wear it," and the bishop, being condemned as a traitor, was beheaded on the 22nd of June, 1535. His head was placed upon London Bridge, turned in the direction of the diocese where he left so many to regret his loss, and his body, being first exposed to the sight of the people, was thrown without a coffin into an obscure grave. The trial of Sir Thomas More, more prolonged, produced the same result. Often timid, sometimes inconsistent in his conduct, More had arrived at a point at which a man of honour, and a Christian no longer listens to aught but to the voice of his conscience. The long months of his captivity had ruined his health, whitened his hair, and bent his form; but his soul remained firm, and his eloquence before the servile tribunal appointed to try him still caused the docile instrument of the king to shudder. More had been deprived of all his books; the means of writing had been taken from him; his farewell to his daughter was traced with a piece of charcoal upon a paper which he had secretly procured; but before losing his pen, he had written this touching proof of gentle firmness: "I am the faithful subject of the king, and every day his interceder. I pray for his Majesty, for his, and for all the kingdom. I do no wrong, I say no wrong, I think no wrong; if that is not sufficient to preserve the life of a man, I have no wish to live. I have been dying since I came to this place; I have several times been at the point of death; and thanks be to our Lord, I did not regret it, but rather I grieved to see my suffering abate. Thus my poor body is at the mercy of the king. Might it please God that my death should do him some good!" Before the council, More replied to offers of pardon by the assurance that he had done nothing against the marriage with Anne Boleyn. Although he disapproved of the step he had never spoken of it but to the king himself; he had even contented himself with preserving silence upon the new title of the king as Supreme Head of the Church; now silence did not constitute treason. His accusers desired to produce witnesses to the contrary, but they failed in their undertaking, and the judges were compelled to declare silence to be treason. More, was condemned. He no longer persevered in silence, and loudly declared that the new oath of supremacy was unlawful. He was led from the hall with the edge of the axe turned towards him; his son threw himself in his path, to ask for his blessing. On approaching the Tower, he perceived his well-beloved daughter, Margaret Roper; she opened up a passage for herself between the guards, and threw herself upon his neck, weeping. Twice she retraced her steps, and could not possibly be driven from that loved father whose head she afterwards carried away from the coffin. The bitterness of death had passed for Sir Thomas More after this separation; upon the scaffold he appeared to have regained something of that caustic gaiety which had formerly placed him in favour with the king. When he learnt that Henry VIII., had commuted the horrible sentence of traitors into the penalty of decapitation, he smiled sweetly. "May God preserve all my friends from royal favours," he exclaimed. He tottered upon the steps of the scaffold. "Assist me to ascend, Master Lieutenant," he said, "I shall easily descend without aid." He was not permitted to speak to those present. "I die a faithful subject and a true Catholic," he said simply; then thrusting aside his beard, he said to the executioner, "My beard has not committed any treason." His head fell on the 6th of July, 1535, to the indignation of all Europe. "I learn that your master has put to death his faithful servant, his good and wise councillor, Sir Thomas More," said the emperor to Sir Thomas Elliot, the English ambassador. "I have not heard it, sire," replied Elliot. "It is true, nevertheless," replied Charles V., "and let me tell you that if we had been master of such a servant, of whose merit we have had experience for so many years past, we would rather have lost our best city than so worthy a councillor."