Free Bloody Mary by Carolly Erickson

could he be certain that he was right and all those who had gone before him were wrong?
    Luther appeared to falter under the pressure of his examiners and the solemn weight of the occasion. He asked for time to prepare his reply. He went back to the freezing attic that was the only lodging he had beenable to find in the city and pondered whether he might have overstated his views. The next day he returned to face the Diet, convinced that he could alter none of what he had written. If he did not yield, the officials warned him, the only possible outcome would be bitter division and civil war throughout the German lands. But Luther was adamant. He had to follow scripture and his conscience, and no one else. Charles V left the room, unconvinced. Luther was outlawed, and left Worms in fear of his life. In the following year the first in a wave of bloody revolts that would devastate German society in the 1520s was under way.
    On the day the Diet of Worms ended Henry VIII’s secretary Richard Pace found the king in his chamber reading one of Luther’s works. It was his new treatise
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,
in which he argued that there ought to be only two sacraments, the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and not the seven defined by Rome. The treatise provided Henry with just the focus he needed for a project he had long had in mind. Since 1515 he had been at work on and off on a theological treatise of his own. Now he would turn it into an assault on Luther. The grateful pope would, he hoped, reward him by giving him another clause to add to his official title. A medieval pope had conferred on the line of French kings the title “Most Christian.” Henry wanted a similar designation for himself and his heirs.
    As a preliminary to his personal assault against Lutheran doctrines Henry and Wolsey planned a formal denunciation. The king was not able to preside in person—a tertian fever confined him to his bed—but the cardinal conducted the proceedings with impressive solemnity. He sat under a golden canopy on a platform in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, and his magnificence was awesome—worthy of the pope himself, in the view of one eyewitness. The proceedings were opened by John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, who spoke for some two hours to the assembled clergy, lay lords and commoners, praising Wolsey and announcing that Henry was at work on a theological refutation of Luther’s heresies. Wolsey then rose to promulgate the papal bull excommunicating Luther and cursed him and all his followers. To dramatize the condemnation he ordered quantities of Lutheran writings heaped up in the churchyard and set on fire, and the smoke from the burning books and pamphlets rose over the platform as he spoke. 1
    The elaborate denunciation of Luther was prompted, at least in part, by the embarrassing accuracy of his criticisms. The English church, like the German, was a highly imperfect vehicle of belief. Some clerics were pious and self-sacrificing, but many others disgraced their offices. They wore bright-colored clothing and silver girdles like laymen; they curled their hair like courtiers; wealthy bishops trapped their horses with costly furs and wore gold buttons and lacings on their caps. To meet a priestwas, in the words of one church critic, “to behold a peacock that spreadeth his tail when he danceth before the hen.” And while many parish priests were so poor they could barely feed themselves, some among the higher clergy were extravagantly wealthy. Ruthal, bishop of Durham and Wolsey’s chief factotum, carried about with him an inventory of his extensive lands and treasure, and Wolsey, easily the richest ecclesiastic in England, had a personal income larger than the king’s.
    Wolsey’s wealth came from another clerical vice condemned by Luther: pluralism. By church law every cleric could hold only one parish, deanery, diocese or archdiocese. In 1521, Wolsey held at least two such benefices—the archbishopric