Free Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) by Sarah Woodbury Page B

saved the heretic?” Lili said.
    “No,” I said. “We left as quickly as we could.”
    “Was that wise?” she said.
    I laughed. “I don’t know. I wanted to let him stew a bit, to have him unsure of what I was thinking for a change. Besides, I couldn’t see talking to him after what happened.”
    Callum smiled. “David might have taken off his head.”
    “Deservedly so,” Lili said.
    I waved her closer, and when she obliged, I pulled her down to sit on my knee.
    Callum was standing with his arms folded across his chest, staring into the fire, not looking at us. “The religious issue is important to Boniface—genuinely so—but I think it is the third item that Boniface cares most about.”
    “I was wondering that myself,” I said. “Do you think he’s made a deal with Philip?”
    “From the bit Acquasparta let slip, I think he has to have,” Callum said. “He has no business involving himself in Aquitaine otherwise.”
    Not always, but often throughout the middle ages, the kings of France had held the ear of the pope far more than the kings of England. England was too independent, with an unruly barony overly concerned about its rights, and with a thriving mercantile class that grew larger and more influential every year and didn’t fit in well with the feudal system.
    In classic feudalism, the stratification of society was rigid with very little movement between classes. Sitting at the top of his personal pyramid was the king, with nobles below him, followed by knights. Merchants and craftsmen took up the next level, with peasants and serfs occupying the vast bottom class. This was a generalization, of course, and Boniface felt he should be sitting pretty above the king. Not all churchmen agreed, however, and certainly very few kings did. Especially English kings.
    Rather than accept such an arrangement, a little over two hundred years from now, King Henry VIII had made himself head of the Church in England, upending the social and religious order of his time and giving a huge boost to the nascent Protestant Reformation. Nobody but the few of us time travelers were even aware that such an act was possible. Certainly, it would never have occurred to this pope that I could declare myself the head of my own church. But I would rather follow in Henry’s footsteps than sacrifice a single one of my beliefs on the way to giving in to Boniface.
    I’d asked my mother about the exact words King Henry VIII had used the day he’d declared himself the head of a church, denying centuries of tradition. But as it turned out, Henry hadn’t. He hadn’t made a bold speech. He’d instituted a process, which began because he wanted to annul his marriage to one of his wives. Martin Luther had already nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Germany (Saxony at the time), detailing all that was wrong with the Church. And in England there was general unrest and resentment—dating back hundreds of years—against the way the Church was run.
    Over the course of the next five years, Henry worked with Parliament, getting them to pass act after act that increased his power over the Church and diminished the Church’s independence from the Crown. This culminated in 1534 with the Acts of Supremacy , which declared Henry the “supreme head … of the Church of England.”
    My Parliament wasn’t nearly as long-established as Henry’s, and the House of Commons was only four years old, not a couple of hundred years as in Henry’s day. I’d already asked them to revoke any previous laws that prevented Jews from living freely in England, and just last month, they’d agreed that a man’s religious beliefs should not subject him to sanction or punishment by the state or by the Church.
    If the Pope had heard about that, it was no wonder he’d sent Acquasparta to urge me back into line. I was pretty sure I could convince Parliament to stand with me again if I put my mind to it. There was a reason freedom of religion