and, and the refusal to avow Henry's hegemony over the Church in England on the other was the direct cause of More's fall. A close examination of the content of that refusal illustrates that, despite the high profile of the issue of the annulment and remarriage, the more serious question for More's political ethics and the political climate of England was the question of royal authority over the Church. To see why it is necessary to establish the context in which the issue of the refusal arose. Henry had married Catherine, his dead elder brother Arthur's wife, on papal dispensation, owing to a biblical prohibition of such a marriage. But the consequences of the original dispensation surfaced as a matter of state for Henry for the reason that Catherine had borne him no sons, only a daughter, Mary. He therefore wanted the pope to annul this marriage, thereby allowing him to marry his lover Anne Boleyn (Hayes, et al., 1967, pp. 360-3; Churchill, 1983, pp. 130-2).
Apart from spiritual considerations, this would have caused war between the Crown of Aragon (Spain) and England. Therefore, the pope delayed, "hoping, no doubt, that in the meantime the matter might resolve itself" (Hayes, et al., 1967, p. 362). The difficulty for Henry (and ultimately More) arose because the question of annulment, dispensation, and remarriage (a spiritual matter) was conflated with the question of the extent of royal discretion in matters of state. Impatient for a son, and reacting against what he considered "papal tyranny" over domestic political affairs, Henry took the indirect route. He did not deny the pope's authority to pronounce on spiritual matters.
What he did do was assert nationalistic jurisdiction over selected spiritual matters within a given state, by means of a series of acts of Parliament that were designed to discredit papal authority in England by legal means. Once the pope refused to annul the marriage to Catherine, Henry's thi...