The purpose of this research is to examine why Thomas More, chancellor of England at the time of Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn, refused to support Henry's request for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and remarriage to Boleyn. The plan of the research will be to set forth the essential elements of the conflict, including the issues that confronted the major players, and then to discuss, with reference to the text of contemporaneous documents of church and state, More's position as articulated in them and in More's public and private correspondence.
The essential elements of the conflict over More's refusal to support the annulment can be seen in the wide context of conflicting spiritual and political priorities that dominated Europe during the Renaissance, and in the narrower context of More's private struggle over the moral authority of the church versus Henry's claim to the legitimacy and authority of his monarchy over spiritual matters within the confines of the monarchy. The interplay and conflict of church and state, as the term is now framed, surfaced over the claims for authority over the same issue. The presumptive inviolability of marriage as an article of faith was one aspect of this. However, the case of royal marriages were complicated. By custom and practice, royal persons might marry members of the nobility or among persons of their exclusive station. But if they chose the latter, marriage inevitably became a matter of both international politics (there being only one royal house to a country) and more standard nuptial praxis. Thus trouble with a royal marriage implied a tension between political and moral spheres, not only for the marriage partners but also for the various institutions to which they were attached, individually and severally.
More's refusal to avow the legitimacy of Henry's annulment of marriage to Catherine of Aragon and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn on one h...