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By Root 4080 0

become Protestant, it might perhaps be argued, if it had not been for the bishop. For Campeggio’s role in the king’s great matter was extraordinary. First, he had suggested that the illegitimate Duke of Richmond should marry his own half-sister Mary and inherit the crown – an idea, it seemed to many, more worthy of the Italian bishop’s contemporary Machiavelli. Then when Henry asked the pope to annul his marriage, and the embarrassed pope craftily turned the case over to Wolsey and Campeggio for trial it was Campeggio’s conduct that decided the outcome. It was a difficult situation. For at that moment, France and the Hapsburg emperor Charles, the queen’s nephew, were fighting for control of northern Italy. Charles was powerful: his dominions extended from Spain to the Netherlands. He had even held the pope captive for a time. If the pope granted the annulment he would be a laughing stock in Italy and anger Charles as well.

The subtle Bishop of Salisbury had known what to do. While Wolsey fretted and Henry grew more furious, he had prevaricated while he watched the situation in Italy. The Emperor Charles had won, the case was withdrawn to Rome and no annulment came. Henry’s patience had run out; Wolsey had fallen and the next year the King of England had started to withdraw his kingdom from the Church of Rome.

And if the Bishop of Salisbury had not prevaricated? Had he agreed to annul the marriage? Who can tell? Perhaps Sarum would be Roman Catholic still.

Shockley still trembled when he remembered the old king. When England left the Church of Rome, the constitution was, at least in theory, a more absolute rule than modern history has witnessed until the rise of the twentieth century totalitarian state. For by making himself – and all English monarchs since – the spiritual head of the English Church, Henry VIII became, in his own kingdom, both king and pope in one, a claim that no medieval monarch would ever have dreamed of. When brave men like his chancellor Thomas More protested, they were executed. His terrible and unpredictable power seemed to fall across England like a shadow. Anne Boleyn gave him a daughter, and was beheaded. Jane Seymour gave him a son at last, then died. Anne of Cleves was repudiated; Catherine Howard executed. Henry’s queens crossed the stage of history like victims going to a sacrifice.

But at Sarum, frightening as Henry was, life had not changed so much. For although the king had broken with Rome, he still showed himself to be a conservative Catholic at heart.

True, he had promoted men with Protestant leanings: the gentle and scholarly Archbishop Cranmer, who had given him his needed dispensation to marry Anne Boleyn; at Sarum, Boleyn’s former chaplain, Shaxton, was made bishop when Cardinal Campeggio was sent packing. But in nearby Winchester, Bishop Gardiner remained, sternly Catholic.

True, for a time, he had let the reformers make some changes. At Sarum, Shaxton good humouredly threw away a quantity of hairs, gobbets of wood, bullocks’ horns and other objects venerated as relics, and discouraged the people from kneeling to images of the saints and lighting candles. But later, seeing the Protestants becoming too strong, the king issued his famous Six Articles, whose orthodoxy was accompanied by such heavy penalties that Shaxton of Salisbury was forced to resign; and when he decided that priests should not be married, he even made poor Cranmer send his wife abroad.

For the church of Henry was Catholic in almost everything except acknowledging the authority of the pope. Indeed, on the great central question of Transubstantiation, Henry threatened anyone who denied it with burning – after all, had he not done so, then his new English Church and her priests would have been inferior to the Church of Rome.

Yet all the same, Sarum had changed – in two important respects.

The first was the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The minor houses had gone soonest. Edward Shockley remembered, as a boy, watching the men carrying two small crosses and items of furniture out of the Grey Friars’ old house