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By Root 1178 0

with Bishop Fisher, that nattering busybody. He had always been irritating and interfering. My grandmother Beaufort and he had been “thick as thieves,” as the saying goes. On her deathbed she had ordered me to “obey Bishop Fisher in all things.” Ha! My days of obedience had ended, although she could have no inkling of that. I paid little heed to the cantankerous old theologian, and certainly never sought his advice. But this public preaching on my foreign policy ... it had to stop. I gave orders.

Everywhere the clergy were publicly debating, denouncing, and pronouncing. The German monk, Martin Luther, had even gone into print with three theological tracts: On the Liberty of a Christian Man; Address to the Nobility of the German Nation; On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God. The last one was a direct attack on the Church in general and the Pope in particular, claiming that the prophecies in Revelation, Chapter 17, had come true at last. (“And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.... And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.... And the angel said unto me ... I will tell thee of the mystery of the woman.... The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.... And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.”) It was obviously the city of Rome, on its seven hills, and the Pope, t;s beliefs to be heretical and dangerous. Taken as a whole, they led to anarchy. They also rebelled against Christ Himself, Who plainly set up the Church.

I believed the Church should be purified, not dismantled. And that is what I have done with the Church in England. It is simple! Why do people make the simple so complicated?

As for my support of the Papacy: my eyes had not yet been opened by my own Great Matter. When I wrote in 1521, I wrote in sincerity and to the extent of my spiritual knowledge at the time. That is all God asks of any man. That he later grows spiritually should not be held against him.

One of Luther’s heresies was in claiming that there were not seven Sacraments; that the Church (for mysterious, self-serving reasons of its own) had invented five of them. These five were Matrimony, Holy Orders, Penance, Extreme Unction, and Confirmation. Only Baptism and Communion remained. Under Luther’s interpretation, marriage was a legal contract; Holy Orders was unnecessary, for priests had no special powers; confession was something one did directly to God, not to a priest; Extreme Unction was a silly superstition; and Confirmation was a redundant version of Baptism. Christ had not performed any of them, therefore He could not have felt they aided in salvation.

I believed—no, I knew—that Luther was absolutely wrong. Each of these Sacraments conferred grace; I had felt it come upon me when receiving them. I also felt called to refute him, on paper, lest he lead more souls to their damnation.

I would find all Christ’s teachings on the matter, and those of every one of the doctors and fathers of the Church, from the very beginning up until today.

It proved to be a formidable task. For upwards of four hours a day I laboured on the work. It required a staggering knowledge of theology, I was soon to discover. I had prided myself on my knowledge of the Churchmen and early Fathers, but culling the exact text for a minute philosophical point was an Herculean labour. I began to feel I lived among the dead, concerned only with the obscure opinions of those long since gone to dust, whilst ignoring the living and their distressingly selfish concerns about wages and room allotments. What was real? I began not to know, and as I shuttled back and forth between two disparate worlds, I became disoriented.

In many ways I felt comfortable and