This menace did not bring Clement VII. to reason, and Henry at last took the step which involved a fatal breach with Rome. He appointed the pliant Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury, and bade him try the question of the divorce in an English ecclesiastical court, without any further application to Rome. Queen Catherine refused to appear before such a tribunal, and formally appealed to the Pope's justice. But Cranmer proceeded with the trial, declared the marriage contrary to the law of God, and pronounced the king free from all his ties and able to wed again. Even before the decision was announced, Henry had secretly married Anne Boleyn (January, 1533), and the moment that the court had given judgment he presented her to the nation as Queen of England. The unhappy Catherine retired into privacy at Kimbolton, where she survived nearly three years. [Sidenote: =Final rupture with the Pope.=] The Pope at once declared the new marriage illegal, and threatened Henry with an excommunication. Many good men were scandalized to see the king repudiate a wife who had lived as his faithful spouse for twenty years. Murmurings and prophecies of ill filled the air, and Henry felt that trouble was brewing. But he only hardened his heart, and caused Parliament to pass a bill for cutting short the Pope's spiritual authority over England, unless he should acknowledge the validity of the new marriage within three months. Clement refused to be bullied into compliance, and the rupture came (1533). [Sidenote: =Act of Supremacy.--More and Fisher executed.=] Queen Anne soon bore the king a daughter, the famous Queen Elizabeth, and Henry then ordered all his subjects to take an oath repudiating all obedience to papal orders, and acknowledging the child as rightful heiress of the realm, to the prejudice of his elder daughter Mary. This oath many persons refused to take, since it openly disavowed the Pope's authority over the English Church. The chief of them were Sir Thomas More, a learned and virtuous statesman who had succeeded Wolsey as Chancellor, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Henry cast them into prison, and soon after caused Parliament to pass the "Act of Supremacy," which declared him "Supreme Head of the Church of England," and pronounced any one who denied him this title guilty of high treason. Under this ferocious edict More and Fisher were beheaded, and many other minor personages suffered with them. [Sidenote: =Henry excommunicated and deposed.=] Pope Paul III., who had just succeeded to Pope Clement's tiara, now caused a Bull to be drawn up against his enemy (Dec. 15, 1535). He not only pronounced King Henry an excommunicated person, but declared him to be deposed from his throne. It was now war to the knife between the king and the papacy, and the rest of Henry's reign was to be taken up with the struggle. During the twelve years that he had still to live, he spent all his energies in severing every link that still bound England to Rome. FOOTNOTE: