The piteous appeal was wasted on a king who was already entertaining
Anne Boleyn with royal state in his own palace; the trial proceeded, and
on July 23d the court assembled to pronounce sentence. Henry's hopes
were at their highest when they were suddenly dashed to the ground. At
the opening of the proceedings Campeggio rose to declare the court
adjourned to the following October. The adjournment was a mere evasion.
The pressure of the imperialists had at last forced Clement to summon
the cause to his own tribunal at Rome, and the jurisdiction of the
legates was at an end.
"Now see I," cried the Duke of Suffolk as he dashed his hand on the
table, "that the old saw is true, that there was never legate or
cardinal that did good to England!" The Duke only echoed his master's
wrath. Through the twenty years of his reign Henry had known nothing of
opposition to his will. His imperious temper had chafed at the weary
negotiations, the subterfuges and perfidies of the Pope. Though the
commission was his own device, his pride must have been sorely galled by
the summons to the legates' court. The warmest adherents of the older
faith revolted against the degradation of the Crown. "It was the
strangest and newest sight and device," says Cavendish, "that ever we
read or heard of in any history or chronicle in any region that a king
and queen should be convented and constrained by process compellatory to
appear in any court as common persons, within their own realm and
dominion, to abide the judgment and decree of their own subjects, having
the royal diadem and prerogative thereof."
Even this degradation had been borne in vain. Foreign and papal tribunal
as that of the legates really was, it lay within Henry's kingdom and had
the air of an English court. But the citation to Rome was a summons to
the King to plead in a court without his realm. Wolsey had himself
warned Clement of the hopelessness of expecting Henry to submit to such
humiliation as this. "If the King be cited to appear in person or by
proxy and his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects will
tolerate the insult. To cite the King to Rome, to threaten him with
excommunication, is no more tolerable than to deprive him of his royal
dignity. If he were to appear in Italy it would be at the head of a
formidable army." But Clement had been deaf to the warning, and the case
had been avoked out of the realm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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