On 30 August 1535, Pope Paul III drafted and signed the papal bull Eius qui immobilis, casting King Henry VIII into outer darkness, stripping him of his crown, absolving his subjects of their allegiance, and consigning his soul to eternal damnation. It was Rome’s ultimate weapon: the spiritual atomic bomb of Christendom. For centuries, a papal decree of deposition had made emperors tremble in their boots and brought kings barefoot into the snow at Canossa. Yet having loaded the doctrinal cannon, the Pope quietly tucked the parchment into a Vatican drawer and told his nuncios to pretend it had never happened. The thunderbolt remained suspended in mid-air.
I have always found the Vatican’s paralysis in the 1530s far more revealing than the domestic soap opera of Henry’s marriages. Popular culture remembers the English Reformation as a swift, dramatic divorce case that severed an island kingdom overnight through royal lust and stubbornness. From Rome, however, the split was a prolonged, sweat-soaked exercise in high-stakes bluffing. Pope Clement VII had spent five years issuing provisional warnings, delayed citations, and conditional bans while Henry systematically dismantled Roman legal jurisdiction across his realm. Rome hesitated because it knew an uncomfortable truth that medieval theologians preferred not to mention: an excommunication only works if someone with an army is willing to enforce it.
The crisis had reached its breaking point not in the royal bedchamber, but in the statute books. In November 1534, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring Henry “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.” It was an unprecedented act of constitutional vandalism against the universal Church, instantly nationalising all ecclesiastical authority, revenues, and doctrine under the Tudor crown. To ensure obedience, the Treasons Act made even spoken denial of the King’s new title a capital crime.
In the summer of 1535, Henry demonstrated that he meant every word. In June, John Fisher, the venerable Bishop of Rochester, was beheaded on Tower Hill. In a desperate attempt to protect him, Paul III had made Fisher a cardinal while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London; Henry simply sneered that the Pope could send the red hat, but Fisher would have no head to wear it on. Two weeks later, Sir Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor and Europe’s most celebrated humanist scholar, followed Fisher to the scaffold for refusing the Oath of Supremacy. The executions sent a shockwave of genuine horror through every Catholic court on the Continent.
Paul III responded with Eius qui immobilis. The bull was ferocious in its Latin severity. It excommunicated Henry, declared his children by Anne Boleyn illegitimate, forbade Christian burial for his supporters, absolved English subjects from their oaths of fealty, and commanded foreign princes to break all treaties with England. It even authorised foreign rulers to seize the property of English merchants abroad and sell English captives into slavery. It was total ecclesiastical war.
Yet the Pope immediately suspended its publication and execution. He couched the delay in pious language, expressing a fatherly hope that the English king might come to his senses and return to the Roman fold. The reality was pure geopolitical humiliation. A papal bull declaring a monarch deposed is not self-enforcing; it is an invitation to a holy crusade. If the Pope published the bull and no Catholic prince invaded England, the papacy would stand exposed as militarily toothless.
The two monarchs capable of mounting such an invasion - Francis I of France and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain - had no intention of doing the Pope’s dirty work. Their foreign policies were governed by cold dynastic rivalry, not papal solidarity. Charles V was Catherine of Aragon’s nephew and possessed every personal reason to avenge his aunt, but he was mired in a costly war against the Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean, having just returned from his naval campaign against Tunis. Furthermore, Charles’s advisors warned him that an embargo against England would bankrupt the Flemish cloth trade in Antwerp and incite rebellion in the Low Countries. Francis I, for his part, loathed the Habsburgs far more than he loved the Pope; he regarded an independent, anti-papal England as an indispensable counterweight to imperial encirclement and happily took English gold to fund his own armies.
Both Catholic monarchs expressed profound sorrow over the martyrs, praised the Pope’s righteous indignation, and quietly refused to mobilise a single soldier. Without French or Spanish boots on the ground, Paul III’s grand excommunication was reduced to an embarrassing piece of parchment.
The suspension dragged on for three years while Rome indulged in wishful thinking. When Catherine of Aragon died in January 1536 and Anne Boleyn was beheaded four months later on charges of treason and adultery, Vatican diplomats convinced themselves that the heretical fever had broken. They imagined Henry, now free of both women, would quietly negotiate his way back to Rome. Instead, Henry began the wholesale Dissolution of the Monasteries, seizing centuries of abbey land, melting down gold reliquaries, and filling the royal treasury with monastic plunder.
In the autumn of 1538, Henry went one step further and committed an act of deliberate iconoclasm that destroyed any lingering hope of reconciliation. Royal commissioners descended on Canterbury Cathedral and demolished the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, the medieval archbishop murdered in 1170 for defending the privileges of the Church against Henry II. Henry VIII had Becket posthumously tried for treason, ordered his bones to be burned and scattered, and confiscated twenty-six wagonloads of gold, silver, and jewels from his tomb. To Rome, Becket was the supreme patron saint of ecclesiastical liberty; to Henry, he was an intolerable precedent of a priest who had defied his sovereign.
The desecration of Canterbury finally forced the Vatican’s hand. On 17 December 1538, Paul III published the final, unreserved bull of excommunication, Cum redemptor noster. By then, however, the moment had long passed. Henry had spent the intervening four years turning England into an unassailable fortress. He used the immense wealth looted from the monasteries to build a chain of modern coastal artillery forts from Hull to Cornwall, modernise the Royal Navy, and purchase the unyielding loyalty of the English landed gentry by selling them confiscated monastic estates at bargain prices. When the papal thunderbolt finally landed, it struck a kingdom that was militarily secure, financially fortified, and economically invested in never returning to Rome.
The sheer irrelevance of papal authority during the schism is captured nowhere better than in England’s foreign relations with Catholic powers. While the Pope demanded that the faithful shun the Tudor apostate, established strategic alliances barely blinked. The Treaty of Windsor, signed between England and Catholic Portugal in 1386, did not suffer the slightest disruption. Portuguese caravels continued to dock in Bristol and Southampton, English wool and cloth flowed into Lisbon, and the perpetual alliance forged in the fourteenth century held firm across the theological divide. Catholic Portugal and Protestant England understood what Rome refused to admit: commercial and maritime geography matters far more than papal encyclicals.
On 30 August 1535, when Pope Paul III signed his suspended bull of excommunication, he was not just struggling to discipline an unruly English king. He was presiding over the funeral of medieval Christendom. For centuries, the popes had maintained the fiction of a unified Christian republic governed from the Holy See. The Acts of Supremacy shattered that illusion forever, replacing the authority of the universal Church with the hard, unyielding reality of the sovereign nation-state. Paul III tucked his parchment into the drawer because he knew that spiritual thunderbolts cannot shatter cannons, and that a Pope without legions is simply an old man with an expensive seal.