Defender of the faith? : anti-heresy policy and the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority under Henry VIII on the eve of the english reformation

In March 1521, Catholic Europe was on the brink of rupture. It had been more than three years since Martin Luther had posted his Ninety-Five Theses in the university town of Wittenburg, and what had been a mere invitation to a public disputation concerning the power and efficacy of ind ulgences had gone on to embroil Christian Europe in an unprecedented doctrinal conflict. The political and religious significance of Luther\u27s revolt was certainly not lost on Rome, which had by this point responded to Luther\u27s December 1520 bonfire fueled by copies of Leo X\u27s excommunication bull and books of canon law by declaring him the slave of a depraved mind, deserving of excommunication, of anathema, of our perpetual condemnation and interdict. 1 Already pressuring Emperor Charles V to put an end to the pernicious poison of Luther\u27s heresies at the upcoming Diet of Worms, Pope Leo X was also busy ensuring that England would remain relatively unscathed by the Luther-question. 2 While he praised Cardinal Thomas Wolsey\u27s efforts to prevent Lutheran books from infiltrating England\u27s shores, the Pope wasted no time in bluntly informing his English legate that a general bonfire would be more satisfactory. 3 As a political psychologist in a cardinal \u27s hat, Wolsey understood the need to express England \u27s orthodoxy and loyal ty to Rome by staging a spectacular coming out for Henry VIII\u27s very own campaign against Luther, culminating in a lavish book burning ceremony on the grounds of old St. Paul\u27s Cathedral in London. 4 While the estimated 30,000 onlookers gazed into a sumptuous bonfire fed by Luther\u27s collected works to date, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester delivered a two-hour long sermon reasserting the key tenets of Catholic doctrine questioned by Luther. Publicly proclaiming England\u27s orthodoxy to a fracturing European continent, Wolsey\u27s book burning was a public relations coup that put Henry VIII and his kingdom on the definitive side of the pope and the emperor, exercising the show of support that Leo X had not so subtly hinted at two months earlier. These events of May 12, 1521 not only signaled a rejection of Lutheranism, but also the beginning of a prolonged domestic effort to quell Luther\u27s mighty storme and tempest within the realm.