Henry VIII (The English Monarchs Series) by J. J. Scarisbrick

Author:J. J. Scarisbrick [Scarisbrick, J. J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780300072105
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Primary responsibility for the conduct of Henry's affairs at the Curia lay with two English envoys, William Benet and Edward Carne, able and stout‐hearted men, but of small status – and, in the case of Benet, at least, secretly friendly to Catherine.2

These two, supported by Ghinucci, Gregory Casale and expensive, but not always helpful, counsel hired in Rome, by occasional French intervention and frequent, but not always judicious, irruptions by Henry, were required to hold back the Imperialists, master the Curia and bring to successful issue a case now so complicated that one can only marvel that it did not wholly daunt them – a mere archdeacon of Dorset and an unknown layman whose only title was an Oxford doctorate in canon law.

They had a single purpose: to prevent the case being heard in Rome and recover it for English judgment. ‘We would in any wise that all ways and means were used to put over the process, as long as ye may, and until Michaelmas at the least’,1 Henry wrote in April 1531, and these words were repeated in one form or another time and again. Whatever happened, the case must not go forward. Carne, the excusator, that is, the one who was to prove Henry excused from responding to Catherine's appeal, must convince the Curia that the king could not come to Rome to answer the citation. Shortly after the Rota began to move (in the first months of 1531), Carne had opened his campaign with an elaborate argument that Henry was prevented from coming to Rome by a ‘necessary, probable, temporary impediment’;2 that not only could he not attend himself but that the case was so grave that he could not be represented by a proctor; that Rome was suspect; that the case belonged to England and nowhere else.3 However, because he had no powers to act as a proctor, or rather, because he said that he had none (whereas he had them only for use ‘in extremity’4) Carne was not admitted by the Rota to present Henry's ‘excuse’ – which served him well enough because, if there were no respondent, the appeal could not be heard.5 But it could also be dangerous – for the other side would now have a chance to demand judgment per contradictas, that is, to ask that, in view of the contumacy of the respondent, the appeal should be heard without him.6 To block this dangerous counter‐move, Carne promptly appealed against the Rota's refusal to admit him sine mandato (without proctorial powers), whereupon the Imperialists replied by asking for apostoli refutatorii, that is, letters of the court disallowing that appeal.7 Thus, exactly as he wished, Henry's case quickly became bogged down in preliminaries, as the contestants argued about the validity of Carne's appeal against the Rota's decision not to admit him to present Henry's reasons for refusing to answer Catherine's appeal – all of which was nearly as fatal a quagmire as the arguments supporting Henry's claim (which the court had

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