English nobles threatened “extreme remedies” against the Roman Catholic Church unless the Pope annulled Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, a letter contained in an exhibition of 100 historic documents from the Vatican Secret Archives has revealed.
The three ft-wide parchment letter, complete with 81 wax seals and red silk ribbons, was one of the highlights of the exhibition, which chronicles more than 1,200 years of the Vatican’s dealings with kings, conquerors and caliphates.
The letter was sent on Henry VIII’s orders to Pope Clement VII in 1530 and was signed by members of the English parliament, as well as bishops, abbots and the Archbishops of York and Canterbury.
They urged the Pope to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine so that he could marry one of her ladies-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, in the hope of producing a longed for male heir.
“If the Pope is unwilling, we are left to find a remedy elsewhere. Some remedies are extreme, but a sick man seeks relief in any way he can find,” the lords wrote in a barely veiled threat.
Henry had fallen in love with Boleyn in 1526 and was desperate for his marriage to Catherine to be annulled – a struggle against the Vatican that he referred to as his “great matter”.
Henry married Boleyn in 1533 but Clement VII declared the union invalid and five years later the King was excommunicated by Clement’s successor, Paul III.
The confrontation led to a split with the Catholic Church and the start of the English Reformation.
The elaborate letter was consigned to the Secret Archives, in a palazzo at the heart of the Vatican City State, but mysteriously went missing in the late 19th century.
It was rediscovered in 1926 – hidden in a small chest beneath a wooden chair.
One of the largest and most unusual documents in the exhibition, in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, is a 180ft-long parchment scroll from the trials of the Knights Templar in Paris in 1309-1311.
It contains the depositions of 231 knights from the order of warrior monks, who were accused by the Church and King Philip IV ‘the Fair’ of France of heresy, idolatry and sodomy.
The latter charge was based on accusations of sexual “obscenities”, including the claim that they forced novices to give and receive kisses on the backside during secret initiation rites.
More than 50 knights were executed and Pope Clement V dissolved the order by apostolic decree in 1312.
Many of the documents are written in ornate Latin script but there are other languages too, including Arabic, Persian and Chippewa – the language of a Native American tribe that wrote to the Vatican on a piece of birch bark in the 19th century.
The collection includes the world’s oldest document written in Mongolian – an order made in 1279 by a khan to give safe conduct to a group of papal ambassadors returning to Europe.
A complicated secret writing code used by a 15th century Pope to send messages to Vatican diplomats, or nuncios, in potentially hostile countries is also in the exhibition.
It consists of a table in which the letters of the alphabet, as well as commonly used words and phrases, can be translated into a cryptic code of dots, squiggles, symbols and numbers.
A parchment register contains Pope John XXII’s official recognition in 1318 of Cambridge University as a place of learning and confers on its graduates the right to teach anywhere – “ius ubique docendi” in Latin.
A hefty tome records the establishment of the Swiss Guard in 1505, after Pope Julius II asked the Confederation of Swiss Cantons to grant him 200 infantry soldiers to protect himself and the Vatican.
The Crusades also feature – in 1202 Pope Innocent III was so horrified by the slaughter carried out by Crusaders in the besieged town of Zara that he ordered every member of the expedition to be excommunicated.
The exhibition commemorates the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Vatican Secret Archives in its present form – it was established in 1612 by Pope Paul V.
It originally consisted of just three rooms, but is now a vast repository of dusty leather-bound documents that line more than 55 miles of shelves.
"The size of the archives has grown more than 400 fold," said Monsignor Sergio Pagano, the Prefect of the Secret Archives.
He said the aim of the exhibition was to “shed light on this ancient institution” and dispel some of the mystery of the archives.
“For the first time ever, this exhibition is giving a wider public a chance to see the reality of the Vatican Secret Archives by viewing some of its most precious documents.”