Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXII

The Choir of Winchester

Cathedral--site of the

marriage of Mary and

Philip   July 1554 

Mary’s first challenge was to secure a Catholic succession to the throne as the heir apparent was her half-sister, Elizabeth, a convinced Protestant.  Elizabeth did conform to Catholicism during her sister’s reign, but Mary knew it was a charade: after all, in Catholic eyes, Elizabeth was a bastard and as such could not inherit the Crown.  Indeed, this was to be the conflict for Mary because she was not only a thorough Catholic, but she was every bit her father’s daughter and wanted the Tudor Dynasty to survive.  So she needed a child of her own to displace Elizabeth and keep the Crown Catholic.  Mary was 37 when she came to the throne—in the 16^th century an age at which many women no longer ovulated.   Several English husbands (including Reginald Pole, of whom we will hear more in the future) were suggested, but Mary’s cousin, the Emperor Charles V, suggested she marry his only son, Philip. 
Philip was nine-years younger than Mary.  He was King of Naples and Duke of Milan and he stood to inherit the vast domains of his father, the Emperor.  (In fact, Charles would divide his realms between the Holy Roman Empire which went to his brother, Ferdinand,  and the Spanish Empire which he would give to Philip.) 
The Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, and the House of Lords petitioned Mary to marry English and not seek a foreign husband, but Mary was distrustful of her countrymen. She had seen their collective lack of integrity in how they failed to champion her mother’s cause against King Henry and she saw how fickle was their faith as they first went pacifically along with Henry’s break with Rome and then just as nonchalantly threw away fourteen centuries of Catholic doctrine and practice in favor of the Reformed Religion of her brother and Cranmer.   Moreover Mary felt she owed Charles for his support of her mother and herself during their long suffering and humiliation under Henry and his shabby treatment of them.   Philip was to receive the Crown Matrimonial which meant he would be King of England, but only by right of his marriage to Mary.  They would reign jointly but should she pre-decease him, all titles and rights would end.  He was to “aid her Highness in the happy administration of her Grace’s realms and dominions.”  In other words, his role was mostly ceremonial and the power remained with Mary.  Even so, the marriage grated the English people and Mary’s popularity began to sink.  England felt threatened on every side—Spain, France, the Empire—and no foreign prince would be a welcome King for their Queen, but the Spaniards were seen as particularly arrogant and thus even more offensive to the understated English personality.  In fact this was the beginning of an English-Spanish conflict that would last three and a half centuries.    
The proposed Spanish marriage triggered a rebellion in the winter of 1554.  The rebels, under Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir James Croft, Sir Peter Carew, and Henry Grey, 1^st Duke of Suffolk planned to overthrow Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne.  Grey was the Father of Lady Jane Grey and all the rebellion did was to bring down the axe on the rebels, including Lady Jane and her husband, Guildford Dudley.  It also built up the paranoia Mary was feeling as she became more and more alienated from her subjects and planted a fear of the Protestant faction in her heart. 
Her husband arrived in England on July 23, 1554 and Mary and Philip were married in Winchester Cathedral two days later by Bishop Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor.    For Mary this was a love match.  For Philip, nine years her junior, the marriage was a political duty.  Political duty does not always make a prime stimulant for the husband “to be ready” to perform his husbandly duties.  To the contrary, it can take a normally pleasant activity and make it a burdensome chore.  Nevertheless, by September—two months after the wedding—Mary stopped menstruating and showed other signs of pregnancy.  This was followed by a set of bizarre circumstances that are difficult for us to interpret today, but apparently the Queen experienced a hysteric (false) pregnancy brought on by her desperate wish to be pregnant.  She didn’t menstruate, her abdomen expanded as if she were pregnant, she gained weight, experienced morning sickness, and even lactation.  The Court was convinced she was pregnant.  Her doctors were convinced she was pregnant.  Rumors spread of the birth of a son and Thanksgiving Services were held in several cathedrals, but no child was ever produced.  When by June 1555 she had not yet delivered, there was huge confusion in the Court.  And in July her abdomen receded and other signs of pregnancy disappeared.  Philip left England in August on a military expedition and though Mary did not know at the time he would not return for two years—and then only for a short visit—she was disconsolate and felt abandoned.   Whatever chances that Mary might have had to bear a healthy child also disappeared after her hysterical pregnancy, the effects of which may have led eventually to her death of uterine cancer.  But that is still several years off. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVII

Mary I

Mary was not able to reconcile England to the papacy as quickly as one might suppose.  First she needed clergy on whom she could rely to bring back the ancient rites.  As mentioned in previous entries, she did not have a single bishop who had been Catholic before Henry’s renunciation of papal authority and who had stood firm in their loyalty to the Roman Pontiff.  The best she could do was rely on bishops like Stephen Gardiner, Edmund Bonner, Nicholas Heath, and Cuthbert Tunstall who had been consecrated according to the rites found in the old ordinal, who had not married, and who had seen—and resisted—the slippery slope from schism into Protestant doctrine and practice.  She also needed to retain a number of bishops such as Goodrich, Aldrich, King, and Chambers who had been properly consecrated according to the old ordinal and who, although they had gone along with Cranmer’s Protestant policies, were now willing to return to the ancient rites.  This was a huge compromise as Mary had to wonder whether their orthodoxy could be trusted, but she had little choice given the number of Sees she had to fill.  The convinced Protestant bishops—Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Hooper, Coverdale, Ferrer, Bush, Scory, Harley, Taylor, Barlow, and Holgate—all had to be removed and replaced.  Mary was able to find a few priests who had not gone along with her father’s schism and her brother’s Protestantization to fill the vacated sees, but for the most part she had to rely on men who had become Protestant but were now willing to return to the old faith.  And again—could they be trusted to be truly Catholic?

In Richard Pate she found a candidate for the Diocese of Worcester who had remained true to the old Church.  Pate had been on the continent the whole time of her father’s schism and her brother’s reign in the service of Mary’s cousin, the Emperor Charles V.  When Mary came to the throne, he returned to England and she made him bishop of  Worcester.  Likewise, Thomas Goldwell had been in Rome throughout the reigns of Henry and Edward and Mary named him to St. Asaph in Wales.  The other sees were not so easy.  James Brooks was named to Gloucester to replace Hooper. Brooks at been at Oxford during the reigns of Henry and Edward and supposedly had conformed but was now ready to return to Catholic practice.  Robert Parfew, whom Mary had named to replace Harley at Hereford had not only conformed but even served on Cranmer’s commission to compose the 1549 Prayer Book. Henry Morgan of St. David’s in Wales, was another who had conformed to the reformed rites under Edward but whom Mary named as a bishop.  Mary restored Tunstall to his see of Durham and named Nicholas Heath, whom her brother had deprived of Worcester, to replace Holgate at York.

Mary’s most important ally in bringing the Church of England back to Catholic practice was Stephen Gardiner whom her father had named bishop of Winchester and who had been deposed by Edward VI for resisting the Protestant policies of his reign.  Mary restored Gardiner to his see—the wealthiest in the realm—and made him Lord Chancellor.  He repaid the favor by officiating at her coronation on October 1, 1553 in Westminster Abbey.

For Canterbury—the primatial see—Mary had a plan but chose to proceed slowly.  It would not be until November 1555—almost a year and a half after her accession—that Cranmer would be deposed and a new Archbishop named. Mary had a score to settle with Cranmer for declaring her parents’ marriage annulled and this leaving him in suspension of duties without being canonically deprived was very much like a cat playing with a mouse.  Cranmer was imprisoned during this time at Oxford along with Bishops Ridley and Latimer.  He was forced to watch them burned at the stake for their heresies.  We will look at his fate in a future posting. 

Mary had her bishops lined up and they proved to be a better lot than might have been supposed.  When Mary died and Elizabeth succeeded to throne, only one bishop who had served under Mary (and who had, in fact, served continuously under Henry and Edward before her), Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff in Wales, would renounce the Catholic faith to remain in office.  The remainder of her bishops—most of whom had gone into schism under Henry and even embraced the Protestant reforms in the reign of King Edward—stood firm in Catholic faith even though it meant the loss of their sees and for some imprisonment.  But there was much more to do than just get reliable bishops. 

Mary needed priests as well.  Unlike the Bishops of King Edward’s time, many of the English priests were not enthusiastic about the Protestant liturgies contained in the Book of Common Prayer—and particularly the 1552 edition which was far more Protestant than the original compromise book of 1549.  Edward had been on the throne only six years and five months.  Most English priests had been ordained before he came to the throne.  Granted some had married under his dispensation but for those who were willing to give up their wives—and many were—Mary was only to happy to have them resume their parishes.  How many actually left their wives and how many maintained a discreet relationship with them would be an interesting study.   Clerical concubinage, or more accurately, clerical common-law marriage had been common enough in and before the reign of King Henry.  It was not difficult to go back to the old ways. 

Yet even with priests and bishops in place for the restored rites, the Queen had much to do to turn England back to the Catholic side.  Mary first required Parliament to repeal the religious legislation passed under her brother that authorized the Protestant liturgy.  Those same rites Parliament had insisted on a few years earlier were now proscribed.  But that does not mean that the Mass could be restored at once.  Altars had been demolished and replaced by plain wooden tables, missals and other service books used as fishwrap, vestments destroyed, and church plate (sacred vessels and such altar furnishings as candelabra and crucifixes) melted down.  It took time—and money—to reequip the churches for the Catholic liturgy. 

In November 1554—more than a year and four months after Mary’s accession Cardinal Reginald Pole arrived in England as Papal Legate with the authority to readmit the Church of England into the Catholic Communion.  Meanwhile, Catholic liturgy and doctrine had been reintroduced.  Pole’s arrival had been delayed by Mary and by the emperor Charles V because they feared that the Papal Legate might oppose their plan to marry the emperor’s son, Philip, to Mary.  There was some tension at this time between the Papacy and the Empire and in fact, Paul IV would recall Pole to Rome because of his displeasure with Mary’s alliance to her husband’s politics, but the Cardinal remained in England—some sources say at Mary’s orders; others due to his failing health.  We will do a posting on Pole in the near future as well as his is a very complex story and key to Mary’s program. 

Henry VIII had confiscated an immense about of Church lands—both from the monasteries and from individual dioceses—during his reign.  This land had been parceled out as rewards for those who supported Henry’s new policies.  Henry had stacked the House of Lords by creating many new peers and he used Church lands to provide income for his allies among the Lords. He also sold property—and much of the Church treasure he had confiscated as well—to provide the income he needed for both is personal luxury but also his political goals such as creating the English Navy.  Many of the newly ennobled families were afraid that they would loose their property to have it restored to the Church with a Catholic Queen.  Mary was anxious to restore the monasteries as far as she could, but in the end was unable to do much.  Monks were brought back to Westminster, nuns to Syon, friars to Smithfield and Greenwich, and the Carthusians to Sheen but vocations were not many and benefactors even more scarce.  Some former monks of Glastonbury petitioned for the restoration of their abbey but I don’t believe monastic life was restored there.  Mary and the Papacy had to settle for the fact that most of this property that had once belonged to the Church was now lost to it.  If Mary wanted to achieve her larger goals of restoring England to the Church—and indeed to reach her various political goals as well—she could not afford to alienate the important families in the realm that now occupied the lands that had once belonged to the monks.  She would have to rebuild the religious life from the ground up but unfortunately history was not to allow her the time needed to achieve this goal.

Foundations of the Anglican Church XL

Pope Clement VII

Well, enough about Judie Brown and Michael Voris and their ilk for now, let’s get back to ol’ Henry and his annulment problems.  We left off that story with the 1527 Sack of Rome by the troops of the Emperor Charles V.  The troops were mostly German followers of Martin Luther, recent converts to the Protestant movement Luther had established less than ten years previously, and all their religious bile came out as they had the chance to sack the papal capital.  It was, as I wrote, a sickening sight with about 12,000 people murdered, from priests at their altars and nuns in their monasteries to women and children in the streets and alleys of Rome.  The Swiss Guard were massacred as they protected the Pope, permitting him to escape through a secret passageway in Leonine Wall to the Castle Sant’ Angelo where he was holed up for months like a rat in his warren until a hefty ransom could be paid to call off the German troops. 
Historians often say that Clement refused Henry his annulment because he was afraid that Charles—the nephew of Henry’s Queen, Katherine of Aragon—would return and revenge his aunt’s disgrace.  But the story is a bit more complicated.  We need to remember that Clement, like Luther’s Pope Leo X, was a Medici.  And the Medici were, as usual, “up to something.”
The Medici had been country folk from the Mugello, an area just north of Florence, who moved into the city sometime around 1200.  It was a time of urban expansion in Europe, and in the cities of Italy in particular.  From the very beginning the Medici began advancing up the social ladder.  They married into some of the better families.  They forged business alliances with some of the more successful families.  Little by little and generation after generation they did better and better.  Actually their rise was comparatively rapid.  In 1397 Giovanni di Bicci Medici established a bank which soon became the leading Bank not only in Florence but in Europe.  The family had had some previous experience in banking but it was when Giovanni di Bicci took his operation in Rome and moved it back to Florence that it really took off.  In the fifteenth century it was Florence that was the center of the Renaissance and indeed the economic center of Europe.  And the Medici were bankrolling it to their profit.
The Medici knew not only how to run a good bank but how to use a bank to advance themselves not only socially to become the premier family in Florence but politically to control the policies of the Republic.  Ironically few Medici ever held civil office and yet the family were the puppet masters of the great Republic.  Florence had longed been governed as a republic but with a rather clumsy governmental structure of a Council known as the Signoria and composed of representatives of the various guilds.   Members of the Signoria were chosen by the respective guilds to serve terms of two months during which they were sequestered in the municipal palace with little or no contact with the outside world so that they could not be influenced in their decision making by individuals or corporations that might want the city government to go this way or that.  So it worked in theory.  In practice the Medici were always able to make their will known to the officials and officials dutifully followed Medici policy.  So important was their position in society that Cosimo the Elder (1389-1464) became known as Pater Patriae (Father of the Fatherland) though the highest office he ever held was a brief term as Priore della Republica—one of the “priors” or members of the Signoria, the city council.  Cosimo’s grandson was Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492)
On Easter Day 1478 Lorenzo and his brother Guiliano were attacked while they were at Easter Mass in the Cathedral of Florence by a coalition of political rivals under the leadership of the Pazzi Family and with the support of Pope Sixtus IV.  Guiliano died, Lorenzo survived.  The plot failed and the Medici emerged victorious.  Lorenzo’s son went on to become Pope Leo X, the Pope with whom Luther struggled.  Giuliano’s illegitimate son, Giulio, became Pope Clement VII, the Pope Henry would petition for his annulment.
While they successfully staved off the attack by the Pazzi and Pope Sixtus, the Medici eventually ran afoul of the Republic and were banned from the city from 1494 until 1512 when Leo X Medici was able to use his power as pope to have the ban lifted and the family return from exile and restored to power.  They were again sent into exile in 1527 as the Florentines realized that their political machinations were a danger to the Republic.
Now this is where the story will intersect with the Annulment—or lack thereof—requested by Henry VIII.
When the Medici were exiled from Florence in 1527 there was a Medici—Clement VII—on the papal throne.  He was determined to have his family restored to power in Florence as his cousin Leo X had  managed to have them restored after their earlier exile.  But how?  Rome was in ruins after the sack by the troops of Charles VII.  Clement’s Swiss guards had been all but wiped out and indeed the papal armies were not only beaten but decimated.  There was no money to hire mercenaries.   What did Clement have to use as a bargaining chip.
Well, fortunately he had a bastard son, Allesandro (1510-1537).  And fortunately for Clement, the Emperor Charles V had an illegitimate daughter, Margaret of Austria (1522-1586).  Now illegitimate children, especially daughters, can be a bit tricky to place as far as marriages go and Clement—a bastard himself—was not one to quibble about which side of the blanket one had been born on (or actually conceived).   Charles had, of course, just beaten Clement silly in the Sack of Rome but Clement wasn’t one to hold a grudge when it came to family politics.  And besides, Charles himself was horrified that his troops had behaved so sacrilegiously and he needed to make things up to the Pope.  Of course the girl was only five or six, but marriages were arranged that early.  The wedding itself wouldn’t take place until 1536 but negations were underway throughout this period and the deal was this:  Charles should take his army and beat the cr** out of Florence just as he had Rome.  Then he should put an end to this pesky Republic and install the young couple in Florence as the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of a Florence that was now, in name, a fief of the Empire.  Thus the Medici would be restored to Florence and secure in their position.  There was only one problem.  That pesky King of England kept petitioning for an annulment of his marriage to Charles’ aunt.  For the Pope to grant an annulment to Henry would scotch his ambitions for the Medici to be restored in Florence.  Florence or England?  Hmmm.  Which should it be?  In the end Clement was willing to give up England rather than for his family to lose Florence.  As Jesus said, “A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them. This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.” (John 10:12-13)

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXVIX

Castel Sant'Angelo where Clement VII sought

refuge from the troops of Charles V during the

Sack of Rome in 1527

Luther’s preaching swept Germany as his complaints about the torpid state of the Church spread to other preachers who took up his cry against the superficial and vapid religiosity that was being pedaled to the faithful as authentic Christianity.  Luther’s simple message that salvation is not something that we earn but which is given us freely by a loving and generous God ignited the minds and hearts of countless souls.  Luther had no intention of starting a new Church—indeed he never saw his work as anything more than reforming the One Church—but his excommunication put a divide between him and Papal Christianity.  Many Germans quickly rallied to his side of the divide.  Luther and other German preachers who agreed with him no longer looked to the bishops for leadership but prepared to take the Church out into the deep waters of reform on their own.  The bishops, for the greater part, were a sorry lot.  They held their offices in gift from the Emperor or various German princes.  Their benefices made them princes in their own right and gave them a most comfortable life in their palaces with hordes of servants and every luxury.  They were not loyal to Rome, much less to the Gospel, but only anxious to preserve their own position and saw the evangelical fervor of Luther as a threat that they too might be expected to take the Gospel seriously and give themselves to the work of God’s Kingdom rather than to hunting and whoring and drinking and gluttony and luxury.  Left without leadership from the bishops Luther and other evangelicals bravely struck out to translate their theological principals into reformed pastoral practice.  One of Luther’s first acts was to provide a German translation of the scriptures so that every German who knew how to read, could read the Bible.  He wrote dozens of hymns in German so that they could sing their faith with the same enthusiasm they sang in the beerhalls—and he used many beer-hall tunes that have become to subsequent generations and to us “religious” music.  He translated the Mass into German and while keeping its basic structure of Introit, Confession of Sin, Kyrie, Gloria, Collect etc. he did eliminate any idea that the Mass was a sacrifice independent of Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary.  (In this regard the poor exegetical methodology referred to in the last posting did him and the liturgy harm as he stripped the Anaphora—the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving over the bread and wine—down to the simple words of consecration.)   While he did translate the Mass to German, he did not object to those congregations who preferred the Latin and Latin persisted in many places for several centuries.  Bach, as you may note, wrote Latin settings for the Evangelical Mass.  He also retained the use of altars, candles, crucifixes and was indifferent about retaining vestments.  Luther had a personal devotion to the Mother of God and while by the mid 1520’s he no longer spoke of her as an intercessor, he did preach and speak about her.  Indeed he had no objection to statues of Mary or the saints but he was anxious for his followers to put their faith in Christ alone as our intercessor before God.  This, of course, is harmonious with the scriptures which emphasize, especially the Letter to the Hebrews, that we have but one intercessor and that is Jesus Christ.  (We Catholics see Mary and the saints as sort of secondary intercessors who join their prayers to those of Christ the High Priest on our behalf but who are not intercessors in their own right.) 
Luther’s zeal, combined with German temper, led him to excoriate the unreformed Catholicism of the Bishops and especially of the Pope.  The Papal insistence on pomp and the money to maintain the papal pomp led Luther to see the Pope(s) as the prophesied Anti-Christ who would set themselves up as false deities.  Luther had anything but an irenic personality and his quick temper enflamed the minds and hearts of many who followed his reformed evangelicalism and they came to see the pope and papal Catholicism as a demonic cult.
Ok, here is where this story begins to affect Henry and his request for an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. 
The most powerful monarch of the day was Katherine’s nephew, Charles V.  Charles was the son of Katherine’s sister—Juana the Mad.  (Why she was called “mad” or crazy is a great story in itself but we aren’t going there.)  Charles inherited from her the throne of Spain and the Spanish empire in the New World as well as Naples, southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.  Not a bad inheritance.  But that was only part of it.  Charles’ father—and Juana’s husband—was Philip the Handsome of Burgundy.   Philip’s father died before he could inherit from his father, the Emperor Maximilian, the Holy Roman Empire—a vast empire consisting of today’s Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, and much of Northern Italy.  This inheritance then passed to Charles.  Charles was a devout Catholic and anxious to preserve the Church from Luther but many of his German subjects had embraced Luther’s reforms.  In 1527 Charles led an army down into Italy to quell rebellions brewing there and solidify his power.  In the process he found himself in conflict with a French backed anti-Imperial league consisting of Florence, Milan, Venice and the papacy.  This put Charles at military odds with Pope Clement VII and Charles’ troops ended up sacking Rome.  Clement fled the papal palace and took refuge in the Castle Sant’Angelo.  But Charles’ troops were mostly Germans—and mostly Lutherans.    For them their attack on Rome was an attack on the anti-Christ and the subsequent sack of the city was horrendous.  Priests were murdered at their altars, nuns raped in their convents, and thousands of Romans—believers and non-believers alike—were put to the sword.  The Pope’s Swiss guards were all but wiped out defending the Vatican.  Tons of gold and silver were carried off as the Roman churches and basilicas were stripped of their treasures—and as the houses of Cardinals and bishops were pillaged alongside the monasteries and convents. 
Charles himself was not in command of the army at the time of the siege.  In fact the problem is that no one was in command.  The designated leader, the Duke of Bourbon, had been killed in the opening skirmish; moreover the army was in mutiny because the emperor had been slow in paying them for their Italian campaign.  The Lutheran troops particularly were in a blood frenzy as they saw themselves as God’s avengers.  The 1527 sack of Rome effectively put an end to the Roman Renaissance and there was a tremendous slowdown in the vast programs of building and art that had characterized Rome for the previous three decades. 
It was at this particularly poor time to ask a favor from the Pope that England’s King Henry wanted an annulment from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, aunt to the Emperor Charles.  Clement was in no position to alienate the Emperor by sanctioning his aunt being dumped for a Trophy Wife and Queen.  But there is more to the story—far more—and the real reason may have more to do with Medici politics than Clement’s fear of pissing off Charles. 

The Sack of Rome--which sack???

The passagetto (“secret” passage from

the Vatican to the Castle Sant’ Angelo)

is contained along the wall to the right

of the picture. You can see the Vatican

in the distance at the end. 

Let’s take a look at the Sack of Rome as it affects the progress of the building of Saint Peter’s.  Rome was sacked a number of times in its history.  It was sacked by the Gauls in 387  B.C.E., by the Visigoths in 410 C.E. (aka A.D.), Vandals in 455, Ostrogoths in 546, The Arabs in 846 (Well, just the Vatican, not the city itself), and the Normans in 1084.  To be honest, for much of its history Rome wasn’t worth sacking.  For most of the Middle Ages Rome was only an overgrown cow pasture with ruins of where the mighty Empire had once been, but by 1527 it was the flourishing center of the Renaissance with a booming economy and a rapidly growing economy.

     What triggered the 1527 attack was that in order to check the awesome power of the Emperor Charles V (who ruled what is today Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and much of northern Italy) France, Venice, Milan, Florence and the Papacy teamed up in the League of Cognac.  Great name, but not a great idea.  It was the mice out to kill the cat and it was a disaster.  The Imperial army handily defeated the French—the only ones in the coalition who had a real army (and in those days the French were considered the best fighters in the world—who knows what happened to them)  but the Emperor didn’t have any money to pay the troops for their service.  Their commander, Charles de Bourbon was French—yes, a French commander for the German Army fighting France!  It seems that when Charles’s wife, Suzanne died—she had been the Bourbon heir—the Queen Mother of France, Louise of Savoy, seized the Bourbon lands and wouldn’t give them back to the widowed husband to whom they had been left by Suzanne’s will.  The King refused to intervene against his mother and so Charles, pissed, sided with the enemy despite his position of Marshal of France. (The Marshal was the head of the army.)  Pity because Charles de Bourbon was a good soldier, a great soldier.  Anyway now he had a German army who hasn’t been paid and no money to pay them. The army was restless.  Pope Clement VII knew this was a dangerous situation and that he was in trouble and sued for a truce, but the army was in no mood to pay attention—the loot from Rome would suffice for the money due them from the Emperor.  Charles de Bourbon had excellent command of his army and could have negotiated a settlement with Clement, but the artist Benvenuto Cellini shot and killed Charles in the initial attack.  That was the mistake.  The army was enraged and went wild, storming the city.  With Charles dead there was no one who could bring the army under control.  Rome had only about 12,000 troops to defend it.  The Imperial attack was a massacre—all but 42 of the Pope’s Swiss guard were killed defending the Pope, but because of their bravery Pope Clement was able to flee  through the “secret” passage way linking the Vatican with the Castel Sant’Angelo where he would be safe.  As Clement fled through the passagetto, Imperial soldiers took pot shots at the papal figure as he passed the occasional break in the wall.  The worst of the sack lasted three days but for a month the Imperial troops dominated the city without discipline.  Churches were pillaged of their ornaments and relics.  The palaces of the Cardinals were ransacked, art destroyed, precious objects carried off.  Monasteries and convents were destroyed, monks and nuns killed, the nuns often raped.  Ordinary Romans were not safe—those who took refuge in Churches were often slain as the clung to the altars begging for mercy.  The Emperor had the upper hand.  Clement feared him and was anxious to win his alliance.  The Pope had some dynastic concerns for which he needed the Emperor. (We will talk more about that when we get to Henry VIII and his failure to get an annulment.)   The Emperor Charles V was Catholic—devoutly so—but he wasn’t on the scene and many of the Imperial troops, being German, were recent converts to Lutheranism.  That certainly didn’t help restore unity to Christendom.  Some historians claim that it brought the renaissance to a crashing end, but in fact Rome recovered quickly and went on to bigger and better triumphs of art, architecture, music, literature, and certainly to a papacy that would become imperial in its own right.  As for Saint Peter’s it brought the construction to a temporary halt but by 1534 Clement had commissioned Michelangelo to fresco the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (it would be frescoed between 1537 and 1541.)  Michelangelo would be named the chief architect of Saint Peter’s in 1546.  And so the work continued.  But don’t let me forget to tell you about Antonio da Sangallo and his stealing from the basilica in the interim before Michelangelo.    

Saint Peter's Proceeds in Fits and Starts

Raphael's Plan for Saint Peter's

Well, Raphael was by all means a great artist, but he wasn’t half the architect Bramante was.  In the first place, he just wasn’t focused enough for architecture.  Saint Peter’s was only one of the many commissions he was working on.  He was busy frescoing the villas of various cardinals and princes and his workshop was turning out Madonna’s at an remarkable rate.  He was surrounded with an army of assistants to prepare canvases for paints and apply the plaster for frescos, to mix the pigments and produce the paints.  He was making money hand over fist and spending it even faster.  Raphael was a bon vivant and a ladies’ man.  And in between the business, the pleasure, the paintings, the frescoes, he was supposed to produce a plan for Saint Peter’s.  Good Luck!  Moreover, the help he had inherited from the triumvirate of architects when he took Bramante’s place vanished.   His Dominican friar teammate, Fra. Giovanni Giocondo died within the year and the old priest had been the engineer—and a very good one—to figure out the technical aspects of the design.  Giulano da Sangallo, the business manager was feeling his age and retired to Florence.  Pope Leo—who was more interested in jewelry and Hanno, his pet elephant—than architecture replaced the team to work with Raphael.  He named Baldassare Peruzzi to replace the old friar, and Giuliano da Sangallo’s nephew—Antonio the Younger Sangallo—to take his uncle’s place. It wasn’t a happy arrangement. 

Bramante's Plan for Saint Peter's

     Raphael for some reason decided to make a fundamental change in Bramante’s perfectly symmetrical plan.  Instead of the Greek Cross plan in which all four arms of the cross would be equal and lead to the central dome over the tomb of the Apostle and its altar, Raphael designed a Latin Cross plan where the “stem” of the Cross would be twice as long as the other “arms” of the cross.  In addition to destroying the symmetry of the building, it threatened to make the building look much more heavy as well as cut down the amount of natural light, or rather reduce the effect of the natural light, entering the basilica through the dome.  The Raphael plan just lacked the elegance of the original design.  It did make for a larger church, but it failed to inspire. 
      In the event, Raphael did not live long enough to see his designs bear fruit.  He died in 1520 at only thirty-seven years of age.  Peruzzi succeeded as main architect and reverted to the Bramante plan of a Greek Cross though he did retain some features—mostly the worst ones—of Rafael’s plan.  Peruzzi didn’t get to see his plans put into action either.  Thank heavens.   Leo died the year after Raphael and was succeded by the pedantic Dutchman (yes, I know that is redundant) Cardinal Adriaan Florenszoon Boeyens who reigned as Adrian VI.  Fortunately he reigned briefly.  One year, eight months, and five days later he was dead; the Roman crowds, delighted to be rid of the dour Dutchman, hung a laurel wreath on the door of the papal physician to thank the doctor for not having prolonged the boredom of this tediously scholarly pope who was far more interested in Reform (which the Romans have always abhorred) than art, beauty, and the Renaissance.  Non  fiducia mai un papa che ha letto solo (never trust a pope who sleeps alone) as the Romans are wont to say.   
      In November 1523 Adrian was succeeded by Leo’s cousin, Clement VII.  The Medici never slept alone, though Clements preference, unlike Leo’s, was for women.  Rampant heterosexuality in a pope brings problems of its own as we will see when we hear the story of why Henry VIII didn’t get his annulment, but that is another story.  Suffice it to say that Clement, like Leo, was a papal disaster.  Leo triggered Luther’s break with the Church; Clement would trigger Henry VIII’s.  Maybe the Romans are wrong about that sleeping alone thing, celibacy is a good idea at least for popes.  But on May 6^th 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome.  It was a debacle from which it would take Rome decades to recover.  We will go into detail in a future entry, but the half-demolished old basilica, half-built new basilica was looted, graves emptied, treasures stolen, clergy, soldiers, and laity alike massacred.  When Peruzzi died nine years later, construction on the basilica had not advanced. The walls stood incomplete where they stood at all, the four great piers waited for a dome that no one could engineer, and the revenues were drying up as country after country fell to a series of Reformations that snapped their ties with Rome.