ABSTRACT
Henry VIII saw himself as Solomon, the Lord’s elect, receiving the homage of his Church, a new David for Israel, but at the papal Curia and in the courts of Christendom he came to be seen as ‘that rebel’, ‘that enemy of the Church’, that ‘lost King’, ‘that perfidious’, ‘impious’ King, ‘a tyrant so cruel’. The great and growing ‘cruelty of a most wicked tyrant’ was constantly lamented.1 ‘So wicked an enemy of God and of justice’, could not escape punishment. Eternal damnation in the next world was already foretold, for he was ‘that lost King’ – a lost soul.2 If Henry was the enemy of God, it was virtuous and a Christian duty to fight him, and holy war was justified.3 By the end of 1538 Pope Paul III was convinced that England’s schismatic king posed the gravest threat to the papacy and to Christendom, and he summoned Christian princes to a crusade. Through the early months of 1539, Henry and his realm faced the prospect of invasion and consequences terrifying to imagine.
