newsKing and Pope in Rome 2025: A good time to remember Christendom in crisis and rebellions that almost toppled an unpopular king
King Charles 111 – Buckingham Palace wants people to look upon his good work and deeds and ignore his disgraced brother, Andrew.
This week, King Charles and the Pope Leo X1V will pray together – the first time this has happened since the Reformation. What will they be thinking as they bow heads and bend knees in the Sistine Chapel?
By Trevor Grundy
The British public has been urged by Buckingham Palace to bend its gaze away from Andrew and look at the work done by more upstanding members of the Royal Family.
The request came on the same day that the king visited a synagogue in Manchester and two days before a heads-down and knees-bend session in Michelangelo’ s Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, featuring King Charles, who is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the American -born Pope Leo.
They will pray together for Christian unity and repair of an environment that is melting before our eyes.
It will be an historic moment and it will be recorded by cameraman from around the world.
What will those two men be thinking about as they kneel together?
My guess is that the Pope knows a lot more about Church and European history than Charles.
But a meeting between a leader of the dwindling Church of England and the head of the world’s largest Christian sect must remind both men of events in the 16th and 17th centuries that led to the break-up of Europe and the effective end of Christendom.
The historian Hilaire Belloc said in his book “How the Reformation Happened” that Henry’s break with Rome was the event that brought about “the disastrous destruction in the English mind of that Faith which had made England.”
It was the end for a Catholic aristocracy that had run England for so long and the birth of Protestant looters who were interested not in religion but rather in filling their own pockets with large sums of money following the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Belloc said that Henry broke with Rome on the persuasion of one man, Thomas Cromwell, “who was utterly indifferent to any consequences, so long as they filled his pockets.”
Thomas was an ancestor of Oliver who arranged the execution of Charles 1 in 1649.
Camilla – Unlike two of Henry V111’a wives she was divorced, re-wedded and survived
As most people know, the break between Henry V111 and the Catholic Church came after Cardinal Wolsey failed to get his monarch the divorce he wanted so he could marry a much younger woman who would give the king a male heir.
We must remember that the Tudor family was of low origin and had no real title to the throne.
In 1525, when the marriage annulment trouble first started, it was only 40 years since the Tudors usurped the throne of England and replaced the national Plantagenet dynasty after the Battle of Bosworth.
On 17 December 1538, Pope Paul 111 fulfilled an earlier threat and excommunicated the English king who had not only outraged Catholics for wanting a legal marriage dissolved but who had burned the bones of Europe’s best- known saint, Saint Thomas Becket, and scattered his ashes to the winds after destroying his shrine at Canterbury Cathedral.
- Henry had declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England
- He persecuted and sometimes executed men and women who opposed the Acts of Supremacy and Succession.
- He dissolved the monasteries. There were 800 religious houses in 1536 but none four years later after Thomas Cromwell had gone to work on them.
- Henry executed the leaders of the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace which under slightly different circumstances and leaders could have seen the overthrown of the Tudors. The story is told well by Anthony Fletcher in his book “Tudor Rebellions” (Longman, 1968)
The various rebellions throughout Britain following the Disillusion of the Monasteries is the essence of the story.
But prettier versions about life under the Tudors are told to British schoolchildren.
History in British state schools is dominated by endless repetitions of the “glorious” Tudor Story . That and Hitler’s Third Reich and the Holocaust.
Pope Leo X1V – a big American – style welcome for the King and Queen of ‘Protestant’ Britain
With the King praying next to the Pope this week, a far richer story about the Reformation and its consequences needs to be told.
The Royals are so different from the days when Henry V111 ran Britain.
In Henry’s time the King made laws and Parliament obeyed.
That could never happen again with a constitutional monarch in Buckingham Palace.
At the time of Henry V111, the job of those close to the monarch was fixed and that was to safeguard the future of the Royal family.
And again, in Henry V111’s time, no-one would have defied the King by mentioning there were several people swirling around Hampton Court living in grace and favour homes, living off the fat of the land, having sex with anything and anyone they fancied because they were entitled to do that because mum and dad were royals.
Thank God how things have changed over the centuries.