2nd March 2015
Congratulations to James Carley, who has achieved the Holy Grail of Tudor historians: a book from Henry VIII's own library, which he may have consulted when divorcing Katherine of Aragon.
US Tudor expert Prof. Carley was looking at the books in the Lanhydrock House library in Cornwall when he and the curator found the leather bound book marked with its royal library number of 282. It is a summary of the theories of philosopher William Of Ockham, which would have been brought to the king by his advisors since Ockham theorised about the limits of papal power.
Henry was anxious to prove that the Pope could not rule against the Bible – in particular that he could not grant Katherine of Aragon a dispensation to marry her dead husband's brother. If the marriage could be shown to be invalid then Henry could marry Anne Boleyn without difficulty. Of course, as we know, the Pope finally ruled that the marriage was valid – but by then Henry had sent Katherine of Aragon away and married Anne Boleyn on his own authority, initiating a breach with the Roman Catholic Church.
It's another great find for Tudor enthusiasts in a year which has, so far, been filled with incident. We are going to celebrate the re-interment of Richard III, we have seen images of Anne Boleyn studied with facial recognition technology – and scientists suggest epidemics of the Black Death were triggered by rises in the giant gerbil population in Asia. Busy times! Whatever next?
William of Ockham is the medieval thinker who gave his name to the theory of ‘Occam's razor’, which states that when you have a number of hypotheses offering explanations of a problem, the one you should choose (to cut through the difficulties) is the one with the fewest assumptions. This may not be the answer, but it is likely to be the easiest to consider.
I can't help thinking that if Henry VIII had read this, as well as William of Ockham's thoughts on papal supremacy, he might have been prompted to ask: why can't I get a healthy male heir? And, 'should I assume that it is God expressing his disapproval?’ There're an awful lot of assumptions in that!