A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

good professional army and had to raise an army of ruffians with promises of plunder. Too late,
Clement tried to buy them off. On 6 May 1527, the mercenaries threw scaling ladders against the
walls of Rome and burst into the city. The result was the most horrifying sack of Rome so far -
worse by far than that of Alaric. It was simply murder, rape and torture, and it went on for months.
They killed pointlessly, without reason. They were determined to get paid if it involved dismantling
every house in Rome and torturing every man and woman to force them to give up their hidden
treasures. As far as Rome was concerned, it was the end of the Renaissance. In fact, it was very
nearly the end of Rome. And this violence was not the fault of Charles V - who tried hard to stop it
- or the vacillating pope. The blame must be laid squarely at the door of Martin Luther. Most of
these mercenaries were Lutherans who were delighted to try to destroy the ‘eternal city’. They
regarded it as a duty as well as a pleasure to rape nuns, to throw priceless statues into cesspools, to
slash religious paintings, to stable their horses in St Peter’s. For these Catholics were robbers and
plunderers and deceivers; they deserved to be exterminated. The sack of Rome of 1527 was an
expression of the new religious spirit of the north.
It also explains why Charles V - a good Catholic - should have developed a particularly virulent
loathing for Protestants; as the ‘second Charlemagne’, he itched for the opportunity to repay them
in kind.
Charles also had something to say about the divorce of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.
Catherine was his aunt; her only daughter Mary - who would become queen of England - his
cousin. He brought pressure to bear on the pope - who would have been perfectly willing to grant
Henry his divorce. Clement vacillated. Francis I sent his armies into Italy and won victories;
Clement now felt independent enough to send an envoy to England to try the case. Then, in 1529,
Charles beat the French army at Landriano and the war ended in a treaty that was humiliating for
France. Henry put the blame on Wolsey - he was the kind of man who had to have someone to
blame - and the cardinal only escaped execution by dying of illness. Then the king secretly married
Anne Boleyn - who was withholding her sexual favours pending wedlock - and a new Archbishop
of Canterbury, Cranmer, declared that Henry was now divorced from Catherine of Aragon.
In 1530, the king suddenly realised that this quarrel with Rome could be highly profitable. Using
the same trumped-up treason charge that he had used against Wolsey - that of recognising the
pope’s authority above the king’s - he blackmailed Canterbury into paying £100,000 and York into
paying £19,000. Then, like a tiger who has tasted blood, he surveyed the abbeys and monasteries of
England, computed their wealth and ordered his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, to squeeze them
dry. Glastonbury Abbey was a typical example. Its abbot, Richard Whyting, had entertained Henry
magnificently, which was a mistake. In 1539, Whyting was accused of treason, sentenced to death
by Cromwell and hanged on Glastonbury Tor. The beautiful abbey building - whose grounds had
held the body of King Arthur - was then reduced to a ruin.
Henry went on to marry four more times. When Anne Boleyn presented him with a daughter (later
Queen Elizabeth I) and then a stillborn son, she was beheaded on an accusation of adultery. Jane
Seymour, the next wife, died after giving birth to a son, Edward. Henry was pushed into marrying
the unattractive Anne of Cleves for political reasons by Cromwell - who paid for the mistake by his
own downfall and execution. When Charles V and Francis I made the marriage unnecessary by
starting to quarrel again, Anne was quickly divorced. Meanwhile, Henry had fallen in love with a
sexually desirable teenager named Catherine Howard - he was unaware that she had already had
several lovers, including her two cousins Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpepper. After marrying
Henry in 1541, she appointed Dereham her secretary and had several clandestine meetings with