Clement VII

Clement's policy was to keep the papacy independent by leaning first toward the emperor and then toward France, and it collapsed in a single day. On 6 May 1527 an unpaid imperial army, largely German infantry with a strong Lutheran element, stormed Rome. The Swiss Guard was destroyed almost to a man covering the pope's escape along the covered passage to the Castel Sant'Angelo, where he was besieged for months while the city was looted, its population killed or scattered and its churches stripped. He came out only after agreeing terms and paying, and Rome as a centre of the Renaissance did not recover.

The English question ran straight through that catastrophe. Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon declared void, and the strongest argument against him was that a previous pope had granted the dispensation that permitted it, which no successor could lightly declare invalid. The decisive fact, though, was political. Catherine was the aunt of the Emperor Charles V, and from 1527 Charles was the man whose army held Rome and whose goodwill the pope needed.

Clement delayed, appointed a legatine court in England, and then in 1529 revoked the case to Rome, which was the practical end of Henry's hopes of a lawful annulment. Cranmer pronounced the marriage void in England in 1533; Clement gave sentence for Catherine in March 1534 and Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in the same year.

A pope who could not act because a besieging emperor was the queen's nephew is the immediate cause of the English break with Rome.

A pontificate remembered for two disasters also produced several things of long consequence, which is the reason it is worth reading beyond the headline.

He confirmed the Capuchin reform in 1528, approving a stricter Franciscan observance that became one of the most effective preaching orders of the Catholic Reformation, and he did so against sustained opposition from the existing Franciscan leadership.

In 1533 he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, a decision confirmed by his successor and executed after his death.

In the same year he received an explanation of the heliocentric hypothesis in the Vatican gardens from a papal secretary who had learned it from Copernicus's circulating summary. The account is documented, and the pope's reaction was interest rather than alarm; the secretary was given a valuable manuscript as a reward. Copernicus's own book, published nine years later, carried a dedication to a subsequent pope, and the condemnation of the theory did not come for another seventy years.

Also in 1533 he presided at the marriage of his young kinswoman Catherine de' Medici to the second son of the king of France, who unexpectedly became Henry II. That marriage put a Medici at the centre of French politics for four decades, through the wars of religion.

What he did not do was call a general council to address the reform demands that had been accumulating since before his election. He feared what a council might do to papal authority. His successor called one, at Trent, eleven years after his death.