There could be rumblings in the royal crypt under St George’s Chapel now that King Charles III has become the first British monarch to pray in the Sistine Chapel, a Catholic church—that too with the Pope himself—in nearly 500 years. After all, King Henry VIII who lies buried at St George’s had called time on that practice way back in 1534 when Pope Clement VII steadfastly refused to annul his first marriage to Katherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.

Henry VIII flew into such a rage in 1527 (just when Babur was in the process of conquering India) at Pope Clement’s intransigence that he decided to break with Rome altogether. He spent the next few years getting the requisite laws in place via the Reformation Parliament to remove all Papal authority over England, decimate the Catholic Church and form his own in 1534—of which he and all future British monarchs would be the supreme governor rather than priests.

He married Anne Boleyn even before the formal schism was effected and got the Archbishop of Canterbury—a post that is now deemed to be the functional head of the Church of England—to do what Pope Clement VII would not: declare Henry VIII’s first marriage to the Catholic Katherine of Aragon null and void, and his second marriage valid in May 1533. And eventually that got him and the Archbishop excommunicated by the next Pope, Paul III in December 1538.

Henry VIII’s Protestant daughter Queen Elizabeth I was also “excommunicated" by Pope Pius V in 1570 via a papal ‘bull’ (order) that declared her to be a heretic and unfit to rule........

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