Lorenzo Campeggio was a Bolognese professor of law who entered the clergy after his wife’s death and rose quickly in papal service. Made cardinal in 1517, he was sent as legate to England in 1518 and given the see of Salisbury in 1524, which he held without ever residing.

As legate at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1524, he found the German estates unwilling to enforce the Edict of Worms, and he responded by gathering the Catholic princes of the south at Regensburg that summer into the first league pledged to suppress the Lutheran movement. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 he advised the emperor plainly:¹

Let the Emperor and the right-thinking princes form a league; … and if these rebels, equally insensible to threats and promises, obstinately persist in their diabolical course, then let his Majesty seize fire and sword, let him take possession of all the property of the heretics, and utterly eradicate these venomous plants.¹ Lorenzo Campeggioto Charles V at Augsburg, 1530

In the negotiations that followed he would not yield on private masses: “I would rather be cut in pieces,” he told the emperor, “than concede anything about Masses.”

In 1528–1529 Campeggio sat with Cardinal Wolsey as judge in Henry VIII’s divorce case at Blackfriars, and his adjournment of the court on July 23, 1529, helped drive Henry toward the break with Rome. Parliament deprived him of Salisbury in 1534. He died at Rome in 1539.

Catholic Opponents