Giulio de’ Medici was born at Florence in 1478, the illegitimate son of Giuliano de’ Medici, who had been murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy a month before the child’s birth. He was raised by his uncle Lorenzo alongside the boy who became Leo X, and under that cousin’s pontificate he became the most powerful man in Rome after the pope himself. He was elected in November 1523.

He was an able administrator and, by the standards of his family, personally respectable. He was also constitutionally unable to decide anything. Caught between the Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France, he changed sides repeatedly, and in 1526 joined the League of Cognac against the emperor.

The reckoning came in May 1527, when an unpaid imperial army — a good part of it German and Lutheran — descended on Rome and sacked it for weeks. Churches were stripped, relics scattered, the papal apartments used as stables. Clement watched from the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he remained besieged for seven months before buying his freedom. The Renaissance in Rome effectively ended that spring.¹

His second crisis decided the shape of English Christianity. Henry VIII sought to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. In ordinary circumstances a compliant pope might have found a way; the difficulty was that Catherine was the aunt of Charles V, whose troops had lately held Clement prisoner. He delayed for six years. In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, as archbishop, pronounced the marriage void; in 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy and the English church was severed from Rome. Clement died a few months later.

It is often said that Henry’s divorce caused the English Reformation. It did not. It created the political opening. The Reformation in England had been gathering for generations — in the Lollard remnant, in the Cambridge men who met at the White Horse Inn, and above all in William Tyndale’s New Testament, which had been reaching English readers since 1526 and which no act of Parliament had authorized. Henry gave the movement a door. He did not give it its convictions. See England.

Roman Catholicism   The Reformation in England

Sources

1. On the Sack of Rome, the annulment crisis, and Clement’s diplomacy see Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910). ↩