Henry VIII letter to pope pleading for divorce reproduced

Replica of 1530 petition to Vatican to allow monarch to divorce Catherine of Aragon will cost €50,000
King Henry VIII
King Henry VIII craved a divorce to enable him to marry Anne Boleyn Corbis

It weighs in at 2.5 kilos, has 81 wax seals dangling from it and at €50,000 (£43,000) costs more than the average piece of ­Vatican merchandising.

But the perfect replica of the letter sent by British nobles to Pope Clement VII in 1530 demanding a divorce for Henry VIII was hailed by historians as crucial to understanding why England is a Protestant country when it was unveiled in Rome today.

"To understand England we need to have this document in mind," said the historian David Starkey, who was present at the launch in Rome.

After languishing lost in a drawer at the Vatican's secret archive until the 1920s, the letter has been painstakingly reproduced by an Italian firm, which plans to turn out 200 copies at a rate of three a month for libraries and collectors.

When the pope denied Henry VIII the divorce he craved from Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, the English king broke with Rome.

Academics and churchmen queued to peer at the scratchy handwriting of the signatories on the parchment, who made up 70% of the House of Lords at the time.

According to Starkey, the document says more about Henry's pressure to get his divorce than any Protestant rumblings in England.

"Very few people were remotely interested in ideas from Germany," he said, adding that Henry was more interested in Anne Boleyn, "who had been to France where women learned to manipulate men.

"This document was the start of what would turn into an avalanche of propaganda against Rome and wicked foreign ways," he said.

"It is so impressive and overblown precisely because it was needed to give a false idea of national unity against papal power," he added. "Even today it helps explain England's strange attitude to the European Union."

A damaged copy of the letter missing many of the seals is kept at the National Archives at Kew. Two of the new reproductions have already been ordered by private Italian collectors.