Philip of Flanders now declares his neutrality towards Henry, in return for which the King agrees to provide him with regular financial support.

Henry now appears to his contemporaries to be stronger than ever, and he is courted as an ally by many European leaders and asked to arbitrate over international disputes in Spain and Germany.

He is nonetheless busy resolving some of the weaknesses that he believes had exacerbated the revolt.

Henry sets about extending royal justice in England to reassert his authority and spends time in Normandy shoring up support among the barons.

he King also makes use of the growing Becket cult to increase his own prestige, using the power of the saint to explain his victory in 1174, especially his success in capturing William.

Henry had undertaken a wave of castle-building during his visit in 1171 to protect his new territories—the Anglo-Normans have superior military technologies to the Irish, and castles give them a significant advantage.

Henry hopes for a longer term political solution, however, similar to his approach in Wales and Scotland, and in 1175 he agrees to the Treaty of Windsor, under which Rory O'Connor is recognized as the high king of Ireland, giving homage to Henry and maintaining stability on the ground on his behalf.

This policy will proved unsuccessful, as O'Connor will be unable to exert sufficient influence and force in areas such as Munster.

The governments of England, Portugal, and Burgundy, following the English-aided victory of Portuguese monarch John I over Castilian invaders at the Battle of Aljubarrota, conclude the 1386 Treaty of Windsor, recognizing John’s House of Aviz in a permanent political alliance between England and Portugal.

Lautrec's defeat at Bicocca has brought England openly into the conflict.

The English ambassador in late May 1522 had presented Francis with an ultimatum enumerating accusations against France, notably that of supporting the Duke of Albany in Scotland, all of which were denied by the king.

Duke Charles II of Bourbon, Constable of France, seeing no hope of prevailing in his fight to keep King Francis from confiscating his late wife’s estates, makes a secret agreement to betray his King and offer his services to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The Emperor, the Constable, and King Henry VIII of England devise a grand plan to partition France.

Henry VIII and Charles on June 16, 1522, sign the Treaty of Windsor.

The treaty outlines a joint English-Imperial attack against France, with each party providing at least forty thousand men.

The plan to attack and partition France will fail, but the French will neither forgive Charles or fully trust him again.

Charles agrees to compensate England for the pensions that will be lost because of conflict with France and to pay the past debts that will be forfeit; to seal the alliance, he also agrees to marry Henry's only daughter, Mary.

Henry had been conducting an affair with Mary Boleyn, lady-in-waiting to his wife Catherine of Aragon There has been speculation that Mary's two children, Catherine and Henry Carey, were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proved and the King never acknowledged them as he did Henry FitzRoy, his six-year-old son by his former mistress, Elizabeth Blount.

As Henry in 1525 grows more impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the male heir he desires, he becomes enamored of Mary's sister, Anne, a charismatic young woman of twenty-five in the Queen's entourage.

Anne, however, resists his attempts to seduce her, and refuses to become his mistress as her sister Mary Boleyn had.

It is in this context that Henry considers his three options for finding a dynastic successor and hence resolving what will come to be described at court as the King's "great matter".

These options are legitimizing Henry FitzRoy, which would take the intervention of the pope and would be open to challenge; marrying off Mary as soon as possible and hoping for a grandson to inherit directly, but Mary is considered unlikely to conceive before Henry's death; or somehow rejecting Catherine and marrying someone else of childbearing age.

Probably seeing the possibility of marrying Anne, the third is ultimately the most attractive possibility to the thirty-four-year-old Henry, and it soon becomes the King's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to the now forty-year-old Catherine.

It is a decision that will see Henry reject papal authority and initiate the English Reformation.

Henry VIII has been happy with Catherine of Aragon for a number of years, but is concerned because Catherine, forty-two in 1527, has borne no male heir to continue the Tudor line.

She has produced six children, two of them boys, but all had been stillborn or died in infancy except Mary, born in 1516, and Catherine’s physical condition clearly will no longer allow her to bear children.

Henry concludes, through his reading of the biblical Leviticus 20:21, forbidding marriage to a dead brother’s widow, that his marriage displeases God.

He therefore orders his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, to approach the papacy for a decree that the marriage is invalid and that Henry is free to marry again.

Henry has by this time fallen in love with twenty-six-year-old Anne Boleyn, the niece of Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk.

Pope Clement VII procrastinates over the annulment, which Catherine opposes, as does her nephew Charles V, Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain.

Because Charles dominates Italy during this period, Clement is unable to grant Henry's request.

In going public, all hope of tempting Catherine to retire to a nunnery or otherwise stay quiet is lost.

Henry had sent his secretary, William Knight, to appeal directly to the Holy See by way of a deceptively worded draft papal bull.

Knight has been unsuccessful; the Pope cannot be misled so easily.

Thomas More, meanwhile, refuses to endorse Henry's plan to divorce Catherine.

John Marbeck, who has apparently spent most of his life at Windsor, where he is organist at St. George's Chapel, had been sentenced to the stake for heresy in 1544 but had been pardoned through the intervention of Bishop Gardiner of Winchester.

Marbeck's “greate worke,” his English Concordance to the Bible, is at this time taken from him and destroyed.

He had begun it again on his release, and it had been published in abbreviated form in 1550, under Edward VI.

He also publishes his setting of plainchant for the Anglican liturgy, Booke of Common Praier Noted (i.e., set to musical notes).

This set the liturgy to semi-rhythmical melodies partly adapted from Gregorian chant; though it will soon be rendered obsolete when the Prayer Book is revised in 1552.

It will be rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and adaptations for the 1662 liturgy are still in use today.