Bishop Gilbert Burnet: "Reformation of the Church of England," 2.94ff.

2.86-109. The long, tedious, twisted, and twisting saga of Realpolitics between the Poop, Cardinals in Rome, Cardinal Syphilis (Wolsey of York), Cardinal Campeggio in Rome and later England, King Henry, Charles V, the Imperial Spaniards at Rome and in England…the saga to grant a reversal of Poop Julius’s dispensation. All of this goes down throughout 1528. Ann Boleyn, aged 27, writes two familiar, if not gutsy, letters to Cardinal Syphilis. She’s “in the know” and Henry is the only one who brought her into these back-channel, high level maneuvers. Steve Gardiner and Edward Fox, a canonist and theologian respectively, are in the back rooms too. Poor Cranmer is doing academic lifting at Cambridge at this point and, soon enough in late 1529, will get sucked into Henry’s gambit. Man plans, but God disposes as He desires. It is must be remembered that the Poop and his prestige had long declined from its zenith under the Sinner, Innocent III, and after the Sinner, Boniface VIII, followed by the Bablyonian Captivity, the Great Schism and the several reformatory councils. The Renaissance Poops did not improves on the deep, sinful, anti-apostolic sewers of the past.