William of Ockham and Henry VIII

The influence of William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man on Henry VIII's decision to claim England was an Empire and he ruled as supreme in materials spiritual and secular is well known, but an article The Guardian highlights another book Henry and his supporters used to make that claim, by William of Ockham or Occam:

A book which helped changed the course of English history, part of the evidence Henry VIII and his lawyers gathered in the 1530s to help win an annulment from Catherine of Aragon and ultimately to break with Rome, has turned up on the shelves of the magnificent library at Lanhydrock, a National Trust mansion in Cornwall.

The book, a summary of the theories of the medieval philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, has been newly identified by a US scholar and expert on the history of Henry’s library. The book was damaged but escaped destruction in a disastrous fire at the house in 1881, and crucially the fly-leaf survived. It still carries the number 282, written in black ink in the top right-hand corner, which Prof James Carley identified as corresponding with an inventory taken in 1542 of the most important of Henry’s books, five years before the king’s death.

William of Ockham's works bolstered Henry's view that the monarch in his own country, not the Pope in Rome, should have control of ecclesiastical matters. Ockham was a Franciscan friar looking to the protection of The Holy Roman Emperor, Louis IV of Bavaria against Pope John XXII, who wanted to change the rule of St. Francis:

Henry’s agents were gathering evidence that could support the move, which may be how the collection of the views of the 14th century priest and philosopher, published in 1495, came to the royal library. Ockham wrote in Latin of the limits of the power of the pope, and the independence of the authority of monarchs. Several pages in the book have key passages marked by secretaries for Henry’s attention, including one crucial section with a heading which translates as: “When it is permitted to withdraw from obedience to the pope”.

In 1532 Henry would begin exactly that process of withdrawal from Rome. In 1533, despite its refusal to annul his first marriage, he married the almost certainly pregnant Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII declared that Catherine was still the rightful queen of England, and Henry responded with the Act of Supremacy, establishing himself as the head of the Church of England. The breach with Rome was complete.

I wonder if William of Ockham would have been pleased with this result, since it soon meant the eradication of the Franciscan order, and every other religious order, in England.