In late November 1531, the youngest son of an important Bolognese family was traveling through imperial territory south of Rome toward the kingdom of Naples when he and his servants were attacked on the road by two gangs of thieves in succession. He succumbed to grievous injuries sustained during the robbery. Was this young man just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was he attacked because he was on a secret mission to someone in Naples on behalf of the king of England? The victim was Paolo, the brother of Gregorio Casali, then Henry VIII's ambassador at the Vatican. His death was only the most tragic of a number of mysterious episodes in the Casali family's involvement with the most famous matrimonial cause ever tried by the Holy See.

Catherine Fletcher's new study focuses on how Henry's case for an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon was fought at the Vatican. In most previous accounts, Rome is the distant and difficult protagonist in the dramatic tale of the growth of Henry's personal power and significance as a European monarch. Things looked rather different from the banks of the Tiber and the villas of the Quirinal Hill. There, Henry looked rather more like, in Fletcher's words, “a mid-ranking northern monarch, a player on the European stage but far from the star of the show” (x).

Gregorio Casali is certainly the star of Fletcher's story. An obscure, even neglected, figure in previous accounts of Henry's reign, he entered the king's service in the 1520s. Using sources drawn from most of the principal archives of Italy, from Vienna, the Vatican, and England, Fletcher shows how Casali was involved in the annulment case from when it was first submitted in 1527 to when it was finally removed by Henry from papal jurisdiction in 1533–34. Throughout the book, Fletcher interweaves the details of the various requests, legal depositions, and disputations made in the Consistory and Rota with her research on Casali's family connections, his personal life, and his ambitions.

One of the central themes of the book is the importance of ecclesiastical and secular patronage in the fortunes of middle-ranking families like the Casali, just as among the great aristocratic houses that provided the Church with its bishops, cardinals, and popes. Fletcher reveals the problems and opportunities the case presented to members of families like the Casali, in papal circles and in half a dozen Italian principalities and city-states where offers of support could bring rewards from a far-off but grateful English king and where opposing his plans might equally well be rewarded by the agents of Emperor Charles V, in effective control of Clement VII after the Sack of Rome in 1527.

Initially, Casali's connections were the source of his appeal for the English crown. Wolsey preferred using local men and relied on Casali among others to expedite matters before the Holy See, especially, of course, to build support in Rome for Henry's case. Casali knew (or so he told his English masters) who among the cardinals was a supporter of Henry and who was not. He knew how to entertain (and to bribe) a cardinal without insulting him, and he knew a range of courtierly stratagems needed to work the Curia. Casali's second major task was to smooth the way for English envoys sent to Rome, as they increasingly were after the fall of Wolsey in 1529. His relations with these men were not always good, and it is clear that Casali did not always have Henry's full confidence. He strenuously denied serving any other than Henry's interests, but he needed considerable income to maintain his household and to provide a dowry for his daughter. Fletcher demonstrates that Casali did work hard for Henry but that he and his family also had other patrons—in fact, it was absolutely essential that they did so. Gregorio's brother Giambattista was imprisoned in Austria when imperial authorities intercepted his pursuit of such patronage in Hungary. The mystery surrounding Paolo Casali's untimely death remains because there is insufficient evidence to resolve it.

Fletcher's book offers a reasonably comprehensive account of the nature of the annulment case and the various stages it reached in Rome before Henry took matters into his own hands. It does not tell us that much which is new about the minutiae of the case itself or the legal arguments put forward by one side and the refutations by the other. These are not, after all, the author's principal concern. We do, however, learn much about the mechanics of the conduct of the case, the delaying and disabling tactics employed at different times by all sides, and the workings of the curial system, and we are offered many insights into the nature of the papacy and its priorities at this crucial juncture in what became the European Reformation. We are also shown just how complex the interplay was among personal, familial, dynastic, and civic or state interests; not, for once, in England but throughout the Italian peninsula. Perhaps the book's main contribution to the scholarship of Henry's reign is the insights it offers into what England and its king looked like from the home city of the Church, whose leadership Henry once revered but which, at the last, he utterly rejected.

The book is very well researched and well written. Fletcher's experience as a journalist shows to advantage in this account, which is lively and spirited. Even in areas that require passages of extended exposition, it never flags, and the reader is carried along with the narrative and observational glances from it that Fletcher provides. It manages to combine, in a way that seems increasingly demanded by publishers, to be at once scholarly and “accessible” to the general reader. My one reservation is the title. To my mind at least, Our Man in Rome, as the British edition was titled, better encapsulated its content, perspective, and spirit. Read the preface of this fine book to find out why.