On 23 May 1533, Thomas Cranmer’s court at Dunstable declared Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon invalid.

The judgment was brief, but it carried more weight than a private ruling about a failed royal marriage. Henry had already married Anne Boleyn. Catherine was still widely regarded as queen. Anne was pregnant. Henry’s marriage case had become a matter of succession, church authority and papal power in England.

Cranmer had only recently become Archbishop of Canterbury. His court sat at Dunstable, close to Ampthill, where Catherine was living. She refused to recognise its authority and did not appear before it. That refusal mattered. It showed that this was not a clean legal settlement accepted by both sides. It was a judgment made inside a political and religious break that was already underway.

For years, Henry had tried to end his marriage to Catherine. He argued that it had never been lawful because she had first been married to his brother Arthur. Catherine rejected that claim. She insisted that her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated and that her marriage to Henry was valid. Rome had not given Henry the answer he wanted.

By 1533, Henry’s government had changed the ground. The Act in Restraint of Appeals blocked appeals to the pope and declared that England was an empire, governed by its own king. In practical terms, Henry’s marriage case could now be settled in England by English authority. Cranmer’s judgment was the formal use of that new position.

The decision cleared the way, within England, for Anne Boleyn to be treated as Henry’s lawful wife. A few days later, Cranmer confirmed Henry’s marriage to Anne as valid. The timing was plain. The king needed his second marriage recognised before Anne’s child was born. When Elizabeth was born in September 1533, her legitimacy rested on the settlement that Cranmer’s court had helped provide.

The ruling did not make Catherine accept defeat. It did not make Rome agree. It did not end the argument over Henry’s actions. What it did was show that the crown, Parliament and the English church were now prepared to decide a matter that had once depended on papal judgement.

That is why 23 May 1533 carries more than the dry language of annulment. A marriage was declared invalid, but the deeper issue was authority. Henry’s England was acting as though the final judgement now sat at home.