The campaign by Henry VIII’s ministers and diplomatic agents to seek the annulment of the king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon is one of those episodes in British history that can be reconstructed from entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Thanks to the policy of including non-British figures who played a significant part in the history of the island nations, that invaluable resource features a number of Italian players in the story of the divorce: Lorenzo Campeggi, the papal legate; Girolamo Ghinucci, the Bishop of Worcester; and Marco Raphael, the Venetian Hebraist whose brief visit to England in 1531 failed to resolve the discrepancy between the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Among the Italians there is a significant omission: Gregorio Casali (ca. 1500–36), who served as one of Henry’s ambassadors at the papal court. His name is familiar from narratives of the annulment campaign drawn from his dispatches: that story has been told before. On the other hand, Catherine Fletcher was certainly right to identify the personal history behind the name as a gap waiting to be filled. By pursuing him in Italian archives she has reconstructed the story not just of Gregorio, but also those of his three brothers — Giambattista, Henry’s ambassador in Venice; Paolo, an adventurer who met a violent end in the Kingdom of Naples; and Francesco, agent in Rome for the anti-Habsburg claimant to the Hungarian throne János Zápolya — together with their Bolognese cousin Andrea, whose house could not have been a more convenient base from which to observe the imperial coronation of Charles V in 1530. Collectively, their finger was on Europe’s diplomatic pulse, and they knew it, even if attempts to weave together their various connections proved to be overambitious. On the domestic front, Gregorio Casali’s marriage to Livia Pallavicino, an heiress with a disputed inheritance, was as productive in archival material as it was lucrative for him: the writer of those diplomatic dispatches was briefly master of an impressive fortress between Cremona and Piacenza, the Rocca Pallavicino-Casali at Monticelli d’Ongina.

Fletcher informs us that she came to sixteenth-century history after working for the BBC at Westminster. Her prose undoubtedly reflects the better sort of journalism, clarifying a complex political story for the benefit of busy people. This talent presumably made for a particularly readable doctoral thesis and — together with subject matter that happens to be the stuff of many a novel, film, or television drama — helped to determine the choice of a trade book over an academic monograph as the next incarnation of her research. This research is solid enough; less convincing are the interpolations for the supposed benefit of a wider audience. One can see the joins. Similarly, Fletcher tells a rattling good story when she is dealing with the Casali family, but she does not have the same command over the contextual material that seems to have been added at a later stage. In the secular sphere, the Italian Wars are understood in terms of the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V in the 1520s, which leads to an assumption that the entire sequence of campaigns from 1494 onward was a conflict between France and the empire. Spain is assumed to have been part of the empire because the same man was both king and emperor; by extension, Naples is described as “Imperial territory,” though it was as King of Spain that Charles ruled there. Elsewhere, Charles VIII and Louis XII of France are erroneously identified as brothers, the “large assembly” of Venetian patricians is referred to as the College, rather than the Great Council, and the Council of Ten is given “executive power” in the Venetian government, rather than responsibility for state security. Venice also suffers disproportionately when the author attempts to add ecclesiastical color, with misunderstandings about the patriarch, the cathedral, and the community at S. Giorgio Maggiore. Beyond the lagoon, Luther appears as a monk and the Bishop of Bath and Wells loses half his diocese. Overall, it might have been wiser to make fewer adaptations for the benefit of the general reader, who now has access to so many biographies as to be phenomenally well informed on the subject of Tudor history.