St John Fisher to St Thomas More: the "'fort had been betrayed even by those who should have defended it''.

When Henry VIII ascended the throne in the 16th century, Christopher Check tells us 

"the faith was vigorous in merry old England. Whereas heresies had brought war to France and Bohemia, and clerical scandals had plagued the whole continent, Henry inherited a country with a thriving Catholicism. The English nobility supported hundreds of monasteries that looked after the corporal needs of the poor and the spiritual needs of all English souls....All this, Henry would destroy."

While reportedly a seasoned adulterer, Henry had remained in communion with the Church.  In the midst of his affair with Anne Boleyn, however, he decided that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon could not be valid.  The Holy Father stood firm and did NOT grant Henry an annulment!  Not getting his own way, Hank decided to have himself declared "Supreme Head" of the Church in England.  Check rhetorically asks,

"How could Henry, a man of such learning, fail to see such obvious contradictions in his own schemes? The answer is in St. Thomas Aquinas, who reminds us that lust darkens the powers of reason: 'Unchastity's firstborn daughter is blindness of the spirit' [Translation: "Sin makes you stupid."]"....

Check continues....

"to get the pope's attention, Henry, with a complicit Parliament, attacked the whole English clergy....Charged with praemunire, a kind of treason, the clergy were forced to pay Henry a sum of 100,000 pounds to purchase a pardon for the imagined offense and were forced to acknowledge Henry as the 'protector and Supreme head of the Church in England'....[Later] came the Submission of the Clergy....The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, prepared a stirring rejection of this suppression of Church authority, but he failed to deliver it in Parliament, prompting Bishop Fisher [i.e., Saint John Fisher] to tell More [i.e., Saint Thomas More] that the 'fort had been betrayed even by those who should have defended it'...

[In the end,] More than one thousand monasteries and convents were destroyed and monks and nuns turned out into the street....Once, the poor were cared for in dignity and charity by men and women religious....The suppression of the Church in England was the dress rehearsal for the French Revolution, the Italian Risorgimento, the Mexican Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War. Henry VIII's divorce is the reason America is a Protestant country."