The last of the "Hans Luft of Marburg" imprints (1530), this is perhaps Tyndale's most strident and bitter polemic. Proclaiming on the title-page his intention to examine the question of Henry VIII's proposed "divorce" from Catherine of Aragon, Tyndale delays his discussion of the divorce for 120 quarto pages (a total of 164). Instead, he conducts a historical survey of the political machinations of those he sees as the servants of Antichrist, beginning with the scribes and pharisees who persuaded Pilate to crucify Jesus, through the rise of the papacy before the reign of Charlemagne, down to the contemporary intrigues of Cardinal Wolsey. This vast historical conspiracy has served to divide nations, securing the dominant position of the prelacy and preventing the development of the harmonious community envisioned in the Gospels.
When Tyndale finally considers the divorce itself, he explains that the curse of childlessness if a man marries his brother's wife (Leviticus 20.21) applies only when the brother is still alive — an interpretation that also explains the injunction (Deuteronomy 25.5) that a man must marry his brother's widow. Wolsey has planted the seed for Henry's scruples through the confessional, in order to precipitate war and invasion and to keep England under the power of France. Because material concerning the divorce was carefully omitted from later Tudor reprints (lest the legitimacy of Edward or Elizabeth be questioned), the vision of history as an international conspiracy became particularly prominent in the English national imagination.