A royal divorce; a religious revolution; the beginnings of political modernity.

This game transforms students into English lords and commoners during the tumultuous years of 1529 to 1536. The king has summoned Parliament in the hope that it somehow will find the means to invalidate his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, thus freeing him to marry his new love, Lady Anne Boleyn. Matters of state also apply, because Henry has no male heir to carry on the Tudor line. But will Parliament be content with solving the king’s marital and dynastic problems? For some in Parliament wish to use the royal divorce to disempower the English church, to sever its ties to papal Rome, and to change it doctrinally from Catholicism to Lutheranism. Others, however, oppose the divorce, oppose secular supremacy and independence from Rome, and oppose this heretical creed filtering in from the continent. The king himself is ambivalent about the reformation unleashed by his divorce campaign, and so the conservatives are loosed to prosecute reformers as heretics, while the reformers are loosed to prosecute conservatives as traitors.

At issue in the game is the clash of four contending ideas: traditionalist Christianity, reformist Protestantism, Renaissance humanism, and Machiavellian statecraft. Depending on the outcome of this contest, the modern nation-state will, or will not, be born.