The Anglican Communion's roots lie in the sixteenth century English Reformation, when Henry VIII's 1534 break with Rome, prompted by the papacy's refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, made the English monarch rather than the Pope the head of the church in England. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 fixed the enduring character of the resulting church as a distinctive middle way, retaining much traditional liturgy and church structure, bishops included, while adopting Reformed theology on many points, an ambiguity that has shaped Anglican identity ever since.
English colonial and missionary expansion from the seventeenth century onward carried this church far beyond England, planting churches across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Australasia that gradually became self-governing national or regional provinces rather than remaining administratively part of the Church of England itself. By the nineteenth century these daughter churches, doctrinally related but organizationally independent, needed some means of maintaining a shared identity without a single governing authority.
That means arrived in 1867, when Archbishop of Canterbury Charles Longley convened the first Lambeth Conference at the request of Canadian bishops seeking a forum to discuss shared concerns, establishing the consultative, non-binding pattern of connection that still defines the Anglican Communion today.