The Act of Supremacy and the English Reformation

The Church of England's separation from Rome began as a dynastic dispute rather than a theological one. Henry VIII, seeking an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon that the Pope would not grant, secured from Parliament the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared the English monarch Supreme Head of the Church of England, transferring papal authority over the English church to the crown without, at that stage, mandating substantial doctrinal change. Substantial theological reform followed under his son Edward VI, driven chiefly by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and its more thoroughly Reformed 1552 revision fixed the vernacular liturgy that has shaped English speaking Christian worship ever since.

A brief and violent reversion to Roman Catholicism under Mary I, who had Cranmer and other Protestant leaders burned, was itself reversed by Elizabeth I, whose 1559 Settlement restored royal supremacy and a moderately Reformed liturgy while deliberately avoiding some of the more divisive doctrinal questions that had split continental Protestantism, establishing the enduring Anglican character of retaining substantial pre-Reformation structure and ceremony within a Reformed theological framework, a compromise that continues to generate both its distinctiveness and its internal disagreements.