Supreme Head, Supreme Governor

The settlement was not stable for a generation. Under Edward VI the church became doctrinally Protestant, with an English prayer book and reformed articles. Mary I repealed the supremacy in 1554 and restored the papal jurisdiction, and the executions ran in the opposite direction. Elizabeth I restored the supremacy in 1559 and with it a prayer book and articles, and the arrangement then held.

One detail of the Elizabethan act is more than cosmetic. The title was changed from supreme head to supreme governor, a formula that avoided claiming spiritual headship of Christ's church for a monarch, and which also avoided the objection that a woman could not be head of the church. It was deliberately capable of being accepted by people who understood it differently, which is characteristic of the whole settlement.

That capacity became the defining feature of Anglicanism: a church defined by common worship and a legal framework, holding together within it people of markedly different theological convictions, and preferring formulas that do not force a choice. Its critics have called that incoherence and its defenders comprehensiveness for four centuries. The royal supremacy itself remains the law in England, with the sovereign as supreme governor of the established church, though the appointment of bishops has passed in practice to the church.