A Break About Jurisdiction Before It Was About Doctrine

The English Reformation begins with a question about who decides, not about what is true. Henry VIII wanted his marriage annulled, Rome would not do it, and the Act of Supremacy of 1534 resolved the problem by transferring the authority to the crown. In doctrine Henry remained conservative, and men were executed under him for denying the royal supremacy and for denying transubstantiation. What changed immediately was ownership. The dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541 removed a substantial proportion of the landed wealth of the country from the church and transferred it, mostly by sale, into lay hands, which created a large class of families with a direct material interest in the settlement not being reversed. Shrines were dismantled, relics destroyed and pilgrimage suppressed, and the physical texture of English religion changed within a decade.

Diarmaid MacCulloch treats the English case as genuinely distinct from the continental reformations for this reason: elsewhere a doctrinal movement acquired political protection, while in England a political act created a church that then had to work out what it believed. The doctrine was argued afterwards, and the arguing took most of a century.