Origin from 1534
Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy of 1534 broke from Rome and made the crown head of the English church. Elizabeth I's own 1559 Act of Supremacy softened the royal title from Supreme Head to Supreme Governor, answering objections that Christ alone is head of the church. Establishment persists today, unlike in the Episcopal Church, the Church of Ireland, disestablished in 1871, or the Church in Wales, disestablished in 1920, all of which are self-governing members of the wider Anglican Communion without state ties.
Facts
Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1Tradition: Anglicanism Doctrinal Category Current StatusEstablishment persists in England. The Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871 and the Church in Wales in 1920, and both, like the Episcopal Church in the United States, are self-governing members of the wider Anglican Communion without state ties. 1 Origins
Origin Period Held ByThe Church of England alone among the Anglican churches. 1 Defining MomentHenry VIII's Act of Supremacy of 1534, which broke from Rome and made the crown head of the English church. 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceElizabeth I's Act of Supremacy of 1559 softened the royal title from Supreme Head to Supreme Governor, answering the objection that Christ alone is head of the church. 1 Learn More
From Supreme Head to Supreme Governor
Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy in 1534 severed the English church from Rome after the papacy refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and the Act named the king himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, a title claiming direct headship in place of the pope. His daughter Mary I briefly restored papal authority during her reign, but Elizabeth I's own Act of Supremacy in 1559 re-established royal authority over the church while deliberately adjusting the title from Supreme Head to Supreme Governor, a change meant to answer the theological objection, pressed by reformers on the continent and at home, that Christ alone can properly be called head of his church.
The 1559 Settlement required an Oath of Supremacy from clergy and officeholders acknowledging the monarch's authority, and by 1571 Article XXXVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles fixed the position doctrinally, asserting the sovereign's authority to govern all estates of the realm, including the clergy, in outward and temporal matters, while explicitly denying that the monarch has any power to minister the sacraments or to decide doctrine directly, a careful line intended to distinguish royal supremacy from anything resembling a lay papacy.
An Establishment the Rest of the Communion Does Not Share
Establishment remains a working feature of English public life today in ways most outsiders underestimate: twenty six of the Church of England's most senior bishops sit as Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords with a vote on ordinary legislation, and the appointment of diocesan bishops still formally passes through the Crown, exercised in practice by the Prime Minister's office acting on a name put forward by the church itself, a survival of royal supremacy quite unlike the clean separation of church and state written into the constitutions of many other nations.
No other province of the Anglican Communion carries this arrangement. The Episcopal Church in the United States was fully disestablished from the moment of American independence in 1789 and elects its own bishops without any government role whatsoever. The Church of Ireland was disestablished by Act of Parliament in 1871 and the Church in Wales followed in 1920, both becoming self-governing member churches of the wider Anglican Communion with no remaining state ties, demonstrating that establishment was always a specific English constitutional arrangement rather than an essential feature of Anglican identity as such. Establishment today coexists uneasily with an increasingly secular and religiously plural England, leaving Royal Supremacy less the vehicle of an actually Anglican nation than a constitutional artifact the church and state have not yet chosen to unwind.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
A doctrine held within Christianity.
The Church of England is England's legally established church, with the monarch as Supreme Governor since Elizabeth I's 1559 Act of Supremacy, a status the rest of the Anglican Communion does not share.
Critiqued By
It was the established church of Ireland until the Irish Church Act of 1869 took effect on 1 January 1871. It holds no established status now, the crown is not its supreme governor, and it legislates for itself through a General Synod in which the laity vote alongside clergy and bishops. It and the Church of England keep the same articles in opposite constitutional positions.
The Church of Scotland is national but not established in the English sense: the sovereign is a member of it rather than its Supreme Governor, swears at accession to preserve its Presbyterian government, and appoints no minister within it.
The Episcopal Church was constituted in 1789 with no crown role of any kind, its first bishop having been consecrated in 1784 by Scottish bishops who required no oath to the British Crown; it elects its own bishops and has never been established.
Sources
1. The Study of Anglicanism
Stephen Sykes, John Booty and Jonathan Knight (eds.), SPCK / Fortress Press, 1998
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Church of England, 1571Article XXXVII, the Thirty-Nine Articles, 1571the holders' own accountView the Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005s.v. Church of Scotland and s.v. Episcopal Church, on establishment refusedView the Source The Book of Common Prayer
Church of England; ed. Brian Cummings, Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), 2011The Book of Common Prayer, 1662View the Source Encyclopedia of American Religions
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