Anglicanism Is Established by Law in England

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Elizabeth I succeeded her Catholic half sister Mary I in 1558 and moved quickly to settle a religious question that had swung between Protestant and Catholic under her father, her brother and her sister in turn, three changes of state religion inside a single generation. The Act of Supremacy of 1559 restored the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, reclaiming the headship her father Henry VIII had first taken and her sister Mary had returned to Rome, and the accompanying Act of Uniformity required a single, revised Book of Common Prayer to be used in every parish in the realm.

The settlement these two acts produced deliberately held a middle path rather than choosing a side outright. It retained bishops and much of the church's traditional ceremony while affirming Reformed doctrine underneath that inherited structure, giving England an established church defined by statute, an act of Parliament, rather than by any single theological camp winning the argument.

What this changed for Christianity's spread was the fixing, after decades in which the state religion had reversed with nearly every new monarch, of a specific and durable form of Protestantism as England's established church. The Elizabethan Religious Settlement's deliberately middle path let Anglicanism hold together bishops and Reformed doctrine at once, a combination that would carry the Church of England, and eventually the whole communion descended from it, well beyond the sixteenth century.