The Divorce of the King Henry VIII and the Establishment of the Anglican Church

Henry VII had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. There was just one problem: he was married to Catherine of Aragon. The solution that Henry VIII devised was to get a divorce; simple enough today, but not so much during this time. A convergence of legal and theological issues stood in the way of Henry VIII achieving his goal. Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce may have had more to do with his desire for a male heir than his love for Anne Boleyn-especially considering her fate. Henry VIII had come to view the fact that his long marriage to Catherine of Aragon had yet to produce an heir as retribution for his marrying his brother’s wife following his death.

Henry staked out his claim that he wanted to avoid the complications inherent in a disputed succession and that was why it was necessary for him to receive permission for a divorce. The anarchy and disputes involved in the Wars of the Roses were still fresh enough that this seemed a likely enough possibility and added much needed fuel to his argument.

At first, in fact, Henry VIII pursued an annulment that would state that his marriage to Catherine of Aragaon had never even taken place. (Don’t you just love the way the Catholic Church allowed people they like to get around legalities they didn’t like?) Political expediencies on the part of the Pope made this impossible, however, so Henry VIII became determined to secure a divorce instead.

This was facilitated by the fateful destiny that awaited the sitting Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop died at just the perfect moment for Henry VIII, who moved to replace him with Thomas Cranmer who heard the case and, not surprisingly, granted Henry his annulment. As a result, Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was declared null and void and it was if it had never happened, and Henry went ahead with his marriage to Anne Boleyn.

This series of events presented such a divide between the ecclesiastical courts of England and Rome, combined with the anti-Roman sentiment that had been growing among the populace of England, that a definitive split was seen as almost inevitable.

The Supremacy Act of 1534 declared the king to be the supreme head of the church of England. This act, along with the Act for the Submission of the Clergy stands out as an attempt to consolidate the power of the monarchy. The Act of Succession even demanded that all adults had to swear an oath recognizing the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

The reformation as practiced in England actually had less to do with religion than with politics and economics. Many Catholic ecclesiastical laws were kept intact, in fact. The primary concern of creating the Anglican Church was to effectively nationalize the institution and practice of religion; to take power away from the foreign influence of Roman and place it firmly within the purview of the British themselves.

As a result of this nationalization, land that had belonged to the Catholic Church, for instance, transferred ownership to the crown. Economic conditions were affected as well, with revenues no longer subject to being split between the crown and the church. With the crown as the legal head of the church, all revenue went to the same place. Government agencies had to be revised as well and, not surprisingly, the bulk of the power that had been out of the king’s hands soon was directly in the middle of the king’s palm. The creation of the Anglican church and the centering of the power of that church, at time when religion was the single most powerful entity in the Christian world, able to ensure loyalty among people that a non-Christian king could never have dreamed of-was a stroke of genius. England essentially became a theocracy in which the religious beliefs of the leader were fully secondary to his secular concerns.