This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 3 November 1534, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, receiving royal assent on 18 December 1534 and declaring Henry VIII and his successors supreme head of the Church of England in place of the Pope. The break was not a theological rupture at its outset; it grew directly out of Henry's marital crisis. Pope Clement VII had refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and Henry, unwilling to accept that refusal, secured his annulment through English ecclesiastical channels instead, severing the authority Rome had held over the English church for centuries.
Henry carried the break through Parliament and the English clergy rather than through popular religious upheaval, remaking the church's governance while leaving much of its Catholic doctrine and worship in place for the remainder of his reign. The change was constitutional before it was confessional: headship moved from Rome to the English crown, and everything doctrinal that followed, under Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I in turn, built on the structure this act created.
What the 1534 act changed for Anglicanism's spread was its true beginning. Anglicanism's own earliest documented event is otherwise the 1559 Elizabethan settlement, a quarter century later, which read alone as an uninterrupted founding rather than the break, Catholic reversal under Mary and eventual resettlement it actually was. Naming Henry's 1534 rupture restores the sequence a settlement-only account leaves out.