Henry VIII

The break with Rome was carried out by statute, in sequence, over about five years, and the sequence is the clearest way to describe it.

It began with a marriage suit. From 1527 Henry sought from Rome an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, on the argument that it had been unlawful from the start because she had been his brother's widow. The case ran for six years without resolution, complicated by the fact that Catherine's nephew was the emperor Charles V, whose troops had sacked Rome in 1527.

Parliament then supplied what Rome would not. The Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 declared England an empire whose spiritual and temporal jurisdiction was complete in itself and forbade appeals to Rome, which allowed Thomas Cranmer, newly archbishop, to hear the case and pronounce the marriage void. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the king to be the only Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England and annexed to the crown the authority to correct errors and heresies. A Treasons Act made it capital to deny the royal titles.

Refusal was tested at once. Thomas More, formerly Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, declined the oath and were executed in 1535, as were a number of Carthusian monks. The atlas records the statutes and their enforcement, which are the historical substance; it does not offer a verdict on the king.

Between 1536 and 1540 every religious house in England and Wales was closed, some eight hundred of them, their communities pensioned or dispersed, their buildings stripped of lead and stone, and their lands taken into the crown and then sold. The sales are what made the change permanent: a very large part of the gentry now held former monastic property, and any restoration of the old order would have required them to give it back.

Shrines went with the houses. The shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, one of the great pilgrimage destinations of Europe, was destroyed in 1538 and Becket's name was ordered erased from service books. In the same period an English Bible was set up in every parish church by royal injunction, an act firmly on the reforming side of the argument.

Yet the doctrine did not move with the jurisdiction. The Act of Six Articles of 1539 reaffirmed transubstantiation, communion in one kind for the laity, clerical celibacy, the binding force of vows of chastity, private masses and auricular confession, with severe penalties for denial. In the years that followed, men were burned for denying the mass and others were executed for denying the royal supremacy, sometimes on the same day.

The result at his death in 1547 was a national church, catholic in most of its worship and belief, with the king in the place of the pope. The doctrinal reformation came afterwards, under his son.