The Act of Supremacy

The English break with Rome began as a legal argument about jurisdiction rather than a dispute about doctrine, and that beginning marked the church that resulted. Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, the pope was unable or unwilling to oblige, and a series of statutes over several years transferred to the crown the powers previously exercised from Rome: first appeals, then the payment of revenues, then the appointment of bishops, and finally, in the Act of Supremacy of 1534, the headship of the church itself.

The act declares the king to be the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, with authority to visit, reform and correct errors and abuses. It does not change a single article of doctrine. For most of Henry's reign the mass continued substantially as before, and men were executed for denying transubstantiation and for denying the supremacy in the same years.

Enforcement was by oath, and the oath is what made it lethal. Refusing to swear was treason. Thomas More, who had been Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, were both executed in 1535 for declining to affirm it, More having kept silent rather than argue. The dissolution of the monasteries followed, transferring an enormous quantity of land to the crown and from the crown to the gentry, which gave a great many families a material stake in the settlement.

The settlement was not stable for a generation. Under Edward VI the church became doctrinally Protestant, with an English prayer book and reformed articles. Mary I repealed the supremacy in 1554 and restored the papal jurisdiction, and the executions ran in the opposite direction. Elizabeth I restored the supremacy in 1559 and with it a prayer book and articles, and the arrangement then held.

One detail of the Elizabethan act is more than cosmetic. The title was changed from supreme head to supreme governor, a formula that avoided claiming spiritual headship of Christ's church for a monarch, and which also avoided the objection that a woman could not be head of the church. It was deliberately capable of being accepted by people who understood it differently, which is characteristic of the whole settlement.

That capacity became the defining feature of Anglicanism: a church defined by common worship and a legal framework, holding together within it people of markedly different theological convictions, and preferring formulas that do not force a choice. Its critics have called that incoherence and its defenders comprehensiveness for four centuries. The royal supremacy itself remains the law in England, with the sovereign as supreme governor of the established church, though the appointment of bishops has passed in practice to the church.