The Beginnings of the Anglican Church

I have been following the Tudor drama on BBC2 on Friday evenings and whilst I have my own reservations about the interpretation of history in this series it cannot evade the murky issue about how the Anglican church came into being. An infamous English King concerned about his need for a male heir set against decades of conflict in the previous century precisely over this issue of the succession, wishes to divorce his wife on the most debatable of theological grounds in order to marry a younger woman with whom he had become infatuated.

This is all set against the complex issues of the Reformation in the church and the divisions in opinion engendered both in the court and in the country as a whole.

Albeit the pope wouldn't grant the divorce so our king took matters into his own hands, wresting religious authority from the papacy and making himself head of the church in England. What an extraordinary story!

It hasn't escaped my notice that had Henry remained married to Catherine of Aragon he might still have gone on to marry Jane Seymour who did finally give him his male heir even if the child was to die in adolescence some years after Henry. But then we would not have had Elizabeth and it would then have been likely that after a brief flirtation with Protestantism we would have reverted to the Catholic fold under the Stuart monarchs. Things might have proved more harmonious in the longer term but we would have been deprived of the English translation of the bible until well into the 20th century. That would have been a major deprivation indeed!