Act of Supremacy — Henry VIII Breaks with Rome
Parliament declared Henry VIII supreme head of the Church of England in November 1534. The proximate cause was a marriage. Henry had been married to Catherine of Aragon for eighteen years without a surviving son, wanted the marriage annulled on the argument that it had been unlawful from the start, and the pope would not do it — partly on the merits and largely because Catherine's nephew Charles V had troops in Rome. The solution, devised chiefly by Thomas Cromwell, was to remove the jurisdiction rather than to argue with it. A series of statutes over three years cut the appeals to Rome, transferred the annates and Peter's Pence to the crown, gave the archbishop of Canterbury the power to determine matrimonial cases, and finally declared that the king is and ought to be the supreme head of the church, with authority to reform heresies and abuses. The Treasons Act made it capital to deny the title, and Thomas More and John Fisher were beheaded in 1535 for declining to swear. The dissolution of the monasteries followed from 1536, transferring perhaps a quarter of the land in England to the crown and then to the gentry who bought it — which created a landed class with a permanent financial interest in the settlement. Doctrine changed very little in Henry's lifetime; the break was jurisdictional. The act was repealed under Mary and re-enacted in modified form under Elizabeth in 1559, with the sovereign as supreme governor rather than head. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was the largest rebellion of the Tudor century and was directed against the dissolution rather than against the king. It was dispersed by a promise of pardon and a parliament, and its leaders were hanged the following year.
- Year: 1534 CE
- Category: Political
