The English Reformation and Anglicanism
Henry VIII breaks with Rome, his children swing England between Protestant and Catholic, and Elizabeth I settles a national church that becomes the root of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
- Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation — Peter Marshall, Yale University Press (2017)
- The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 — Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press (1992)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
- Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 — Linda Colley, Yale University Press (1992)
Henry VIII broke with Rome not over doctrine but over the pope’s refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 made the king Supreme Head of the Church of England, and between 1536 and 1540 the monasteries were dissolved and their wealth seized. William Tyndale, whose English New Testament was smuggled into the country, was executed near Brussels in 1536, but within a few years an English Bible was placed in every parish church.
- Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation — Peter Marshall, Yale University Press (2017)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
Under Edward VI, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1549, revised 1552) made the church clearly Protestant. Mary I restored Catholicism and burned nearly 300 Protestants. Elizabeth I’s settlement of 1559 created a Protestant church that kept bishops, vestments and much of the old liturgy, a compromise later called the Anglican via media, and it was opposed from both sides, by Catholics and by Puritans who wanted further reform.
- Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation — Peter Marshall, Yale University Press (2017)
- The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 — Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press (1992)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
The Reformation gave the English the Bible and prayer in their own language, freed the church from a foreign power, and produced the martyrs remembered in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, like Archbishop Cranmer, burned at Oxford in 1556.
- Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation — Peter Marshall, Yale University Press (2017)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
Historians such as Eamon Duffy argue that late-medieval English Catholicism was vibrant and loved, and that the Reformation was largely imposed from above, destroying monasteries, shrines and a rich religious culture, and making martyrs of Catholics too.
- The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 — Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press (1992)
- Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation — Peter Marshall, Yale University Press (2017)
For centuries English Protestants told the Reformation as the moment England became itself: independent of Rome, reading the Bible in English and destined to resist Catholic Spain and France.
- Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 — Linda Colley, Yale University Press (1992)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
Why it matters today
The Anglican Communion, tens of millions of people from England to Nigeria, Uganda, Australia and the US Episcopal Church, grew from this settlement, as did the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, whose language still echoes in English. Its "middle way" between Catholic and Protestant, and its current divisions over sexuality, reflect a church held together by worship more than by a single confession.
The Reformation made England a Protestant nation and the Church of England its established church, with the monarch as Supreme Governor to this day. Few English people go to church now, but the parish church, the Prayer Book and the King James Bible shaped the language, the calendar and the landscape, and the ruined abbeys left by the dissolution are part of almost every English county.