House of Tudor · 1534
Henry VIII and the break with Rome
On the third of November 1534, in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster, the Act of Supremacy passed its third reading and received Royal Assent the same day. The fourteen-clause Act, drafted by Thomas Cromwell on the direct political commission of Henry VIII (the second Tudor monarch, then forty-three years old, in his twenty-sixth year on the throne), declared Henry to be *the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England*, dissolved the jurisdictional connection between the English Church and the Roman See that had stood since the Augustine mission of 597 (nine hundred and thirty-seven years), and gave the Crown the direct legal authority over the doctrine, the ecclesiastical discipline, and the monastic properties of the English Church. The Act was the political-legal end-point of the six-year king's-divorce-case of Henry from Catherine of Aragon (1528–34); the 1531 Convocation Submission of the Clergy; the 1532 Submission of the Clergy Act; the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals; and the 1534 Act of Succession. The political-religious consequence ran through the Tudor century: the Dissolution of the Monasteries 1536–41 (the largest single transfer of land-ownership in English history before the 1845 Irish-Land-Act-and-Famine settlements); the execution of Sir Thomas More (1535) and Bishop John Fisher (1535); the Pilgrimage of Grace 1536; the 1547 Edwardian Reformation; the 1553–58 Marian Counter-Reformation; the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement. The break with Rome is, by every careful judgment of the Reformation historians (G. R. Elton, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Eamon Duffy), the foundational political-religious event of the modern English state.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of Tuesday the third of November 1534, on the throne-platform of the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster, in pale autumn light through the Chamber's Perpendicular tracery. He is forty-three years old. He is Henry VIII, King of England since the twenty-second of April 1509, in his twenty-sixth year on the throne, the second monarch of the Tudor dynasty established by his father Henry VII at Bosworth in 1485.
He is on the throne in the formal Lords-Parliament regalia of the crimson-velvet-and-ermine robes of state, with the Crown of State (the Tudor crown of Henry VII, the precursor of the modern Imperial State Crown) on his head. Below him on the Lords benches are the twenty-eight bishops, the fifty-seven temporal peers, and the Commons delegation under the Speaker Sir Humphrey Wingfield. On the clerk's-table on the floor of the Chamber are the three large parchment folios of the Act of Supremacy, the Act of Succession, and the Act of Treasons (the three companion Acts of the 1534 Reformation Parliament).
He thinks: the Act of Supremacy passes today. The Act dissolves the jurisdictional connection between the English Church and the Roman See that has stood for nine hundred and thirty-seven years since the Augustine mission of 597.
He thinks: the political-cause of the break is, in plain reading, the six-year divorce-case of Catherine. The cause has, by the Cromwell political-management of the 1531–34 Reformation Parliament, become a larger political-jurisdictional question. The larger question is whether the English Crown is, on the political-jurisdictional grounds, in a position of foreign subordination to the Bishop of Rome.
He thinks: the Act answers the question. The Crown is the supreme jurisdiction of the realm. The Bishop of Rome is, on the jurisdictional grounds, a foreign prelate of the Continental-Italian Church who has, on the 1531-Convocation submission, no legal authority in the realm of England.
He thinks: More and Fisher will refuse the Oath of Supremacy. More and Fisher will be on the Tower Hill scaffold within twelve months. The Pope will, on the news from Rome, declare the Excommunication of the King of England within eighteen. The Excommunication is, on the political-jurisdictional principle the Act establishes, a Papal-foreign-prelate's statement-without-legal-effect.
He thinks: Cromwell will run the 1536-Dissolution of the Monasteries on the basis of the Act. The Dissolution will transfer about a quarter of the arable land of the realm from the Catholic-monastic-ecclesiastical ownership to the Crown-and-Crown-creature-aristocratic ownership. The political-aristocracy of the English Reformation will, by 1547, be a Crown-creature aristocracy founded on the monastic-property windfall.
He gives the Royal Assent at twenty-five past three by the formal Norman-French phrase Le Roy le veult (the King wills it), pronounced by the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Audley on the King's behalf. The Act of Supremacy becomes law at twenty-five past three. The Act of Succession (which Sir Thomas More had refused to sign and for which he was already in the Tower) follows at half past three. The Act of Treasons (which made it treason to deny the Royal Supremacy by spoken word) follows at twenty to four.
The Reformation Parliament rose at four o'clock on the third of November 1534. The Pope Paul III issued the Bull of Excommunication of Henry VIII on the thirtieth of August 1535, after the execution of Bishop John Fisher at Tower Hill on the twenty-second of June 1535 and the execution of Sir Thomas More on the sixth of July. The Dissolution of the Monasteries ran from the 1536 Suppression of Religious Houses Act through the 1539 Second Suppression Act, transferring about eight hundred and fifty monastic houses, about two-and-a-quarter million acres of land, and the monetary value of about £130,000 per year of monastic income (in 2025 purchasing-power, about £100 billion) to the Crown.
The English Reformation continued through the Edwardian (1547–53), Marian (1553–58) and Elizabethan (1558–1603) phases, with the 1559 Act of Uniformity establishing the Elizabethan Religious Settlement that is, in legal continuation, the current Established Church of England. The Tudor dynasty produced the most consequential political-religious change in English history. The Welsh Acts of Union 1536–43 incorporated Wales into the Kingdom of England on the direct political-administrative initiative of the Cromwell-Tudor Reformation programme. The Tudor period ended with the death of Elizabeth I on the twenty-fourth of March 1603 and the accession of James VI of Scotland (the Stuart dynasty). The Tudor crown, the Tudor rose, and the Tudor architectural-style of the 1485–1603 country-houses are the foundational national-cultural-iconography of modern English national identity.