This series of events infuriated King Henry, who was determined to
marshal all the political force necessary to secure the divorce
and to get his male heir. And although Henry was a devout Catholic
in many ways, he did not want the pope or the Roman Church itself
to stand in his way. His summoning of Parliament at the close of
1529 was the first step in his political war against Rome. Among
the members of Parliament were many common lawyers and landowners
who resented the power of the Church with its vast landholdings and
its court system–which often caused jurisdictional disputes when
Church jurists conflicted in their legal opinions with common law
jurists. These members of parliament also resented the taxes they
had to pay which were sent off to Rome to support the Papacy. Henry
did not find it difficult to get such a Parliament to vote with him
to override the pope's decisions concerning the divorce and to subordinate
the independence of the Church in England to obedience to his crown.
Although Henry at first considered himself the supreme
head of the Church in England, his title soon changed to "Supreme
Head of the Church of England." This distinction was crucial, because
the second title signified a schism with the Catholic Church, which, until
the first decades of the sixteenth century, had reigned virtually unchallenged
in Western Europe as the ultimate spiritual and temporal authority.
Henry, who had once been named Defender of the Faith by a pope,
now claimed pope-like authority over the Church in England, which
was thenceforth conceived as a distinct body answerable only to
God, and to no man outside its national borders. This break with
Rome was a revolutionary step for Henry to take, and it required
firm support from Parliament and severe methods of enforcement
by the government to secure it as reality. These were some of the
driving reasons behind the 1534 Act of Supremacy and Oath of Succession,
the rejection of which guaranteed the imprisonment and death of
men such as Thomas More.
