Became Queen of England June 1533 through a secret marriage to King Henry VIII. His earlier marriage to Catherine of Aragon was declared null and void by an English church court upon Henry's insistence. The explicit reason given was because that she was the widow of Henry's brother and was thus supposedly the recipient of a Levitical curse and thus bore Henry no male children. Upon Henry's marriage to Boleyn in January 1533 and the subsequent annulment of his former marriage to Catherine, Pope Clement VII excommunicated King Henry. In response Henry ordered English clergy to stop all relations with the roman Pope and declared the Act of Supremacy in 1534, making himself the head of the Anglican Church, thereby completely separating himself from Rome. The September following their marriage Anne bore him a daughter, Elizabeth. Henry later executed Boleyn on charges of adultery and then married Jane Seymour.

[tags]Anne-Boleyn, BlogRodent,

Daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. First wife of King Henry VIII, she bore five children, but only one survived infancy, Mary. Catherine was previously the wife of King Henry's deceased brother, Arthur. Because she bore Henry no male children, he persuaded the English courts to annul their marriage. Her daughter eventually ascended the throne.

[tags]BlogRodent, Catherine-of-Aragon, church-history, ChurchRodent, Henry-VIII, history[/tags]

The young Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, successor to Ferdinand and Isabella. Heir to the wealth of the New World. The nephew of Catherine of Aragon. In 1521 summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms to give an account of his writings, and declared Luther an outlaw. Condemned Luther to death. After 1530 he tried to quench the growing heresy, but the Lutheran princes banded together against him and out of this conflict grew the Peace of Augsburg.

[tags]BlogRodent, Catherine-of-Aragon, Charles-V, church-history, ChurchRodent, Diet-of-Worms, history, Peace-of-Augsburg[/tags]

While other influences contributed to the break with Rome, succession to the throne was the primary constitutional factor in the transformation of the Church in England into the church of England.

For centuries the Church in England had been moving toward independence from Rome. by Luther's time, most patriotic Englishmen had a sense of the distinctive character of the faith in their fatherland.

The schism in the church came over a royal problem — not over theological conflicts. Henry VIII, King of England, revolted against the pope because he passionately desired Anne Boleyn, a lady-in-waiting of the court. Henry and Catherine of Aragon had borne no male children and Pope Clement VII would not issue them an annulment for fear of offending Catherine's nephew, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V. When Henry secretly married Anne, he had an English church court declare his marriage to Catherine

King of England from 1509-1547. Under King Henry, England rejected the authority of Rome. King Henry had no son born of his queen, Catherine of Aragon, who had delivered five children (the only survivor beyond infancy was the princess Mary). England was in no mood to accept a girl as heir to the throne because of the nation's only previous queen who had occasioned bloody wars of succession. As Catherine grew older, Henry grew more troubled. In 1525 the queen was forty and Henry pondered more and more the ways of God: "Am I under some curse of God?" (Catherine had been Henry's deceased brother Arthur's wife for several months.) In his mind was Le 10:21, "If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing, they shall be childless." The Church of Rome recognized the curse, but had granted the marriage for reasons of its own

The daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Spain. Succeeded her half-brother Edward VI to the English throne upon his death. Devoutly Catholic, she threatened England's newfound independence from Rome. She sent nearly 300 Protestants to the burning stake earning her the title "Bloody Mary". Although she may have been England's only pious monarch of the 16th century, her mistake was in marrying Phillip of Spain, seen as a betrayal of her people. She died a broken and dispirited Queen.

[tags]BlogRodent, Catherine-of-Aragon, church-history, ChurchRodent, Edward-VI, Henry-VIII, history, Mary-Tudor[/tags]