Had he not converted to Anglicanism, how would history have been different?
George VI? I wasn’t aware he converted. Wasn’t he born into the religion?
Can you clarify who you’re talking about?
I believe King William III was the last King of England. I’m not aware of a conversion.
The Georges were Kings of Great Britain I believe rather than England.
Last king of England was William III, prior to Act of Union 1707. William was born into a Protestant (Dutch Calvinist) family, though, so I’m not sure his becoming head of the Anglican faith was a particularly big deal.
The only king who ever ‘converted’ was Henry VIII, who founded the Anglican Church. But he certainly wasn’t the last King of England. 
It would make sense to ask how Henry’s break with the Pope changed history, otherwise I have no idea what you mean.
I understood that WIlliam III converted from Calvinism (as slash2k mentioned). This was to make him being King rather than consort an easier pill for some of Parliament to swallow.
He was pretty much raised a Protestant from what I knew and I checked, it was indeed Calvinist.
(I added William III to the title of the thread).
Henry VIII remained a fairly orthodox Catholic to his dying day; his argument was with the authority of the Pope in England, not with the theology of Catholicism. The child-king Edward VI did become fervently Protestant, and later on Charles II made a death-bed conversion to the Catholic faith (although he may not have been fully conscious at the time). James I was baptized as Catholic as an infant, but later brought up in the Church of Scotland; his grandson James II, raised in the Church of England, converted to Roman Catholicism in the late 1660s.
It wasn’t really a conversion. Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, etc. were all close allies against the Catholics. I doubt whether William needed to give it much thought.
William was a great hero to all brands of Protestants.
If he hadn’t been willing to swear to uphold the Anglican Church he wouldn’t have been offered the throne in the first place, but that was unlikely.
That’s often said, but I disagree.
Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries, and his authorisation of the complete destruction of all shrines to saints, went far beyond being simply a Catholic who disagreed with the current Pope. It was unarguably a major Protestant reform.
Nor did he leave any pathway open for reconciliation with a future Pope. The independence of the Church of England from Rome was intended to be permanent.
In his personal life, William probably gave thought to his conversion; he was known to be opposed to the high-church elements in the Church of England. However, he was ultimately a pragmatist, in the vein of Henri “Paris is worth a mass” IV of France: if he needed to be Anglican to be widely accepted in England, he’d be Anglican. In Scotland, he was more tolerant of Episcopalians than were most of the Scottish clergy, as he was wary of alienating a block of potential allies, and even in Ireland he was willing to be conciliatory to the defeated Catholics (although the Dublin parliament was not).
Meanwhile, what choice did the English parliament have? Mary made it plain she would not rule without William, and there wasn’t another obvious Protestant contender; until the death of Anne’s son in 1700, the Hannover line had not been on the radar.
Yup. It wasn’t just this particular pope’s refusal to grant him a divorce; this was a struggle generations in the making (go back to Thomas Becket and Henry II, e.g.). He objected to the power of the pope, ANY pope, to control the English church.
By the late Middle Ages, English monasteries controlled about a quarter of the nation’s landed wealth. Henry V a century earlier had dissolved dozens of religious houses, with their assets going into the royal purse to help fund his wars in France; when the monks of Creake Abbey in Norfolk all died of plague in 1506, the estate was given to Lady Margaret Beaufort to fund an endowment at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Cardinal Wolsey turned a priory in Oxford into the foundations of Christ College, Oxford, and he subsequently obtained papal approval to dissolve some twenty religious foundations to fund the endowment thereof.
By Henry’s reign, the need for monastic reform in England was well-known; figures ranging from John Fisher (later executed by Henry) and Thomas More (ditto) to Wolsey himself emphasized the need for fewer but larger and better-run establishments. Only a minority of the existing monasteries, for example, even had the twelve religious members believed necessary to celebrate Divine Office, while monks and nuns theoretically subject to vows of poverty were paid cash wages and lived outside the cloisters. Efforts at reform were slow and halting, however, as the monasteries often enjoyed widespread local support and they could appeal to Rome.
Once that latter avenue was closed, however, reform (or “reform”) could begin in earnest. The initial rounds of dissolution concentrated on smaller facilities, especially those that lacked enough religious members or had particularly poor reputations, and genuine efforts were made to transfer monks/nuns from dissolved foundations who wished to do so to larger monasteries/nunneries, or pay cash to those who wished to return to the secular world. Later, the larger and wealthier establishments were dissolved and their assets transferred to the king’s purse.
I think it incorrect, however, to say that this was a “Protestant” reform. Monasteries at the beginning of Henry’s reign tended to irreligious and outside of the king’s control; that’s a political issue rather than one of doctrine. Similarly, the destruction of shrines owes more to reformers within the Catholic Church, such as More and Erasmus, rather than Luther or Calvin.
There was doctrinal reform as well. There was a whole boiling ferment of doctrinal discussion, about what should be reformed and how far reform should go.
While the form of services remained about the same, there were many other issues and doctrines under discussion, such as worship of saints, confession, purgatory and masses for the dead, clerical celibacy, transubstantiation, English translations of the Bible in churches, etc.
There were many attempts at compromise, and to allow a range of beliefs and practices in some areas.
Henry himself was mostly on the conservative side, but there was great pressure on him for doctrinal reform, and even he vacillated on some issues.
There’s a good discussion here about the debates, which eventually led to the 39 Articles after Henry’s time.
Ten Articles (1536)
The Church of England’s break with Rome inaugurated a period of doctrinal confusion and controversy as both conservative and reforming clergy attempted to shape the church’s direction, the former as “Catholicism without the Pope” and the latter as Protestant. In an attempt “to establish Christian quietness and unity”, the Ten Articles were adopted by clerical Convocation in July 1536 as the English Church’s first post-papal doctrinal statement.[4] The Ten Articles were crafted as a rushed interim compromise between conservatives and reformers. Historians have variously described it as a victory for Lutheranism and a success for Catholic resistance.[5] Its provisions have also been described as “confusing”.[6]
…Bishops’ Book (1537)
… The Bishops’ Book preserved the semi-Lutheranism of the Ten Articles, and the articles on justification, purgatory, and the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist and penance were incorporated unchanged into the new book.
…Six Articles (1539)
… Meanwhile, England was in religious turmoil. Impatient Protestants took it upon themselves to further reform – some priests said mass in English rather than Latin and married without authorisation (Archbishop Cranmer was himself secretly married). Protestants themselves were divided between establishment reformers who held Lutheran beliefs upholding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and radicals who held Anabaptist and Sacramentarian views denying real presence …
… The final product was an affirmation of traditional teachings on all but the sixth question…King’s Book (1543)
… The one area in which the King’s Book moved away from traditional teaching was on prayer for the dead and purgatory…
As you note, the 39 Articles come after Henry’s time. The Six Articles came in the midst of the dissolution of the monasteries, were debated in Parliament with the active participation of the king, and they affirmed traditional Catholic doctrine: the Eucharist as the true body of Christ, communion in one kind, clerical celibacy, vows of chastity, the legitimacy of votive masses, and the sacrament of confession were all preserved, with denial of any punished, at a minimum, by life imprisonment. Yes, the English church was in a period of turmoil and upheaval and doctrinal revision, but Henry himself held to the conservative and traditional. He greatly disliked the Bishop’s Book of 1537, and the King’s Book of 1543 as a formal statement of the doctrine of the Church of England included standard Catholic theological views on transubstantiation, the mass, etc.
While elements of the new Church of England embraced Protestant doctrine, Henry himself did not. His last will, for example, written a month before he died, was quite conventionally Catholic, right down to stipulating the construction of an altar for daily masses (with an endowment for two priests to say mass thereat) and asking the Virgin Mary to pray for and with him that he might get through purgatory and to everlasting life more quickly.
Coming back to the dissolution of the monasteries, while it’s true that monasteries were dissolved and reformed on occasion by Catholics, there’s a big difference between that and Henry VIII’s actions.
Under Catholic rule in England and elsewhere, monasteries that were no longer viable were dissolved and combined, and there were also issues with land ownership, politics, etc. But there was never any question about monastic life as such. Monks, nuns, and their institutions always had a right to exist. It was only the practical details that were ever in dispute.
Henry, on the other hand, dissolved all the monasteries, seized all their land, and left no possibility for any kind of monastic life at all in England. The whole institution of monastic life ceased to exist. That was a major change, demanded by Protestants, that went far beyond what Catholics accepted.
Catholics in England certainly didn’t regard Henry’s reforms as acceptable. Hence the massive Catholic uprising the north.
From The Religion of Henry VIII by Prof. Richard Rex of the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity, published in 2014:
Abstract
This article takes issue with the influential recent interpretation of Henry VIII’s religious position as consistently ‘Erasmian’. Bringing to the discussion not only a re-evaluation of much familiar evidence but also a considerable quantity of hitherto unknown or little-known material, it proposes instead that Henry’s religious position, until the 1530s, sat squarely within the parameters of ‘traditional religion’ and that the subsequent changes in his attitudes to the cult of the saints, monasticism, and papal primacy were so significant as to be understood and described by Henry himself in terms of a veritable religious ‘conversion’. …
… Prior to the break with Rome, his religious beliefs and practices stood squarely within the parameters of ‘traditional religion’, with little if any indication that Erasmus’s influence had undermined his commitment to or investment in it. Subsequently, even though he was often at pains to emphasize the Catholicism of his Church of England in doctrinal essentials, he departed from traditional religion in some dramatic ways by suppressing the monasteries, pruning the cult of the saints, and publishing the Bible in English.
These changes, it will be argued, illustrate not the outward expression of a long-standing inner ‘Erasmianism’, but the influence on the king of those around him as they sought to align his religious agenda with theirs.
Fortunately, there is a substantial body of source-material through which to reconstitute and analyse Henry’s religious development: his own writings; other texts written under his supervision; texts authorized by him; and contemporary descriptions and assessments of his religious beliefs and practices.
That’s a ‘true Scotsman’ argument. It adds nothing to the discussion.
Also, Erasmus, featured in your citation, is a father of the counter-reformation, and remains an important figure in the Roman Catholic church. He’s not a protestant. Debating if Henry always agreed with Erasmus, or only agreed with Erasmus under pressure from protestants, doesn’t advance your argument.
Please explain how it’s a ‘true Scotsman’ argument. Henry was excommunicated by the Pope. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a massive Catholic armed uprising against Henry’s reforms. That Catholics in general didn’t find Henry’s reforms acceptable seems to be a plain statement of fact.
Yup. That’s the whole point. Read what the paper says more carefully.
Henry’s excommunication was primarily based on political reasons: Henry denied the supremacy and authority of the pope. The 1535 papal bull of excommunication stemmed from the Act of Supremacy and the fact that Henry had put aside his lawful wife and purported to make his “concubine” queen. Yes, denying the authority of the pope was unacceptable to many Catholics. Yet, this is just a continuation of a long-running dispute between the papacy and the English monarchy; the first of the great English shrines destroyed by Henry was that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, who you will recall had his own fight with another King Henry over clerical independence and the rights and privileges of the church in England.
Certainly many Catholics were aghast at Henry’s reforms of the church in England; the seizures of land and plate and the closing of monasteries had economic and political implications as well as theological ones, and one of the stated grievances of the Pilgrimage of Grace was the Statute of Uses, a reform of English land law designed to enhance Henry’s tax collections and shore up royal finances. Beyond that, any reform by necessity is going to have opponents who like or benefit from the old ways, and that’s as true for Henry’s reforms as the later Counter-Reformation (or for that matter Vatican II).
You seem to be drawing a distinction between political and religious that I don’t believe existed at the time.
Maybe more of a tautology? There were a lot of Catholics who were okay with Henry’s reforms. It’s just that, after the reforms, those Catholics all stopped being Catholics and started being Anglicans.
You’re defining ‘Catholics’ as people who disagreed with Henry, in an argument about if Henry was Catholic or not.
I’ve read your posts again, and it still seems that you’re arguing that Henry wasn’t Catholic. The point of the paper is about how and when Henry starting agreeing with a Father of the modern Roman Catholic Church. Reading it again didn’t change that.
And you’re mixing that in with the fact that Henry was excommunicated by the Pope (who was under economic and military pressure from Spain), and under pressure from Calvinists (who were still catholic), as if those two facts define Henry’s theology, rather than the paper you cite.