When Henry VIII decided to solve his dynastic succession problem by sacking the Pope, he had to put aside the somewhat inconvenient fact that his people had been Catholic for at least a thousand years; 1,300 if you go back to St Alban.
The price paid for his quest for a legitimate male heir was the destruction of the Catholic Church in this land – with the Crown appropriating about £500 million worth of land and goods in the nationalisation or dissolution of the monasteries – and its replacement with a more confusing coalition of spiritualities that became Anglicanism.
