When Henry VIII broke with Rome, he had no intention of starting a “new” Church. In this way, he was very like both Luther and Calvin, both of whom wanted to “clean-up” the Church in Rome. But, it didn’t work in any of the three cases. Not that the Church in Rome didn’t clean up its act! It did! After losing northern Germany to Lutheranism, Much of Holland, France and Switzerland to Calvin, and most of the British Isles to Anglicanism, the Popes in Rome figured out (or their subordinates did) that they’d gone too far. As a result, the Council of Trent was called, and a series of changes in the administration of the Roman Church followed. This is generally known as “the Counter-Reformation”. Without the Counter-Reformation, the Roman church might well have died during the Enlightenment, but instead, it largely fixed itself, and was there, ready and waiting when the tide of religious awareness came in the 18th Century, and consequently the Roman Church is today the largest single Confession within Christianity. In the meantime though, changes kept happening within the three great strands of Reformed Christianity. “Three” is used advisedly, for of course there were four, but the fourth, the Anabaptists were small and they stayed small, and have, right up til today. For our purposes, the three great mainline Protestant Churches were Lutheran, Calvinist Reformed, and Anglican.
Henry VIII died, of course, as we all must, and he was succeeded by his son Edward VI. Yes, Henry had finally gotten a son, but only one, despite having divorced, killed or outlived a total of six wives. But, Edward came to the throne as a child, and so most of his religious duties were handled by his father’s religious advisors, notably Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer, though a loyal subject of Henry VIII, was personally deeply committed to many of Calvin’s ideas. So were many other English Churchmen. So, with a boy king in office, Cranmer and his associates set about crafting a unique brand of English Churchmanship: one that was both Catholic and Protestant. Among the first of his ideas was to remove Latin from English worship and replace it with the vernacular. Ever after, English liturgy was to be said in English. Cranmer also wanted to put the Bible within reach of all Englishmen, so, in addition to supporting an English translation, he had the King require that one such be placed in every English Church, made available for every Englishman who could read to come and read, whenever he wanted to. His final major effort was to put everything an English citizen needed to know about worship into one consolidated Prayer Book. Then and now, it was called “The Book of Common Prayer”, and it serves as the basis of all worship in and by the Church of England, everywhere that English is spoken and understood.