A Sixteenth Century Brexit

It is sometimes forgotten that there was a time when relations

Henry VIII.
Hans Holbein the Younger 1497/8 (German)
Google Art Project [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

between Henry VIII and the Vatican were quite cordial. The origin of the term ‘Defender of the Faith’, still used today, originates from 1521 when it was granted to Henry himself for his theological treatise attacking the tenets of Martin Luther, and defending the supremacy of the Pope and the sanctity of marriage. Henry married his first wife, Catherine of Aragon in 1509. Since Catherine was the widow of his older brother, Arthur, Henry applied for and was granted papal dispensation for the marriage to proceed. 

The outcome of Henry’s next application to the European Commission of the day was slightly less positive. Despite exhaustive argument and scriptural reference to try and prove that his marriage to Catherine was invalid since she had a previous divinely ordained commitment to Arthur, the papal response to his request to annul the marriage and embark on a fresh start with Anne Boleyn was a flat and terminal rejection. 

Henry, a mercurial character given to dramatic gestures, decided that not only had he had enough of his Spanish wife, but the entire European project of the time. In an extraordinary decision, he disassociated himself from the entire spiritual and temporal framework that bound Western Christianity together, and removed the Church of England from papal jurisdiction. Freed from the need to negotiate with the Vatican, or suffer their intolerable bureaucracy and quibbles, he ended his marriage to Catherine and married Anne. For this he was duly excommunicated, a technicality that did not discourage him from then re-declaring himself ‘Defender of the Faith’.  

As for Anne Boleyn, after just three years of marriage, she was removed to the Tower of London and duly beheaded (in 1536) having been accused of adultery, incest and plotting to murder the King. The self-appointed Supreme Head of the Church and Defender of the Faith was in any case by now courting Jane Seymour, who was to become this third wife, and, courtesy of a complicated childbirth, able to subsequently die a relatively natural death.

In 1541, Henry VIII, a man with a taste for executive orders – a kind of Tudor version of Donald Trump if you will, was declared – or rather declared himself - King of Ireland. He had also considered the future of the Irish Church, and how it should in future be governed. After surveying the available possibilities, he very naturally reached the conclusion that the best-qualified candidate by far was himself, and thus he became Supreme Head of the Irish Church as well. 

From this point on ethnic discrimination was to be accompanied by religious discrimination, leaving the likes of the Hadsor family with some very serious choices to be made.