The Acts of Supremacy are two acts passed by the Parliament of England in the 16th century that established the English monarchs as the head of the Church of England

 


                                                     Queen Katherine_of_Aragon


The Acts of Supremacy are two acts passed by the Parliament of England in the 16th century that established the English monarchs as the head of the Church of England; two similar laws were passed by the Parliament of Ireland establishing the English monarchs as the head of the Church of Ireland. The 1534 Act declared King Henry VIII and his successors as the Supreme Head of the Church, replacing the Pope. This first Act was repealed during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I. The 1558 Act declared Queen Elizabeth I and her successors the Supreme Governor of the Church, a title that the British monarch still holds.


Royal supremacy is specifically used to describe the legal sovereignty of the King (i.e., civil law) over the law of the Church in England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Supremacy#First_Act_of_Supremacy_1534


Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy was repealed in 1554 during the reign of his staunchly Roman Catholic daughter, Queen Mary I. Upon her death in November 

1558, her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne. The first Elizabethan Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy 1558,[nb 1] which declared Elizabeth the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, instituted an Oath of Supremacy, requiring anyone taking public or church clergymen to swear allegiance to the monarch as head of the Church and state. Anyone refusing to take the oath could be charged with treason.[12]


The use of the term Supreme Governor as opposed to Supreme Head pacified some Catholics and those Protestants concerned about a female leader of the Church of England. Elizabeth, who was a politique,[citation needed][13] did not prosecute nonconformist laymen, or those who did not follow the established rules of the Church of England unless their actions directly undermined the authority of the English monarch, as was the case in the vestments controversy. 

Thus, it was through the Second Act of Supremacy that Elizabeth I officially established the now reformed Church of England. This was a part of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethan_Religious_Settlement

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ekklesia

The Ekklesia had a body of writing which it preserved for the instruction of its members and the continuity of its doctrine; but it took a long time before these documents were sifted and before a certain proportion of them, a small portion of the whole, were affirmed to have special value as Scripture, that is, inspired and therefore authoritative. There were for instance in the way of records or pretended records of Our Lord’s life and teaching certainly more than fifty such documents, for we have fragments of at least that number. Only four were admitted to the Canon, that, is the “regular” or “official” collection. In the same way letters were written by the missionaries of the Early Church, but in the same way only a certain number, under the name of “Epistles,” were admitted to the Canon, and one record of early Apostolic action, the Acts of the Apostles; one apocalyptical work, which we know as the Apocalypse. This being the sequence whereby the Canon of what we call today th
Read more