KING HENRY VIII's failure to get his own way at Rome in the matter
of the so-called divorce was not, of course, the cause of the English
anti-clericalism of the time, nor of the weaknesses and abuses in the
ecclesiastical system; it was not the source of the various heresies already
active in England. And all of these were highly important factors in the
coming religious revolution. But the first, and main, cause of that revolution,
in the order of time, was undoubtedly the action of the king; and what moved
the king to abandon, at a critical moment, the English monarchy's traditional
rôle, so that, instead of defending the cleric's place in the Church and the
Church's place in the realm, he led the attack, was undoubtedly the anger and
bitter resentment against the papacy bred in him by the experiences of the
marriage suit -- varied experiences, indeed, and the outcome (in very large
measure) of incredible expectations on the king's own part.

No account of the great change could be true to fact which ignored the
history of the divorce; after all these years, much of the significant detail
of that long contest between Henry and the pope is still too little known; ¹
but to one who studies the bulky correspondence between Henry and his
ambassadors, those at Rome and those in Spain, during the years 1527-1529,
no great doubt will remain whence derived the peculiar spirit in which the
religious revolution was carried through, whence came that active, aggressive,
bitter, revengeful blood-thirstiness, the craft, the cruelty, the lies, the
royal affectation of piety, the personal resentment that borders on mania; ²
all those excesses which make the story of what took place in England a
thing apart in the general history of the Reformation. ³

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