From the beginning of the 16th century reformers were springing up all over Europe to challenge the Catholic Church. Martin Luther in Germany, John Knox in Scotland, John Calvin in Switzerland, to name a few.

While all of these men were trying to enlighten the Catholic Church to biblical truth as they had come to see it, Henry VIII was trying to persuade the Pope to grant him a divorce from his Catholic queen, Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.

Henry claimed that his desire to divorce Catherine was a matter of conscience based on his reading of Deuteronomy, which states that a man may not have relations with his brother's wife. Catherine had been briefly married to Henry's older brother Arthur before Arthur's death at age fifteen. It had been necessary for Henry to obtain a dispensation from the Pope to marry Catherine, but now that he was asking the Pope to reverse himself and agree that the dispensation should never have been granted, the Pope was refusing to agree that the marriage was invalid.

Although Henry had a daughter, Mary, by Catherine, he was convinced that he needed a son to assure his succession, and many in England agreed. Although the majority of English did not want Anne Boleyn as Queen, they were willing to go along with Henry's break with Rome. Henry further strengthened his case with the English people by convincing them that the Roman Church had grown too rich at their expense. His solution for this and other perceived Church abuses was to dissolve the English monasteries and take their money for the crown and the English noblemen. At first resistant to this campaign, the general population was eventually persuaded to go along with the dissolution of the monasteries because Henry said it would mean he would never have to levy taxes again.

Though Henry's break with Rome and his establishment of himself as head of the Church in England was the result of such ungodly motivations as greed and lust, England's forced "reformation" was as far-reaching as that of any other European country. In less than seventy years, England went from being a Catholic country to a Protestant country from which the renegade underground Catholic Church was almost entirely extinguished.