http://www.tomrichey.net This PowerPoint was designed to accompany a lecture on the history of the English Reformation. The English Reformation began with a controversy over Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. In order to ensure an orderly succession (and to marry the much more attractive Anne Boleyn), Henry steered the Act of Supremacy through Parliament, which declared him to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England. While Henry dissolved the monasteries and established the Anglican Church as separate from Rome, he made no major changes to Catholic doctrine (which he had defended in the early days of the Reformation). Following Henry's death, England went through religious tumult during the short reigns of his more aggressively Protestant son, Edward VI, and his even more aggressively Catholic daughter, Mary I (aka, "Bloody Mary"). It took Elizabeth I's 44 year reign to establish England as a Protestant kingdom.