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Almost every British schoolchild is taught that Henry VIII, the swaggering Tudor king driven by lust and his quest for an heir, broke away from the Roman Catholic church in 1534 after the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Henry created the Church of England, appointed himself its supreme governor, divorced Catherine and married Anne Boleyn (who lasted just three years before she was beheaded for treason).
Henry did not stop there. He declared war on Catholicism, ordering monasteries to be destroyed, land and valuables seized, libraries and manuscripts burned, and priests, monks and abbots executed.
For hundreds of years, Catholics in England and Scotland were banned from openly worshipping. Even until the 1950s, mixed marriages between Catholics and Anglicans were frowned upon.
Now, almost 500 years after Henry’s momentous breakaway, his successor, King Charles III, has prayed with Pope Leo XIV beneath the sublime frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in an act of rapprochement between the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England.
“The age of mutual suspicion really is now over,” Jamie Hawkey, a canon-theologian at Westminster Abbey, told a briefing hosted by the Religion Media Centre.
“Seventy years ago, it was not possible for Catholics and Anglicans to go into one another’s churches without causing great offence. This is a moment where history can be seen to be healed.”
Turmoil, violence and antagonism characterised relations between Catholics and Anglicans for centuries. Queen Elizabeth I was declared a heretic and excommunicated by Pope Pius V in 1570.
In 1605, a plot by Catholic conspirators including Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the Protestant King James I inside was thwarted.
The 1701 Act of Settlement confirmed a ban on a Catholic or anyone married to a Catholic succeeding to the throne.
But since the middle of the last century, relations between the C of E and the Roman Catholic church have thawed, with regular visits to Rome by senior royals and archbishops of Canterbury.
In 2013, the Succession to the Crown Act relaxed restrictions on royal heirs marrying Roman Catholics, although the monarch must still be an Anglican.
Earlier this year, King Charles and Queen Camilla made a private visit to Pope Francis days before his death. And in September, the king became the first monarch in 500 years to publicly attend a Catholic mass when he attended the funeral of the Duchess of Kent, a convert to Catholicism.
The past 60 years had seen an “extraordinary rediscovery of our common roots”, said Hawkey, while acknowledging that significant disagreements remained.
Catherine Pepinster, the author of The Keys and the Kingdom: The British and the Papacy, told the RMC briefing: “This country has a long history of difficulties with Rome, of tensions ever since the Reformation …
“We’ve come a very long way … but until now we haven’t seen the supreme head of the Church of England – that is, the monarch – kneeling in prayer with the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.”
