page_title: History of the Anglican Communion
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Anglican Communion / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Dublin - St. Patrick's Cathedral
context_page_description: The history of the Anglican Communion may be attributed mainly to the worldwide spread of British culture associated with the British Empire. Among other things the Church of England spread around the world and, gradually developing autonomy in each region of the world, became the communion as it exists today.
context_section_description: The only provinces of the Anglican Communion with a direct and unbroken history stretching back to the pre-Reformation church are to be found in Great Britain and Ireland: the Church of England, the Church in Wales, the Church of Ireland and the Scottish Episcopal Church. As its name suggests, the Scottish situation is unique; the national Church of Scotland is Presbyterian and for some years in the late 17th and early 18th centuries the Scottish Episcopal Church, despite its similarities to the Church of England, was regarded with some suspicion because of its occasional associations with Jacobite opposition to the House of Hanover.
  Although Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome in the 1530s, he strongly resisted thereafter associating the English Church with the Continental Protestant Reformation.
    Henry's position was however, reversed in the brief reign of his young son Edward VI 1547–1553, when the leaders of the Church of England, especially Thomas Cranmer, actively sought to establish England in the centre of  evolving Reformed churches.  Cranmer's ambitions, however, were not widely shared amongst the bulk of laity and clergy; and accordingly, the return to the religious forms of traditional Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary was widely welcomed.  
  The Elizabethan Settlement in England was broken in 1570 with the excommunication of Elizabeth. Although few, if any, concessions were made to the Papacy or to Roman Catholic doctrine, a small number of changes were then made to the Articles of Religion and to the Prayer Book, especially in relation the Real Presence and to the continuation of worship in more traditional forms.  Only one of Mary's English and Welsh bishops conformed to the Elizabethan settlement, though all save 300 of the parish clergy subscribed.  In Ireland the position was reversed; all bishops save two accepted the Elizabethan Settlement, but the bulk of parish clergy and laity remained loyal to the pope.  In the period since 1553, Continental Reformed Protestantism had itself continued to develop, especially in Geneva and Heidelberg, but English divines who wished the Elizabethan church to take part in these developments were to be bitterly disappointed; Elizabeth refused any further change to the forms or structures of religion established in 1559. In particular, Protestant controversialists began to attack the episcopal polity, and the defined liturgy of the Elizabethan Church as incompatible with the true Reformed tradition; and, in response, defenders of the established church began, from the early 17th Century onwards, to claim these specific features as positively desirable, or indeed essential.  
  The attempt to impose in Scotland a Prayer Book on the English model, drove the three kingdoms into  civil war.  However, the Puritan sympathies of the victorious Parliamentary armies in the English Civil War, and the consequential abolition during the Commonwealth of English bishoprics and cathedral chapters with the suppression of the Book of Common Prayer, resulted in English churchmen beginning to recognise Anglican identity as being distinct from and incompatible with the traditions of Presbyterian Protestantism.  This distinction was formalised at the Restoration of Charles II, when the proposals of Puritan divines for further reform of the Prayer Book were thoroughly rejected; and 1,760 clergymen were deprived of their livings for failing to subscribe to the 1662 Book.  From this date onwards dissenting Protestant congregations were to be found throughout England, and the established church no longer claimed or sought to comprehend all traditions of Protestant belief.  In Ireland and in many of England's American Colonies, the numbers who subscribed to Presbyterian congregations formed the majority of the Protestant population; while in Scotland from 1689, following the accession of William and Mary, Presbyterian church polity was revived, and constituted in that kingdom, the established church; so that those ministers and congregations who continued to subscribe to the Anglican Episcop
caption: St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin in Dublin.
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