But he obtained no permanent national gains;
and the final result of his foreign policy was to make the emperor
master of the papacy at the moment when Henry wanted the pope to annul
his marriage with the emperor's aunt, Catherine of Aragon. Henry
desired a son to succeed him and to prevent the recurrence of dynastic
wars; he had only a daughter, Mary, and no woman had yet ruled or
reigned in England. The death of all his male children by Catherine
convinced him that his marriage with his deceased brother Arthur's
widow was invalid; and his passion for Anne Boleyn added zest to his
suit for a divorce. The pope could not afford to quarrel with Charles
V, who cared little, indeed, for the cause of his aunt, but much for
his cousin Mary's claim to the English throne; and in 1529 Henry began
the process, completed in the acts of Annates, Appeals, and Supremacy,
by which England severed its connexion with Rome, and the king became
head of an English church.
It is irrational to pretend that so durable an achievement was due to
so transient a cause as Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn or desire for a
son; vaster, older, and more deeply seated forces were at work. In one
sense the breach was simply the ecclesiastical consummation of the
forces which had long been making for national independence, and the
religious complement of the changes which had emancipated the English
state, language, and literature from foreign control.
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