mightychurch.com

The mightychurch article, from an English newspaper, speaks of the Pope’s impending gift for Charles and Camilla’s marriage. Quote:

It may be an unfortunate accident or a piece of mischievous theatre. Either way, the Prince of Wales will need all his regal sang-froid when he tears off the wrapping of his gift from the Pope next week.

When the Prince presents the Duchess of Cornwall to Benedict XVI as his wife for the first time, he will receive a gift that may strike an unwelcome chord: a “luxury facsimile” of the 1530 appeal by English peers to Pope Clement VII asking for the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

It is intended as a gesture to help to heal five centuries of schism between Rome and the Church of England, of which the Prince will one day be the head. It is also a reminder of the causes of the rift and of the Vatican’s stern views on divorce.

Quoted in Wikipedia is an interesting statement which refers to the origins of the Church of England, and how it views itself. It appears that the Church of England always thought it had its power base at Canterbury Cathedral, going back to the Christian beginnings in England, with the head of the English church based there. It is said that Henry VIII simply reinforced that position to the chagrin of Rome:

While Anglicans acknowledge that the repudiation of papal authority by Henry VIII of England led to the Church of England existing as a separate entity, they believe that it is in continuity with the pre-Reformation Church of England.

Quite apart from its distinct customs and liturgies (such as the Sarum rite), the organizational machinery of the Church of England was in place by the time of the Synod of Hertford in 672–673 when the English bishops were for the first time able to act as one body under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Henry’s Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) and the Acts of Supremacy (1534) declared that the English crown was “the only Supreme Head in earth of the Church of England, called Ecclesia Anglicana,” in order “to repress and extirpate all errors, heresies, and other enormities and abuses heretofore used in the same.”
The development of the Thirty-Nine Articles of religion and the passage of the Acts of Uniformity culminating in the Elizabethan Religious Settlement resulted by the end of the seventeenth century in a Church that described itself as both Catholic and Reformed with the English monarch as its Supreme Governor.[2] MacCulloch commenting on this situation says that it “has never subsequently dared to define its identity decisively as Protestant or Catholic, and has decided in the end that this is a virtue rather than a handicap.”

Separation from Papal Authority

John Wycliffe (about 1320 – 31 December 1384) was an English theologian and an early dissident against the Roman Catholic Church during the 14th century. He founded the Lollard movement, which opposed a number of Roman practices. He was also an antagonist of the papal encroachments on secular power.
Wycliffe was associated with statements indicating that the Church in Rome is not the head of all churches, nor did Peter have any more powers given to him than other disciples. Statements of this ilk related his call for a reformation of its wealth, corruption and abuses.
Wycliffe, an Oxford scholar, went so far as to state that “...The Gospel by itself is a rule sufficient to rule the life of every Christian person on the earth, without any other rule.” The Lollard continued his pronouncements from pulpits even under the persecution that followed with Henry IV up to and including the early years of the reign of Henry VIII.

However, a politically supported split with Rome occurred when Henry VIII’s requested annulment to his current wife was refused. A similar annulment had been granted to Henry VIII’s forebear, Henry II of England.
Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine on 18 May 1152. Eleanor had children with Louis VII of France. Henry VIII used the political crown and the unsuccessful persecution to sustain his break with Rome. The first break with Rome (subsequently reversed) came when Pope Clement VII refused, over a period of years, to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, not purely as a matter of principle, but also because the Pope lived in fear of Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, as a result of events in the Italian Wars.