The Reformation would have a
greater political, social, and
economic impact as it moved north.
Henry VIII
Catherine of Aragon
Anne Boleyn
Thomas Wolsey
Thomas More
Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cromwell
Submission of the Clergy (1532)
Act of Succession (1534)
Act of Supremacy (1534)
Six Articles (1539)
Book of Common Prayer
Mary Tudor
Elizabeth I
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By the 1520s Protestant ideas had spread to England, France and
eastern Europe.
In England, Henry VIII’s motives to break from the Church
combined personal, political, social, and economic elements.

Tudor King Henry VIII sought to annul his marriage to
Catherine of Aragon due to not producing a male heir but the
Pope refused.

Henry had Parliament enact the Act of Supremacy which
separated of the Church of England from Rome with himself as
its head.

Henry retained many elements of Catholicism but dissolved the
monasteries and confiscated the monastic lands, selling them off
to the nobility.

Managing those estates required the development of a modern
centralized government bureaucracy; Thomas Cromwell,
reorganized the bureaucracy's structure and improved its
efficiency.
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Some would argue that John Calvin had an even greater influence than
Luther on the future course of history.
 Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1535, introduced the concept
of predestination which led to the firm conviction of Calvinists that they
were among the elect.
 Centered in Geneva, John Calvin and the elect enforced morality not only
on themselves but on the entire population.
 Reformers and refugees flocked to Geneva; returning home, they became
the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Huguenots of France, and the
Puritans of England.
 Calvinism’s notion that God calls the elect to a calling and dignified all
labor, encouraged an activist approach to life.
In the late 19th century, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote the, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argued for an intimate
connection between the rise of commercial capitalism and Protestantism.
 The Calvinist calling encouraged the traits of hard work, saving, frugality
which made the growth of capitalism possible.
 Those countries that became Calvinists, England in the mid 17th century,
Scotland, and Holland, particularly saw great economic success in the 17th
and 18th centuries.