ABSTRACT
The Elizabethan Act of Supremacy that re-established the position of the prince over the Church did so by reviving several Henrician statutes repealed under Mary. Revived were Acts cutting off the flow of appeals and money to Rome, removing the papacy from the consecration of English bishops, and reaffirming the submission of the clergy to the Crown. The Henrician Act of Supremacy was not revived, but essentially all of the authority granted to the Crown in that Act was reclaimed for the monarch. Rather than accepting Elizabeth as the ‘Supreme Head’ of the English Church, spiritual
and temporal officers were required instead to declare their acceptance in conscience ‘that the Quenes Highnes is thonelye supreme Governour of this Realme and of all other her Highnes Dominions and Countreis, aswell in all Spirituall or Ecclesiasticall Thinges or Causes as Temporall’. While this exchange of titles does seem to have portended a less direct form of exercising leadership of the Church than that favoured by her father, the same Act nevertheless claimed the same scope of royal authority over the Church for Elizabeth as the Act of Supremacy had claimed for Henry. Parliament established
As explained by the royal Injunctions of 1559 for the benefit of those administering the oath affirming the queen’s supremacy in the Church: ‘nothing was, is, or shall be meant or intended by the same oath to have any other duty, allegiance, or bond required by the same oath, than was acknowledged to be due to the most noble kings of famous memory, King Henry VIII, her majesty’s father, or King Edward VI, her majesty’s brother.’3
