House of Tudor the Tower of London saved him from the public humiliation and inevitable execution he would have suffered upon his arrival at the Tower. In order to allow Henry to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn, the English parliament enacted laws breaking ties with Rome, and declaring the king Supreme Head of the Church of England (from Elizabeth I the monarch is known as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England), thus severing the ecclesiastical structure of England from the Catholic Church and the Pope. The newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was then able to declare Henry's
History of the Church of England used in the same." The development of the Thirty-Nine Articles of religion and the passage of the Acts of Uniformity culminated in the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. By the end of the 17th century, the English church described itself as both Catholic and Reformed, with the English monarch as its Supreme Governor. 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." The English Reformation was initially driven by the dynastic goals of Henry VIII,