The separation of the Church of England from Rome under Henry VIII, beginning in 1529 and completed in 1536, brought England alongside this broad Reformed movement. However, religious changes in the English national church proceeded more conservatively than elsewhere in Europe; King Henry himself sought only to break the bond to Rome, but the bishops, in particular Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, drove the newly freed church into Protestant reformation. Reformers in the Church of England alternated, for centuries, between sympathies for ancient traditions and more radical Protestantism, progressively forging a compromise between conservative practices and the ideas of the puritans. In the Victorian period this was reinterpreted by John Newman as a "via media" (middle way), which idea remains a current theme of Anglican discourse.