“I don’t think St. Thomas More and Bishop St. John Fisher would agree that a question of foreign policy was all that was at stake—as opposed to the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage and the teaching authority of the Pope—when they chose to go to their executions rather than change their minds.”
There was plenty of Catholic kindling and Protestant kindling put to flame around that time, let’s not kid each other. More and Fisher were certainly men of Faith and not politics - the Pope was a politician as much as he was a man of Faith. He had to be.
Again - it’s a testament to our founding fathers that they enshrined freedom of religion in our Constitution. They knew what both kings and popes were capable of and wanted no part of that.
Don’t you think it’s a little odd that your hero, Henry, founded a church of which he, a political authority, was the head? He wasn’t a Protestant because, unlike Cranmer or the others in his court, he was not a follower of any of the Protestants of his time and actually seems to have believed in the Mass. Left to his own devices, he would have been a schismatic, that is, someone who accepted the Faith but broke off from the authority of Peter through Apostolic succession.
The problem is that the Faith doesn’t last very long once Apostolic Succession has been broken. The Orthodox never broke it and they are still in the Faith and it is really more of an administrative problem than anything else. But Henry’s church, the Anglican church, did eventually break it and adopted the British Crown as the source of its powers.
This is clearly silly and impossible. The Anglicans tried to remedy this with a rather dubious Dutch or German episcopal consecration at some point, which gave them the only possible claim they might have to the validity of their orders. But basically, when you except some royal twit instead of the Pope as the head of your church, you know it’s all over for you. As we are seeing in abundance nowadays.