Replies

“It is actually pretty accurate.”

No, it is false and the history of England before Henry VIII is replete with proof of that. Martyrdom of Thomas Becket ring a bell?

“Henry took over the Church,....”

An admission of which completely disproves your earlier claim. First you said: “The government, of which the Church was part...” and now you say that wasn’t so. Which is it?

“The Act of Supremacy didn’t give him power as head of the church, it rather recognized that he was already head of the church.”

No. It gave him powers he never had using a legal fiction - that the king was somehow always the boss of the Church even though there was no way anyone actually believed that. Even Henry never believed it and never proposed it until he realized he could defy the pope and seize control of the Church which no English monarch had legally controlled or spiritually controlled before. If everyone believed it no penalty and no oath would have been needed.

“The conflating of church and state before 1584 is shown by Henry’s application for dispensations.”

No. First, you mean 1534 and not 1584. If you can’t even get the year right you might want to reconsider engaging in any debate about a topic which might be completely foreign to you. Also, if by “Henry’s application for dispensations” you mean his securing of a dispensation to marry Catherine, that had nothing to do with “conflating of church and state” in itself. If we had lived at the same time and had the same situation, we too could have done the same thing.

“Your problem is, that Henry’s established church and state with state at the top. You perhaps preferred established church and state with church at the top.”

What I would have preferred is what existed before Henry which is neither one of the things you just mentioned.

“As an American, I prefer no established church, but the past is a different country. They do things differently there.”

Do? Did. What you prefer is immaterial. What was and is true is all that matters.