That is a major MAJOR debate, because what are we even looking at when we are looking at Henry VIII's Church of England?

Henry's church was one which began against the backdrop of him wanting to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn (which the Pope would not let him do because he was imprisoned by Catherine's nephew at the time). Consequently, there were no deep theological reasons for breaking with Rome other than the personal. To justify the annulment (and his position as the new head of the Church) Henry had to seek help from clerics critical of the Catholic Church, including Thomas Cranmer, a Cambridge don who Anne Boleyn got installed as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1532, Cranmer was critical of a whole range of issues including transubstantiation, Papal Supremacy, services in Latin, and clerical celibacy. Other important figures were Thomas Cromwell, whose role in the Dissolution of the Monasteries was decisive. Anne's own role was also important - she was influential in promoting Protestant voices. Things changed in 1536 with the execution of Anne, as Catholic noblemen, headed by the Duke of Norfolk, started to make their opinions heard once again.

That meant for the rest of Henry's reign, his parliaments were producing everything from revolutionary Protestant statements (such as 1536's Ten Articles), to more traditional doctrines (such as the 1543 King's Book). This is probably because Henry was a little bit fickle, and often listened to those courtiers and advisors with the loudest voices (in the early 1530s Anne Boleyn, in the late 1530s Thomas Cromwell, and then in the 1540s a mixture of Cranmer and Norfolk). As to his personal religion, it seems he liked the power of being Head of the Church, but disliked most other Protestant view points (except, perhaps, their rejection of pilgrimage). He even had prayers said for the soul of Queen Jane Seymour in 1537, which went against much of what his ministers were saying in terms of religion at that time.

The only outright statement we have of popular opinion as to Henry's church is the 1537's Pilgrimage of Grace, which was where much of Northern England rebelled. Although partly about economic grievances, it was also a rejection of the break with Rome, the dissolution of monasteries, as the policies of Thomas Cromwell. Henry ruthlessly crushed this rebellion, but discontent didn't stop there. In general, the North and more rural areas were more likely to retain Catholic traditions (so much so that even today there is a greater affiliation with Catholicism in the North of England than in the South), while the big cities (particularly London, Oxford, and Cambridge) were more likely to be teeming with Protestants.

After Henry died, his son Edward VI came to the throne, and started pushing through a hardline Protestant regime. The doctrine of this regime was laid out in Cranmer's Forty-Two Articles (1553) and his Book of Common Prayer (1552). These were not immediately implemented, however, as Edward died in 1553, and was succeeded by his half-sister Mary (Catherine of Aragon's daughter). Mary went about reversing all of her brother's reforms and trying to restore traditional Catholicism (although she did not restore the monasteries or important shrines that had been destroyed, such as the shrine to Thomas Becket at Canterbury). Eamon Duffy has written extensively about how England was a lot more traditionalist than has been previously thought at this point, and has made arguments that Mary's religious programme may have even been successful if she had lived longer and had a Catholic heir. However, she was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth (Anne Boleyn's daughter), and she favoured a Catholic looking church that was Protestant in doctrine, and it is Elizabeth's Church of England we see today. She brought back the Forty-Two Articles (reduced to 39 to be less offensive to her Catholic subjects) and created a slightly modified version of the Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth always claimed she never liked to "make windows into men's souls", so tried to be as loose as possible with the Anglican church to accommodate as many people as possible. The Church of England made it's final break with Rome in 1570, when after yet another failed rebellion by Northern Catholic lords, the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth I. In retaliation, she had a clause added to the Thirty-Nine Articles which explicitly rejected transubstantiation.

So, what does all this mean for how the Church of England was accepted in England? As I've said before, there was a big split in terms of geography. The old landed families often tended to be recusants (most prominently the Catholic Howard Dukes of Norfolk, who are still Catholic today), while the gentry (who bought up a lot of old monastery land) tended to favour Anglicanism. There was the odd pro-Catholic rebellion in the sixteenth century (most prominently, the 1537 Pilgrimage of Grace and the 1569 Northern Rebellion), but by the seventeenth century it was more likely to be the hardline Protestants making the loudest noise, especially after the crowns of England and very Protestant Scotland were joined in 1603.

The question of how far the Church of England was accepted rumbled on for hundreds of years. The English Civil War (1642-1651) was partly about religion, with the Royalists more likely to be religious traditionalists and the Parliamentarians hardline Puritans. During the reign of Charles II, popular hysteria was whipped up in London when a conman started making claims that various Catholics were trying to assassinate the king. The deposition of James II in 1688 and the installation of constitutional monarchy under William III & Mary II was entirely the product of the Protestant landed gentry fearing an absolutist Catholic monarch, and resulted in making the Penal Laws (laws which restricted Catholics' civil liberties) even harsher. In 1780, two years after the Papists Act sought to give some relief from the Penal Laws, there were massive anti-Catholic riots in London, which saw widespread vandalism. Catholic emancipation only happened with the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, and though it was unpopular with Protestant leaders (including the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel), it had to go through due to fear of unrest in Ireland. Even today in the largely irreligious UK, there are still examples of sectarian violence and rivalry, most prominently in Northern Ireland (but this also has national and political issues as well), and in parts of Scotland, where a strong Protestant/Catholic divide is still felt.