Firstly, the Church of England separated from Rome not to allow divorce, but to permit the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon; procuring a divorce in England was quite difficult until the 19th century, and the Church of England did not formally recognize remarriage after divorce until 2002. The issue under dispute in the King's Great Matter was whether Henry's first marriage was canonically valid. If the answer was no, then the marriage could be annulled, and he would be permitted to remarry.

In service of getting the answer he wanted, Henry had to recruit allies, and many of the more traditionalist churchmen in England took the papalist position that Henry could not overrule Rome on questions of annulment. Henry had no particular enthusiasm for church reform, but many of the people he enlisted to help him annul his marriage to Catherine were. His Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, wanted to take the Church of England in a direction much more Protestant then Henry was willing to go. On Henry's death, it was Protestant churchmen and councilors who held critical positions of power in the regency of his son, Edward VI. It should be noted as well that the separation from Rome did not go uncontested during Henry's own reign. The Henrician church suppressed some of the old popular church ceremonies, but is also dissolved the monasteries, which dramatically restructured English religious life. The Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion in 1536 was probably the most dramatic resistance to Henry's reforms.

Henry's young son Edward VI, who reigned for only six years, played a much more dramatic role in moving the Church of England towards Protestantism. If England did not re-Catholicize after Henry, it was because his immediate successors adhered to a more radical vision of reform than he did. The church calendar was simplified, many of the old feasts were eliminated, religious iconography was proscribed and destroyed, altars smashed, saint cults were suppressed, and the old Sarum liturgy was replaced by the simplified Book of Common Prayer, which itself provoked another rebellion in 1549. By Edward's death, Protestantism was already well-seeded in English soil.

There was a brief and violent reaction during the reign of Edward's oldest sister, Mary I, who brought the Church back in communion with Rome, and reintroduced some of the old ceremonies. Mary and her allies, Cardinal Pole and Bishop Bonner, met with some limited success, but Mary died childless, and the succession fell to her younger sister Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was a clever enough politician to maintain some sense of outward conformity during the Marian years, but while on the throne adopted a moderate Protestant course, affirming the monarch as the head of the church, and adopting the 39 Articles as the standard for Anglican practice, while permitting some use of more elaborate ceremonies and clerical vestments. Over the course of her long reign, Elizabeth adopted a middle path acceptable to English lay Christians who were Catholic enough to want ceremony and hierarchy, but Protestant enough to want vernacular liturgy and a more Reformed approach to theology.

If England did not become Roman Catholic again after Henry, it was largely because there was no political force sustained for long enough to bring it back.

Readings,

Christopher Haigh, English Reformations

Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars

Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith