How did divorce law change in the Church of England?

by fulltimevolunteer

How did the CoE and cannon law go from being created in order to let Henry VIII marry and divorce at-will, to (essentially) forcing Edward VII to abdicate in order to marry a divorcee?

mimicofmodes

The laws on divorce never changed. I have a number of past answers relating to this:

On Katherine of Aragon

On Anne Boleyn

On royal marriages vs mistresses

On problems people had with Wallis Simpson

The tl;dr is that Henry had annulments rather than divorces, which is (generally speaking) the religious way of dissolving marriages - saying that they never really happened in the first place because of a mistake or later-discovered problem. But even if he had had divorces, there was a difference between the male sovereign changing from one wife to marry a noble/royal virgin and the male sovereign marrying a non-noble/royal woman who had been married twice before. The fact that Wallis was divorced was only half the problem.