Was Henry VIII Catholic or protestant?

Answer 1

Protestantism is basically shunning of the Catholic church and all its doctrines and dogma. Protestants believe that the Catholic church in Rome should have no power over government and monarchy.So based on that last statement and having read enough about Henry to venture an opinion I would say he was always a protestant he just didnt know it until it worked in his favour

Answer 2

Yes and No

answer

Unlike the Roman Catholic bishops in many other European countries, the bishops in England were not sovereign lords, for even before Henry VIII's time, the religious authorities were subject to the political authority of the king. Church prelates in England owed dual loyalties -- to Rome and to the crown -- but their loyalty to the English king, if tested, would have proven greater. Almost a hundred years before Henry VIII became king of England, a pope acknowledged, "Not the pope but the king of England governs the church in his dominions."

But the church in England was powerful, and very wealthy, and as the authority of the church did not conflict with that of the king, the issue of ultimate supremacy had not arisen.

By the early sixteenth century, the abuse of power, moral lapses, ostentation, greed, and arrogance of the clergy at all levels had become so extreme that faithful Catholics all over Europe were beginning to recognize the need for reform.

After 1520 Lutheran materials began to find their way into England. At Cambridge, a circle of students and clergy began to meet at the White Horse Inn to discuss Luther's ideas. This group included such future leaders of the Protestant Reformation in England as William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer, Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, and Mathew Parker -- many of whom were martyred for their faith.

When William Tyndale published his English translation of the New Testament in 1525, a work heavily influenced by Lutheran thought, the religious authorities in England did their best to suppress it, but it was smuggled in and achieved a fairly wide distribution nonetheless. Tyndale's New Testament and Miles Coverdale's Old Testament translation formed the Great English Bible (1539), which the king's chief councilor, Thomas Cromwell, had placed in churches throughout England.

--Henry VIII's Role in the English Reformation

Henry VIII was crowned king of England in 1509, at the age of eighteen. He married Catherine of Aragon, five and a half years his senior, who had been briefly married to his brother Arthur, though that marriage had never been consummated. This fact was important, since Leviticus 20:21 says that anyone marrying his brother's widow will be childless. Henry's own father, Henry VII, was certain that this law applied only in cases where the first marriage had been consummated. Besides, Pope Julius II had issued a Bull of Dispensation in 1503 that officially permitted their marriage whether Catherine's marriage to Arthur had been consummated or not.

But after eighteen years as Henry's wife, Catherine had gone through menopause and was no longer capable of bearing children. Unfortunately, despite many pregnancies, and six childbirths, she had given Henry only one surviving child -- and that was a girl, the Princess Mary. Three children had been stillborn, two had died in infancy, and several other pregnancies had ended in miscarriage.

King Henry desperately needed a male heir. Only when his father defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field (1485), to assume the throne as King Henry VII, had the bloody dynastic struggles known as the Wars of the Roses come to an end, allowing England a period of relative peace and prosperity. Like most of his contemporaries, Henry VIII believed that women were not fit to rule, and that a throne held by a woman would never be secure. If he died without a son, he believed, the Tudor dynasty would fall, and England would be plunged once more into the horrors of civil war.

The fact that Catherine could not give him sons, and that so many of her pregnancies had ended disastrously, began to seem to Henry like the punishment prescribed in Leviticus for a man who married his brother's widow. It is likely that his religious scruples on the matter were quite real, especially since he needed to believe his marriage to Catherine was not truly lawful. She had grown middle-aged and unattractive, and she had not provided him with a male heir. Furthermore, there was another lady at court that he very much wished to be free to marry -- the Lady Anne Boleyn. Henry had always had mistresses, including at one time Anne Boleyn's older sister Mary. But unlike the other women, Anne refused to become Henry's mistress, and the more she resisted his advances, the more infatuated he became.

Determined to repudiate his marriage to Catherine, Henry charged Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, his Lord Chancellor, with obtaining from Pope Clement VII a pronouncement that Pope Julius's dispensation was illegal and void, and that Henry's marriage to Catherine was therefore never lawful. But Clement had been taken prisoner by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor--and Catherine's nephew. Charles did not want his aunt's marriage annulled, and Clement was in no position to disobey Charles. Besides, if he nullified Julius's dispensation, he would be seriously undermining his own power and authority as pope, and he had no desire to do that.

The annulment case (commonly referred to as "the King's Great Matter") dragged on for years, with Clement deliberately postponing a final decision, for fear of angering either of the two powerful monarchs.

On the advice of a quiet theologian with discreet Protestant leanings -- Thomas Cranmer, who had been part of the Cambridge circle at the White Horse Inn -- King Henry had the question taken up by scholars all over Europe, Their answers, however, were disappointingly indecisive. Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1523, not long after the masterful politician Thomas Cromwell entered the king's service and began his rapid rise to power.

Following Cromwell's advice, in 1531 Henry declared the papacy guilty of violating the English Statute of Praemunire, which proscribed appeals to Rome, and which required the king's consent before papal legates could be sent to England. He also accused the English clergy of complicity in the violation. The English clergy had been so demoralized by Wolsey's bullying tactics, and had developed such a distaste for Rome's power, that they easily yielded to Henry's pressure to recognize him as "Protector and only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy in England."

Cromwell guided and pressured Parliament to deny papal power in England, and to give the Archbishop of Canterbury -- Thomas Cranmer, who had always sympathized with the king on the question of his marriage -- the power to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine.

In 1532 Parliament passed an act forbidding all future payments of annates to Rome. That same year, the English clergy was forced to agree that the canon-making power of the church was subordinate to the lawmaking power of the king and Parliament. The day after the submission of the clergy, the devoutly Catholic Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, resigned his post.

By January of 1533, Henry had learned that Anne Boleyn was pregnant. Anne had finally welcomed him to her bed after she was certain he would repudiate Catherine and marry her. To avoid the risk that Anne might bear him a son out of wedlock, Henry married her secretly on 25 January 1533. Within two months Archbishop Cranmer had convened an ecclesiastical court, declaring Henry's marriage to Catherine "null and absolutely void" and his marriage to Anne "good and lawful." The child, as it turned out, was not a son but a daughter -- who would one day rule England as Queen Elizabeth I.

Aware that the pope would have him excommunicated, Henry went on the offensive, and he had Parliament pass a flurry of laws denying papal authority and legally validating Henry's claim to be the "only supreme head in earth of the Church of England" (Act of Supremacy, 1534). Another law passed at the same time, the Act of Succession, declared the Princess Mary illegitimate, and confirmed the royal succession through the children of Anne Boleyn. The Treason Act made it a capital offense to deny the king's ecclesiastical supremacy.

The former chancellor, Sir Thomas More, never openly denied the king's supremacy, but his refusal to openly affirm it infuriated (and perhaps threatened) the king. More was arrested for refusing to swear the oath attached to the Act of Succession. That oath denied papal supremacy, and the devout More could not in conscience do that. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, was also arrested at the same time for refusing to deny papal supremacy, and both men were eventually executed.

Thomas Cromwell, in a move to enrich the crown, began the process known as the dissolution of the monasteries. He had official reports drawn up accusing monasteries and convents of inefficiency, corruption, and immorality. The land and wealth of the monasteries were confiscated in two waves of dissolutions, between 1536 and 1539.

The only significant protest against the dissolution of the religious houses was the so-called "Pilgrimage of Grace," a poorly organized northern rebellion that attempted to force the king to end the suppression of the monasteries, withdraw newly imposed taxes on their woolen industries, dismiss the "heretical" (Protestant) bishops, and remove Thomas Cromwell. Henry sent the Duke of Norfolk and the Earls of Shrewsbury and Suffolk to suppress the rebellion. They promised the rebels that their demands would be presented to the king, and the rebel army soon disbanded. Soon afterward, Henry had the leaders of the uprising killed, and several monks and abbots hanged.

In 1539 Henry's Parliament passed the Six Articles, which reaffirmed many of the doctrines of the Catholic church, including transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, and oral confession.

A conservative court faction, led by Thomas Surrey, Duke of Norfolk, had long been working to reduce the influence of the Protestant clergy and of Cromwell, who had guided so much of the break from Rome. Cromwell arranged a marriage between King Henry and Anne of Cleves, the sister of Duke William of Cleves, the leader of the Protestant states in western Germany. Henry had long since rid himself of Anne Boleyn, who had grown middle-aged and unattractive without providing him with a male heir. Anne was executed on false charges of treasonous adultery in 1536, and Henry married Jane Seymour, who died soon after giving birth to Henry's only male heir. Two years after Jane's death, Cromwell decided to set up a Protestant alliance to counterbalance the alliance that seemed imminent between the Catholic powers of Spain and France.

Henry took an immediate dislike to his new bride. After only six months, and with Anne of Cleves' full cooperation, he had their unconsummated marriage annulled. He was angry with Cromwell for having arranged the marriage, especially when the Catholic alliance did not materialize after all, and Henry was left in an embarrassing alliance with Lutheran princes, whom he considered to be heretical.

Ironically, Henry VIII always considered himself a devout Catholic, and a number of Protestant heretics had been martyred during his reign -- especially when Tomas More was his Lord Chancellor, for More zealously burned Protestants at the stake. The rigid Six Articles of 1539 also led to the persecution and killing of Protestants, perhaps because Henry needed to prove to himself and the world that despite the break with Rome, he himself was not a heretic.

When Henry VIII died in 1547, his nine-year-old son became King Edward VI. During the six years of Edward VI's reign, Protestantism advanced rapidly in England, with the vigorous assistance of Edward's Protestant council of regents, headed by Jane Seymour's brother Edward Seymour. There was a brief Catholic restoration under Queen Mary, during which the burning of numerous Protestant heretics earned her the sobriquet "Bloody Mary," but when she died in 1558, her devoutly Protestant half-sister Elizabeth became England's queen.
Although some claim he became a Protestant on his death-bed, he advocated catholic ceremony and doctrine throughout his life

Answer 3

Henry was a Catholic in religion, but when it went to money and divorcing, he became a protestant. So inside his heart, he was a Catholic.

Henry leaned towards the reformed religion only to suit his purposes, he remained a loyal catholic to the end of his days, with the exception of his disloyalty to the pope. He was the head of the English church, which was English protestantism, only he himself was the head, and the pope (the bishop of Rome, as he was referred to) was not.
that being said, Henry slapped down those who were too reformed as well as those who were too conventional. He trod a path right in the middle.
Neither. He broke away from Catholicism and started the Church of England
well Henry was a catholic but then he used same ideas of the protestants for his own use such as him wanting a divorce with Catherine of Argonne to marry his true love Anne Boleyn and have a son but the catholic church didn't let him do that so he stuck up for the protestant side knowing that they might let him divorce. so basically Henry was a Catholic in side but sometimes used the protestant ideas for his own good.

Answer

Henry VIII was baptized a Catholic, later in life, when the Pope wouldn't go along with his predilections in women, he left the Church and formed his own protestant Church known as Anglican.