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Of course WW2 generally figures in Brexit debates. Sometimes we go back to Napoleon, and there’s a bit of Armada sometimes thrown in. But I wish @MikeStuchbery_ or some other historian would factor in our original break from Rome with Henry VIII. That’s really Brexity.... 1/3
2/3 What’s very now about the creation of the Church of England was its ideological vacuity, but pragmatic and finanical acuity for H8. He got the marriage he wanted, and suddenly the middle classes got hold of church and monastic lands
3/3 Henry VIII’s CofE (I remember as a choirboy) was a ‘holy Catholic Church’ far removed from Puritanism. But a mixture of personal opportunism and privatisation of monasteries, schools and abbeys made it economically profitable for many
