Parliament, the royal supremacy, and the Edwardian Church

Journal article

It has long been acknowledged that the English Reformation, enacted through parliamentary statute, had immense significance for the English constitution and the history of parliament as well as that of the Church. The parliaments of Edward VI are not much studied, but arguably they are more worthily defined as ‘Reformation parliaments’ than their Henrician forbears. Certainly, it was in Edward’s reign in which the thorough-going transformation of religious life, orchestrated above all by Archbishop Cranmer, was first established through acts of parliament imposing comprehensive protestant reform. The protestant regime inclined to rule the Church in an absolutist manner, through the flexible use of powers inherent in the royal supremacy. The momentous decision taken by Edward’s government to enact such an extensive range of religious reforms in parliament was because Edward’s protestant ministers and bishops noted the particular utility of statute as a mechanism that could impose binding obligations on all subjects and, crucially, because the lay members of parliament, who massively outnumbered the clergy in the Lords, and who entirely populated the Commons, seem to have been willing to assent to changes in religious practice to which their clerical brethren objected. Meanwhile as a corollary of the zeal of Edwardian evangelicals to create a godly Church and commonwealth as swiftly as possible, the same members of the laity in Lords and Commons increasingly viewed with alarm the ambitions of the protestant clergy to create a new and powerful Church untethered by papal primacy. Edward’s brief reformation must be considered equally as important as that of his father’s in the unintentional creation of an ambiguous and embattled constitutional legacy for future generations.

Authors: Gajda, A

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Parliamentary History
• Acceptance date: 2026-08-01
• EISSN: 1750-0206
• ISSN: 0264-2824
• Language: English
• Keywords: Thomas Cranmer; anticlericalism; Book of Common Prayer; common law; canon law; Edward VI; royal supremacy