The Reformation would have a greater political, social, and economic impact as it moved north.

Henry VIII Catherine of Aragon Anne Boleyn Thomas Wolsey Thomas More Thomas Cranmer Thomas Cromwell Submission of the Clergy (1532) Act of Succession (1534) Act of Supremacy (1534) Six Articles (1539) Book of Common Prayer Mary Tudor Elizabeth I

 By the 1520s Protestant ideas had spread to England, France and eastern Europe.  In England, Henry VIII’s motives to break from the Church combined personal, political, social, and economic elements.  Tudor King Henry VIII sought to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon due to not producing a male heir but the Pope refused.  Henry had Parliament enact the Act of Supremacy which separated of the Church of England from Rome with himself as its head.  Henry retained many elements of Catholicism but dissolved the monasteries and confiscated the monastic lands, selling them off to the nobility.  Managing those estates required the development of a modern centralized government bureaucracy; Thomas Cromwell, reorganized the bureaucracy's structure and improved its efficiency.

 Some would argue that John Calvin had an even greater influence than Luther on the future course of history.  Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1535, introduced the concept of predestination which led to the firm conviction of Calvinists that they were among the elect.  Centered in Geneva, John Calvin and the elect enforced morality not only on themselves but on the entire population.  Reformers and refugees flocked to Geneva; returning home, they became the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Huguenots of France, and the Puritans of England.  Calvinism’s notion that God calls the elect to a calling and dignified all labor, encouraged an activist approach to life.  In the late 19 th century, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote the, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argued for an intimate connection between the rise of commercial capitalism and Protestantism.  The Calvinist calling encouraged the traits of hard work, saving, frugality which made the growth of capitalism possible.  Those countries that became Calvinists, England in the mid 17 th century, Scotland, and Holland, particularly saw great economic success in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.