Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Church of England counts 597 as the start of its formal history, when Pope Gregory I sent Augustine to England to Christianise the Anglo-Saxons. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. The church traces Christianity in the region to the Roman province of Britain as early as the 3rd century.
Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to secure a male heir, but Pope Clement VII refused. Henry used Parliament to assert royal authority over the English church, culminating in the November 1534 Act of Supremacy, which abolished papal authority and declared Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England.
The Book of Common Prayer is the Church of England's official liturgical text, written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. The first version was published in 1549 during the reign of Edward VI. The official version in English law remains the 1662 edition, though the General Synod approved an alternative, Common Worship, in 2000.
Dame Sarah Mullally became Archbishop of Canterbury on the 28th of January 2026, succeeding Justin Welby who resigned effective the 6th of January 2025. Mullally is the first woman to hold the office.
The General Synod approved the ordination of women as priests in 1992, and the first ordinations took place in 1994. In 2010, for the first time in the church's history, more women than men were ordained as priests, with 290 women and 273 men ordained that year.
Anglican Sunday attendance almost halved between 1968 and 1999, falling from 3.5% to 1.9% of the English population, and continued to fall to 1.4% by 2014. The COVID-19 pandemic deepened the decline; by 2024, all-age average weekly attendance remained 19% below 2019 levels. Against this, 9.87 million people visited a Church of England cathedral in 2024.