In north-west Europe

The rediscovery of pagan Latin and Greek writers, the emergence of a challenging intellectual attitude to the church, the realisation that there was a vast unknown world to explore beyond the oceans, all combined to foster a spirit of enquiry different to what had existed before. It was centred on the individual, the man or woman who could bring knowledge and experience to bear on any question, and resolve it. England, on the north-west periphery, was not immune to this change in intellectual life.

Universities and their scholars were still an international community based on teaching in Latin. The German invention of printing with movable type in 1455 was brought to England by William Caxton in 1476. From then, reading could not be confined to the monastery or college: books could be read at home, and hidden away, if they were on forbidden topics. The English had no great monuments of antiquity to contemplate and emulate as had the Italians, the French and the Spanish; their language had evolved from a barbarian speech, not from a classical tongue; they had no line of descent to trace back to Virgil, Aristotle or Homer. But the spirit which led to the Renaissance and the Reformation empowered them just as it empowered men like Michelangelo in Italy, Erasmus in Holland, and Martin Luther in Germany.

It brought Sir Thomas More to write his Utopia, in 1516, an exploration of how classical humanist ideals, lacking divine revelation, could be reconciled with the divinely inspired but degenerate Christianity of his day In Utopia, gold was used to make chamber pots, and military glory was contemptible.

Defender of the faith and destroyer of the monasteries

Henry VIII, supreme individualist, made his own pattern out of the traditional and novel elements of his world. Patron of new music, new art, new architecture, he also relished hunting and horsemanship. Far from averse to military glory, he launched several wars against France. He was at first a strenuous defender of Catholic orthodoxy and wrote a book against the teachings of Luther; the Pope rewarded him with the title 'Defender of the Faith'. His alienation from the papacy began in 1527, when he began to seek a divorce from Catherine. Thomas Cromwell, became his chief agent in procuring parliamentary support. A series of acts of parliament traces his steps to the final Act of Supremacy in 1534. More and Bishop Fisher of Canterbury were beheaded for their refusal to accept either this or the legitimacy of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, already pregnant with his second daughter, the future Elizabeth I.

In 1536 Anne Boleyn was executed and Henry married Jane Seymour, who bore "him a son and died a few days afterwards. She was succeeded by a diplomatic marriage to Anne, daughter of the Duke of Cleves in Flanders; this was a failure in all respects and was annulled in 1540. A brief marriage to Catherine Howard followed before she was executed for adultery (an activity Henry permitted only to himself), and the king's sixth wife, Catherine Parr, survived her tempestuous husband.

Despite his increasing megalomania and despotic tendencies, Henry VIII was not a tyrant. In an address to parliament in 1543, he said: 'we at no time stand so high in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, when we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic.