The Church of England is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
The church dates its establishment to the 6th-century Gregorian mission in Kent led by St Augustine. The English church renounced papal authority when Henry VIII broke with Rome to secure an annulment from Catherine of Aragon in the 1530s. The English Reformation accelerated under Edward VI's regents before a brief restoration of Catholicism under Queen Mary I and King Philip. The Act of Supremacy 1558 renewed the breach and the Elizabethan Settlement charted a course whereby the English church was to be both Catholic and Reformed: