How Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon was granted by an English ecclesiastical court presided over by Cranmer

This explanation contains sections that have been cut from Bailey & Rowley's Introduction to the Act of Supremacy and pasted here. Sorry about the mistakes derived from the cutting and pasting
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.... In December 1530 Henry charged the whole of the Church of England with having broken the Statute of Praemunire, because, as a body, it had condoned and abetted Wolsey’s offence. The Convocation of Canterbury, thinking it largely a matter of money, admitted the technicality and offered to pay the crown £40,000. Henry demanded £100,000, and, more significantly, the recognition of himself as Sole Protector and Supreme Head of the Church and clergy of England...

... Over temporal matters, {the King} argued, he had supreme power already. In the end both Convocations agreed on Singular Protector, Only and Supreme Lord, and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even Supreme Head. This title represented a partial victory for the king, but its real meaning, still unresolved, lay in the interpretation of ‘as far as the law of Christ allows.’...

Parliament did not meet again until January 1532. During the previous months the king’s cause had made no further progress at Rome, but Henry was obviously determined to marry Anne somehow. In July he had compelled Catherine both to leave court and to be separated from their daughter Mary...

Cromwell... steered parliamentary discussion away from the subject of the ‘divorce’ towards the ever popular one of clerical abuses, with the result that by midsummer both houses had approved Henry’s claim to license all canons (that is, all legislation passed by Convocation), had made legal the appointment of English bishops without papal approval, and, in anticipation of retaliation, had denounced excommunication and interdict should the papacy seek to use these weapons against the English crown...

When Parliament adjourned in the early summer of 1532, Cromwell must have felt satisfied with its work. The preliminaries of the anticlerical campaign had been completed. All must now await the death of Warham, the aged archbishop of Canterbury.

Warham died on 23rd August 1532. A week or so later, on 1^st September, Henry created Anne Marchioness of Pembroke in her own right, and henceforward, on formal as well as informal occasions, openly treated her as if she were a queen. He also sent envoys to bring back Thomas Crammer from his diplomatic work at the Imperial court, and by the end of the year Crammer was dutifully petitioning Rome for the papers necessary to confirm his appointment as the new archbishop. Clement was glad to be able to do something uncontroversial for Henry...

Very secretly indeed Henry and Anne went through a service of marriage at the end of January 1533. By the time Clement was sealing Crammer’s papers in Rome, and Parliament was prohibiting any appeals to Rome in ‘causes testamentary and causes of matrimony and divorce’, Anne was telling Henry that she was pregnant. Both had to keep their secret until after Crammer had been created archbishop on 30^th March. After that nothing but formality remained.

On 11^th April the new archbishop requested the king’s permission to settle the king’s ‘great cause of matrimony’. Henry after some pretended hesitation empowered Crammer to judge the case. The archbishop’s court sat at Dunstable towards the end of May, and, after painstakingly but unnecessarily re-examining the evidence, derived the expected verdict. Five days later Crammer announced that since Henry had never been legally married to Catherine, his secret marriage to Anne Boleyn must be valid. On Whit Sunday in Westminster Abbey, Crammer publicly demonstrated this verdict by crowning Anne queen in the presence of nobles, clerics, and people. There could be no appeal. The recent act forbade it. Irrevocably the decision had been made, and Convocation, unable to initiate any canon without royal permission, had to accept it.