Board: AQA | Option: 2D | Component: Component 2 (Depth Study) | Assessment Objective: AO3
This option examines the English Reformation as a depth study, concentrating on the forty years that transformed England from a Catholic to a Protestant nation. Students trace the break with Rome under Henry VIII, the dissolution of the monasteries, the Protestant reforms under Edward VI, the Marian restoration, and the Elizabethan settlement — and engage with the central historiographical question of whether the English Reformation was imposed from above or responded to genuine popular demand for change.
What this option covers
- Henry VIII and the break with Rome: the royal divorce, the Act of Supremacy, and Henrician theology
- Cromwell and the dissolution of the monasteries
- The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536: popular resistance to the Reformation
- Edward VI: the Book of Common Prayer and the pace of Protestant reform
- Kett’s Rebellion 1549 and popular responses to religious change
- Mary I: the restoration of papal authority and the burning of Protestant martyrs
- Elizabeth I and the Elizabethan settlement 1559: via media or Protestant compromise?
- Puritanism and the limits of the Elizabethan settlement
Key historiographical debates
- Was England a Catholic nation that had Protestantism imposed upon it? (Duffy’s ‘stripping of the altars’ thesis)
- The Henrician Reformation: religious or political? (Scarisbrick vs Elton)
- The pace and depth of Protestantism in England: how Protestant was England by 1559?
- The Elizabethan settlement: a genuine via media or an unstable compromise?
Debate 1 — Was Protestantism imposed on a Catholic nation? (free sample)
Was late-medieval English Catholicism a decayed faith ripe for reform, or a vigorous tradition violently displaced from above? This first debate is free and open to all. The full pack adds three more debates (below).
Eamon Duffy — revisionist. The Stripping of the Altars (Yale University Press, 1992). Duffy reconstructs a late-medieval Catholicism that was rich, vital and widely loved; the Reformation was a violent rupture imposed on a conforming people, not the fulfilment of popular demand. (source)
A. G. Dickens — Whig-Protestant. The English Reformation (Batsford, 1964). The long-standard survey portrays a spiritually lethargic old Church and a Protestant movement that met a deep popular need and spread quickly from below — the orthodoxy the revisionists set out to overturn. (source)
Christopher Haigh — slow and resisted. English Reformations (Clarendon / Oxford University Press, 1993). Haigh argues there was no single Reformation but several halting, contingent ones whose Protestant triumph was never inevitable — driven by politics from above and frequently resisted at parish level. (source)
Comparison task. Compare Duffy’s and Dickens’s interpretations of English religion on the eve of the Reformation. Which offers the more convincing account of why the old Church was, or was not, displaced?
Mark-scheme note. Top-band answers evaluate the kind of evidence each historian privileges — Duffy’s parish records and church goods versus Dickens’s reformist sources — rather than simply labelling one ‘revisionist’ and the other ‘traditional’.
Provenance prompts. (1) How might confessional standpoint — Duffy a Catholic historian, Dickens within an Anglican tradition — shape each reading? (2) How does the rise of local and social history between 1964 and 1992 help explain Duffy’s emphasis on parish experience? (3) Whose voices survive best in the records each historian uses?
The full pack — three more debates
Subscribers get the full AO3 pack as a downloadable PDF: Debate 1 above plus three more, each with named historians, a comparison task, mark-scheme guidance and provenance prompts.
- Was the break with Rome religious or political? The Henrician Reformation — G. R. Elton, J. J. Scarisbrick, G. W. Bernard.
- How Protestant was England by 1559? Pace and depth of reform — A. G. Dickens, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Ethan Shagan, Peter Marshall.
- The Elizabethan settlement: via media or unstable compromise? — J. E. Neale, Norman Jones, Patrick Collinson.
Full pack: four debates · 12 named historians · 12 verified sources · 12 provenance prompts · review checklist.
£9.99 per pack
Related resources
See also AQA 2C: The Reformation in Europe and AQA 2E: The English Revolution. Free reference pages on every major debate are in the 20th Century Interpretations library.
