It's important to point out that monarchs (and other governments) throughout Christian history has always tried to usurp fundamental authority from the Church. After all, the Church was the main direct check against monarchical authority.
Because, back in those days, all Catholic monarchs were crowned either by the Pope or his bishops. This is significant because being a king was not merely a temporal, secular title, but it was also a bit of a religious vocation, just as being a monk or a nun, or being married is considered a religious vocation. You are taking vows to God, and are responsible for your kingdom and your subjects, and you will be held doubly account for this, just as a priest would be for the attendance of his parish and flock. In other words, you are king because God allowed you to be king.
Notice, I didn't say power. Authority and power are two different things. Authority is merely the right to say what ought to be done. Power is the ability to get it done. Kings, really, didn't have as much power as modern people today think. Power was widely diffused, much more widely than it is in so-called "republics" today where it is concentrated in a certain group of people. Authority in western republics has been widely diffused, through the process of voting, so that those in power are rarely held to account for what they do, because of a strange concept known as the Consent of the Governed.
Under the 4th Commandment, Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother, this also includes anyone in a position of legitimate authority. Therefore, if you were a Catholic subject, you were obligated to obey the sovereign and his appointed ministers, as a religious duty. However, neither he nor his ministers could ever order you to do anything that disobeyed God's Law. After all, God outranks everyone. If a monarch or a nobleman flagrantly or routinely violated God's Law, and made no act of contrition or atonement for it, he could be excommunicated. If that happened, the subjects would not be obliged to obey the sovereign while excommunicate.
This was what was at stake with Henry and St. Thomas. Henry believed that by appointing someone who would be beholden to the crown, he would be shielded from clerical accountability from the Pope and the bishops for any indiscretions. This is why kings and emperors throughout Christendom fought tooth and nail to secure the power to appoint their own bishops (known as Investiture). This is what was at issue between Rome and Constantinople, leading to the Great Schism between the East and Western Churches; the Byzantine Emperors wanted priests to bless whatever they wanted, regardless of what the Church taught, to further undermine Church and Papal authority.
Henry VIII would eventually achieve what no other English monarch had been able to do. By separating from the Church, and forming his own with himself as head of it (known as the Anglican Church), he now had nobody to contest his authority on any decision he made, leading to a bloody persecution of his Catholic subjects: All so that he could divorce his actual wife, Queen Catharine of Aragon.
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