Conflict between the English Crown and the Holy See began in the period known as the English Reformation which began with the rejection of papal jurisdiction in England by the declaration of royal supremacy by King Henry VIII, followed in time by the confiscation of church properties, the dissolution of the monasteries, the execution of priests, forced attendance at Anglican worship, forced payment of tithes to the state church and the illegalisation of Roman Catholicism.
Subsequently, Pope Pius V's excommunication of Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 and authorisation of rebellion against her contributed to official suspicion of the allegiances of English Catholics.
This, combined with a desire to assert the claims of the established church, led initially to renewed persecution by the state, and to the continued enforcement of severe legal restrictions.
[1] Some attempts at dialogue began in 1915, when Pope Benedict XV approved a British Legation to the Vatican, led by an Anglican with a Roman Catholic deputy.
Continued efforts resulted in the spread of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in both churches (and others) and the visit of George Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chichester, to Cardinal Montini of Milan, later Pope Paul VI.
[2] Real rapprochement was not achieved until the warming of Roman Catholic attitudes to ecumenism under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, whose foundation of the "Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity" encouraged the then archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, to make a historic, though not entirely official, visit to the Vatican in 1960.
In 1966, the archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, made an official visit to Pope Paul VI and, in the following year, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was established.
IARCCUM's purpose is: In 2000, George Carey, then archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, then president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, convoked a conference of Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops in Mississauga in Canada to discern the progress made in theological conversations since the 1960s, and whether closer co-operation could be developed between the two traditions.
[7] Although ARCIC had just completed the major document on Marian theology in 2003, Pope John Paul II officially called off all future talks between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion upon the consecration of Gene Robinson as a bishop.
In 2019, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, responded to Anglican priests defecting to Rome in this way by saying ‘Who cares?’ and that he did not mind people leaving to join other denominations as long as they are 'faithful disciples of Christ.