The Act was piloted through Parliament by Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell (though it is unrecorded who actually wrote the bill), and punished "the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with Mankind or Beast".

[5] However Henry later used the law to execute monks and nuns (thanks to information his spies had gathered) and take their monastery lands—the same tactics had been used 200 years before by Philip IV of France against the Knights Templar.

[7] Nicholas Udall, a cleric, playwright, and Headmaster of Eton College, was the first to be charged with violation of the Act alone in 1541, for sexually abusing his pupils.

The Act was repealed in 1553 on accession of the staunchly Catholic Queen Mary, who preferred such legal matters adjudicated in ecclesiastical courts.

[13] The courts had previously established, in Rex v Richard Wiseman in 1716, that heterosexual sodomy was considered buggery under the meaning of the 1533 Act.

[14] In light of R v Jacobs, fellatio thus remained lawful until the passage of Labouchere Amendment in 1885, which added the charge of gross indecency to the traditional term of sodomy.

The last two Englishmen who were hanged for sodomy were executed in 1835, when James Pratt and John Smith died in front of the Newgate Prison in London on 27 November.

The United Kingdom Parliament repealed buggery laws for England and Wales in 1967 (in so far as they related to consensual homosexual acts in private between people over the age of 21), ten years after the Wolfenden report.