'History can be healed' Charles visit offers hope for interfaith conciliation

AImost every British schoolchild is taught that Henry VIII, the swaggering Tudor king driven by lust and his quest for an heir, broke away from the Roman Catholic church in 1534 after the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

- Harriet Sherwood

Henry created the Church of England, appointed himself its supreme governor, divorced Catherine and then married Anne Boleyn (who sadly lasted just three years before she was beheaded).

Henry did not stop there. He declared war on Catholicism, ordering monasteries to be destroyed, their land and valuables seized, libraries and manuscripts burned, and priests, monks and abbots executed.

For hundreds of years, Catholics in England and Scotland were banned from openly worshipping.

Even until the 1950s, mixed marriages between Catholics and Anglicans were frowned upon.

Now, almost 500 years after Henry's momentous breakaway, King Charles III has prayed with Pope Leo XIV beneath the sublime frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in an act of rapprochement between the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England.