England Remains Catholic

[Dan the Roman]

I think people confuse the cause and effect of religion. England and Spain were allied by fear of France, and not by religion in the early 1500s and this outlasted both Henry V, Edward, and Mary, and went several years into Elizabeth's reign. Elizabeth spent her first few years an ally of Philip.

Furthermore this alliance collapsed not because of religion, but because of the eclipse of the monarchy in France following the death of Henry II, which did have a strong religious component, but was coming anyway as blow-back for the centralization under Charles VII and Louis XI. With France gone, England and Spain were left as the major rivals.

With a Catholic England there may still have been a break with Spain, still have been support to a Protestant revolt in the Netherlands for reasons of pragmatism, much as Catholic France aided the Protestants in the Thirty Years War. And there may still have been an Armada. And likely, a religious split eventually. The split, when it happened in the 1530s, was unfortunate from the perspective of everyone, since England's natural allies stayed Catholic, and had Jane Seymour lived, likely there would have been reconciliation with Rome, since both Anne and Catharine were dead. By the 1560 however, Protestantism would have been politically necessary.