What were the main causes of the English Reformation?

Neither of these answers reflects the more important
historical roots of the English Reformation, a desire for independence from the Roman
Papacy, which, due to the political activities of the Papal States, was actually a
(moderately hostile) temporal foreign power as well as an ecclesiastical one, allied
with England's enemies. This distrust of the Papacy, and reluctance to have a foreign
Pope appoint Bishops who sat in the House of Lords and have control of huge tracts of
land in England, dates back as far as the Acts of Praemunire, Provisions, and Provisors
in the fourteenth century.

One of the great tensions in the
institutional structure of Christianity from its origins had been the centripetal force,
impelled by the needs of the Roman emperors who made Christianity a state religion, to
have Christianity unified with a coherent bureaucracy and power structure, versus the
centrifugal tendencies towards regional or even congregational independence. The notion
that the Bishop of Rome should proclaim himself a "Pope", overriding ecumenical councils
unilaterally (by, for example, adding the "filioque" to the Nicene Creed), and claiming
dominance over other archbishops such as the Patriarch of Constantinople, was never
something uniformly accepted by all Christians; in some ways, the organizational
structure of the Church of England could be considered as reclaiming many of the
Orthodox traditions of episcopal structure (which have continued from early Christianity
to the present day) from which the Roman Catholic Church had
departed.

There were also many proto-Protestant movements
in England before the establishment of the Church of England including the Lollards,
who, contra the above post, were generally poor and uneducated, and not members of the
noble elites. Although the events of Henry VIII's life were certainly the catalyst for
the final step of a break with Rome, the tensions leading up to the break had existed
ever since the introduction of Christianity in England. While the 664 Synod of Whitby
imposed a Roman model of Christianity on England, this imposition was controversial and
far from uniformly popular. To account for the English reformation simply in terms of
the events of a few years is to drastically oversimplify issues that had a long and
complex history.