My main point by bringing up Henry and Elizabeth was that there was much more of a possible Catholic rebellion in England (in fact I think there were a couple of half-assed ones) than there was a Protestant one in France or the Iberian peninsula. When Henry started the Anglican church most of England was still majority Catholic. When Elizabeth was in charge there was still a large amount of Catholics in the country, not to mention a lot of nobles who were still Catholic. And I believe that the majority of Henry's military officers were Catholic as well. I'm not saying they would have, or they wanted to, I'm just saying it would have been stupid, especially considering the intrigue that occured in the relatively short period between Henry and Elizabeth's reigns.
And Philip may not have necessarily brought the inquisition to England (although I think he would have), but he would certainly have curbed Protestant power there and definitely would have increased the authority and influence of the Catholic nobles, or at least tried to. He wanted to make himself King after all!
Like i said before, people in Anglo-Saxon countries tend to darken both Philip II and the Inquisition a lot. I live in the only country that was occupied in Philip II kingdom ( well in his words, he inherited, conquered it and bought it :/ ) and i can tell exactly what Philip II did to ocuppied countries: first and far before the military move , he would bribe a lot of the nobles to desert in the worst hour( most likely he did the same in England ), he would move a most likely symbolic force against the enemy and then the turncoats would show their hand. Then he would make a mock-up crowning, leave some high ranked noble as Viceroy and leave to the Inqusition the issue of rounding any resistors ( remember, the Bible says that all authorities are established by gGod, so rebelling is going against someone that God chosen ... so rebeling is a sin and can be adressed by a religious court
). That was what happened here and I don't expect that would be any diferent if that half baked plan of the
Armada had worked and spanish troops had conquered England. The diferences in religion would only make things more colourful, but not substantially diferent... most likely the resistors would be protestant and the turncoats catholics, but that is all. Unlike it was sold by the Elizabethean propaganda, most likely there would not be anything as mass murdering and the burning of London....
True, but excommunication was not followed by all out war against the RC peoples... like we saw as a result of the Reformation.
There was more differences in Orthodoxy than just that one thing... the hierarchical structure is was led to the problems within RC in my opinion... because power corrupted.
In the end, the RC has been hugely beneficial to the planet with its outreach programs, etc... but during the medieval period and renaissance, there were definitely some huge problems. Mainly when the RC was trying to be a temporal power also...
True enough, but that is because the orthodox churches tend to be extremely subservient to the state where they are and not the other way around, most likely due to not existing anything like a orthodox Vatican. And surely power corrupts, and the RC obviously is a good example of that. Don't think that I'm defending the RC : I come from a family of crypto-jews and the house of my mother's side grandfather still shows the cross that was made in the house of the "jews" in spite of most of the family being catholic nowadays ( I'm not either catholic or jew , but that is besides the point ), so I have enough of family stories of persecutions to know that RC was not exactly a friendly bunch in those days. But the RC is only diferent in size and organization of the other christian ( and not only ) groups in that regard ...
And responding to the other post you made after this one: think on this, Philip II was fighting protestant rebels in what would be the Dutch republic and a lot of it's enemies were protestants. My guess is that if you picked Elizabeth or Henry VIII and placed them as Spanish kings of the time they would had done the exact same things, given what did in England, and this regardless of how religious/unreligious they were.
Oh, and to the poster that compared Spain to Sweden: I can't talk much of Spain , but I live in a country that is sold as being as catholic as Spain, so I guess I can give a more based opinion on that. According to offcial data, more than 90% of the people that call themselfes "catholic" in Portugal will go to church once per year or less, and most of the times just because of some pagan ritual that by acident has a priest and was disguised as a catholic ritual ( the
romarias and
procissões ), or to baptisms , funerals or weddings or in Christmas and Easter. By some reason most of the people here define themselfes as "non-practising catholics"
when they are asked about what is their religion. The churches, besides the ocasions I mentioned before , are as much to the flies as I suppose they are in Sweden : small groups of more eldery people ... I guess that in Spain things should not be as diferent, given what spanish people I know tell me.
By that definition , those orthodox events I quoted in Greece or Russia are catholics ... hey ,even the communists during the Spanish civic war carrying pictures of La Passionaria in the streets were making a catholic event by that definition 
