Are there any useful parallels between the EU referendum and religious history?

Niall Ferguson got me thinking about this in his Sunday Times piece, in which he rejected the allure of Brexit and declared himself an ‘Anglosceptic’. He concluded: ‘In the days before empire, Henry VIII’s version of Brexit was to renounce Roman Catholicism and divorce Catherine of Aragon. A true sceptic in those days would have advised him to Bremain — and unite against the Turk.’

It’s an odd choice of illustration, because in that case Brexit did work, it paved the way for a stronger braver England, then Britain. It was the making of us. Tudor history is surely a precedent in the Brexiters’ favour.

So can Boris dress up as Henry VIII, so to speak, and paint Brussels as Rome? In a sense he is doing exactly this, when he talks of sovereignty. Henry’s Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 declared England to be ‘an empire unto itself’, meaning a sovereign nation that must reject alien laws coming from another European city.