LONDON — Across the English Channel, a great and unyielding power holds sway, denying London’s rights. The sovereign state is not sovereign at all.

Days before a referendum on leaving the European Union, those are the images of Britain’s plight advanced by the so-called Brexiteers, who are campaigning for their nation to signal a muscular new era of independence by leaving the 28-nation bloc.

But the English have been there before.

Five centuries ago, King Henry VIII, chafing at the theological and financial clout of the papacy, broke with Rome and led his subjects into the new pastures of the Church of England, with himself as its supreme overlord. It was a step that changed Christendom, molding faith and identity to this day among the world’s roughly 85 million Anglicans.

In the process, “England ceased to be part of a huge, medieval, cross-channel European empire and instead became an independent sovereign nation-state, free from ‘the authority of any foreign potentate’ — above all the Pope,” Adrian Pabst, a lecturer in politics at the University of Kent, wrote in The Guardian in 2009. “If you ever wondered about the origins of English euroskepticism, look no further than the Protestant Reformation.”