scholar, linguist and translator of unsurpassed genius, his mastery of the English language was consummate. The first person to translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English, he did so in prose which is accessible, supple, beautiful, numinous and noble. His rhythms and cadences are with us to this day. Few literary scholars manage to make a major contribution to a social, political and religious revolution, but this is precisely what Tyndale did.
His The Obedience of a Christian Man is one of the most underestimated books in our language. His influence on the thinking, literature and religion of English-speaking people can hardly be overstated.
Born in Gloucestershire and educated at Oxford, he travelled widely on the continent in the 1520s, staying in Hamburg and Cologne, and in Luther’s Wittenberg. He was something of a loner, and valued his independence. He does not seem to have been particularly pleasant in his personal dealings. Betrayed by an Englishman called Phillips when he was living covertly in Antwerp, he was arrested by the authorities, imprisoned for heresy, and then strangled and burnt to death.
Huldrych Zwingli
A leading Swiss reformer, who dominated the important city of Zurich in the 1520s, Zwingli was highly sexed, charismatic and a theatrically powerful preacher. His short but influential career as a reformer indicated the essentially fissile nature of Protestantism; he was much alarmed by the growth of radical Anabaptism in Zurich, and he fell out with Luther in a nasty, extended spat over what happened at communion. The way the two men abused each other in a series of polemical tracts ended whatever brief hopes there had been that Protestantism might be a united movement.
Zwingli was killed in combat, wielding his battleaxe, as he fought the army of the Catholic cantons of Switzerland.
Introduction
THIS is an intensely dramatic story. It is the story of extraordinary courage, of martyrs, of burnings and persecution, of danger and escape, of degradation and wickedness, of superhuman heroism, of felicity and nobility, of betrayal and treachery, of the destruction of much that was precious and beautiful, of constant, unremitting and often incomprehensible change, of fervent spiritual yearning, of warfare and strife, of social renewal and visionary democratic innovation. It is in part the story of the beginning of the modern world. And that itself, paradoxically, is just the beginning of it. Most of all, this is about the Christian quest for God.
Many people still regard the European Reformation as an unmitigated disaster which led to division and secularisation. Others regard it as the most positive movement in world history, a movement that led to the opening of the minds of ordinary people and set them free from the forces of medieval darkness. Still more find in it the seeds of modern capitalism, or modern decadence, or both. The Reformation divided, and it still divides.
There is peace and piety to be found in this story, but perhaps not enough of either. One thing is clear: our story is supremely one of turbulence and uproar. Its great begetter, a beer-swilling, boorish German peasant who, in his own words, was just ‘an uncivilised fellow from the backwoods’, was also, despite himself, a brilliant revolutionary – possibly the most effective revolutionary in human history. This man, Martin Luther, felt himself constantly ‘impelled by God into the midst of uproar’. This is the story of the Great Uproar.
Our story begins not with Martin Luther but with a man winning the crown of England in battle. His name was Henry Tudor. He was determined to have his royal legitimacy endorsed by the highest authority available: the pope, his ‘Vicar on Earth’. When Pope Innocent VIII duly confirmed Henry Tudor as Henry VII, the rightful king of England, he was ensuring among other things that the new monarch would have the loyalty of the English clergy, of whom there were many (far too many). This was important for Henry because the senior clergy controlled much of the land of England and exercised considerable political power.
Henry VII proved to be a most pious king, though his piety was at times stagey and used for secular purposes. He went on many pilgrimages, but his principal work of devotion was the building of an extravagant and gorgeous monument to himself, the Lady Chapel at the east side of Westminster Abbey. Thousands of people visit it every week of every year; it is the most elaborate and complex part of this famous building. The chapel was to be his own resting place, the magnificent site of his tomb, as well as a shrine to his predecessor Henry VI.
Henry VII was a peace-loving man, although he won his crown in the battle at Bosworth Field in 1485. He managed to end the Wars of the Roses, the vicious dynastic squabbles that had bedevilled England for many years. But, two years later, his army had to win a hard-fought and very bloody battle to preserve his kingship. This battle is described in some detail in this book, partly because it is important to emphasise that countries like England and Scotland were not peaceful places before the Reformation.
Critics of the Reformation often insist that it led to pervasive strife and many wars. There is some truth in this – but, on the other hand, the condition of pre-Reformation Europe was hardly peaceful or stable. The worst disaster in Scottish history, the terrible military catastrophe of Flodden Field, took place in 1513, a few years before the first stirrings of religious reform were felt in Scotland. At Flodden, James IV, King of Scots, died. He was one of the most powerful and charismatic of Scotland’s kings, and latterly his kingly obsession had been his desire to persuade the pope to undertake a new crusade. Rather presumptuously, James wanted to lead the navy of Venice against the Turks. The popes themselves were monarchs of a kind, ruling a large swathe of central Italy. Some of them were also warriors, notably Pope Julius II, who was however wary of James IV’s grandiose plans for a new crusade.
This, then, was the late medieval world: kingship was everything. The eminent Tudor historian David Starkey has emphasised that this was indeed a king-centred world. These kings were ‘the be-all and end-all of imagination and fact’.
Our story is partly about the smashing of kingly authority. The great figures in it are not kings, or queens, but men of humble birth, most notably a German, a Frenchman and a Scot: Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox. They created a new order (or, in some respects, a disorder) in which kingly authority was to be seriously diminished.
Even the most accomplished and glittering monarch of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth of England, found that she had to endure more and more truculent and offensive challenges from religiously motivated Puritans who did not respect her office. In Scotland, Knox harangued his monarch, Mary Queen of Scots, with insolent confidence. And Mary’s son James VI was lectured in a hectoring manner, and very firmly put in his place, by the first great Scots Presbyterian, Andrew Melville. The Scottish Reformation was largely driven by demotic notions. It was one of the later European reformations – after some false starts, it began properly only when John Knox returned to Scotland in 1559 – and it should be regarded as a political and social as well as a religious revolution.
The Scots reformers, led by Knox, had a visionary determination to place education at the very heart of their revolution. This education was to be democratic; the sons of the laird’s servants were to receive just as good and thorough schooling as the sons of the laird.
There were many European reformations, and the first and most crucial one was German. The catch-all singular word ‘Reformation’ is nevertheless valid. This overall Reformation was a movement which encompassed immense national and even regional differences, and covers a series of diverse and separate reformations.
The Reformation movement – which the likes of Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland, strong traditional Christian monarchs of the early sixteenth century, could not have dreamed of, let alone begun to understand – was unleashed by a coarse and obscure German Augustinian monk called Martin Luther. Coarse he undoubtedly was, and remained. But the obscurity vanished almost overnight. Luther was one of the few surpassing
