D Hay Fleming
Though James V wished the morals of his clergy to improve, and the pride of his prelates to be reduced, he steadily opposed Lutheranism and thereby won the favour of the popes. He had been installed as king in July 1524, when he was little more than 12 years old. Clement VII thus wrote to the young monarch in January 1526:
“Dearest son of ours, we have added to the singular and peculiar affection that we deeply felt before to your serene highness as a Christian king, as we ought, because you have kept your kingdom without injury from the perfidious Lutheran heresy, although it is flourishing in the nearest country. While this was altogether in accordance with your piety and duty, and advantageous to all your subjects . . . yet we, as in duty bound, took it as a most pleasant and welcome thing, and we have extolled your virtuous conduct and your diligence more than once with great and deserved praises. . . . And, dearest son, we exhort and request you, by every feeling of charity and in the Lord our God, that you be willing to perform and accomplish in the future that same thing in honour of God . . . especially since no staggering blow can be struck at the Catholic faith in your kingdom without your authority being at the same time overturned.”
Clement was, no doubt, delighted with the Act the Scottish Parliament passed in the preceding July, prohibiting the importation of Lutheran books, and forbidding the rehearsal of Lutheran opinions except to confute them. In his reply, James thus assured Clement that, as he had already opposed the doctrine of Luther with all his might, so “for the future, by the favour of God . . . we will endeavour to devote ourselves with all zeal to the Catholic religion, and the defence of the liberty of the Church, so that our territories shall not be invaded either by that most wicked Lutheran heresy or by any similar one”.
Paul III sent a consecrated sword and hat to James in January 1537 and exhorted him to oppose heresy. The king had just married Madeleine, the eldest daughter of Francis I and was then in France. On meeting the messenger in February, he manifested the greatest satisfaction at this demonstration of the Pope’s regard. Henry VIII was reported to be displeased with James for accepting the gift, as the sword was intended to be used against the English. James had done something to merit the Pope’s confidence; not only had he enlisted his illegitimate infants in the Church, he had highly approved (October 1534) of the proposal of the Emperor, Charles V, for a general council; he had intimated his readiness to send men to attend; he had promised to do what he could to prevent the spread of Lutheranism; he had (June 1535) re-enacted, with additions, the 1525 Act against Lutheran books and heresies.
It was much easier to burn Protestants or drive them into exile than to prevent the circulation of their books and pamphlets. Before breaking with Rome, Henry VIII and his abettors experienced considerable difficulties in trying to suppress heretical books, many of which were printed abroad and smuggled into England. Lists of them were given in proclamations issued against them. In the “memorandum of a proclamation made at Paul’s Cross”, no fewer than 30 works are listed which the people were forbidden to buy, sell or read. Some of these assailed the Papacy, its doctrines and corruptions; others set forth the way of life and some of them no doubt found their way into Scotland.
The primates of England and a body of Oxford and Cambridge divines, called together by Henry VIII, condemned a number of books printed in foreign regions as containing pestiferous errors and blasphemies. They also concluded that it was not necessary for the common people to have in their hands the Scriptures in English; they ought rather to be expounded to them by preachers. It was intimated in June 1530 that if, in future, the people abandoned their perverse opinions, the king intended to have an English translation made by “learned and Catholic persons”. In the meantime all translations in circulation should be given up. The last part struck at Tyndale’s translation, which had been in circulation for four years.
The influence of Patrick Hamilton’s converts, of Lutheran books, and of Tyndale’s Testaments, was beginning to tell in Scotland. But whether the Act against Lutheran books and heresies was intended to strike against translations of the New Testament or not, the Scottish bishops had already prohibited reading it in the vernacular. Cochlaeus2 defended the bishops’ decree; he not only condemned Tyndale’s translation and Luther’s, which he denounced as corrupt, but also objected to any translation into the vernacular, no matter how faithfully it might be done.
If the king wished to preserve among his people the ancient harmony in piety and divine worship with all the blessings of ecclesiastical discipline, Cochlaeus claimed, he should “cease from this business of translation especially at this time, because far more evil and ruin than good or edification will result from it. For the Lutherans will abuse the best and most undisputed translation for their contentions and questions about the faith, in opposition to the bishops and monks, whom they make suspected by the people as
2A prominent Roman Catholic of the time in Germany.
persons that do not teach the truth but, for the sake of their belly, suppress it and unjustly keep it back. Thus taking whatever translation in the native language you give them, they will point out to the people many and various passages of Holy Scripture that seem, according to the letter, to read in favour of the Lutheran doctrines.”
Alexander Alane3 appealed to the King about translations and published a reply to Cochlaeus. The King promised to do what he could for Cochlaeus, and Alane’s pamphlets were probably consigned to the flames. At all events, Cardinal Pole, in writing to James a few years afterwards, expressed satisfaction that he had burned heretical books sent to him.
The decree of the Scottish bishops was not a dead letter. Not only had Henry Forrest suffered, as Knox alleges, for having “a New Testament in English”, but Lord William Howard and Bishop Barlow, writing from Edinburgh in May 1536, affirmed that the reading of God’s Word in translation had lately been prohibited by open proclamation. And writing from Berwick in March 1539, the Duke of Norfolk says that men were coming to him daily wishing do flee out of Scotland, “saying that if they were taken, they should be put to execution” “for reading of Scripture in English”.
Two months after the death of James, the Regent Arran alleged that in the past whatever had been decreed by the clergy in their blindness, for “stopping of God’s Holy Word”, had been put in force by the King’s authority. And in the epistle to James VI prefixed to the Bassandyne Bible,4 written in the name of the General Assembly and dated 10 July 1579, it is stated that the clergy of the realm, abusing the gentle nature of James V, made it a capital crime “to be punished with the fire”, to have or to read the New Testament in their own language. And to make its readers more odious to all men, they were named New Testamentares, as if it had been “the detestable name of a pernicious sect”. Sir James Melville relates that when the clerical and other enemies of James Kirkcaldy of Grange wished to prejudice the King against him, they alleged that he had “become a heretic, and that he had always a New Testament in English in his pouch”. And one of the charges on which Cardinal Beaton condemned Sir John Borthwick in 1540 was that he had the New Testament in English.
When the Vicar of Dollar was at the stake, according to one account, someone plucked the New Testament from his bosom and, holding it up before the people, cried, “Heresy! Heresy!” Then the people cried, “Burn him! Burn him!” This illustrates the hostile feeling which benighted Romanists entertained towards the Bible in English. From their own standpoint they
3For Alane, see the July issue, p 217.
4The first printing of an English Bible in Scotland, an edition of the Geneva Bible.
judged rightly, for the Word of God was the root cause of the Reformation, and from it was derived the necessary strength. Even those prelates who did so little to spread a knowledge of the New Testament did not object to paying it external honour. When Cardinal Beaton condemned Borthwick for having that Testament in English, he had the Gospels placed before him in pronouncing sentence, so that the judgement might seem to proceed from the face of God. And at his consecration the Gospels were laid upon his shoulders.
The opposition of such men as the Cardinal to the circulation of the vernacular Scriptures was, no doubt, chiefly due to the fear that so-called heresy would thereby be encouraged, that the position of the Church would be weakened, and that the clergy themselves would lose their power and influence. It is in no way uncharitable to attribute selfish, personal motives to those men. Had they been self-denying, self-sacrificing zealots, their opposition to the Reformation and their cruel, pitiless treatment of the Reformers might have been explained on the ground that, in excommunicating and killing better people than themselves, they thought that they were doing God service. But such an explanation cannot be suggested on behalf of men who sacrificed all the weightier matters of the law on the altar of self-indulgence.
Opposition, however, to the Scriptures in the common language was not new. Before the middle of the thirteenth century, the councils of Tarragona, in Spain, and of Toulouse, in France, forbade the laity to read vernacular translations of the Bible. Henry Knighton, a canon of the abbey at Leicester, and a contemporary of Wycliffe, thus expatiates on the consequences of giving the Bible to the people in their own tongue: “The gospel, which Christ gave to the clerics and doctors of the Church, that they might sweetly minister it to the laity . . . this Master John Wycliffe translated from Latin into the English tongue; whence . . . that has become a common thing and more open to laymen and women who are able to read, than it is wont to be to clerics more than ordinarily learned and of superior intelligence; and so the pearl of the gospel is thrown out and trampled on by the swine”.
That there was a demand for Bibles, even in the Church of Rome, is proved by the fact that so many editions of the Latin Vulgate were printed before 1500. These were, of course, of no use to people who could read only their mother tongue. But that Church was loath to produce translations. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Pius IV required the bishops to refuse lay people permission to read even Roman Catholic versions of Scripture unless their confessors or parish priests judged that this was likely to prove beneficial to them.
Not until 1582 did Roman Catholics produce a printed English translation of the New Testament; and not until 1609-10 one of the Old Testament. The
New Testament was translated and printed at Rheims, the Old at Douay. According to Lord Bute, “The version, or rather series of versions . . . generally called the Douay Bible . . . is indeed, especially in the earlier editions, difficult to understand for anyone who does not know Latin”. The unreformed Church of Scotland could not be expected to approve of the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular, when it was afraid to put its own Catechism – Archbishop Hamilton’s – freely into the hands of the laity. The clergy were forbidden “to lend their copies to every layman indiscriminately, but only according to the decision, advice and discretion of their bishop”; even for bishops it was only “lawful to lend copies of the said Catechism to some few laymen worthy, grave, of good faith and prudent”.