When it comes to state violence, official justifications have always been paramount. Throughout history, savvy administrations have paid close attention to their messaging around the use of force and how it is perceived. This is not a modern phenomenon. William the Conqueror went to great lengths to dress up his invasion of Britain as a righteous act to punish a perjurer.
And so it was with the Tudor Reformation – a violent act that required an explanation.
King Henry VIII was short of money. And he urgently needed a new wife. The English Church had money, and the Pope was blocking his annulment. So it was a simple calculation: crush the infrastructure of the Church in England and appropriate its money. He was, though, rightly aware that this would not look very good. Only 12 years earlier, Pope Leo X had awarded him the title “Defender of the Faith” for his valiant support of the Church.
His course of action was, he knew, rather mercenary and lacking in a higher purpose, so his administration duly came up with a suitable story: he was – by the grace of God – saving the country.
The history books therefore dutifully tell us that Henry passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1533, and the country was grateful to be free of the “dead hand” of Rome. Thus liberated, and buoyed up with a unique and divine potential, plucky England went on to become a green and pleasant land, discover the New World, pioneer the Industrial Revolution and bring enlightenment to swathes of the gloomy globe.
It will come as no surprise that this version of events is a bit simplistic in its rush to drown Henry in adulation.
For starters, setting up a new Church could not be achieved by a single Act of Parliament, like Lord Chesterfield’s calendar change of 1752. To rip up and replace an entire country’s millennium-old religion took the reigns of Henry, Edward and Elizabeth, with aftershocks that spilled across subsequent centuries including the Civil War and beyond. Like most religious wars, it was intensely emotional and violent.
The overwhelming majority of the three to four million people of England and Wales watched on with disbelief and anger. They marched in protest. And they died in large numbers to protect the way of life of their ancestors. It took generations for their despair to turn to resignation and acceptance. And as they lost the will to fight, the official Tudor version of events became the received history. Henry and Elizabeth were cast as the saviours of England.
The Tudors and their supporters gave many justifications for the changes, including doctrinal, sacramental and liturgical beliefs. But one that remains prominent in the modern mind, and continues to be repeated (not least in Wolf Hall) is that the Church controlled the people by refusing to give them the Bible and religious instruction in English.
Hogwash: there had been Scripture in English for centuries. In fact, translating the different books of the Bible into dozens of different languages had been going on since the earliest times, before the canon of the Bible was even settled.
The books we call the Old Testament (more or less the Jewish Tanakh) were mostly written in Hebrew, with some Aramaic and Greek. As early as the 1st century BC, Jewish scholars in Alexandria wanted to make Scripture more accessible, as Hebrew was no longer a living language. They therefore set about translating it into Greek, which was the everyday language of much of the Roman empire. Tradition says that 70 of them worked on the task, so their work is called the Septuagint (from septuaginta, 70), or the LXX for short.
Once the early Church had added the New Testament and some years had gone by, a fresh problem arose. The New Testament was in Greek, but there were many in the empire whose first language was now Latin. Enter St Jerome, whose fame rests largely on his monumental effort to translate it all into Latin,