In July 1535 the industrious London stationer Thomas Berthelet, who also
served as “King’s Printer” to Henry VIII, published a selective text of the
Latin Old and New Testaments, in the Vulgate version of St Jerome: this
seems to have been, perhaps surprisingly, the very first bible to have been
printed in the British Isles. That no earlier native attempt had been made
to create so saleable a product is usually explained by its ready
availability from Continental Europe, where large bibles for lecterns, and
small portable ones for the personal use of the clergy and educated laity,
had poured from the press since the mid-fifteenth century, at competitive
prices. Indeed, with the exception of a Greek-based Latin New Testament of
1540, no English bookseller thought it worthwhile to repeat the exercise
until 1580–85, when a collection of the “reformed” Latin versions of Junius,
Tremellius and Beza was shared, over six years, by five publishers.
Berthelet’s isolated novelty, a stout but handy small quarto, laid out in
double columns, is titled Sacrae Bibliae Tomus Primus (ie, the first volume
– only – of the Holy Bible); it consists of the Pentateuch, Joshua and
Judges, Psalms, Proverbs and the Sapientia or Wisdom of Solomon (a late
Greek text now consigned to the Apocrypha), plus the entire New Testament,
including Revelation. A preface addressed to the devout reader, headed “Pio
Lectori”, apologizes none too humbly for the apparent eccentricity of
leaving out more than half the canonical Old Testament, and promises to
collect all the omissions in a supplementary volume, which either never
appeared or (far less likely) has perished.
Clearly the 1535 Sacra Biblia was a one-off production, and the unsigned
address explains, in effect, why it came to exist. One might assume at first
that the writer of such a preface, who begins by routinely puffing the
product – the Scriptures – as “true riches” valuable beyond any worldly
goods, but also takes specific credit for its selection, arrangement and
issue, was the publisher Berthelet himself, especially as it calls attention
to the use of a new typeface, perhaps not as elegant as some founts, but
“more suitable and easier to read”. However, a second look reveals that the
author, hence the conceiver or designer of this idiosyncratic recension and
its robust apologist, was not Thomas Berthelet, nor any of his corresponding
or in-house scholars or “correctors of the press”, but his own royal patron,
Henry VIII.
I wish I could claim to have made this discovery for the first time, but it is
actually a rediscovery, for some nineteenth-century historians were well
enough aware that the preface was Henry’s: for example, Arthur Cayley in
Memoirs of Sir Thomas More (1808) and J. M. V. Audin in Histoire de Henri
VIII et du schisme d’Angleterre (1847). But the clear implication that Henry
himself was responsible for the 1535 Vulgate went unexplored then; and
through a remarkable lapsus memoriae among biographers and historians of the
English Reformation, the entire connection has vanished from today’s massive
corpus of synoptic and reinterpretative Henrician scholarship.
“You know well”, the prefacer declares,
how our Lord God, whose words or scriptures we are discussing, ordered that
when a king sat on the throne of his kingdom, he should write for himself
the law of God, and having it with him, should read it every day of his
life, so that he should thus learn to fear the Lord his God, and guard His
words."
This is a reference to Deuteronomy 17:18–19, employed to justify (as only a
king could) the present reordering and selection of scriptural materials,
offered to the pious but perhaps obstinate reader who found any “departure,
however slight, from ancient practice or established form . . . an offence
to religious scruple”. “If you consider our intention in this matter”, he
continues, magisterially, “and the cause for this change, you will doubtless
judge it reasonable and justly done.” That “intention” is later spelled out
as “to join with the Gospels those scriptures of the Old Testament in which
is expressed the history of human life, together with the precepts, moral
teaching, and due instruction for living”: that is, “the Pentateuch, Psalms
and Proverbs, with the other books associated with them there”.
The rationale, de haut en bas, carries on:
We therefore, considering it to be our duty to God, have undertaken this task,
as we should be within our realm like the soul in the body, and the sun in
the universe, and exercise judgment as God’s representative in our kingdom.
And, having everything in our power as regards jurisdiction, to seek always,
in God’s stead, to govern and protect the very Church itself: for whether
her discipline grows or slackens, we are to render our account to Him, who
entrusted her to us."
The grandiose reference to the soul and the sun (“ut in regno simus sicut
Anima in corpore et Sol in mundo”) is side-noted “Thom.”, that is, Thomas
Aquinas, who employs the sun/world image in his Summa contra Gentiles, Book
II. But in fact Henry is closely paraphrasing Erasmus’s Institutio principis
Christiani (1516; “Quod Deus in universo, quod sol in mundo, quod oculus in
corpore, hoc oportet esse Principem in Republica”), while somewhat
presumptuously elevating the regal function of the eyes (“oculus”) within
the body to the soul (“anima”) itself.
“Although we certainly have a goodly number of priests (God be thanked)”, he
proceeds,
qualified to undertake and perform this task [of editing the Scriptures],
which the necessity of our people requires for their spiritual direction,
yet we have judged it our own concern to cherish the law of God in our own
bosom, whence we shall constantly ascertain that both the people, and their
spiritual fathers, faithfully and observantly execute their duties. For this
reason, although much has already been compiled, relating to the knowledge
and teaching of the divine law, we have wished to add our own work: the more
readily to serve the [common] need, as well as the desires of the
well-informed."
Remarkably, Henry then adds a very personal reason for sponsoring the new
biblical text in its present form:
"It was necessary for us, at an age when the acuteness of the senses is
weakening, to look ahead and seek out such a work as might conveniently be
brought to fruition. Although our eyes are still, by the grace of God, sharp
enough, because they may, as is usual with advancing age, lose their
strength, we have adopted a printing type which is, in our opinion, more
suitable and easier to read. Other types may perhaps be judged more elegant
and praiseworthy, but although this one may yield to them in one or two
respects, in other ways it is much more acceptable."
Henry’s proprietary concern with the specific typeface employed suggests that
he, a confirmed bibliophile, took the details of Berthelet’s production
keenly to heart – unless of course Berthelet, with permission, introduced an
advertisement of his new fount. As to the endangered eyesight, James Carley
in The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives has noted the alteration of
Henry’s reading habits in the 1530s, and his resort to spectacles, a pair of
which was provided for in one of his travelling libraries.
Finally, Henry means to make practical use of the result of his labour. “This
little book” – that is, “libellus”, small by comparison to the traditional
folio bible – “which we have decided to cherish so, should be at least a
constant guest or housefellow, and will be for us an honour and inseparable
companion, as it is His whose people we are, and in Him live, move, and have
our being.” The odd term “honour”, ostensibly construable
as “credit” or “distinction”, is more likely a compositorial error, for it
is crossed through in ink – no doubt a hasty printing-house correction – in
all four of the known copies containing the preface.
Thus King Henry’s “own” Sacra Biblia issued from the press in 1535. What,
then, can be said of its distinctive character, if any, in the contexts of
bible publication and English religio-political history? First, its
selectivity – the omission of twenty-nine books of the Old Testament,
between Ruth and Malachi – is unusual, but not unprecedented: in 1529, for
instance, a folio bible with Protestant apparatus was printed at Wittenberg,
consisting of the entire New Testament, but only Genesis through Kings of
the Old. Second, the Berthelet text is strictly conservative: pure Vulgate,
despite the ongoing appearance of alternative versions, freshly Latinized
from the Greek and Hebrew by Continental scholars. The heavily revised Latin
New Testament of Erasmus (1516–35), and the slightly earlier retranslation
of the Pauline epistles by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, would have been well
known to Henry, but were ignored here; and while Berthelet himself had
commissioned and imported from France a new Latin version of the Psalms,
adapted from the Hebrew by Jan van den Campen, as recently as 1534, this,
too, was passed over in favour of the old familiar Vulgate. Third, a feature
of Henry’s bible is a seventeen-page alphabetical “Tabula Historiarum”, an
index not only of names and events, but of topics and categories of
instruction. Considering the unique form of the 1535 text, this was clearly
original, and might repay examination as reflecting specific regal or
English concerns.
Given whatever doctrinal or theological thrust such editorial choices suggest,
can we adduce any special purposes in the publication of Henry’s bible,
beyond those he states, of fulfilling an obligation to God and serving “the
necessity of the people”? Was it really directed to a popular readership, or
was it more in the nature of a ceremonial performance? Ordinary “people”,
after all, could rarely manage Latin, and those who could, would probably
have preferred – like Henry’s scrupulous reader – a complete bible, which,
if they could afford Henry’s, they no doubt already possessed. Here a few
bibliographical observations may be helpful.
The volume is, to begin with, conspicuously rare: it now survives in only four
complete copies, and three slightly imperfect ones, none of which bears any
sign of ceremonial presentation, that is, a lavish contemporary binding or
sententious inscription. Apparently it was never reprinted, and the
companion volume promised in the preface seems never to have materialized;
and the rough and ready pen-cancellation of the word “honour” in the
preface, which effectively calls attention to a misprint, is more the stuff
of a preliminary or proof version than a proud final one. Remarkably, for a
substantial English publication in Latin, no copies whatever are recorded –
so far as I can tell – in Continental libraries, although one of the
imperfect copies, originally annotated by an English reader, had migrated to
a French home by 1567. Hence it must seem unlikely that copies were
deliberately circulated abroad, or presented by Henry or his agents to
foreign dignitaries, as evidence of his piety or his concern for responsible
church government. Indeed, one may even wonder if the whole project was not
somehow aborted, and the publication effectively abandoned, if not
suppressed. For if Henry’s intent was really to serve “the people”, an
English-language bible freely circulated in England would have been
infinitely preferable, and that momentous possibility had been on his mind,
pro or con, since at least 1530: prelates like Stephen Gardiner were in fact
hard at work on a committee-produced authorized English text while the 1535
Vulgate stood in Berthelet’s press, although the imminent royal licensing of
Coverdale’s version (dedicated to Henry and first printed in England in
August 1537) rendered that long-mooted exercise unnecessary.
So perhaps the forthcoming availability of the complete scriptures in
reader-friendly vernacular English left Henry’s and Berthelet’s curious
Vulgate – still the “first” bible printed in England, no mean distinction –
something of an anachronism, or throwback, and accounts for its virtual
demise both in practical use and in (modern) historical memory. Another
possibility, also linked to its date of appearance, is more prosaic, but
evocative: July 1535 was not exactly a serene month in the religio-political
history of the English monarchy and Church. Bishop John Fisher had been
beheaded at Tower Hill on June 22, to the indignation of nearly all Europe,
a furore compounded by the perfunctory trial of Sir Thomas More, who
followed Fisher to the block on July 6. Henry had escaped the latter
occasion with a long summer progress through the West Country. But in the
light of impending reaction from the rest of the Christian world, including
papal excommunication itself in August, the appearance of a somewhat
self-congratulatory “personal” canon of scriptural law, via an eccentric
edition of the Vulgate, might have seemed grotesquely ill-timed.
The author would like to thank James Carley, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Keith
Fletcher, Clive Hurst, Anna James and Paul Quarrie.
Arthur Freeman is the author, with Janet Freeman, of a bio-bibliography
of John Payne Collier, 2004.
