Three years after William Tyndale was strangled and burned outside Brussels for translating the Scriptures into English, a Bible containing his work stood chained to a desk in every parish church in England by order of the Crown.

It was a folio fifteen inches tall — hence its name. Its title page, traditionally ascribed to Holbein, showed Henry VIII enthroned, handing the Word of God down through Cranmer and Cromwell to a shouting, grateful people. It had been begun in Paris under a license from the King of France, interrupted by the Inquisitor-General, rescued in part from a haberdasher who had bought the confiscated sheets to wrap caps in, and finished in London on presses smuggled across the Channel.

It is the only English Bible ever formally commissioned and ordered into the churches by royal authority.¹ And its Psalter is still prayed in the Book of Common Prayer today.

The Need for a Third Bible

By 1537 England had two licensed English Bibles, and Thomas Cromwell was satisfied with neither.

Coverdale’s Bible of 1535 had been made at second hand from German and Latin, and had proved in many respects unsatisfactory as a translation. Matthew’s Bible of 1537 was far better in text — two-thirds of it was Tyndale — but it swarmed with polemical annotations that made it politically dangerous to everyone who had sponsored it. Cromwell and Cranmer had been careful not to draw Henry’s attention to how much of the condemned Tyndale stood inside a book the king had licensed; the fact could be raised against them at any moment.²

Early in 1538 Cromwell applied to Coverdale to undertake a wholly new revision, using Matthew’s Bible as its basis. The translator now became the editor, and the book he was to revise was the rival volume that had superseded his own.

It says a great deal for Coverdale that he showed no resentment. He had written in one dedication that he esteemed it no less his duty to amend other men’s faults than if they were his own, and had told the king in another that he was always willing and ready to do his best as well in one translation as in another. He kept the pledge, taking up a labor that was meant to eclipse his earlier effort and that implied, in the taking, that his own Bible of 1535 was deficient.³

One consequence of the revision should be named plainly. The distinctive anti-papal apparatus of Matthew’s Bible — its two thousand notes, its prefatory theological matter, its table with the entries on the Mass and on merit — was stripped out entirely. Eadie’s verdict is blunt: Samson’s locks were shorn, and he became like any other man.⁴

What was gained was a Bible the establishment could defend. What was lost was the margin that had taught its readers what to make of the text.

Paris: Paper, Privilege, and the Inquisition

Paris was chosen for the printing because its paper and workmanship were superior to anything available in England. Coverdale and Richard Grafton crossed over, probably in May 1538, and work began at the press of François Regnault. A royal license was obtained from Francis I at the request of Henry, his carissimus frater — but it carried stipulations that could suspend the enterprise at any time, and the French ecclesiastical authorities were jealous of it from the start.⁵

The correspondence back to Cromwell survives, and it is one of the most vivid records we have of an English Bible being made.

On 23 June 1538 the two men reported that they had entered upon the work, sending two copies printed on parchment — the only two to be so printed, one for the king and one for Cromwell — and a third specimen on the paper the rest would be made from. They set out their method, asked for money, and added a line that hangs over the whole project:

The print, no doubt, shall please your good lordship: the paper is of the best sort in France. The charge is certainly great… We be daily threatened and look ever to be spoken to withal.⁶ Coverdale and Grafton

They were not being dramatic. Sheets were dispatched to England as fast as they were printed, precisely so that a seizure could not destroy the whole. On 9 August they sent more leaves by Cromwell’s servant Sebastian, with a full account of the system of marks they were using in the text. On 12 September they reported the work going well forward and expected to finish within four months.

The English ambassador at Paris was Edmund Bonner — the same Bonner who would later earn an unenviable name as a persecutor under Mary. He was at this point warmly patronizing to the English party, had them often to dinner, and often dined with them at the printer’s house, generously paying the bill.

On 13 December Coverdale wrote asking Cromwell’s pleasure about the annotations, promising to avoid any private opinion or contentious words, and offering to let Bonner inspect every note before it was printed. In the same letter he sent home another consignment of printed sheets, so that these at least might be safe should the ecclesiastics of Paris confiscate what they could lay hands on.

His precaution was justified within four days. On 17 December 1538 the Inquisitor-General issued an edict through Le Tellier, sworn scribe of the Holy Office, forbidding the work, seizing the pages already printed and not yet got across the Channel, and citing the printer to appear before his tribunal. The Englishmen fled.⁷

The confiscated sheets were condemned to be burned in the Place Maubert — close by the Rue des Anglais. They were not burned. An officer of the Inquisition, for the sake of a little money, sold them off as waste paper to a haberdasher to lay caps in, and four great dry vats full of them were bought back and saved.

Encouraged by Cromwell, Coverdale and Grafton made bold to return to Paris and carried off the presses, the type, and the workmen to London. The printing was completed there in April 1539.

One point where the sources differ. Christian History reports that after negotiations the manuscripts, paper, and type were released to London but the confiscated sheets were never returned. Eadie and Milligan both record the haberdasher, the waste-paper sale, and the four great dry vats recovered. The likeliest reading is that these are two separate recoveries — an official release of equipment and stock, and a private rescue of sheets already sold off — but anyone citing the story should know the accounts are not identical.

April 1539: The Book

The first edition is a handsome folio in black letter, its pages fully fifteen inches long and over nine broad. No other English Bible of the period approached it in size, and the name follows from that.⁸ The title reads:

“The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye, the content of all the holy scripture, bothe of the olde & newe testament, truly translated after the veryte of the Hebrue and Greke textes, by the dylygent studye of dyuerse excellent learned men, expert in the forsayde tonges. Prynted by Rychard Grafton & Edward Whitchurch. Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum. 1539.”

The colophon closes with a Latin motto from Psalm 118:23 — A Domino factum est istud. This is the Lord’s doing.

Those diverse excellent learned men require a caution. There is no proof that any living divines worked alongside Coverdale, and no trace of such collaboration in his correspondence. The phrase almost certainly refers to the printed versions he consulted — principally Münster for the Old Testament and Erasmus for the New. The Great Bible was made by continuous consultation of books, not by a committee.⁹

The Title Page

The frontispiece, traditionally ascribed to Holbein, is a piece of Tudor political theology worth reading carefully, because it states a doctrine of Scripture and of the crown in a single image.

At the top, Christ in the clouds, two Latin scrolls issuing from his lips. One is Isaiah 55: the word that goes forth from my mouth shall not return to me empty, but shall accomplish whatsoever I will. The other is addressed to Henry: I have found me a man after mine own heart, who shall fulfill all my will.

Below, the king on his throne, crown and Garter insignia at his feet, holding in each hand a book marked Verbum Dei. On his right stand Cranmer and the clergy with their mitres on the ground; the king hands one book down to them with the scroll Hæc præcipe et doce — these things command and teach. On his left stand Cromwell and the lay peers, receiving the other with a decree from Daniel 6 that throughout the king’s realm men should tremble before the living God, and the charge from Deuteronomy to judge righteously and hear the small as well as the great. A kneeling figure answers with Psalm 119: thy word is a lantern unto my feet.

Lower down, Cranmer in his pontificals distributes the Word to the clergy with Peter’s charge to feed the flock of Christ, and Cromwell distributes it to those around him with the call from the Psalms to turn from evil, do good, and seek peace.

At the foot of the page, a preacher addresses a crowd on 1 Timothy 2, that supplications and thanksgivings be made for all men and for kings. The congregation shouts back in Latin, Vivat Rex. In the corner, the children — who are not supposed to know Latin — shout in English: God save the Kynge. And from grated windows in the background, three prisoners look out on the scene in chagrin and amazement.¹⁰

Everything about the page argues one thesis: that Scripture descends to the English people through the king. It is a magnificent image and a tendentious one, and it is the reason the Great Bible looks, at first glance, like a royal achievement rather than what it actually was.

Eadie puts the credit where the evidence puts it. The Great Bible owed its existence to Cromwell and his Protestant zeal; the merit belongs to the vicegerent, and neither to the king nor to the archbishop.¹¹ Cromwell’s own copy — printed on vellum, gilt-edged, the covers embossed with brass, his arms in color on the frontispiece — survives in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge.

The Text

The Great Bible is Matthew’s Bible revised — which is to say, it is Coverdale’s revision of Tyndale’s work and his own. He revised against the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, leaning principally on Sebastian Münster’s Hebrew-Latin version for the Old Testament and on Erasmus and the Vulgate for the New.¹²

The revision was thorough where he chose to work closely. In Isaiah 53 alone, the Bible of 1539 differs in nearly forty places from his own version of 1535.

Much of what he took from Münster is still in the Bible most English readers know by heart. Three familiar phrases in Psalm 23 entered the English tradition here and were kept by the Authorized Version:

• “paths of righteousness” for “way of righteousness”
• “through the valley of the shadow” for “in the valley of the shadow”
• “I will dwell in the house” for “that I may dwell in the house”

Erasmus left his mark on the New Testament, not always happily. He is behind “born from above” at John 3:3, and behind the rendering “one fold” at John 10:16 where the Greek has one flock — an error that persisted in English Bibles for centuries and has done real damage to the exposition of that verse.¹³

A later bishop, Sandys, complained that the setters forth of this common translation followed Münster too much, who was a very negligent man in his doings and often swerved very much from the Hebrew. Eadie grants the fact and disputes the slur: Münster was constantly used, but his Latin version is very literal and on the whole accurate.

One feature of the text is peculiar to this Bible and deserves attention. Coverdale had noted diversities of reading as he worked, and incorporated a good many of them — chiefly from the Vulgate — directly into the text, distinguishing them by parentheses and a smaller type. Readers met sentences like these:

Joshua 2:11 — “As we heard these things (we were sore afraid and) our hearts did faint.”

Job 14:6 — “He may rest (a little) until his day come.”

Isaiah 40:1 — “Comfort my people (O ye prophets).”

Luke 24:36 — “Peace be unto you (It is I, fear not).”

Galatians 5:13 — “But by love (of the Spirit) serve one another.”

Colossians 3:25 — “Neither is there any respect of persons (with God).”

The additions are thickest in the Psalms. Psalm 14 gains three entire verses after what we number as verse 3, apparently to bring it into line with Paul’s composite quotation in Romans 3:10–18. Psalm 29 gains the clause “Bring young rams unto the Lord.” Psalm 132:4 gains “neither the temples of my head to take any rest.”¹⁴

The honest assessment is that this is a translator importing readings from a secondary version into the body of Scripture, marked off by nothing more durable than a parenthesis and a font. That the marks were sincere and visible does not make the practice sound, and no later English Bible in this line repeated it.

The Silent Margin

The Great Bible has no notes. It has no dedication either.

Coverdale had fully intended to supply annotations, and had marked the text for them — pointing hands in the margin and in the text itself, flagging places where a note was to come, along with other marks for variant readings, for sentences present only in the Latin, and for Old Testament texts quoted in the New. The notes were to be gathered in a table at the end.

They never appeared. The short preface explains why, and the explanation is its own commentary on the times:

…forasmuch as yet there hath not been sufficient time ministered to the king’s most honourable council for the oversight and correction of the said annotations, we will therefore omit them till their more convenient leisure… when thou comest at such a place where a hand doth stand, and thou canst not attain to the meaning and true knowledge of that sentence, then do not rashly presume to make any private interpretation thereof, but submit thyself to the judgment of those that are godly learned in Christ Jesus.¹⁵ Great Biblepreface, 1539

The more convenient leisure never came. Several editions kept the hands, pointing at explanations that did not exist, until the marks were finally dropped.

Eadie is severe with Coverdale here, and the severity is worth preserving rather than smoothing away. He finds in these sentences the man’s constitutional weakness — a want of firmness, a readiness to sacrifice to expediency. Coverdale’s pliancy, he allows, sprang from no regard for worldly interest but from a desire to charm others over to his opinions; still, it was undutiful to himself and to his convictions to profess such eagerness to tune his annotations to the likings of those who might inspect them.¹⁶

A reader who wanted to know what a hard place meant was told to ask a licensed clergyman. That is a long way from Tyndale’s plowboy.

Cranmer’s Bible, 1540

Through the autumn of 1539 a second edition was prepared in London, the Parisian type and workmen still in hand. Cranmer composed a preface for it, to be submitted to the king through Cromwell, and from that preface the Great Bible is often called Cranmer’s Bible — though he had no part whatever in the translation.¹⁷

On 14 November 1539 Cranmer wrote to Cromwell asking whether the preface had the royal approval and arguing over the price: the archbishop proposed thirteen shillings and fourpence, which Cromwell thought high; the printers were willing to sell at ten shillings if they alone might print it.

By a striking coincidence, on that same 14 November Cromwell received from the king a patent granting him sole and unlimited power to license the printing and publication of English Bibles for five years. Its terms are worth noting for what they assume: that the frailty of men is such that a diversity of translations may breed manifold inconveniences when willful and heady folk confer upon their differences. It ends per ipsum regem — by the king himself — ignoring Council, Convocation, and Parliament alike.¹⁸

“Are There Any Heresies?”

The preface was ready in November, but the volume did not appear until April. The delay is probably explained by the story Fulke heard Coverdale tell from the pulpit at Paul’s Cross, answering slanders against his translation.

The book had been presented to Henry and committed by him to divers bishops to peruse — Stephen Gardiner among them. They kept it a long while. The king was repeatedly petitioned for its publication. At last he called for it himself and asked the bishops their judgment of the translation. They answered that there were many faults in it.

“Well,” said the King, “but are there any heresies maintained thereby?”

They answered, there were none that they could find.

“If there be no heresies,” said the King, “then, in God’s name, let it go abroad among our people.”¹⁹

Coverdale, in the same sermon, conceded the point about faults with characteristic candor: he now espied some himself, and doubted not he could amend them if he might review it once more; but as for heresy, he was sure there was none.

The volume appeared in April 1540, its title page in black and red, declaring: This is the Byble apoynted to the use of the churches.

Cranmer’s Prologue

The prologue is the best thing attached to the Great Bible, and the most quotable prose Cranmer ever wrote on the subject of reading Scripture.

He opens by dividing his readers into two sorts who equally need correcting — those too slow, who need the spur, and those too quick, who need the bridle. Some lose their game by short shooting; some by overshooting. The first are those who refuse to read or hear the Scripture in the vulgar tongue, and worse, those who discourage others from it. The second are those who by inordinate reading, indiscreet speaking, and contentious disputing slander the Word they would seem to further.

Then comes the passage that answers the whole medieval argument about who may be trusted with a Bible:

Here may all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, sick, poor, priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants, and mean men; virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition soever they be, may in this book learn all things what they ought to believe, what they ought to do, and what they should not do.²⁰ Thomas Cranmer

And the sentence that follows it:

Briefly, to the reading of the Scripture none can be enemy, but that either be so sick, that they love not to hear of any medicine; or else that be so ignorant that they know not Scripture to be the most healthful medicine. Thomas Cranmer

Cranmer calls the Bible the most precious jewel and most holy relic that remains upon earth, and asks that every man who comes to it bring the fear of God and a firm and stable purpose to reform his own self accordingly — so that in time he may prove able to teach, if not with his mouth, then with his living and good example, which is the most lively and effectual manner of teaching.

Seven Editions, and an Erased Coat of Arms

Seven folio editions of the Great Bible appeared in three years: April 1539; April, July, and November 1540; and three in 1541, the last finished in December. None was a simple reprint — the Prophets in particular were revised again with Münster’s help.²¹

Between the third and fourth editions, Thomas Cromwell was attainted and beheaded. He had held his earldom one hundred days.

The book records his fall physically. His arms appear on the title page of the first three editions and are erased from the last four. Where Cranmer and Cromwell had each been pictured with his shield beneath him, Cromwell’s figure now stands alone, the heraldry carefully cut away and the circular space left blank. The pointing hands in the margin disappeared after his death as well.²²

The November 1540 edition and its successor carried a new line on the title page: overseen and perused at the king’s commandment by Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, and Nicholas Heath, bishop of Rochester.

That name should stop a reader. Tunstall was the Bible burner — the same “my lord of London” into whose palace Tyndale had asked admission in 1523 and been refused, who preached against Bible translation at Paul’s Cross in 1526, and who bought up Tyndale’s New Testaments in order to burn them. Fourteen years later his name stands on the title page of a Bible that is substantially Tyndale’s, vouching for it.

Eadie’s explanation is political rather than devout: Cromwell had been executed, and lest the Bible he had promoted should fall under suspicion with him, episcopal authority was set in prominence on the front of two editions by royal command.

Set Up in Every Parish

Cromwell, as the king’s vicegerent, had prepared for circulation before the book was even finished. His injunctions of September 1538 required every parish to provide, by a set feast, one book of the whole Bible in the largest volume in English, set up in a convenient place in the church where the parishioners might most commodiously resort to it and read it — the cost to be divided, half by the parson and half by the parishioners. The clergy were not merely to permit this but expressly to provoke, stir, and exhort every person to read it, as that which is the very lively Word of God.²³

Cranmer issued parallel injunctions for Hereford, Latimer for Worcester. A royal proclamation of 6 May 1541 found that many parishes had neglected the duty, and proceeded with less patience: any parish still lacking a Bible by the feast of All Saints would forfeit forty shillings a month, half to the Crown and half to whoever informed on them. The price was fixed by the same proclamation at ten shillings unbound and twelve shillings well bound, trimmed, and clasped, with a four-shilling penalty on any seller who charged more.

Eadie’s comment on this is worth keeping. The fixing of prices, the stepping in of the law between buyer and seller, and the employment of informers were of a piece with the economics of the age; but a man fined for not having bought a Bible was not likely to regard the volume with special affection. And another plan for securing wide circulation was apparently never considered — to print the book in a smaller and cheaper form.²⁴

The Bibles were chained. Latimer ordered a copy chained in the monastery at Worcester; Lee, now archbishop of York, ordered every curate to provide one within forty days and chain it in some open place in the church. The chains were not there to restrain the readers but to keep the books from being stolen — which is its own commentary on how badly people wanted them.²⁵

Reading and Resistance

The reception was extraordinary. Strype, drawing on Foxe, describes it:

It was wonderful to see with what joy this book of God was received, not only among the learned sort… but generally all England over, among all the vulgar and common people; and with what greediness God’s Word was read, and what resort to places where the reading of it was. Everybody that could bought the book, or busily read it, or got others to read it to them if they could not themselves, and divers more elderly people learned to read on purpose, and even little boys flocked among the rest to hear portions of the Holy Scripture read.²⁶ John Strype

A contemporary state paper notes what the Bible displaced: Englishmen now had the Holy Scriptures in their mother tongue instead of the old fabulous and fantastical books of the Round Table, Lancelot du Lake, Bevis of Hampton, and Guy of Warwick.

Not everyone cooperated. Complaints reached the Crown that parsons, vicars, and curates read the Word of God confusedly — humming and hawing and hawking at it, so that scarce any could understand. Others plucked the Bible out of its convenient place into the choir or into some private pew where poor men durst not presume to come. There was no small number of churches that had no Bible at all. And some told their parishioners that whatever they were compelled to read aloud, the old fashion was the best.²⁷

The most telling episode belongs to Bonner. Back from Paris and now bishop of London, he commanded every parson and curate of his diocese to read and study a chapter of the Bible daily, working from the beginning of Matthew to the end of the New Testament and holding it in memory for recitation on demand. He set up six Bibles in St Paul’s for the common good.

Then abuses crept in. People read them during the service and the sermon. Bonner threatened to take the Bibles down, and issued an admonition requiring that readers come with discretion, honest intent, charity, reverence, and quiet behavior; that no such number meet as to make a multitude; that no exposition be made beyond what the book itself declares; that it not be read with noise during divine service; and that no disputation or contention be used at it.²⁸

The pattern is the same one the royal proclamation had set with Matthew’s Bible two years before. The Word was given to the people, and in the same motion hedged about with rules against their making too much of it.

The Psalter That Outlived the Bible

One portion of the Great Bible has never gone out of use.

When the first Prayer Book of Edward VI was compiled, its Psalter was taken from the Great Bible along with the other Scripture passages. In 1662, when the rest were revised to agree with the Authorized Version, the Psalter was deliberately excepted. The familiarity that had grown around a part of Scripture so constantly sung and said made change impossible, and it was urged besides that its language was more smooth and fit for song.²⁹

So Coverdale’s Psalms remain in the Book of Common Prayer to this day, and it is in his words that the Psalter became the household treasure of English-speaking Christians.

The judgment on it must be double, and both halves are true. Scrivener, comparing the two, pronounced the Authorized Version’s Psalms prosaic and spiritless beside it. Westcott found in its incomparable tenderness and sweetness the translator’s own gentle spirit reflected — full of humility and love, and therefore best in harmony with the tenor of our own daily lives.

And yet, as a translation, its inferiority must be conceded at once. Its renderings are often inaccurate, and a frequent redundancy robs them of force. It is the most beautiful English Psalter and not the most faithful one, and a preacher who loves it should know both things about it.

The Reaction

The Great Bible reigned for barely three years before the counterattack came, and it came in two forms.

Gardiner’s Latin, 1542. When Convocation met in 1542, proposals were made in the king’s name for a new translation, and the Upper House decided that the Great Bible should be revised according to the Bible usually read in the English Church — that is, the Vulgate. The omission of any reference to the Greek text tells the whole story of the motive. The books were apportioned among the bishops, and at the sixth meeting Gardiner handed in a list of some ninety-nine Latin words that should be retained in their original form or else fitly Englished with the least alteration: ecclesia, pœnitentia, pontifex, presbyter, episcopus, sacramentum, justificare, charitas, hostia, and the rest.³⁰

The scheme would have made the English Bible as incongruous and un-English as the Rheims version. Some of the words were harmless and already in the text; the indifferent ones, as Eadie observes, were probably only cover for the distinctive ecclesiastical terms. Restore ecclesia and presbyter and pœnitentia, and you have quietly reversed the three renderings for which Tyndale was hunted.

Cranmer saw through it at once. On 10 March, having consulted the king, he announced it to be the royal will and pleasure that the translation be examined by both universities instead. The bishops protested vehemently that learning had decayed at the universities and that the learning of the land was chiefly in Convocation; Cranmer stuck close to the king’s resolution. The universities never took up the work, and Convocation was never troubled with the subject again. The conspiracy was, in Eadie’s word, baffled.

The Act of 1543. The second blow landed. Parliament passed an Act for the Advancement of True Religion by which all books of Tyndale’s translation were clearly and utterly abolished and extinguished and forbidden to be kept or used — and no one of the class of apprentices, servants, husbandmen, or laborers was permitted to read the Old or New Testament at all, whether in public or in private.³¹

The reason lies in a complaint of Henry’s own: that the book was disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same. Three years later the proscription was extended to the writings of Wycliffe, Coverdale, and many others.

Grafton, questioned about the suppressed annotations after Cromwell’s fall, was imprisoned six weeks and bound over in £300 to print or sell no more Bibles. The edition of December 1541 was the last printed in Henry’s reign, which had four years yet to run.

The outcome is the strangest fact in this whole history. When the reaction had done its work, practically the only English Bible left standing in England was the Great Bible — the one the Crown had commissioned. The plowboy of Tyndale’s vow was now specifically forbidden by statute to read it.

Scotland, 1543

The same year brought the opposite result north of the border. On 12 March 1543 it was proposed in the Parliament at Edinburgh that all the lieges of the realm might read the Scriptures in their native tongue. Opposition failed — though the Dean of Restalrig long repugned it, and certain old bosses along with him — and proclamation was made at the Market Cross that every man was free to read the Scriptures in his own or the English tongue.

John Knox, looking back twenty-five years later, called it no small victory of Christ Jesus, and no small comfort to such as before were held in such bondage that they durst not have read the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, nor the Articles of their faith in English without being accused of heresy:

There might have been seen the Bible lying almost upon every gentleman’s table. The New Testament was borne about in many men’s hands.³² John Strype

Legacy

The Great Bible was the only English Bible ever formally authorized for public use in the churches, and for a generation it was the Bible the English people actually heard. It was still chained to desks in many country churches at the close of the sixteenth century, when the Geneva Bible had long since won the households and the Bishops’ Bible held official favor.

Its line of descent is direct. The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 was a revision of the Great Bible, undertaken by Archbishop Parker with instructions to follow the common English translation used in the churches and depart from it only where it varied manifestly from the Hebrew or Greek. The King James translators were in turn instructed to follow the Bishops’ Bible as their basic text. The Great Bible stands directly in the line from Tyndale to 1611.

And its Psalter has outlived every other part of it, prayed daily for nearly five centuries by people who have never heard of Miles Coverdale.

What the book finally demonstrates is how little a royal warrant settles. Henry commissioned it, licensed it, ordered it chained in every parish, and then forbade most of his subjects to read it. The Word had been unbound by a king and was promptly bound again by the same hand. It would take Geneva, and exile, and another generation of martyrs, before an English Bible reached the English people in a form no crown could regulate.

A Note on “the First Authorized Version”

Two English Bibles are commonly given this title, and the pages on this site follow the distinction rather than the slogan.

Matthew’s Bible (1537) was the first English Bible to carry the king’s license — Set forth with the Kinges most gracyous lycēce on its title page — and is the version from which all later revisions descend. Coverdale’s second edition of the same year carried the same license, and Eadie holds that which had priority cannot now be determined.

The Great Bible (1539) was the first English Bible commissioned by the Crown and the first ordered by injunction into every parish church. Hastings calls it on that ground the first and only English Bible formally authorized for public use.

Both claims are defensible; they are claims about different things. A licensed book is one the Crown permits. A commissioned book set up by royal injunction is one the Crown requires.

Sources

1. James Hastings, ed., “English Versions,” in Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), §23. ↩
2. Hastings, “English Versions,” §22; George Milligan, The English Bible: A Sketch of Its History (London: A. & C. Black, 1895), ch. 9, §1. ↩
3. John Eadie, The English Bible: An External and Critical History of the Various English Translations of Scripture (London: Macmillan, 1876), ch. 26, quoting Coverdale’s dedications; Milligan, ch. 9, §1. ↩
4. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26. ↩
5. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26; Hastings, “English Versions,” §22. ↩
6. Coverdale and Grafton to Cromwell, 23 June 1538, quoted in Milligan, ch. 9, §1, and Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26. ↩
7. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26, giving the date of the Inhibition as 17 December 1538 and naming Le Tellier; Milligan, ch. 9, §1. ↩
8. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26, for the page dimensions and the title; Milligan, ch. 9, §2. ↩
9. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26. ↩
10. Milligan, ch. 9, §2, and Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26, both describing the frontispiece in detail; Hastings, “English Versions,” §22, for the traditional ascription to Holbein. ↩
11. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26. ↩
12. Milligan, ch. 9, §3; Hastings, “English Versions,” §23. ↩
13. Milligan, ch. 9, §3. ↩
14. Milligan, ch. 9, §3, for the parenthetical insertions and the Psalm additions. ↩
15. Preface to the Great Bible, 1539, quoted in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26; see also Hastings, “English Versions,” §23, on the withdrawal of the marks after three editions. ↩
16. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26. ↩
17. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 27; Hastings, “English Versions,” §24. ↩
18. The patent of 14 November 1539, quoted in full in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 27; Milligan, ch. 9, §5. ↩
19. William Fulke, as quoted in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 27, and Milligan, ch. 9, §5. ↩
20. Cranmer’s Prologue to the Great Bible, 1540, quoted at length in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 27; see also Milligan, ch. 9, §5. ↩
21. Hastings, “English Versions,” §24; Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 28, for the December 1541 colophon. ↩
22. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 28. ↩
23. Cromwell’s injunctions, quoted in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26, and Milligan, ch. 9, §6. ↩
24. The royal proclamation of 6 May 1541, quoted in full in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 28, with his comment following. ↩
25. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 29; David M. Scholer and the editors, Christian History 43 (1994), noting that the Bibles “had to be chained to keep them from being stolen.” ↩
26. Strype, from a manuscript of Foxe, quoted in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26. ↩
27. Contemporary complaints quoted in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 26. ↩
28. Bonner’s injunction of 11 May 1542 and his subsequent admonition, quoted in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 29; Milligan, ch. 9, §6, for the six Bibles at St Paul’s. ↩
29. Milligan, ch. 9, §4, quoting Scrivener and Westcott; Hastings, “English Versions,” §24. ↩
30. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 29, reproducing Gardiner’s list from Fuller’s transcript of the Convocation records. ↩
31. Milligan, ch. 10, §1; Hastings, “English Versions,” §25. ↩
32. Milligan, ch. 9, §7, quoting Knox. ↩

Further Reading

• John Eadie, The English Bible, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1876), chs. 26–29 — the fullest critical account, including the Paris correspondence
• George Milligan, The English Bible: A Sketch of Its History (London: A. & C. Black, 1895), ch. 9
• J. F. Mozley, Coverdale and His Bibles (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953)
• Thomas Cranmer, Prologue to the Great Bible (1540) — printed in most editions of Cranmer’s miscellaneous writings
• A. W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible (Oxford, 1911) — the documents, injunctions, and proclamations in full

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