A very messy Reformation

Acollection of prayers for Roman Catholics in England, smuggled in from a printing press abroad in 1583, contained a curious anomaly. Edited not by a cleric but by a layman, George Flinton, a merchant, it drew heavily on a Dutch handbook published by the Catholic grammarian Simon Vereept in the 1560s. But Flinton wanted to give the book an English character and included prayers by the martyrs Thomas More and John Fisher.

Astonishingly, he took the translation of Fisher’s Latin prayers from a Protestant source, a collection by none other than one of Henry VIII’s wives, Katherine Parr, published by the king’s official printer in 1544, a decade after the break with Rome. Since by 1583, Catholics and Protestants had long been at each others throats, and martyrs on both sides had been consigned to the stake and the scaffold, this is a surprising cross-current in Reformation piety.

There had been a related under-sea current in the preceding decade that was remarkable enough. The great English choral composer William Byrd took one of the prayers from Vereept’s book, a prayer to God the Blessed Trinity, and set it to music as part of his printed book, Cantiones Sacrae, dedicated to the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Byrd was known to be a Catholic, but any ordinary persons found to be in possession of papist books such as Vereept’s or Flinton’s would have gone in danger of their lives.

Eamon Duffy is good at prising out shiny gems of information such as these. The Reformation, it turns out, was not at all what we assumed. Most of us think of it as a Protestant movement set off by Martin Luther hammering up his protests against corrupt practices on a church door in 1517. That’s

Christianity was in chaos for centuries longer than we think. By Christopher Howse