Myles Coverdale (1488–1569) was a champion of the Word of God in sixteenth-century Europe, especially in England. He translated the Word, preached it, embraced new insights into its meaning vis-à-vis justification by faith alone, rejection of Christ’s physical presence in the Lord’s Supper, and the regulative principle of worship. He served as the bishop of Exeter for a time, got married, translated works of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) into English, and almost died for his convictions under the rule of Queen Mary (1542–1587).
G. F. Main’s biography of this significant English Reformer highlights Coverdale’s role in bringing England out of the Middle Ages, a Reformer who has been mentioned in biographies of “almost all the leading figures of the Reformation” (3), and yet who himself has been “forgotten.” Main’s training at Oxford University and teaching experience surely helped him write this carefully researched and accessibly written biography of Myles Coverdale, which happens to intersect with the first forty years of the English Reformation. Main hints at two reasons why the Reformer has gotten lost in the annals of history. First, hardly anything is known about the first thirty-eight years of his life while he served the Roman church. Second, he led about twenty years of his life after his conversion to the Reformation in exile (3–4).
In 1527 Coverdale took his leave from the Austin Friars in Cambridge and joined the cause of the Reformation. While little is known about his conversion, he was clearly set apart to be a Reformer both in England and Europe more broadly. Almost immediately after leaving the monastery he took to preaching the gospel and joined William Tyndale (1494–1536) in exile to translate the Bible into English. Coverdale’s first translation of the Bible, the 1535 Coverdale Bible, was the first complete Bible printed in English (2). He spent his first exile in Antwerp, translating the Bible into English. After Henry VIII (1491–1547) brought Reformation, Coverdale returned to England, only to leave again in 1540 when Henry VIII began to persecute the Reformers. Coverdale returned to England after Edward VI (1537–1553) came to the throne and supported the Reformation, only to leave again under Queen Mary’s reign, this time to Geneva, where he was influenced by the Genevan Reformation and practices and helped translate the Geneva Bible (1560). He returned to England in 1559 and spent the rest of his life in London under the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1533–1603).
Although there is scant information about the first thirty-eight years of Coverdale’s life, which he spent as a monk and priest in service to the Roman church, we do know about the state of religion in England during that time. After Coverdale was born in York in 1488, he joined the priesthood in 1514, not long after the printing press dawned in England in 1476 (8). Priests in the church in England at that time offered the Host, led prayers, and preached. Just as indulgences hit close to home for Luther, they must have for Coverdale also, as Pope Leo X authorized the Austin friars to sell indulgences in 1516. The mass, too, was central to the religion of pre-Reformation England; in it, the penitent received not only the body and blood of Christ, but also the forgiveness of sins and the removal of dead people from purgatory. Heresy laws, moreover, had been enacted in England as early as 1401, and in 1408 the Arundel Constitution forbade translation of the Bible into English. This was not only problematic for the Lollard followers of John Wycliffe (1328–1384), who circulated his Latin to English translation, and William Tyndale (1494–1536), but also for Coverdale, whose later life work consisted in translating the Bible into English. Most importantly, however, was the central teaching of the Roman church, which “was that good works, obedience to the church, and a strictly observed round of duty were able to save the soul” (15–16).
Against this backdrop of the teachings and practice of the Roman church, which were largely legalistic, Coverdale discovered the gospel, writing that it “is not a corporal, but a spiritual kingdom; neither consisteth in outward things, but a pure and faithful believing heart: and yet reacheth it throughout the whole world and amongst all nations. In the hearts of all faithful believers doth Christ reign through His Spirit, and there overcometh he the devil, sin and death” (16). Coverdale insisted on two central doctrines contrary to the Roman church: “First, the Bible is the infallible truth of God; second justification is by faith only” (18). John Bale, a bishop in Ireland, wrote that Coverdale’s conversion followed closely on the heels of the emergence of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament and the circulation of Luther’s writings, noting that “when the Church of England was revived he was one of the first to make a pure profession of Christ. Other men gave themselves in part, he gave himself wholly to propagating the truth of Christ’s gospel” (28). When he left the Austin Friary in Cambridge in 1527, he quickly began preaching, mostly to a congregation of Lollards in London. As the church of England began to suppress the Reformers, who were influenced by Tyndale’s publication of the English New Testament, Coverdale was invited by Tyndale to join him in his translation work in exile (34–37).
It was in his first exile in Antwerp that Coverdale found a community of translators and published the first complete English Bible, the 1535 Coverdale Bible. Initially he joined Tyndale, helping him translate the Old Testament, which endeavor John Rogers (1505–1555) joined in 1534. Tyndale was arrested in the spring of 1535, giving Coverdale incentive to complete their work. Although Coverdale did not share Tyndale’s command of Greek and Hebrew, his 1535 Bible nonetheless had an “impact” that “was immediate and long-lasting; it was reprinted four times, twice in 1537 and again in 1550 and 1552 (51). Coverdale worked with five extant translations of the Bible in producing his own: (1) Tyndale’s English New Testament, Pentateuch, and translation of Jonah, (2) Luther’s German Bible, (3) Zwingli’s Zurich Bible, (4) Pagninus’s Latin Old Testament of 1528, and (5) Jerome’s Vulgate. Main disagrees with C. S. Lewis’s famous remark that Coverdale’s 1535 Bible “shows like a rowing-boat among battleships” compared to other English translations of the Bible; indeed, “His English style was elegant and reverent, plain and clear. In many places it refined carefully and moderately Tyndale’s work” (45).
At the time of the publication of the Bible, King Henry VIII had divorced Catherine of Aragon and was married to Anne Boleyn, who influenced him to allow Bible translation, with the result that Coverdale’s 1535 Bible was in circulation in London as early as 1536.
On his return to England in the mid-1530s, Coverdale worked for Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540), the king’s first minister and viceregent in spirituals, for five years. His most lasting contribution during the time was his Great Bible of 1539, a revision of the 1537 Matthews Bible produced by John Rogers, which was based on Coverdale’s own 1535 Bible. It was, at the instigation of Cromwell, to be placed in every church so that laypersons could read and consult it, and according to A. G. Dickens, was “Coverdale’s masterpiece . . . a sober, tasteful, workmanlike production” (64). First published in 1539 in London, Coverdale’s Great Bible saw six subsequent editions published in 1540–1541, the second of which contained a preface by Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), and ten more editions during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I until 1568 when the Bishops Bible became the preferred translation of the Crown (66).
After Henry VIII and Edward VI had died and Queen Mary took the throne, she imprisoned him, ready to execute him. But in God’s mysterious providence, the king of Denmark intervened and had Coverdale released. It was at this time that Coverdale spent time in Geneva, was influenced by the Reformed movement there, and worked on the Geneva Bible. He arrived in Geneva in 1558, only three weeks before Queen Mary died, and stayed there for about a year. While there Coverdale found a community of English exiles, with whom he worshiped and translated the Geneva Bible, published in 1560. The translators of the Geneva Bible included, besides Coverdale, Master Goodman, Master Gilby, Master Sample, Dr. Cole, and Master Whittingham (142). Coverdale’s greatest contribution, perhaps, was his work on the Psalms, setting them in meter for congregational singing. The Geneva Bible also contained many Reformed marginal notes, with the result that it was the Bible of choice for Reformed-minded English folk throughout Elizabeth’s reign and beyond, including the Scottish kirk and the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, between 1560 and 1615 the Geneva Bible saw ninety-one editions and sold nearly 500,000 copies (144). Coverdale was greatly influenced by his time in Geneva, developing firmer convictions about the regulative principle for worship against the unnecessary popish ceremonies that still existed in many respects in the church of England, to which he would return and push for Puritan measures for the remainder of his life.
Through his newfound liberty received in the gospel, Coverdale also broke from some of the practices of the church in England. One example is marriage (10–11). His first marriage came at age fifty to Elizabeth Macheson, who died in London in 1565 after twenty-six years of marriage. He soon got married again, this time to Katherine, who was his wife for the last four years of his life. By getting married in 1539, Coverdale was putting his life at stake, as marriage of priests was forbidden on that same year with the threat of punishment by hanging (68).
Finally, it is worthwhile to consider that even heroes of the faith are not perfect. While Main seems very sympathetic to Coverdale, he does not produce hagiography; he launches a few criticisms of his own, such as the Reformer’s use of the term “penance” in his 1535 English Bible, his acting as judge in a heresy trial, which resulted in a burning at the stake, and his wearing the old vestments while he was bishop of Exeter (180). Myles Coverdale was a hero of the faith who pointed to the object of his and every Christian’s faith, Jesus Christ, who for sinners obeyed God’s law perfectly and thus was and is and ever will be the only perfect human, the God-man.
©Casey Carmichael. All Rights Reserved.
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Casey Carmichael
Casey Carmichael holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Geneva. He is the author of A Continental View: Johannes Cocceius’s Federal Theology of the Sabbath (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019). He is also the coeditor of the Classic Reformed Theology series, published by Reformation Heritage Books. He has translated various works from the Reformed tradition, including J. H. Heidegger’s Concise Marrow of Christian Theology and John Calvin’s Necessity of Reforming the Church.
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