The turbulent times of the Tudors have recently proved to be a fertile source of material for popular historians. We have Richard III (whose death made way for the Tudor monarchs) discovered in a Leicester car-park, Hilary Mantel’s portrayal of Henry VIII and his chancellor Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, and a bountiful array of biographies, historical novels and tv documentaries covering everything and everyone from scheming ladies at court to what really happened to the Spanish Armada (and what Elizabeth I was wearing at the time).
In this programme we off er a musical snapshot of the life and times of William Tyndale (1494-1536), priest, scholar and fi rst acknowledged translator of the Bible into English. Today it seems obvious that the Bible should be available to all, and in any language, but things were very diff erent in the 1520s and 30s. It is a common misconception that Henry VIII’s founding of the Church of England and the ‘Reformation’ are one and the same thing. They are not. Like many kings of his time, Henry was obsessed with his succession, and it was his wish to divorce Katharine of Aragon and re-marry in the hope of fathering a son with another wife that led to his quarrel with the Pope and his breakaway Church. But Henry still saw himself as ‘defender of the faith’ and that faith was still predominantly Catholic. And Catholic worship was still essentially in Latin, the preserve of the clergy, and anything else was seen as at best subversive and at worst heretical. The Reformation, both in England and in Northern Europe, followed a few years later. So Tyndale worked largely in secret, and latt erly not in Oxford, where he studied, but in Antwerp where, in 1534, he published his translation of the New Testament and then turned to the Old Testament, much of which remained to be done. In 1535 he was betrayed by a fellow Englishman, imprisoned by the Imperial authorities in the Castle in Vilvoorde and subsequently executed there in 1536. Just three years later Henry placed a copy of his own ‘Great Bible’ in every church in the land. Much of this volume was Tyndale’s work, which also later formed the basis for the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible of 1611.
It is not even known where Tyndale spent much of his life, so successful was he at hiding; and the composers of his time were also itinerant, moving from one Court or Chapel to another. So the fi rst half of our programme creates the soundworld which Tyndale would have encountered as he worshipped, be it in Oxford or Antwerp. It is largely conjecture, but based principally on geographical evidence. - who was where and when. The
second part looks at the impact of Tyndale’s translations on the work of subsequent generations of composers – starting with those writing in the early days of the English Reformation, and moving via the extravagant days of the Restoration and the long reign of Queen Victoria to the present day – where we celebrate the 80th birthday of Arvo Part this year.