Removed they were, in place most fayre
At God’s right fearful looks.
He rode on hye and did so flye
Upon the Cherubins,
He came in sight, and made his flight
Upon the wings of winds,” etc.
It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely Saxonism of such psalms than the Stabat Maters and Te Deums and Jubilates, which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess Katharine of Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such psalmodies received small crumbs of favor from the Court, the English Bible was by no means a free-goer into all companies.
“A nobleman or gentleman may read it”—(I quote from a Statute of Henry VIII.’s time)—“in his house, or in his garden, or orchard, yet quietly and without disturbance of order. A merchant may read it to himself privately: But the common people, women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen and servingmen, are to be punished with one month’s imprisonment, as often as they are detected in reading the Bible, either privately or openly.”[80]
Truly this English realm was a strange one in those times, and this a strange King—who has listened approvingly to Hugh Latimer’s sermons—who harries Tyndale as he had harried Tyndale’s enemy—More; who fights the Pope, fights Luther, holds the new Bible (even Cranmer’s) in leash, who gives pension to Sternhold, works easy riddance of all the wives he wishes, pulls down Religious Houses for spoils, calls himself Defender of the Faith, and maybe goes to see (if then on show) Gammer Gurton’s Needle,[81] and is hilariously responsive to such songs as this:—