A reader writes in regard to this article in the (UK) Spectator:
I’m not a historian, but this time I am sceptical of the Specky. Is it really true that:
- "In 1510 England was an authoritarian outpost of the Catholic Church — a country where, uniquely, it was illegal to read the Bible in the national language."
- "…the placid tolerance of the Anglican Church is at its most bizarre when afforded to Thomas More, the very man who attempted — both literally and figuratively — to strangle the Reformation at its birth. Here was a man who persecuted, with a peculiarly vindictive obsession, Protestant heretics such as Tyndale, and put a few hundred to their excruciating deaths. " I was under the impression More was fairly lighthanded compared to some others.
And would you describe Henry’s reformation as:
"a movement which loathed and distrusted heavy-handed centralised authority; which felt that God’s word was the property of the people rather than the Church, and was thus open to a multitude of divergent interpretations."?