2 AUGUST 1930, Page 23

A Rare Tudor Translator

The History of the Church of Englande. Compiled by Vener- able Bede, Englishman. Translated out of Latin into English by Thomas Stapleton Student in Divinitie. (Oxford Black- well. £5 5s.)

THE Shakespeare Head Press of Stratford-upon-Avon has done nothing finer than its noble reprint, in folio, of Stapleton's Bede. The bold and clear type, the stout paper, the ample margins, the ruhricated headings, the homely woodcuts that have been engraved anew, and the strong and comely half- leather binding, are all of the best. It is a perfect book. Moreover, the labour of production has been worthily ex- pended. Stapleton's translation of our earliest historian is. a magnificent piece of early Elizabethan prose. It was, too, the first English rendering, for the Anglo-Saxon version made by King Alfred's order had for ages been a sealed book to Englishmen. Furthermore, it had very considerable significance from the ,political and religious points of view, which is still worth noting.

There was nothing accidental in the fact that John Lait published at Antwerp in 1565 an English version of the first history of England, up to the year 781, by an English theologian. For the translator, a brilliant young Oxford man, then thirty years of age, was living at Louvain, an exile from his country because of his faith. At Elizabeth's acces- sion in 1558 he was a Fellow of New College and Prebendary of Chichester. He went abroad to continue his studies in peace and then, on a visit home in 1568, was deprived of his prebend because he would not renounce the Pope. Returning to Louvain, he engaged in controversy, and his translation of Bede was designed, as the preliminary address to the Queen states, to let her and others see " as well the misse information of a fewe for displacing the auncicnt and right Christen faith, as also the way and meane of a spedy redresse that may be had for the same, to the quietnesse of the greater part of your Majesties most loyal and lowly subjectes consciences." The exiled Catholics had not, in 1565, abandoned the hope of reconciling Elizabeth to the Papacy, and it was not till live years later than the Papal Bull of excommunication was issued against the Queen, Thus Stapleton's Bede was meant as a friendly gesture from the English Catholic—one of many able men—who lamented the conflict between his patriotism and his religious con- victions. We Protestants seldom remember how great a loss this conflict entailed at that time on our country.

It is wrong to look a gift horse in the mouth, or to criticise anything in this charming reprint. And yet Mr. Philip Hereford, who contributes an appendix on Stapleton, must be chided for omitting altogether a very notable fact in his career. For it was Stapleton who wrote the most important life of Sir Thomas More. As Professor Chambers has pointed out, Stapleton, who was born in the year of Mores execution, collected first-hand information about the great humanist from the surviving members of his household. With this material Stapleton produced a Latin memoir which passed through numerous Continental editions but had never till recently, been printed here or translated. Stapleton, who in his Three Thomases wrote of Sir TI as More, the Apostle St. Thomas, and St. Thomas Becket, deliberately emphasized the importance of More in the Earl• English Renaissance. Those who regard More as the one 111311 who might have reconciled the old learning with the new and guided the Reformation in the way of peace. most therefore have interest in Stapleton, who was his biographer and a kindred spirit. Now that More and his circle are at last being studied seriously, and his English works are promised in a eamplete edition for the first time since Mary's reign. Stapleton's Bede makes a very welcome appearance. Let us :old that. apart from all question of religion or polities, it is excellent reading for its own sake. The rich Tudor prose With its homely expressions—such as Redshanks " Gar the Picts — captivates one, no less than the pious legends with which the Venerable Bede enlivens the talc of the Saxon conquest and the conversion of England.