Henry VIII and Luther

‘What plague so pernicious did ever invade the Flock of Christ? What Serpent so venomous has crept in, as he who writ of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church?’ – thus (supposedly) the reaction of King Henry VIII on reading Martin Luther's De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae. When on 21 May 1521 Henry responded with his Assertio septem sacramentorum, England – at least in German eyes – emerged from relative obscurity on the edge of Europe to become one of the first powers to oppose Luther's teachings, with Henry championing the old faith against the little Wittenberg professor.

The ‘pernicious plague’ had, of course, been spread by printing, the importance of which the Reformers had soon recognized and embraced. Within a year, Luther's Babylonian Captivity, published at Wittenberg on 6 October 1520, had been disseminated widely throughout Europe. This attack on the Church's teachings on the sacraments was so vehement that Luther later admitted he should have pitied the ‘Papists’ (WA 10, 2: 223). Jean Glapion, Emperor Charles V's confessor, who had originally regarded Luther as ‘a noble new plant from which the Church could harvest useful fruits’, admitted that when he read it he would not have been more shaken if he had been scourged from head to foot (WA 6: 493).