Henry and Luther before 1525

Henry VIII no doubt first heard of Luther when the famous Ninety-Five Theses finally reached England. Dispatched from Wittenberg by Luther on 31 October 1517, the Ninety-Five Theses entered the public domain in December. From January 1518, their serious but bitingly funny challenge to the abuses of papal indulgences took all Germany and then much of educated Europe by storm. Europe's leading intellectual, Desiderius Erasmus, sent a printed copy from Louvain in the Netherlands to his friend Thomas More in London in March 1518, under the description ‘Conclusiones de veniis Pontificum’. This may well have been the earliest sighting of the theses in England. Erasmus did not expect his friend to have seen them already, and they had probably not been in his own hands long. Given that More was by this time a member of the King's Council, and stood in high favour thanks to the enthusiastic welcome accorded to his Utopia by European scholars, he presumably made the king aware of Luther and his theses at once. Henry VIII enjoyed intellectual debate at Court, and it is hard to believe that More would not have shared with him Luther's provocative manifesto. There is no evidence that other early publications of his made it as far as England in 1518, but Erasmus's favourite printer, Johannes Froben of Basel, issued a little bundle of Luther's writings, Lucubrationes, that arrived there early the next year. Froben wrote to Luther in January 1519 to say that he had sent consignments as far afield as Spain and England.

By May 1519, Erasmus felt able to assure Luther that ‘You have in England some who think very well of your writings, some of whom are very powerful’. Erasmus was the figurehead of Europe's fashionable intellectuals, the ‘humanists’, and had his own agenda for the reform of the church. This agenda did not encompass doctrinal change but was nevertheless itself already generating controversy. So he was nervous about the way Luther was trying to link their causes, and was careful to distance himself from his correspondent's increasingly outspoken views. Nevertheless, as his comment to Luther indicates, there was much sympathy for Luther in humanist circles.