The Reformation: History in an Hour. Edward Gosselin A

he married Katherine von Bora so that he could please his father, ‘spite the pope and the devil’ and have someone to carry on his name after what he expected would be an early martyrdom. He said of von Bora, a former nun he had brought back to Wittenberg for one of his fellow former monks to marry, that he would ‘rather have Katie than France or Venice’, and together they sired six children. When Luther died on a visit to his home town of Eisleben in 1546, contemporary Catholic writers asserted that a posse of devils had been seen taking his soul directly to Hell both for his ‘theological heresy and for marrying a former nun’.

       ‘Infallible Donkey’ and ‘Upstart Heretics’

      By the late 1520s, Lutheranism had spread to England. The famous English scholar and friend of Erasmus, Sir Thomas More (pictured below), who himself later became a martyr to the Catholic cause, wrote tracts against Luther on behalf of (and under the name of) Henry VIII. He declared Luther an ‘infallible donkey’ and foresaw that the unity of all Christendom would soon break into many pieces because of the whims of ‘upstart heretics’. However one saw it, the Protestant Reformation had truly begun and had reached well beyond the borders of Germany.