11 May 2026 is the 660th anniversary of the birth of Anne of Bohemia, wife of King Richard II of England, who played an important role in the history of the English Bible. This is the story …
Anne of Bohemia
Anne was born in the beautiful city of Prague in 1366, the daughter of Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, known as Karl in German and Karel in Czech. She grew up in a royal court where education, vernacular language, Scripture, and devotion were encouraged. She knew three languages: Czech, German, and Latin. Her father had promoted Czech literacy, and in 1347 he commissioned the translation of the Bible from Latin into Czech, which was completed in 1360. After her father’s death, her brother became Holy Roman Emperor, and Anne came to England as part of an agreement to marry the English king.
A queen who loved Scripture
Anne arrived in England in the winter of 1381 to marry King Richard II, son of the Black Prince. They married in 1382, and biographers agree that the marriage was happy. She entered a world in which the Bible was in Latin and unavailable in English. Unusually, Anne had a personal devotion to Scripture, which she studied, valued, and understood.
She arrived in England with Scriptures in Latin, German, and Czech, and was perhaps surprised, and certainly disappointed, to find no English Gospels available that could help her learn the local language. She asked for translations to be made for her so that she could learn the language through the Bible. Anne was not a translator, but she was a patron of a translation of the Gospels into English. The Gospels she commissioned seem to have been translated by John Trevisa.
John Trevisa
John Trevisa was vicar of Berkeley in south Gloucestershire, near the River Severn, and chaplain to Lord Berkeley at Berkeley Castle. In the introduction to the 1611 King James Version, called “The Translators to the Reader,” we read: “Much about that time, even in our King Richard the Second’s days, John Trevisa translated into English.” Trevisa was a fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, from 1372 to 1376, at the same time as John Wycliffe, by whom he was clearly inspired.
John Wycliffe
The evidence suggests that Anne’s love of the Bible drew her into sympathy with Wycliffe’s concerns, and that Wycliffe himself was encouraged by her interest in the Scriptures. Wycliffe wrote: “For it is possible that the noble Queen of England, sister of the emperor, had the Gospel in three languages—Bohemian, German, and Latin—and to call her a heretic for this reason would be diabolical pride.” He also wrote: “If that small nation,” meaning the Czechs, “can have their own translation, why shouldn’t England?” Queen Anne’s patronage and example gave the demand for an English Bible social credibility. Wycliffe and his followers finished the task of translating the Bible into English from Latin, and it became known as the Lollard Bible. Anne was a popular queen who learnt English, and she received a copy of the English Bible with gratitude. Wycliffe and his reforming ideas led to groups of lay itinerant preachers called the Lollards, who were England’s first evangelical movement. They were still being burnt at the stake for heresy up to 1532.
Death
Queen Anne died in London, probably of the plague, on 7 June 1394, aged just 28. The king loved her very much and went into a long period of genuine mourning. He commissioned the first example of a royal double tomb in England, where the king and queen are buried together, which can still be seen in Westminster Abbey.
At her funeral, Archbishop Arundel said of her: “Although she was a stranger, yet she constantly studied the four Gospels in English, and explained them by the exposition of the doctors; and in the study of these, and reading of godly books, she was more diligent than even the prelates themselves, though their office and business require this of them.” Her husband died five and a half years later, in 1400. They had no children, so our current royal family is not descended from her.
Bohemia to England
Anne’s arrival opened a link between Oxford and Prague at a time when the language of education was Latin. Students from Prague came to study at Oxford and encountered Wycliffe’s writings. After Anne’s death, many of the Bohemians carried Wycliffe’s writings back to Bohemia, where they helped prepare the way for Jan Hus and the Hussites. Jan Hus read and quoted John Wycliffe. Later, Martin Luther read and quoted Jan Hus. In 1521, when Martin Luther was condemned for heresy, it was the fact that he agreed with Hus that condemned him. Later, William Tyndale read and quoted Martin Luther. The influence had come full circle back to England.
Legacy
This year, as we mark the 500th anniversary of the first printed English New Testament in 1526, we can recall a man who grew up near Berkeley and who probably read the Trevisa Gospels in Berkeley Castle library. That man was William Tyndale, also from south Gloucestershire. The story of Trevisa and, likely, his translation may have been partly behind Tyndale’s motivation to translate the Bible into English. Unlike Trevisa, who translated from Latin, Tyndale was able to use the Greek New Testament published by Erasmus, Erasmus’s fresh translation into Latin, and Tyndale also made reference to Luther’s German.
Epitaph
The epitaph on Queen Anne’s tomb is in Latin, but in English it reads: “Beneath a broad stone now Anna lies entombed; when she lived in the world, she was the bride of Richard the Second. She was devoted to Christ and well known for her deeds; she was ever inclined to give her gifts to the poor; she calmed quarrels and relieved the pregnant. She was beauteous in body, and her face was gentle and pretty. She provided solace to widows and medicine to the sick. In 1394, on a pleasant seventh day of the month of June, she passed over. Amen.” However, her real legacy is that she was the catalyst for the translation of the Bible into English and a precursor of the Lollards and the Reformation in England.
