BERNERS, JOHN BOURCHIER, 2ND BARON (c. 1469 1533 ), English translator of Froissart and one of the founders of the Tudor prose style, was born probably at Tharfield, Hert fordshire, England. His father was killed at Barnet in 1471, and he inherited his title in 1474 from his grandfather, John Bourchier, who was a descendant of Edward III. In 1484 he was implicated in a premature attempt to place Henry, duke of Richmond (afterwards Henry VII.), on the throne, and fled in consequence to Brittany. In 1497 he helped to put down an insurrection in Cornwall and Devonshire, raised by Michael Joseph, a blacksmith, and from this time was in high favour at court. He accompanied Henry VIII. to Calais in 1513, and was a captain of pioneers at the siege of Therouanne. In the next year he was again sent to France as chamberlain to the king's sister Mary on her marriage with Louis XII., but he soon re turned to England. In 1516 he became lord chancellor. In 1518 he was sent to Madrid to negotiate an alliance with Charles of Spain. He sent letters to Henry chronicling the bull-fights and other doings of the Spanish Court, and to Wolsey complaining of the expense to which he was put in his position as ambassador. In the next year he returned to England, and with his wife Catherine Howard, daughter of the duke of Norfolk, was present in 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But his affairs were greatly embarrassed. Perhaps in the hope of repairing his fortune, he accepted the office of deputy of Calais, where he spent the rest of his life in comparative leisure, though still harassed by his debts, and died on March 16 His translation of Syr Johan Froyssart of the Cronycles of England, France, Spayne, Portyngale, Scotland, Bretayne, Flaunders; and other places adjoynynge, was undertaken at the request of Henry VIII., and was printed by Richard Pynson in two volumes dated 1523 and 1525. Two romances from the French followed : The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux (printed by Wynkyn de Worde, reissued and modernized in 1601), and The Hystory of the Moost noble and valyaunt knight Arthur of lytell brytayne (ed. E. V. Utterson 1814). His other two translations, The Castell of Love (printed 154o) from the Carcel de Amor of Diego de San Pedro, and The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius (completed six days before his death, printed from a French version of Antonio Guevara's book, are in a different manner. The Golden Boke gives Berners a claim to be a pioneer of Euphuism, although Lyly was probably ac quainted with Guevara not through his version, but through Sir Thomas North's Dial of Princes, in which the new style was much better developed. The Golden Boke was the most popular of all Berners's translations, and went through 14 editions in the next 5o years. It caught the fashionable taste of the time.
A biographical account of Berners is to be found in Sir Sidney Lee's introduction to Huon of Burdeux (Early English Text Society, 1882-87) . Among the many editions of his translation of Froissart may be mentioned that in the "Tudor Translations" (1901), with an introductory critical note by Professor W. P. Ker. See also a smaller edition (1895) by G. C. Macaulay, and Baron Kervyn de Letterhove's Froissart (1857).