In the 1550's, many reformers took refuge in Geneva, Switzerland. This is where John Foxe wrote and published his “Foxe's Book of Martyrs,” which is to this day the only exhaustive reference work on the persecution and martyrdom of Early Christians and Protestants from the first century up to the mid-16th century.
With the protection of John Calvin and John Knox, Foxe, Coverdale, Thomas Sampson and William Whittingham and others determined to produce a Bible that would educate their families while they continued in exile.
The New Testament was completed in 1557, and the complete Geneva Bible was first published in 1560. This was the first Bible to add numbered verses to the chapters, so that referencing specific passages would be easier. Every chapter was also accompanied by extensive marginal notes and references so thorough and complete that the Geneva Bible is also considered the first English "Study Bible". William Shakespeare quotes from it hundreds of times in his plays.
The Geneva Bible became the Bible of choice for over 100 years of English speaking Christians. It retains over 90% of William Tyndale's original English translation. The Geneva holds the honor of being the first Bible taken to America, and the Bible of the Puritans and Pilgrims. It is truly the “Bible of the Protestant Reformation.”
With the end of Queen Mary's bloody reign, the reformers could safely return to England. The Anglican Church, now under Queen Elizabeth I, tolerated the printing and distribution of Geneva version Bibles in England. The marginal notes, which were vehemently against the institutional Church of the day, did not rest well with the rulers of the day however. A Bible with a less inflammatory tone was desired, and since the copies of the Great Bible were getting to be decades old, a new version was ordered. In 1568, a revision of the Great Bible known as the Bishop's Bible was introduced. This Bible is referred to as the “rough draft of the King James Version.”
By the 1580's, the Catholic Church saw that it had lost the battle and the Bible would be available in the English language. In 1582, the Church of Rome decided that if the Bible was to be available in English, they would at least have an official Roman Catholic English translation.
And so, using the corrupt and inaccurate Latin Vulgate as the only source text, they went on to publish an English Bible with all the distortions and corruptions that Erasmus had revealed and warned of 75 years earlier.
Because it was translated at the Roman Catholic College in the city of Rheims, it was known as the Rheims New Testament.
The Douay Old Testament was translated by the Church of Rome in 1609 at the College in the city of Douay.
The combined product is commonly referred to as the "Douay/Rheims" Version. In 1589, Dr. William Fulke of Cambridge published the "Fulke's Refutation", in which he printed in parallel columns the Bishops Version along side the Rheims Version, attempting to show the error and distortion of the Roman Church's corrupt compromise of an English version of the Bible.