Portions of the Bible were translated into English way before Tyndale and the Reformation--all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon period. See: English translations of the Bible.
But these translations were not for the "common man to read about Jesus" because the common man couldn't read anyway. And even if he could read, a whole Bible cost about as a much as a house, because it had to be painstakingly copied by hand.
The people who were reading and had access to books were mostly scholars, and every scholar pretty much knew Latin. So far from being some great conspiracy, there really wasn't any huge need for Bibles in English.
And as far as the Church was concerned, it was certainly no sin to translate the Bible. Don't forget, the Latin Bible itself was a translation from the Greek (and partially the Hebrew).
While it is true that the Church clamped down on vernacular translations after the Reformation, that was because people with printing presses were taking out bits of the Bible they didn't like and adding words here and there to suit their theological proclivities. The Church was extremely concerned that inaccurate versions were going out and spreading under the disguise of a "translation".
But soon enough English Catholic scholars produced their own versions to compete with Protestant Bibles. The Douay-Rhiems Bible came out even before the King James and formed the backbone of English Catholicism right up till the 1960s.
Sure there was...Lots of people could read German (in the case of Luther's time) and lots of people became fluent in reading English...Latin was a dead language and the people who rejected Catholicism wanted to know what God was actually saying to them...And when they found out what God was really saying, there were massive defections from your religion...