Book of Fire (12 page)

Tyndale opened his New Testament with a woodcut of an angel holding a pot of ink for St Matthew to use for his quill pen. Until now, in Cologne in 1525, no page of the scriptures had ever been printed in English. Before the printing of the first gospel was completed, however, drunken printers betrayed the contract to Cochlaeus, a correspondent of Thomas More and a Catholic propagandist. He informed Henry VIII and Wolsey, and Tyndale fled for his life southwards along the Rhine.

(Hulton Getty)

The contract was at Tyndale’s expense. Only a handful of creatives – artists, writers, propagandists – made money directly from the printing industry. Illustrated pamphlets and cartoons were immensely profitable, and illustrators were sometimes well rewarded.
Das Wolffgesang
, a woodcut showing the pope flanked by bishops and cardinals with wolves’ snouts, catching laymen like geese in a net while a monk with a cat’s head sang the wolves’ song of the title, sold scores of thousands of copies in 1520 and enabled its artist, Adam Petri, to demand a high price from printers. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Whore of Babylon, the papal diadem on her head, rode sidesaddle in perhaps a hundred thousand prints, on a many-headed dragon with writhing tail and claws, while friars on bended knee and the princes of the Church grovelled before her beneath a roiling sky.

Dürer, master of slashing and vigorous woodcuts, and delicate and almost photographic engravings, was tempted to give up oil painting altogether. ‘No one could ever pay me to paint a picture again with so much labour,’ he wrote after completing an altarpiece. ‘Herr Georg Tausy wanted me to paint him a Madonna in a landscape with the same care … I flatly refused to do it, for it would have made a beggar out of me … I shall stick to my engraving, and if I had done so before I should today have been a richer man by 1000 florins.’

Books were a different business. The market was far smaller. Printers made their books as visually attractive as possible, using woodcut illustrations and sometimes saving money by reusing them in several different books, but they could of course only sell to those who could read. The number of literates in England began to rise strongly from the late 1530s, spurred by pamphlet printing, and inspired at least in part by the desire to read the English Bible. Before then, it was doubtful whether one in ten ordinary husbandmen could sign their names. Perhaps 40 per cent
of richer yeomen farmers could do so, and churchwardens and constables might be able to read. Literacy jumped sharply in the towns, and many journeymen, craftsmen and apprentices had some reading; but the rate in the country as a whole was probably little better than one in fifteen.

If the book market was restricted, though growing, it was also slow. It might take a decade or more to sell out an edition, and during that time the main investment – the cost of the paper – was dead money. Printers did not begin to buy manuscripts from authors and translators until the end of the century. Before then, a handful of authors with proven sales records were able to pressure their printers into giving them free copies of their work, which they then sold on their own account, becoming in effect their own publishers. Erasmus fell into this rare category, as did Luther. The two had huge leverage – some 300,000 copies of Luther’s works were sold in the three years to 1521 alone – and they were able to supply cost-free copies directly to their booksellers and agents. ‘We have sold out all your books except ten copies,’ Luther’s man in Basle reported, ‘and never remember to have sold any more quickly.’

Lesser authors were obliged to buy a proportion of the print run from the printer in advance, normally between two thirds and three quarters, and to act as unpaid proofreaders. This guaranteed profits for the printer but it made writers dependent on patronage for survival. Erasmus and Luther also sought patrons – Erasmus dedicated his Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer to Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, who sent him fifty gold crowns in gratitude – but this was icing on the cake. Poorer writers were obliged to preface their books with a flattering dedication to a powerful personage, who was expected to return the compliment by the gift of a benefice or a pension, and a contribution towards printing costs. Early in his career, for example, Thomas More had opened
Utopia
with the words: ‘The most victorious and triumphant king of England, Henry the eighth of that name in all royal virtues a
prince most peerless …’ His reward came with promotions in government service.

Tyndale could scarcely dedicate an illegal book to an individual patron. Neither could he expect Peter Quentell to accept any of the risk in printing books that would have to be smuggled by sea to their final destination. As Bible-running became an established business, some printers agreed to indemnify booksellers against loss of the merchandise if books were ‘seized from the purchaser by the enemies of the gospel’ within three months of buying them. The Geneva publisher Laurent de Normandie signed such contracts with his French clients, twenty-one of whom found themselves arrested and their books confiscated; but Tyndale was too early to benefit from such commercial insurance.

It was, of course, true that his work was a potential bestseller. Luther had proved the vast appeal of vernacular scripture. The four thousand copies of the first edition of his September Testament had sold out in ten weeks. Posters warning that pope and emperor condemned the book seem only to have boosted sales. They were, in any event, soon countered by a forged bull of Clement VII that Lutheran wags pasted up, which claimed that the pope was eager to ‘permit and enjoin the reading, re-reading and dissemination of Luther’s works’. By 1525, the Testament had been reprinted fourteen times in Wittenberg, making the printer Melchior Lufft a very rich man, and in sixty-six pirate editions.

Tyndale faced obvious obstacles in repeating this triumph. German speakers outnumbered the English by more than four to one. The German book market was far larger and more sophisticated than the English; where England had little more than a dozen presses, Germany had several hundred printers, who promoted their books at the large annual fairs at Frankfurt and Leipzig. Nonetheless, Tyndale set his sights high. His contract with Quentell was illegal and was probably never written down. It was for a handsome, large-page quarto edition on good quality
paper, with a lengthy prologue and marginal comment and glosses. The first gospel was prefaced by a full-page woodcut of St Matthew sitting in the shade of a tree, writing and dipping his pen into an inkpot held by a chubby angel; the chapter divisions had large illuminations. A compromise print run of three thousand seems to have been agreed on. Tyndale had originally wanted six thousand, but Quentell was worried that he would be left out of pocket if any incidents took place.

The cost is uncertain. The smaller format copies of Tyndale’s Testament that eventually reached England were sold at retail for an average of 3s a bound copy; Luther’s September Testament sold in Germany for one gulden, the amount a farmer expected for a pig ready for slaughter. The retail price was generally three or four times above the production cost, with bound copies substantially more expensive than unbound sheets. If Tyndale had contracted to pay Quentell 10d per set of unbound sheets, a reasonable sum, a print run of three thousand would have cost some £125.

That was an appreciable amount. Ten pounds bought a year’s lodgings and fees for a law student at the Inner Temple, and many a country rector was expected to survive on less, though his parsonage and his glebe land were free. At the same time, it was a readily manageable sum for the sympathetic London merchants whom Sir Thomas More was convinced were providing the funds for Tyndale; indeed, as a price for bringing God’s word to the English, it likely seemed a pittance. The accounts of one William Mucklow, a cloth merchant, show that he enjoyed a multi-thousand pound annual turnover. He brought five hundred bales of cloth each year to the spring and summer fairs of Bergen-op-Zoom and Antwerp, selling these for £1800, of which he invested a fifth in buying luxury goods in Flanders to sell on the English market at further profit. The close links between merchants in the Steelyard and Cologne made transfers of money a simple exercise.

*

The first words printed, towards the end of August 1525, were from the prologue. Tyndale addressed them to ‘brethren and sisters most dear and tenderly beloved in Christ’, and they were less innocent than they seemed.

‘I have here translated,’ Tyndale wrote, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ‘the new Testament for your spiritual edifying, consolation and solace.’ He said that he had not translated it word for word – he had sought to ‘interpret the sense of the scripture and the meaning of the spirit’ – and he modestly insisted that others will have greater skills than himself. Readers may perceive that he had failed to capture the exact sense of the scripture, or had not given the right English word. If so, he says, they have a duty to amend his writing. The gifts of God are not for ourselves. They are for the honour of God and Christ, and for ‘edifying of the congregation, which is the body of Christ’.

The use of the word ‘congregation’ was an alarm bell for any English speaker. Tyndale was using it in place of ‘Church’, as in the Testament itself he translated the Greek εκκλησια as ‘congregation’ and not as ‘Church’. This was a direct threat to the Church’s ancient – but, so Tyndale here made clear, non-scriptural – claim to be the body of Christ on earth. To change these words was to strip the Church hierarchy of its pretension to be Christ’s terrestrial representative, and to award this honour to the individual worshippers who made up each congregation. It changed the religion. Tyndale reinforced this in the choice of three other words. Instead of priest, he used ‘senior’ or ‘elder’ for the Greek πρεσβυτερος stressing the absence of any priestly hierarchy in scriptural times. He rendered the Greek µετανοειτε as ‘repent’ instead of ‘do penance’, which the Church, with its huge vested interest in the lucrative penitential industry of pardons and indulgences, insisted was the correct translation of the Vulgate’s
poenitentiam agite.
So it might be, from the Latin, but Tyndale was working from the Greek original. He also translated
the Greek α’γα'πη as ‘love’ – ‘nowe abideth fayth, hope and love, even these thre: but the chefe of these is love’ – rather than as ‘charity’. While ‘charity’ was obviously close to the Vulgate’s use of
caritas
– ‘
major horum est caritas
’ – Tyndale was justified in finding that ‘love’, from the Old English
lufu
, was a more accurate translation of the original α’γα'πη But this, too, was a notion dangerous to the Church, for the apparent downgrading of charity might undermine the lucrative donations, indulgences and bequests with which the faithful were persuaded to pave their way to heaven.

Tyndale mocked the fact that his Testament was illegal. Who could be ‘so despiteful that he would envy any man so necessary a thing’ as the scripture in English. Who was ‘so bedlam mad’ as to deny the reader, enslaved in the dark human ignorance and mendacity, the true light of God’s word?

These simple words, and run of the mill thoughts, were the very stuff of heresy as they came off the Quentell press. It was, as his readers well knew, the Church itself that was ‘bedlam mad’ enough to deny them the gospels in their own tongue. Any English reader will readily have identified the principal ‘despiteful’ men as Cardinal Wolsey and the bishops of London and Rochester. The Church was sketched, with economy and force, as mad, envious and unloving. Against this, the reader had for the first time in English the joyful illumination of the gospel.

Jesus had said, as Tyndale translated in John, that: ‘I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me may not abide in darkness.’ The new book allowed the English speaker to abide in the light; there need be ‘none occasion of stumbling in him’.

But not yet. Cochlaeus, Tunstall’s friend and Bible-hunter, had arrived in Cologne from Mainz shortly before Tyndale. He was seeking a printer to publish works by Rupert of Deutz, abbot of the
monastery on the opposite bank of the Rhine from Cologne four centuries before, and a writer on the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Cochlaeus arranged a contract with Peter Quentell. As part of it, he was obliged to edit the work himself. This brought him into daily contact with Quentell’s printers and he got to know them well. They were a hard-drinking crew and when they were in their cups they boasted to him that ‘whether the king and cardinal of England would or no, the whole of England would soon be Lutheran’.

He invited some of the printers back to his lodgings, where he plied them with wine. They told him that two English apostates were working with them on the New Testament in English. Their expenses were being ‘abundantly supplied by English merchants’, who were to convey the book secretly to England. The book was being produced in three thousand copies, they said; work had already advanced as far as sheet K. This meant that ten sheets had already been printed, making eighty pages in quarto format. Cochlaeus, putting on a show of admiration, admitted to be ‘inwardly astonished and horrified … gloomily weighing the greatness of the danger’. To scotch Tyndale’s ‘abominable plan’, Cochlaeus secretly visited Hermann Rinck, a Cologne senator who was known to Henry VIII. Rinck sent one of his agents to confirm independently that the printing was taking place at the Quentell press. He then arranged for the senate to issue a prohibition on further work and to confiscate the existing sheets.

Tyndale got wind of what was afoot. He and Roye fled southwards up the Rhine, taking with them the sheets at least to signature H, up to verse twelve of Matthew 22. The loose-tongued Roye may have prompted this near-disaster by encouraging the printers to prattle over what should have remained a secret contract. Tyndale, though he could bellow with rage in print, was discreet and secretive in his personal habits. He never spoke of Cochlaeus, despite the expense and danger he was put to. Roye, however, wrote a snide and catchy verse about him: