Book of Fire (14 page)
Tyndale transformed the Paternoster from a mumbled and ill-understood Latin formula into the infinitely familiar:
O oure father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name
Let thy kingdom come; thy wyll be fulfilled as well in erth as
hut ys in heven
Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade
And forgeve vs our treaspases, even as we forgeve them which
treaspas vs,
Leede vs not into temptacion, but delyvre vs from yvell …
Another passage stamped for more than four centuries into the memory of every English-speaking Christian is from the Worms book, too:
Jesus toke breed, and gave thankes, brake it, and gave it to his
disciples, and sayde, Take, eate, thys ys my body.
And toke the cuppe and gave thankes, and gave it them,
sayinge, Drinke of it every won
This is my bloudde of the newe testament, which shalbe
shedde for many, for the foryevenes of synnes.
Its earliest readers afforded the book more than the value ascribed by Spalatin; although, in money terms, they acquired their treasure for two or three rather than thousands of shillings, they risked ending their lives at the stake for reading it.
Tyndale wrote a short epistle, simpler and more moving than the abandoned prologue from the Cologne edition, and ran it at the end of his work. Its words seem to catch the cadence of the Bible itself, for they flow from the same hand; their ring is familiar, demanding to be read aloud; and they hint, in their plain and affectionate intensity, at the deep-boned faith and spirit of vanished generations.
Publishers were already highly skilled at promoting their books, using strong graphics and eye-catching copy to describe the contents, with introductions and end-pieces in the role of the modern dust jacket. Tyndale’s epistle is a masterpiece of the art. He was selling salvation itself to his readers and his opening appeal was irresistible. ‘Geve diligence, Reder, I exhort the, that thow come with a pure mynde, and as the scripture sayth, with a syngle eye, unto the wordes of health and of eternall lyfe,’ he wrote, ‘by the which, if we repent and beleve them, we are borne anewe, created afresshe, and enioye the frutes of the bloud of Christ …’ That blood ‘cryeth not for vengeaunce, as the bloud of Abel’; instead, it ‘hath purchased lyfe, love, faveour, grace, blessinge, and whatsoever is promysed in the scriptures to them that beleve and obeye God’, and it was Christ’s blood that ‘stondeth betwene us and wrathe, vengeaunce, curse …’ .
This was no ordinary book, he made clear; it was the very word of God, speaking now in English, and those who attended to it and committed themselves ‘unto the deservynge of Christ’ would find in its tightly printed pages a guide to this life, and God’s promise of mercy and immortality in the next. ‘Soo shalt thou nott despeare,’ he comforted his readers, ‘but shalt feale god as a kynd and a mercifull father; and his sprete shall dwell in the, and shall be stronge in the, and the promises shalbe given the at the last.’ It was a necessary reassurance, of course, for the possession of a copy carried with it the threat of the fire.
For his own part, Tyndale prayed his readers to forgive him if his rude English offended them. He had no man to ‘counterfet’, or imitate; ‘neither’, he added, ‘was holpe with English of any that had interpreted the same or soche lyke thinge in the scripture beforetyme’, confirming that he had not used Lollard manuscripts. He stood by the honesty of his work. ‘I am sure, and my conscience beareth me recorde,’ he wrote, ‘that of a pure entent, syngly and faythfully I have interpreted it, as farre forth as god gave me the gyfte of knowledge and understondynge.’ How well he had succeeded was demonstrated by James’s divines, who incorporated almost nine tenths of him verbatim in their Authorised Version, despite the intervening eighty-five years of biblical scholarship.
Inevitably, there were revisions to be made – Tyndale mentioned the ‘cumbrances’ under which he laboured, not detailing them lest they help to identify him – and he warned his readers that the book was like a premature child. He caught seventy-two of the ‘errours comitted in the prentynge’ – ‘for hegged, rede begged … Noses rede Moses … anzareth rede nazareth’ – but many others got through. ‘Count it as a thynge not havynge his full shape, but, as it were, borne afore hys tyme,’ he said, ‘even as a thing begun rather than fynnesshed.’ If God gave him time, he would fill it out, to give it more light, and ‘to seke in certane places more proper Englysshe’. He wanted, he said, to make it
simpler for ordinary folk to read – ‘more apt for those with weke stomakes’ – by including a table to explain words which were not commonly used, and to ‘shewe howe the scripture useth many wordes which are wotherwyse understonde of the commen people’. He appealed to the educated to ‘helpe thereunto, and to bestowe unto the edyfyinge of Christ’s body (which is the congregacion of them that beleve) those gyftes whych they have receaved of god for the same purpose’.
It was at the few words in brackets that Catholics most bridled. They reaffirmed the Cologne prologue, and showed that the author’s translation of εκκλησια as congregation, and of πρεσβυτερος as elder, was not accidental. The man believed Christ’s body not to be the Church, but the sum of believers. The same aberration showed, too, in the way he bade his readers farewell, blessing those who had faith: ‘The grace that commeth of Christ be with them that love hym. Praye for us.’
This was the work of a heretic.
T
wo events – auguries, for they defined the future – took place in London as Tyndale had the first completed copies of his Testament collated and bound in Worms. At Shrovetide, in February 1526, Henry VIII appeared in the tiltyard wearing a jousting dress embroidered with the words ‘Declare I Dare Not’. It was the first visible sign that the king was wooing Anne Boleyn, a young lady of the queen’s household, an infatuation that changed the religious loyalties of England. (The religion itself was another matter. ‘Our king has destroyed the pope,’ a canny reformer was to note, ‘but not popery.’)
Anne was twenty-four. Catherine of Aragon, the queen, worn out by miscarriages, was forty-one. Her only living child was a daughter, Mary, and she was too old now to bear another. The king was six years younger than his wife, still fit and handsome, and eager for a son to shore up his dynasty. Talk already had Anne as Henry’s mistress, but she was not. Her virginity was her trump card to become queen; it guaranteed the king’s continuing lust for her and set him off on his seven-year quest for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. The king’s ‘great matter’ – his pursuit of the annulment and remarriage to Boleyn – weaves in and out of
Tyndale’s life almost to the end. From the outset, ‘Mistress Anne’ was hostile to Cardinal Wolsey and to the Church, which treated her as the king’s whore, and nourished a sympathy for reforming ideas.
In her portraits, Anne’s face is pale and oval, her lips thin and pursed. They cannot do her justice for she had a vivacity that captivated men. ‘The lively sparks that issue from those eyes,’ the poet Wyatt wrote, ‘sunbeams to daze men’s sight.’ She played cards and dice, sang, danced and hunted; she was graceful, with a quick wit and easy conversation. Above all, she knew her own mind, and the period she had spent at the French court as a girl had taught her the guiles and stratagems that she needed to meet her own expectations, and those of her ambitious father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, the Treasurer of the Royal Household. Her grandfather had been knighted by Henry VI, and had bought himself Hever, a moated castle that still stands in Kent. He had made his money in trade, however, as a successful mercer who had become Lord Mayor of London in 1457.
The family were upwardly mobile, but they retained the radical views of London merchants and were sympathetic to reformers. It is likely that Margaret de Valois, Francis I’s evangelical sister, influenced Anne while she was in France. One of her chaplains, William Latimer, says that she was ‘very expert in the French tongue, exercising herself continually in reading the French bible and other French books of like effect, and conceived great pleasure in the same’. She ordered her chaplains ‘to be furnished of all kind of French books that reverently treated of the holy scriptures’.
Anne’s first English suitor was Henry Percy, the young heir to the earldom of Northumberland. Such a marriage would have been glorious. The Percys had sailed with William the Conqueror; they were one of the most powerful families in the land, and the mercer’s granddaughter would have become the chatelaine of their great seat at Alnwick Castle. Wolsey disapproved of the match,
however, as indeed did young Percy’s father when he heard of it. Wolsey discussed the matter with the king, whose permission was needed for a marriage at this level of nobility. The king is said to have confided his ‘secret affection’ for Anne to the cardinal. It seems that he was already planning to take Anne as a mistress, as he had taken her sister Mary; certainly, he instructed Wolsey to break off the engagement. Wolsey summoned Percy to his London palace at York Place. He gave him a public dressing down, telling him not to involve himself with ‘that foolish girl yonder in the court’. This was reported back to Anne Boleyn, who neither forgave nor forgot the remark. ‘His Highness intended to have preferred Anne Boleyn unto another person,’ Wolsey added, ‘although she knoweth it not.’ This mystery person transpired to be the king.
Wolsey now had an enemy at court and Tyndale a potential friend.
The other augury – this one an ill omen for Tyndale – was a penitential procession that passed through the London streets to St Paul’s on Shrove Sunday 1526. This marked the emergence of Thomas More as an active heretic-hunter.
Booksellers had been warned off Tyndale’s Testament well in advance. The Bible translation itself ran foul of the 118-year-old anti-Lollard Constitutions of Oxford, which remained in force. The blanket ban on reforming books in general was based on a legatine commission issued by Wolsey on 14 May 1521. This was directed with papal authority to all the bishops of England and Wales, and was read out in every church in the land at mass. It said that ‘many and diverse pestiferous and pernicious propositions and errors of Martin Luther’ were in circulation, ‘setting forth both Greek and Bohemian heresies’. The Bohemian reference covered John Huss, and thus embraced Wycliffe and the Lollards; the Greek Orthodox, among their other heresies, permitted the
clergy to marry and the laity to take the cup at communion. Any person with such writings was to surrender them to the bishop or his agents within fifteen days.
Mindful of Tunstall’s warning, in 1524, of the perils of handling heretical books, the printers also paid heed. The industry was small and easily coerced; 550 books were printed in England between 1520 and 1529, where Paris alone was producing three hundred different titles a year. The foreigners who dominated the trade – two thirds of the printers, booksellers and bookbinders in England were foreigners, men like the Norman Richard Pynson, and Wynkyn de Worde, an Alsatian, using French and German printing equipment – were in no mood for adventures. They relied heavily on the crown and the Church both for business and for protection from the jealous native Stationers’ Company. Three English printers, John Gough, Thomas Berthelet and Robert Redman, were briefly in trouble, but these were merely technical offences in failing to obtain episcopal licences in advance. Indeed, one of the books was a translation of Erasmus by Thomas More’s daughter Meg, which the printer had not thought to clear; a second edition, with Wolsey’s arms and the permission,
cum privilegio a rege indulto
, was hastily published. English publishing remained heresy-free.
Imports were another matter. Lutheran books and pamphlets were shipped across the Narrow Sea, largely from Antwerp, in defiance of the ban. Robert Barnes was charged with heresy for a supposedly Lutheran sermon he preached at Cambridge at Christmas 1525. He was brought to London for interrogation, his friend Miles Coverdale travelling with him to help in his defence. He was given the standard choice between recanting and the stake. He was fortunate to survive an exchange with the bishop of Bath, his principal judge. When Barnes maintained that any man was a martyr who ‘was persecuted, and dyed for the worde of God’, the bishop snapped that ‘he wolde make me frye for this’. He was,
however, allowed to read out his revocation. His public penance was set for Shrove Sunday, 11 February 1526.
At the end of January, Thomas More led a raid with armed men on the Steelyard. He burst in on the merchants as they were about to dine in their hall on a Friday evening. More said that he had been informed that some among them were importing Lutheran books and tracts, which caused grievous errors to the Christian faith of the king’s subjects. He named three merchants, who were arrested on the spot, and left with them. More was back the next day, with a squad of searchers who went carefully through each merchant’s chamber, confiscating suspect books. A further eight merchants were marched off to Westminster, where Wolsey spoke to them severely of the dangers of heresy.
Four of the German merchants accompanied Barnes on the penitential procession to St Paul’s, seated backwards on donkeys and wearing pasteboard mitres on which pages from the offending books were pinned. They were led into the church and obliged to kneel in the aisle with symbolic faggots tied to their backs. As a fiery preacher, Barnes had damned ‘the gorgyous pompe and pryde of all exteryour ornamentes’. He was now forced to regard the elevated scaffold that Wolsey had ordered to be built for the ceremony, with ‘six and thirty abbots, mitred priors and bishops … the Cardinal sat there enthronised, his chaplains and spiritual doctors in gowns of damask and satin, and he himself in purple, even like a bloody Antichrist’. Wolsey conducted the mass, and Bishop Fisher of Rochester delivered a searing sermon against Luther. Though it was difficult to hear the sermon ‘for ye great noyse of ye people within ye church’, Fisher later wrote it out and had it printed in Germany, so that Tyndale and the exiles might read it. During the ceremony, Barnes and his fellow penitents were made to kneel on their own platform, and at its end they publicly begged forgiveness.
