Book of Fire (16 page)

A
drought-spoilt harvest increased shipping movements and the opportunities for Bible-running. Wheat was so scarce that Wolsey feared that rioting would break out – ‘either the people must die from famine,’ he was warned, ‘or else they, with a strong hand, will fetch corn from them that have it’ – and he encouraged the Steelyard merchants to import grain from the Continent.

By late August of 1526, the inflow of Tyndale Testaments was so alarming that an emergency meeting of bishops was convened. No account of the conclave has survived, but the king referred to the recommendations it made to him. ‘With deliberate aduyse of the Cardynall,’ Henry announced, ‘and other reurende fathers of the spyritualtye determyned the sayde corrupte and vntrue translatyons to be brenned with further sharppe correction & punisshment against the kepars and reders of the same.’ He spoke of ‘certayne prefaces and other pestylent glosses in the margynes’.

London was the worst affected and Tunstall issued a proclamation on 23 October 1526. ‘Many children of iniquity,’ he said, ‘maintainers of Luther’s sect, blinded through extreme wickedness and wandering from the way of truth and the catholic faith,
craftily have translated the New Testament into our English tongue, intermeddling therewith many heretical articles and erroneous opinions …’ The following day, he formally warned his archdeacons that the translator of the Testament had ‘profaned the hitherto undefiled majesty of holy scripture with cunning perversities and heretical depravity’. The bishop deplored the increasing sales of the Testament, ‘of which translation there are many books imprinted, some with glosses and some without, containing in the English tongue that pestiferous and most pernicious poison, dispersed all throughout our diocese of London in great number …’. All copies were to be confiscated within thirty days under pain of excommunication and suspicion of heresy to the owners.

In fact, the bishop did not wait a month. Rumours that there was to be a grand conflagration of Tyndale’s work had been current since early September, when an evangelical made the prediction in a letter to an English merchant in Antwerp. The burning took place at St Paul’s Cross, most probably on Sunday 28 October 1526. Tunstall preached a fiery sermon, dismissing the Testament as
doctrinam peregrinam
, strange doctrine, and denouncing it for containing ‘errours three thousand and more’. When he had finished, every copy of Tyndale’s translation that had been seized was burnt.

Humphrey Monmouth, Tyndale’s old benefactor, was at the burning. It seems that he owned one of the copies that was consigned to the flames, having dutifully passed it to his confessor, who in turn handed it to Tunstall. Though the Testament was anonymous, the bishop had no doubts of authorship. ‘When I harde my lord of London preach at Pawles Cross,’ Monmouth wrote later, after More had sent him to the Tower, ‘that sir William Tyndal had translated the N. Testament in English, and was naughtilie translated, that was the first time that ever I suspected or knew any evil by him.’ The gospeller John Lambert, later to be
burnt himself, was also in the crowd ‘when the newe testament, imprinted of late beyond the sea, was first forfended’. He said that ‘truly my heart lamented greatly to hear a great man preaching against it, who showed forth certain things he noted for hideous errors to be in it, that I, yea and not only I, but likewise did many others, think verily to be none. But (alack for pity!) malice cannot say well. God help us all, and amend it.’

On 3 November, Archbishop Warham adopted Tunstall’s declaration as his own, and instructed his suffragans to hunt down copies in like manner. Cardinal Campeggio wrote to Wolsey from Rome on 21 November, saying that he was pleased to hear of the burning of ‘the sacred codex of the bible, perverted in the vernacular tongue, and brought into the realm by perfidious followers of the abominable Lutheran sect; than which assuredly no holocaust could be more pleasing to Almighty God’.

Many felt that heresy and shame lay not in the translation but in the burning of God’s word. Tyndale naturally attacked Tunstall. ‘[F]or what service done in Christ’s gospel came he to the bishoprick of London, or what such service did he therein?’ he wrote. ‘He burnt the New Testament calling it
Doctrinam peregrinam
, “strange learning”. Yea, verily, look how strange his living, in whose blood that testament was made, was from the living of the pope; even so strange is that doctrine from the pope’s law, in which only, and in the practice thereof, is Tunstall learned …’

Thomas More was acutely aware that people thought that the burning was to ‘put euery man to silence that woulde anye thinge speake of the fautes of the clargye’. He found that ‘men mutter amonge them selfe, that yt boke was not only faultles, but also verywel translated, & was deuysed to be burned, bicause men should not be able to proue that suche fautes (as were at Poules cross declared to haue ben found in it) wer neuer founde there in dede …’.

As his obsession with Tyndale grew, More reviewed the body of
evangelical books and had no hesitation in placing ‘fyrst Tyndales new testament father of them all by reason of hys false translatyng’. He saw a symphony of heresy in which Tyndale was ‘the basse and the tenour whereupoon [others] wold singe the trouble [treble] wyth mych false descant’.

Sir Thomas More’s hatred for Tyndale – ‘a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil’ he described him – was fierce and all-consuming. It unhinged him. Lord chancellor of England by day, More devoted his nights to penning half a million poisonous words attacking his great enemy. He celebrated the burning of Tyndale’s fellow evangelicals with rapture – ‘Tyndales bokes and theyr owne malyce maketh them heretykes,’ he wrote. ‘And after the fyre of Smythfelde, hell doth recyue them where the wretches burne for euer’ – and yearned for nothing more than that Tyndale should join them.

(Mary Evans Picture Library)

More said that ‘no good Christian manne hauing any drop of witte in his head’ should marvel that the New Testament had been burnt, for it had not. What had been consumed in the fire at St Paul’s Cross was Tyndale’s Testament, ‘for so hadde Tyndall after Luthers counsayl corrupted and chaunged it from the good and wholesome doctrine of Christ to the devilishe heresyes of their own, that it was cleane a contrarye thyng’. Tyndale was ‘a hellhound in the kennel of the devil … discharging a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth’. The work was as ‘full of errors as the sea is of water’, More said, and much of it was ‘wilfully mistranslated .. to deceive blind unlearned people’.

The ‘pestilent glosses’ in the margins of the Cologne sheets, referred to by the king, were clearly Lutheran and partisan. The text itself, however, was judged to be almost wholly accurate by the committee of divines later appointed by James I to produce the Authorised Version. They amended words and phrasings, of course, but Tyndale has never been found to deliberately alter the sense and meaning of any passage. Though they did not admit it, the wrath of Tunstall and More rested on the translation of three words.

Tyndale wrote, as we have seen, of ‘the congregation’, rather than the Church, ‘which is the body of Christ’. The Greek εκκλησια is a word of particular importance to the papacy. It appears only three times in the gospels, each time in Matthew. The only biblical justification for papal power over the Church lies in a claim made in a single verse in Matthew 16 and nowhere else. Popes claim to be the successors of St Peter. Tyndale translated Jesus in verse eighteen as saying: ‘And I say also unto thee, that
thou art Peter: and upon this rock I will build my congregation. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ To use ‘congregation’ in place of ‘Church’ was to strip the papacy of its claim to have inherited the leadership of the Church from St Peter.

More flayed him for this, and for the two other supposed mistranslation. Tyndale, he said, ‘chaunged comenly this worde chyrche in to this worde congregacyon, and this worde preste, into this worde senyour, and cheryte in to loue [love] … and penaunce in to repentaunce’; in this, ‘Tyndale dyd euyll [evil] in translatynge the scrypture in to our tonge’.

This was not hair-splitting. When King James’s divines came to the Authorised Version, they made two changes to Tyndale’s verse eighteen. One was to replace Tyndale’s ‘gates of hell’ with the weaker ‘gates of Hades’. The other was to substitute ‘church’ – ‘upon this rock I will build my church’ – for ‘congregation’, since the Protestant Church of England was itself now established, powerful and hierarchical enough to claim the same authority over its worshippers that Rome had enjoyed. Some Protestants continued to support Tyndale’s definition. Robert Browne was the most prominent, claiming in
A Book which sheweth the Life and Manners of all true Christians
that individual congregations, bound under God by covenant, should govern themselves independently of the State. From this the Congregationalists spring, while, deriving from Tyndale’s translation of πρεσβυτερος as ‘senior’ or ‘elder’, the Presbyterians developed a polity in which Anglican and Catholic bishops are rejected and the Church is governed by presbyters, or elders. Congregationalists and Presbyterians now number in the tens of millions.

The King James version also changed Tyndale’s ‘love’ into ‘charity’. More had demanded this. ‘What nede was it to put the indyfferent loue [love] in place of the vndowted good worde cheryte?’ he asked. ‘I saye that euery loue is not cheryte, but onely suche loue as is good and ordynate’. He did so for the same reason.
Charity is linked in meaning to good works, and it was in the interests of the established Church – Catholic in More’s day, Anglican under James I – to promote good works, donations and charity, of which it was either the direct beneficiary, or in whose moral glow it basked. To Tyndale, as he wrote in a thirty-two page
Compendious introduccion vn to the pistle off Paul to the Romayns
, much of it translated directly from Luther and which he published late in 1526, all good works that are unaccompanied by faith are ‘vnprofitable, lost, yea and damnable in the syght of God’. Goodness did not exist in itself – if it did, men would ‘be taken as Christe, yea and above christe and sytt in the temple of God’ – but only as a natural adjunct of faith.

The real horror of Tyndale’s Testament to the Church was not so much the words in themselves, however, but that they were English words. As heretical polemic moved out of Latin and into the vernacular, the whole of English society was open to the infection; and one book, passed from hand to hand, read out aloud by a literate to a company of illiterates, and spread by them in turn, could infect a multitude.

Already, More was using four fresh expressions to describe the Bible-men: ‘newe men’, ‘newe named bretherne’, ‘evangelycall fraternyte’ and the ‘new false sect of our evangelycall Englysshe heretykes’. On 18 December, while attending the king at Greenwich, he wrote to Erasmus, his ‘dere derlynge’ friend, urging him to fight the evangelicals with ‘strength of spirit up to your dying breath, even if there were a disastrous catastrophe’. As a lawyer, More was careful to accuse the evangelicals of sedition as well as heresy, since it enabled a dual attack to be made on them. They ‘lyttle care in ded of hel or heauen,’ he was to write, ‘but would in this worlde liue in lewd libertie, and have all runne to ryot … that they may be able to tourne the world up so down, and defende theyr foly and false heresye by force’. In Luther’s Saxony, he said, they had not only polluted the churches, despised
the saints, and ‘ioyned freres and nunnes together in lechery’; they had also ‘abhorred all good gouernance, rebelled agaynst all rulers …’.

The profits to be made from the Testament soon attracted printers in Antwerp, who were already major suppliers of books in English. Pirate copies started arriving in England in November 1526. They were printed in Antwerp by Christoffel van Ruremund (brother of Hans van Ruremund), poorly proofread, perhaps, on cheap paper, but issued in quantity.

Pirate editions were known on the Continent as
Nachdruck
. It is estimated that five times as many pirate Luther works sold as originals. Luther was resigned to it as inevitable – he suggested that pirates might wait at least a month ‘out of Christian charity’ – but it irritated. ‘Some rogue steps in, a compositor who lives off the sweat of our brow, who steals my manuscript before I have finished it, takes it away, and has it printed somewhere else, ignoring our expenses and our labour,’ Luther complained. He said he could tolerate this if they made a decent job of it; he might even forgive their trick of printing ‘Wittenberg’ on the title page of books that had never been near the town. But the pirates filled them with so many mistakes, misspellings and mismeanings that ‘when they reach me I do not even recognise my own books’.

He arranged for two ‘marks of quality’ to be printed in authorised editions of his work. One was the Lamb with the Chalice and Flag, in which wine flows from the breast of the lamb into a chalice beneath the flag of the Cross, as a symbol of the sacrifice of Christ; it was adapted for the signs outside ‘Lamb and Flag’ inns and hostelries. The other was the ‘Luther Rose’, an armorial device he had inherited from his father, bearing the letters ‘ML’ and the legend: ‘Let this sign be a guarantee that these books have passed through my hands, for wrong printing and corrupt books now abound.’