Book of Fire (18 page)

Bilney laboured for ‘the desperates’; he was a ‘preacher to the prisoners and comfortless’, and particularly for lepers. Leprosy was a disease of Old Testament terror. The consequences were so appalling – the leper was banished from society, marooned on an island of sickness until he died – that a whole chapter of Leviticus is devoted to the accurate diagnosis of the disease. Tyndale translated it with simple but vivid and clear terms. ‘The Lord spake,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘saying: when there appeareth a rising in any man’s flesh either a scab or a glistening white: as though the plague of leprosy were in the skin of his flesh … let the priest look on the sore’. If it ‘be waxed blackish and is not grown abroad in the skin’ it was simply a ‘scurf’, and the person was clean; but if ‘there be therein golden hairs and thin, let the priest make him unclean’. As Tyndale’s prose showed with brutal finality, the penalty was harsh: ‘And the leper in whom the plague is, shall have his clothes rent and his head bare and his mouth muffled and shall be called unclean … and shall therefore dwell alone.’

Christian lepers were bound by these Old Testament regulations. They gave a warning cry – ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ – as they walked, or sounded a horn, and wore cloaks marked with the letter L. They were forbidden to talk to anyone unless they were downwind. They were cast out of the community in a ritual dating from 1179. The penitent leper stood by an open grave with a black cloth on his head. ‘Be dead to the world, be reborn in God,’ the priest said. ‘Jesus, my Redeemer,’ the leper responded, ‘may I be reborn in Thee.’ The priest then read out a proscription: ‘I forbid you to enter church, monastery, fair, mill, marketplace or tavern … I forbid you ever to leave your house without your leper’s costume … to live with any woman other than your own … to touch a well, or well cord, without your gloves … to touch children, or to give them anything … to eat or drink, except with lepers.’

St Francis had shamed cities into building leprosariums or lazar-houses outside their walls, and Bilney preached ‘at the lazar cots, wrapping them in sheets, helping them of that they wanted’, hoping to convert them to Christ. He had been warned not to preach Lutheran doctrines in 1526, however, and in November 1527 he was seized and charged with heresy. He denied it, and described Luther as a ‘wicked and detestable heretic’ during his questioning. Indeed, Bilney was not a Lutheran, in the full-blown sense that Tyndale was. Bilney’s views on the sacraments and the primacy of the pope were orthodox, but his acceptance of justification by faith was evidence enough for Tunstall, who refused to hear defence witnesses before declaring him a heretic. Bilney recanted and was taken to the Tower in December 1527, where he remained for a year until Wolsey let him return to Cambridge.

In February 1528, Tunstall began a six-month campaign to arrest Lollards, Lutherans and Tyndale’s Bible readers. By the middle of March, the ecclesiastical prisons in London were full and suspects were held with common criminals in the Fleet,
Newgate, the Old Compter and the Poultry Compter near Bucklersbury. A London friar was found to have sold a copy of Tyndale’s Testament for 3s 2d to some Lollards from Essex; a Gloucestershire priest exchanged one for a load of hay; a law student at Gray’s Inn distributed them from his rooms. It was now that the Essex men Pykas, Hilles and Tyball were seized and interrogated. Tyball admitted that he had shown his books to the curate of Steeple Bumpstead, Richard Fox, confirming that Tyndale was a peril to ordinary country clergymen as well as to university trained hotheads.

Tunstall did not want blood on his hands. He did not drive suspects to the sticking point, but left them space to repent without too much damage to conscience. The penitent was required to sign a confession listing his ‘damnable and erroneous opinions’, which he swore that ‘he now utterly abjures and renounces, desiring to do penance for the same, and promising never to return to them’. John Hig of Cheshunt was found to have a ‘boke of the Gospels’ which he expounded in alehouses. He was brought in front of Dr Geoffrey Wharton, Tunstall’s vicar general, and abjured in March 1528. The document listed his heresies. Hig had said that all men, including laymen, could preach the gospel; he claimed that Martin Luther was more learned than all the doctors in England, and that the Church was blind; he had mocked those who went on pilgrimages, and called them fools; he had preached against purgatory, saying that prayers and alms were of no value to the dead; at mass, he ‘had not done reverences at the elevation of the Host, but kept reading his Dutch book of the Gospels’. He abjured these beliefs, which were typical of evangelists, by signing a formal document.

The vicar general laid down the penance. Hig was ordered to head the procession to St Paul’s Cathedral on Palm Sunday 1528, bareheaded, shoeless and carrying a faggot on his left shoulder. He was to remain in the custody of the apparitor, the chief officer of
the ecclesiastical court, until Good Friday, when he was to stand at St Paul’s Cross, again bareheaded and carrying his faggot, throughout the preaching of the sermon. On Easter Sunday, Hig was to head the procession at his parish church in Cheshunt, bareheaded and with his faggot. He was to hear the mass on bended knee but he was not to receive communion until the following day.

As additional punishment, Hig was forbidden ever to leave the diocese of London without the permission of the bishop. He was also commanded to wear a silken faggot embroidered on his sleeve for the rest of his life. Hig pleaded for dispensation from this, on the grounds that no one would employ him if he was compelled to wear it, and he would be reduced to beggary. His abject petition for forgiveness – ‘Honourable Master Doctor, I desire you to be good master to me, for I do knowledge myself that I have offended in learning the Gospels …’ – was accepted by Dr Wharton, and the stipulation of the silken faggot was dropped. The petition was signed ‘
Johannis Hig, scripta manu ejus propria in turri vocata Lollards Towre
’. His incarceration in one of the most forbidding places in England no doubt made an impression on him.

Thomas More, now chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, was increasing his activity. He had attended the Bilney trial and he was sending out informants and listeners to pry about London, hoping to come on what he called ‘nyght scoles’ of heresy, where small groups met behind locked doors to read Tyndale’s Testament and other forbidden texts. He and Tunstall had some success: a tailor, a merchant venturer, a scrivener’s servant and a shoe-maker were arrested and forced to abjure.

Hans van Ruremund, the brother of the Antwerp pirate Christoffel van Ruremund, was imprisoned in the Fleet and abjured. Tyndale’s own brother John was arrested, for ‘sending five marks [£3.33] to his brother William Tyndale beyond the
sea, and for receiving and keeping with him certain letters from his brother’.

More personally searched Humphrey Monmouth’s house in May 1528. He came too late: Monmouth confessed that ‘al the lettres and treatyes that Tyndale sent me … I did burne them in my howse’. After witnessing Tunstall’s bonfire at St Paul’s Cross, Monmouth had gone straight home and burnt every piece of paper that linked him with Tyndale, letters written by Tyndale to him from Germany, a copy of Tyndale’s translation of the
Enchiridion
, a collection of the sermons that Tyndale had given at St Dunstan’s. ‘I did burn them,’ Monmouth admitted, ‘for fear of the translator more than for any ill that I knew by them.’

It is a loss to history, for the letters might have cast light on the elusive translator’s movements in Germany, but it was a wise precaution. More thought that Monmouth was Tyndale’s chief supporter and treasurer and had the unfortunate draper imprisoned in the Tower. He was accused of multiple heresy. ‘Good, sadde and discrete persons in the Citye of London,’ the accusation said, a reference to More’s secret informers, attested that Monmouth ‘wast privy and of counsail, and diddest ayde … with mony … that the new testament translated into English by Sir William Hochin, or Tyndal, and Friar Roye, was printed and brought into this realm … [A]fter they were openly forbodden, as being full of errors thou hast had, red, and kept them … Thou hast eaten flesh in the lent season … hast said, affirmed and beleved that faith onlie is sufficient to save a man his sowle, without any works … that pilgrimages be not profitable for man’s sowle and should not be used …’ At this point, the compiler of the list became weary and concluded with the catch-all: ‘Briefly, for being an advancer of all Martin Luther’s opinions, etc.’

On 19 May 1528, rightly thinking that the cardinal would be more sympathetic than More, Monmouth petitioned the king through Wolsey from the Tower. ‘They examined me,’ Monmouth
wrote, ‘what exhibition I did give to anybody beyond the sea. I said, None in three years past …’ Monmouth confirmed that he had promised Tyndale £10 while Tyndale was staying with him in London – claiming, as we have seen, that this was for saying prayers for the dead and not to finance the Bible – and that this had been sent out to him in ‘Hamborow’, or Hamburg. Since then, Monmouth said, ‘I never sent him the value of one penny, nor never will.’ Monmouth said that he was innocent of heresy, and begged to be released from the Tower before his business was ruined. More had no hard evidence against him and he was freed to restore his fortunes. He returned to the Tower one day in 1535, not this time as a prisoner but as a sheriff of the City of London to escort Thomas More, his old tormentor, to the scaffold. Monmouth was perhaps too kindly a man to have relished the irony.

The net was cast beyond London. More wrote to Oxford to have ‘Henry the mancypull of White Hall’ arrested and escorted to London. He was particularly concerned that suspects might learn of his interest, and have time to suspend their meetings and hide their books. He therefore asked the Oxford authorities to ‘handle the matter so closelye that ther be of hys apprehension and sendyng upp as lytyll knowledg abrode as may bee’. A manciple was lesser fry, a college steward responsible for buying supplies, but larger names were soon forthcoming.

Thomas Garrett, a London priest and bookseller, most intrigued the heretic-hunters. He had first appeared in Oxford at Easter in 1527. He sought out Greek and Hebrew scholars, pretending that he wished to study their subjects, and ‘distributed a great number of corrupt books among them’. He had most success at Cardinal’s College. Wolsey had brought a group of eager young scholars from Cambridge to his lavish new college at Oxford. Several of them were zealous reformers, as Cambridge remained the great breeding ground of Lutheran scholars. Garrett was back
in Oxford on Christmas Eve 1527, lodging with one Radley, a ‘singing-man’, or choirmaster, at Cardinal’s College. Garrett was helped in spreading his message and his books by other members of the college, whose names included Clerke, Dalaber and Sumner.

Evidence of this ‘neste of heresye’ reached Dr John Loudon, the dean of New College. He noted that Garrett ‘has been privily doing much hurt’ ever since his arrival, and that the Cambridge graduates Clerke and Dalaber were leading others astray. The ‘most towardly young men in the university’ were being infected with Bible-men’s ideas. Loudon found it ‘clearly proved that Clerke read in his chamber Paul’s Epistles to young men and those who were of two, three or four years standing in the University’. The dean said that he wished Wolsey had not invited any Cambridge men to Oxford. ‘It were a gracious deed if they were tried and purged,’ he wrote, ‘and restored unto their mother from whence they came, if they be worthy to come thither again.’ The scholars of Cambridge complained at Oxford’s ‘calumny which has been circulated of their being favourable to Lutheranism’; the fenmen protested that they ‘have done nothing more than practice their old scholastic disputations’.

Wolsey was informed of the goings on and he gave ‘secret commandment’ that Garrett should be arrested. Dr Loudon reported on 24 February 1528 that the wanted man had been seized the previous Saturday, but he had escaped when the episcopal officer, Dr Cottisford, had left him locked in his rooms to attend evensong. Garrett had taken a secular scholar’s coat to disguise himself; the unfortunate scholar was promptly interrogated, ‘confessed his books of heresy’ and was thrown into prison. Cottisford was in a state of ‘extreme pensiveness’ as he contemplated being disciplined for his slackness in allowing his prisoner to escape. He consulted an ‘expert in astrology’ who divined from the stars that Garrett had ‘fled in a tawny coat south-eastward, and is in the middle of London’. In the meantime, Radley’s lodgings were searched, and
some of Garrett’s books were found. It was reckoned that Garrett had sold as many as 350 banned books, and Dr Loudon asked that Wolsey should be warned ‘what poison these booksellers bringeth into England’. He prayed God that Garrett should be caught, and that after his trial ‘the University may be clear for many years’.

Garrett did not flee south east, as Cottisford’s astrologer claimed, though the ports of Dover, Rye and Winchelsea were alerted, but westward. John Flooke, the vicar general of Bristol, broke the news of his arrest to Cottisford on 1 March. Garrett had abandoned the scholar’s jacket and was wearing a courtier’s coat and a buttoned cap. He was caught by chance, on the suspicion of a Bristol man whose son-in-law was a proctor at Oxford and had mentioned the escape. Flooke reported that he was held securely in a cell at Ilchester, the common jail of Somerset.

The fierce bishop of Lincoln, John Longland, wrote to Wolsey saying that he suspected that Garrett had corrupted the monastery at Reading, whose prior was said to have bought sixty books from him. Garrett, he said, was ‘a very subtyll, crafty, soleyne and an untrewe man’. He suggested that the prior should be put in custody and the monastery searched. He also warned the cardinal that the parson of Honey Lane in Oxford, Dr Farman, and his servant John Goodale, had dealt in Garrett’s books and that the names of ‘many infected persons’ might be learnt from them if they were imprisoned. Longland also mentioned a London bookseller, John Gough, as a prime suspect.

Gough was promptly arrested and questioned by Tunstall. The bishop reported to Wolsey on 5 March that Gough said he did not know Garrett, ‘and has never dealt in forbidden books with him, or anyone at Oxford … He has only had a shop of his own for two years, and, before that, was servant to another.’ Gough claimed that he was the victim of mistaken identity. ‘The bringer of these books this year past was a Dutchman from Antwerp, named Theodoryke,’ Tunstall quoted him as saying, ‘who was for
some time in London and has brought many books …’ The Dutchman had ‘many New Testaments in English of the little volume’; Gough said that he was careful not to ‘be aknowen of them’ except to those he thought would buy them and be silent. Tunstall concluded that Gough was innocent, but nonetheless he committed him to the Fleet, ‘as all his other prisons are full of persons from the furthest parts of the diocese’.