Book of Fire (19 page)
Tunstall also interviewed Goodale and Dr Farman. Goodale admitted that Garrett had sent two heavy fardels, or crates, to Oxford before Christmas last, but denied that he knew what was in them. Farman for his part confessed to buying banned books, but said that he did so ‘to see what opinions the Lutherans had, and be the more ready to defend the Church’. He also claimed that Wolsey had given students at Cambridge a licence to read Lutheran books. Tunstall had sent informers to listen to the sermons that Farman gave at Honey Lane, and reported to Wolsey that he ‘cannot find out that he preached otherwise than well’.
John Higdon, the dean of Cardinal’s College, reported to Wolsey that he was keeping ‘in ward’ six men – Clerke, Sumner, Betts, Frith, Bayley and Lawney. In fact, since the college was still under construction and lacked suitably secure rooms, they were ‘cast into a prison, within a deep cave under the ground of the same college, where the salt fish was laid’. Radley and several others were not imprisoned, on the grounds that they were young and ‘unlearned’. Higdon wrote that many members of the college were excommunicated because of contact with Garrett; he asked Wolsey to absolve them, since Easter was near and they were denied the sacrament. Garrett himself wrote to Wolsey imploring the cardinal to release him, ‘not from the iron bonds which he has so justly imposed upon him, but from the more terrible bonds of excommunication, and receive the wandering sheep back into the fold …’.
The accused scholars were kept in the stinking fish cellar
throughout the summer. They were thus much weakened and in poor condition to withstand an outbreak of fever that swept through Cardinal’s College in August. On 1 September 1528, a priest named Thomas Byrd wrote to Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s ambitious aid and able general factotum. Byrd begged for his pension to be paid, and included intelligence he felt would be useful. He reported that Clerke and Sumner had died a few days before. ‘Jesus pardon their souls!’ he wrote. ‘They were buried in Christian sepulture, but the Sacrament was denied them by the dean.’ The others remained in the cellar – ‘the university is little infect but there, our Lord preserve it!’ – and Byrd reported that he had heard that they would soon be released. This proved to be accurate. Wolsey, a humane and often kindly man, was shocked by the deaths and ordered that the survivors should not be ‘so straitly handled’. John Frith, a man of singular charm and courage, was let go, and soon crossed the Narrow Sea to join Tyndale.
An interesting intervention was made during the affair: Anne Boleyn took up the cause of one of the booksellers. ‘I beseech your grace with all my heart,’ she wrote to Wolsey, ‘to remember the parson of Honey Lane for my sake shortly.’ Honey Lane is a street in Oxford in which stands All Hallows Church. The rector was Thomas Farman, whom Tunstall had arrested and interviewed. Whether Anne’s plea was answered is not known. Farman died a little later in 1528, having been, according to Foxe, one of those who was ‘troubled and abjured’.
Two others who were implicated were later patronised by Anne. William Betts, a survivor of the cellar, returned to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. Anne chose him as one of her chaplains in 1533. Nicholas Udall, another survivor who recanted, stayed at Oxford, although his heretical views were thought too pronounced for him to be granted his Master of Arts degree for some years. Anne commissioned him to write verses for her coronation.
Henry VIII’s long infatuation with Anne Boleyn – the king’s ‘great matter’ – was of great good fortune to the evangelicals. The pope’s refusal to annul Henry’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon led to the break with Rome, and undermined Wolsey and More. Anne was herself reform minded. She had a copy of Tyndale’s banned New Testament, and she marked passages, with her fingernail, in his book
The Obedience of a Christian Man
that she wished Henry to read, and ‘besowght his grace moste tenderly to reade them’. But Tyndale failed to make use of her sympathy.
(Mary Evans Picture Library)
Anne’s confidence was waxing in 1528. At the start of the year, her present to Henry was a likeness of a ship on which a ‘lonely damsel’ was tossed about, a mirror of her own position. The king responded with the promise that his motto for the year would be
Aut illic aut nullihi
, ‘Either there or nowhere’. He wrote to her ‘assuring you that henceforth my heart will be dedicated to you alone, and wishing greatly that my body was so too, for God can do it if He pleases’.
In order to ginger up God’s representative on earth, Henry dispatched two envoys to Rome in February 1528 to pressure the pope to put the question of the divorce before a decretal commission that would sit in England. They took a letter from Wolsey with them, which praised the ‘purity of her life, her constant virginity, her maidenly and womanly pudicity, her soberness, chasteness, meekness, humility …’. It added the essential dynastic rider of her ‘apparent aptness for the procreation of children’. Henry wrote to Anne of his trust that, thanks to the mission, ‘shortly you and I shall have our desired end, which should be more to my heart’s ease, and more quietness to my mind, than any other thing in this world’.
The optimism was misplaced. Wolsey half expected as much. ‘If the pope is not compliant, my own life will be shortened,’ he rightly surmised, ‘and I dread to anticipate the consequences.’ The pope could make minor concessions, and procrastinate; but he could not close the king’s ‘great matter’ as Henry wished. Clement VII was no longer caught between Henry and Charles V, Queen Catherine’s unforgiving nephew; he was now in the latter’s hands. A rabble of Spanish soldiers and German mercenaries had broken into Rome the year before. They did so in the service of Charles V, whose devotion to Catholicism was compromised by the loom of his vast possessions. He was emperor of Germany and the Low Countries, and thus numbered Tyndale among the aliens living in his territory, and he was also king of Spain and her rapidly growing
lands in the New World. The excursion by his forces to Rome was part of a squeeze he was applying to the papal states, which lay between others territories of his, in Lombardy and Naples.
Some of the German mercenaries were Lutherans. Thomas More claimed that the whole force was made up of ‘fierce here-tiques’ who were so cruel that ‘they haue taught ye deuill new tormentes in hell’, and whose idea of ‘sporte and laughter’ was ‘to take the childe and bynde it to a broch [spit] and lay it to the fyre to rost’. He exaggerated – most of the Germans were Bavarian Catholics and Charles V was a notably devout Catholic himself – but they did delight in humbling the pope and his priests. Blasphemers in the Eternal City, they wore cardinals’ robes, drank from sacred chalices, stabled their horses in St Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel, daubed Luther’s name on paintings, stole jewels and offerings from shrines, and, tearing the bones of saints from reliquaries, threw them for dogs to devour. Cardinal Giovanni del Monte, the future Pope Julius III, was hung by his hair until a ransom was paid for him. Clement VII took sanctuary in the Castel del’Angelo, a purple robe thrown over his white papal vestments to disguise him as he fled.
The sculptor, goldsmith and gloriously immodest autobiographer Benvenuto Cellini served as a volunteer bodyguard for the pope. To ‘an accompaniment of blessings and cheers from a number of cardinals’, Cellini claims to have felled the imperial commander with his arquebus from the castle walls. He then cut a Spanish officer in two after his shot struck the man’s sword. The pope was so ‘astonished and delighted’, Cellini wrote, that he made the sign of the cross above Cellini’s head and ‘forgave me all the homicides I had ever committed and all those I ever would commit in the service of the Apostolic Church …’
Looting and revelry by the imperial forces was unchecked for eight days. The pope’s ransom was set at 400,000 ducats. Cellini claims that Clement summoned him to a room in the castle. Here
he was told to remove the gold settings from tiaras. He also took jewels from the Apostolic
camera
, or treasury, and sewed them into the linings of the pope’s vestments. Cellini then built a little brick furnace and melted down the gold. It weighed some 200 pounds. ‘Harassed from within and without, completely in despair’, Clement used the gold to negotiate a peace. Half the population had fled and Rome was a bruised shadow of itself. That a Catholic monarch had done this added to the humbling of the Church, for, as Erasmus wrote in shame, Rome was ‘not only the fortress of the Christian religion and the kindly mother of literary talent, but … indeed the common mother of all peoples’.
If he accommodated Henry, Clement would humiliate Queen Catherine and, by extension, Charles, her nephew. Henry was the king of a distant and sea-girt realm. Charles was the most powerful man in Christendom and his writ ran to Rome. Clement was a Medici, a cousin of the flamboyant Leo X, a most cunning diplomat and a man of the world. The prospects of him agreeing to the divorce were negligible. In two years’ time, indeed, Clement was to crown Charles as Holy Roman Emperor at Bologna, the last time a pope was ever to do so, an arrangement that enabled Rome and the papal states to be restored to him.
Henry’s disaffection from the papacy – though not from Catholic dogma, to which he remained firmly attached – gave Tyndale and the reformers material to work. It also strengthened Anne Boleyn’s existing sympathy with reform, which she had acquired during her time at the French court. She had a handsome copy of the
Pistellis and Gospelles for the LII Sondayes in the Yere
in French, given to her by one Francis Denham, who had spent time in Paris with ‘pestiferous followers of Luther’, before he died of plague in 1528. The daughter of an evangelical mercer, who supplied the court with fabrics, recalled that her father used to ‘go beyond the sea’ because Anne ‘caused him to get her the gospels and epistles written in parchment in French together with the psalms’.
Anne had no hesitation in reading banned books. It is likely that she had already bought a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament. Her copy of his later revised Testament survives in the British Library, with her name and title on the edges of the leaves, and Tyndale’s ragingly Lutheran prologue tactfully removed. Certainly, she had a copy of Simon Fish’s
A Supplication of the Beggars
in 1528, the year that it was printed in Antwerp, where Fish was in voluntary exile. This was a violent attack on the inventions – fees for masses, dirges, hallowings, indulgences, tithes and so on – that were used by the ‘ravenous wolves’ of the Church to gouge ever-increasing amounts of money from the laity. A meticulous man, Fish calculated the amount to the nearest penny, as ‘43 thousand pounds and £333 6s 8d sterling’ per year. Foxe says that Anne showed her copy to Henry, at the suggestion of her pro-evangelical brother George, and that the king was so delighted with it that he gave protection to Fish and his wife. This may well be so. Henry clearly had a professional interest in seeing the detail of how the Church parted the laity from its money, being in the same business himself; and Fish and his wife indeed benefited from a royal safe-conduct that allowed them to return to England in 1530.
I
n Germany, Tyndale had begun work on revising his New Testament and translating the Old. He was also writing
The Parable of the Wicked Mammon
, the first work that bore his name as an author. The colophon said it was ‘printed the viij day of May Anno Mdxxviij’, 8 May 1528, and named the printer as ‘Hans Luft of Marburg’. This was false. A printer named Hans Luft existed, certainly, but he was happily making his fortune publishing the works of Luther in Wittenberg, and he did not work for Tyndale. Neither was the actual printer in Marburg, or ‘Marlborow’ or ‘Marborch’ as the English also called it.
Mammon
was printed in Antwerp, though not by Christoffel van Ruremund, who as, the pirate van Endhoven, was continuing to print copies of the New Testament. The type, paper, woodcuts and style used in this and later Tyndale books shows the true printer to be Johannes Hillenius van Hoochstraten.
Antwerp was huge, bustling, known simply as ‘the Metropolis’, and ideal for Tyndale. It had expanded at breakneck speed since its rival, Bruges, was cut off from the North Sea by the silting up of the River Zwin. The population, 20,000 in 1440, had reached 75,000 and was soon to peak at 125,000, more than double that
of London. The Fuggers of Augsburg, the great banking dynasty, had moved their trading house to Antwerp from Bruges in 1505, and others had followed, with buildings of late Gothic bravado topped by soaring watchtowers from which to espy the shipping on the Scheldt.
It was a cosmopolitan place. Thomas More had visited the city with Erasmus, and set the opening scene of
Utopia
in an Antwerp inn; more to Tyndale’s liking, Albrecht Dürer had stayed in a house on the Wolstraat. Large contingents of foreigners lived there – Englishmen, Portuguese, South Germans, Hanseatic men and Castilians – who were organised into Nations, enjoying some immunity from local legislation. A stranger with Tyndale’s skills at cloaking himself could pass unnoticed.
