Book of Fire (20 page)

The city had no bishop and no university. This was to Tyndale’s advantage. No senior churchman was on the spot to bully the city authorities into arresting heretics, and there were no radical university teachers and students to catch the repressive attention of the Church. He had no shortage of kindred spirits, however. The first Lutherans to be spotted by officials in the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries were in Antwerp. The Augustinian prior in the city was identified as a supporter of Luther very early on, in 1519, and two of his fellow Antwerp Augustinians, Hendrik Voes and Johannes Esschen, became the first martyrs of the Reformation when they were burnt in Brussels. The city magistrates, however, were proud of their autonomy and conscious that religious intolerance would sit badly with the trading freedoms on which their prosperity was founded.

The printing industry was outranked only by Venice and Paris. It was perfect for Tyndale’s needs. Antwerp printers published work in Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin, and in the biblical languages, Greek and Hebrew. They were the leading printers of English language books, outstripping the small London printing trade. Books were a heavy cargo, but it was no problem to
find a merchant ship to carry them across the Narrow Sea. Wharves ran along the bank of the Scheldt for more than a mile, making Antwerp the greatest port in northern Europe. Scores of ships served the English trade, carrying Flemish cloth, Rhenish wines, Venetian velvets and silks and glassware, and pepper and cinnamon transshipped from Portugal.

Censorship was an irritant to the evangelical book trade with England but it failed to stop it. Antwerp became a phenomenon, a Catholic city that was a centre for Lutheran, and then Anabaptist and Calvinist, propaganda. The theological faculty at Louvain university, the heart of ultra-Catholic feeling in the Low Countries, did its best to prevent this. It condemned Lutheran works in November 1519, seven months before the pope did so, and ten months before Charles V banned their publication in the Low Countries. The first public book burnings in Antwerp were held in July 1521 and were swiftly followed by three more. Printers merely took precautions – false colophons and bills of lading, aliases, bribes, the use of smuggling skippers – and continued publishing. The big printer Michael Hillenius van Hoochstraten, probably a relative of Johannes, was typical in simultaneously publishing works by Luther and attacks on him by Fisher and Henry VIII. Profit came before theology.

At least ten Antwerp printers were producing heretical material in 1528, in French, Danish, Dutch, English and even Spanish. The pirate Christoffel van Endhoven, or van Ruremund, was one of them; the most daring was Adriaen van Berghen, who was to be sent on a penitential pilgrimage to Cyprus, only to be executed when he relapsed and was again found trading in banned books. Tyndale chose well with Johannes van Hoochstraten. He was ‘as wise as a serpent’, discreet, avoiding arrest by publishing orthodox books bearing his own name, and using aliases and false addresses for his heretical output. His colophons gave Basle and ‘Wittemberch’, ‘Argentorati’ and ‘Marborch’ and ‘Marlborow’,
respectively Wittenberg, Strasbourg and Marburg, as the place of publication, and ‘Adam Anonymous’, ‘Peter Congeth’, ‘Joannes Philoponos’ and ‘Steffan Rodt’ as the printer. For his work with Tyndale, he used ‘Hans Luft’ and ‘Marburg’.

Tyndale was almost certainly in Antwerp while
Wicked Mammon
was printed, a slim octavo volume in Gothic black-letter type, with no title page or marginal notes. He identified himself as a heretic in the first line of the introduction. ‘That faith the mother of all good works justifieth us, before we can bring forth any good work,’ he wrote, ‘as the husband marrieth his wife before he can have any lawful children by her.’ He felt himself to be in some peril while the book was being produced, and was clearly relieved to have finished it at all. It was rushed, with many printing errors. In his apology below the colophon, he asked the reader not to be offended by the apparent negligence in printing, ‘for verily the chance was such, that I marvel it is so well as it is’.

The preface was headed ‘William Tyndale otherwise called hychins to the reader’. The game of his anonymity was over, and he explained why ‘I set my name before this little treatise, and have not rather done it in the New Testament’. He said that Christ had exhorted men to do their good deeds in secret, and to be content with a good conscience and the knowledge that ‘God seeth us’. But he felt obliged to dissociate himself publicly from a book of scurrilous doggerel attacking Tunstall and Wolsey, which people assumed that he had written, but which was in fact the work of William Roye and Jerome Barlow.

Barlow had ignored Tyndale’s advice and had gone straight to join Roye at Strasbourg. Here Roye published a translation of a short Lutheran instruction book for children,
Brief Dialogue between A Christian Father and his Stubborn Son
, which was printed at the end of August 1527. Introducing it, Roye wrote that some of his readers would know ‘how this last year, the new testament of our saviour, was delivered unto you, through the faithful
and diligent study of one of our nation’. He identified this as ‘William Hitchyns’, to whom, he added, he was ‘help fellow, and partaker of his labours’. Much to his irritation, Tyndale had now been named in print as the translator.

Worse, Roye and Barlow had jointly produced a rhyming satire that they called
Rede me and be nott wrothe
. It opened with a cartoon of Wolsey with six axes. Red ink was used for his cardinal’s hat and for the drops of blood that fell from the axes. The poem was in the form of a conversation between Jeffrey and Watkin, the two servants of a priest, who discuss the burning of Tyndale’s Testament:

Though the verse was primitive compared to his prose, Tyndale had himself attacked the bishop and the cardinal in more savage terms. It was the crudely expressed theology, and the claim that another hand had helped him write the prologue to his Testament, that most angered Tyndale in these lines:

The prologue had not been written by ‘they’, Tyndale and Roye, but by ‘him’, Tyndale alone. He went on to lambast Roye and Barlow for failing to ‘suffer the evil with meekness’ – a charge that could as easily be made against himself – and for not making their points peacefully and rationally. He was also angry that they should treat the saving merits of Christ’s Passion, a central part of Lutheran dogma, in frivolous verse. ‘It becometh not then the Lord’s servant to use railing rhymes,’ he wrote, ‘but God’s word; which is the right weapon to slay sin, vice and all iniquity.’

With Roye thus rubbished in the prologue,
Mammon
then drove home the Lutheran message that a Christian is justified by faith alone. Faith is ‘mighty in operation, full of virtue and ever working … and it setteth the soul at liberty and maketh her free to follow the will of God’. Good works are subsidiary to faith, for ‘deeds are the fruits of love, and love is the fruit of faith’. Mary Magdalene washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and anointed them through the love that came from faith; she ‘did inflame and burn in love, yea was so swollen in love, that she could not abide nor hold, but must break out …’. Lyricism and tenderness cascade through Tyndale when he writes of faith and love. The crabbiness and tantrums that cloud his prose at the mention of pope or priest are dispelled; Mary is ‘overcome and overwhelmed with the unspeakable yea and incomprehensible abundant riches of the kindness of God’, and, kneeling before Christ, would ‘have run into the ground under his feet to have uttered her love toward him, yea would have descended down into hell …’.

He saw the gospels as a part of that love; he adored them, in
the religious sense. When we hear the gospels, he wrote in
Mammon
, we believe in the mercy of God, and through that we receive the spirit of God, and then, why – we ‘are in the eternal life already, and feel already in our hearts the sweetness thereof, and are overcome with the kindness of God and Christ and therefore love the will of God, and of love are ready to work freely’. The Bible, and the faith that flowed from it, ‘reneweth … and begetteth afresh’, so that a man ‘hath power to love that which before he could not but hate’. To Tyndale, it poured into the soul as ‘health doth unto the body, after that a man is pined and wasted away with a long soking [consuming] disease’. The vernacular Bible had an intensity that could never be repeated. Lollards had willingly paid a wagon load of hay for a few hand-copied scraps of Paul’s Epistles; but now the New Testament burst out in living English in the still new and vivid medium of print. With its explanatory glosses and marginal notes and prologues, it was a complete route-map to salvation.

Tyndale’s sarcasms returned the moment he dealt with the Church. It had taught for centuries, of course, that it was itself the pathway to heaven. Tyndale ridiculed this claim. No salvation could come from the Church, he said. Popes, cardinals and bishops differed only in name from the Pharisees and Antichrists who had taken Jesus in front of Pilate. ‘They do all things of a good zeal, they say, they love you so well,’ Tyndale warned, ‘that they had rather burn you than you should have fellowship with Christ.’

Good works flow naturally from faith. From lack of faith, he wrote in homely fashion, comes the man who looks to ‘buy as good cheap as he can, and sell as dear as he can, to raise the market of corn and victuals for his own vantage, without the respect of his neighbour …’. Not to help a brother or a neighbour was to rob Christ, for ‘every Christian is heir annexed with Christ’. And Christ was all: ‘Our Redeemer, Saviour, peace, atonement, and satisfaction to Godward for all the sin which they that repent … do,
have done, or shall do. So that if through fragility we fall a thousand times in a day, yet if we do repent again, we have always mercy laid up for us in store in Jesus Christ our Lord.’

Only the blood and merit of Christ can save. Without it, the reader was doomed, even ‘though thou hast a thousand holy candles about thee, a hundred tons of holy water, a ship-full of pardons, a cloth-sack full of friar’s coats, and all the ceremonies in the world, and all the good works, deservings, and merits of all the men in the world, be they, or were they, ever so holy’. All works are good that are done within the law of God. This includes pissing and breaking wind, for ‘trust me if either wind or water were stopped thou shouldest feel what a precious thing it were to do either of both, and what thanks ought to be given God therefore’. By the same token, he said, a kitchen page was as pleasing to God as an apostle: ‘if thou compare deed to deed there is a difference betwixt washing of dishes and preaching the word of God’, but ‘as touching to please God none at all’.

This held true for all his readers, and his description of them – ‘whether brewer baker tailor victualler merchant or husbandman’ – showed all too clearly to worried churchmen that Tyndale had indeed set his sights on the common man as a recipient of scripture.

He added that to pay a priest to pray for the dead was absurd, a statement that made a mockery of Monmouth’s claim that he had given Tyndale £10 to pray for the souls of his parents. ‘If thou give me £1000 to pray for thee, I am no more bound than I was before,’ Tyndale wrote. ‘I am bound to love the Turk with all my might and power – yea, and above my power – even from the ground of my heart, after the ensample that Christ loved me; neither to spare goods, body or life, to win him to Christ. And what can I do more for thee, if thou gavest me all the world?’

Tyndale was rightly confident that
Mammon
would share the fate of his Testament. Some would ask why he had written it, he
said, ‘inasmuch as they will burn it, seeing they burnt the gospel’. If that was God’s will, he welcomed it: ‘not more shall they do,’ he added, ‘if they burn me also’.

Tyndale was wrong, however, to presume that life would be made ‘joyful’ when its every aspect was referred to the Bible. The Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli was already creating the high-handed, snooping and self-righteous prototype of the Protestant pastor-prig of future caricature.

Zwingli had been elected priest of Zurich’s Great Minster a decade before, in 1518. He prided himself on studying the Greek and Latin philosophers ‘day and night’, believing that this toil ‘tames and perhaps extinguishes unchaste desires’. He preached at great length on the New Testament books, starting with Matthew and slowly working his way through the Acts and the Epistles. He accompanied his sermons with diatribes against papal superstition and vice, rebuking his congregation for their idleness, gluttony, rich clothing and suppression of the poor. This was not appreciated by all. Drunks mobbed his house and ‘threw stones, broke windows, shouted, scolded and raged …’.