Book of Fire (24 page)
Thomas More, and Tunstall and Wolsey, found Tyndale’s
Obedience
to be every bit as alarming as his Testament. It was, More wrote, ‘a holy book of disobedience’, one ‘whereby we were taught to disobey Christ’s holy catholic church’. The efforts to track down its author continued.
On the Continent, meanwhile, Hackett was having little luck with Richard Herman. From his prison cell in Antwerp, the bookseller demanded to be given the names of the Lutherans whom he was supposed to have succoured, and the dates and places where
he had done so. The ambassador wrote a stream of letters to Wolsey, pleading to be given some hard evidence that he could produce in court. It was not until 22 January 1529 that the prosecution supplied names: ‘the one was named Willem Tandeloo’, they claimed, and the other was ‘the son of Petit Roy, being a runaway monk of the observant order’. Roye’s father, Petit Roy, had been born in Antwerp but had later moved to London, where he had been ‘denizened’, or given English nationality.
A pair of names, with no other detail, hardly made a case. Herman petitioned Charles V for release, on the grounds that the Testaments had no obvious Lutheran content, and that they had done no harm within the emperor’s realm since they had been shipped directly to England. He testified that ‘a merchant out of Germany sent to the petitioner certain New Testaments in English without any gloss which books the petitioner received, and sold them to a merchant out of England, and the latter conveyed them over to England’.
Herman was duly released on 5 February 1529. He was, however, tainted with the heretic’s brush. He was expelled from the English House in Antwerp, at the instigation of Hackett or Style, and fell on hard times. Anne Boleyn remembered him when she became queen, as we shall see, asking that he be readmitted to the House after the ‘great hurt and hindrance’ he had suffered on behalf of the English Testament.
West had by now returned to his monastery at Greenwich, but he still kept an ear to the ground. In December 1528, he heard that Roye had sailed secretly to England to see his mother at Westminster. The tip came to nothing, but in February 1529 he asked for a meeting with Wolsey to urge the cardinal to allow him to return to Germany, since ‘the tyme drawyth nere of the Frankford Markte’, and he half hoped to seize Tyndale at the Fair. Frankfurt lay in the diocese of Mainz, and a letter was drafted calling on the bishop of Mainz to arrest and hand over ‘William
Roye and William Hutchyns, otherwise Tendalle, traitors and heretics’.
It is uncertain whether West set off for Frankfurt, or whether the hunt at the book fair was left to Rinck and the bishop of Mainz. In any event, they drew a blank. West was in England in June, searching in East Anglia for Roye and a red-haired man, whom he thought to be Barlow. A schoolmaster from Yarmouth told West that he had spoken and drunk with Roye at ‘Lestoe’, or Lowestoft. It was difficult to look for a man whose face was a blank, a fact that must have helped Tyndale to stay out of the clutches of West and the others. But the schoolmaster had good sight of Roye, and he told West ‘the features and secret marks of his face, the manner of his speaking, his apparel, and how he does speak all manner of languages’. West followed the fugitive’s tracks to ‘Attellbryge’, or Aldeburgh, but found that ‘Roye and the other took ship for Newcastle’. West told Wolsey that he would try to follow – ‘great as the labour is, we endure it for Christ’s sake’ – provided that the cardinal sent him funds. But from here both West and Roye disappear from sight. No more is heard of them, except for a note in Foxe that said that Roye was burnt in Portugal in 1531.
In fact, Tyndale had left Antwerp for Hamburg in December 1528 or early in the New Year. He was seeking a quiet place to complete his translation of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. Worry over those searching for him may also have prompted him to move. He had already completed the translation of Deuteronomy when he sailed for Hamburg. It proved a wasted effort. His ship was caught in a winter gale and wrecked on the Dutch coast. He lost all his books and manuscripts, but he arrived at Margaret von Emerson’s house in Hamburg to restart work on the five books of Moses. Thomas More was also writing furiously. Tunstall invited him in the late winter of 1528 to defend the Church against ‘certain sons of iniquity’ who were ‘trying to
infect the land with heresy’ by translating and printing Lutheran books. The bishop told More that he feared that the Catholic faith would ‘perish utterly’ unless ‘good and learned men’ met the danger by ‘quickly putting forth sound books in the vernacular on the catholic side’. He urged More to do this ‘holy work’ himself, ‘since you, dearest brother, are distinguished as a second Demosthenes in our native language as well as in Latin’. Tunstall gave More a special licence to read heretical works, some of which he enclosed with his letter. ‘I am sending you their mad incantations in our tongue along with some of Luther’s books,’ he wrote, so that ‘you will understand more easily in what hiding places these twisting serpents lurk.’ In his Chelsea house, More began writing
A Dialogue Concerning Heresies
, an account of ‘thyngys touchyng the pestylent secte of Luther and Tyndale’. It became known as his
Dialogue Concerning Tyndale
, for Tyndale, a ‘very treasury and wellspring of wickedness’, was its main concern.
A great feud, that would consume five years and three quarters of a million words, was under way.
M
ore was now writing his first book in English, but he used a Latin tag –
simplicibus et ideotis hominibus
, the ordinary simple soul – to describe the readers he wished to warn of the evils of the doctrine of ‘Luther and Tyndale, by the one begun in Saxony and by the other laboured to be brought into England’.
A Dialogue Concerning Heresies
was in four books, and its author, fully absorbed by the law and politics in the day, drove himself into the early hours to complete it by night. A man must ‘wryte by candellyght whyle he were halfe a slepe’ if the need were urgent enough, More said, and nothing was more pressing than the war against heretics. Exhaustion did not drain the venom from his onslaught.
He described Tyndale as ‘a hell-hound in the kenel of the dyuy’ who discharged blasphemies ‘out of his brutyshe bestely mouth’, and a ‘drowsy drudge’ who ‘hath drunken depe in the dyuy’s dregges’. When his anger courses directly from his heart on to the page, More’s other facets – the cool and temperate lawyer, the humanist author of
Utopia
, the discreet diplomat, the measured politician, the courtly servant of the king – are eaten up by his
hatred, and vanish. He claimed that Tyndale was so full of evil, so crammed with pus like a boil in a biblical plague, that he must burst; but this also describes the malice that More himself bore Tyndale. His enemy ‘is the beast who teaches vice, a forewalker of Antichrist, a devil’s limb’, More scribbled. ‘He sheweth himself so puffed up with the poison of pride, malice and evil, that it is more than a marvel that the skin can hold together.’
The book’s purpose was clear from one of its marginal notes, which read with Tyndale-like brevity: ‘The Lutherans are the worst heretics that ever sprang in Christ’s church.’ More cast the book in the humanist style made fashionable by Erasmus of a dialogue between the author and ‘the Messenger’, a young man, bright and ‘nothynge tonged tayed’, who knows his Tyndale and who has fallen among Lutherans at university. The Messenger scorns learning, and apes Tyndale, saying that logic is mere ‘babbling’ since man ‘hath no light but of holy scripture … which he said was learning enough for a Christian man’.
More chats to him in the study of his Chelsea house, and slowly persuades him to stay within the ‘comen fayth and byleve of the ole chyrche’. Doctrinal questions, of the sacraments, pilgrimages, images, relics, are treated as individual rounds in the contest between them, all of which are won by More as he easily outpoints his opponent. More’s arguments are, in their essence, those of Pope Nicholas. The Church was founded by the apostles, he says. It is a visible and majestic body, whose traditions date back fifteen hundred years, and which stands for order and stability. Its decisions are blessed by time and common beliefs, and ‘so comen downe to our dayes by contynually successyon’. Miracles and relics and pilgrimages reinforce its divine purpose.
There had been heretics before, of course, who had ‘lefte the common fayth of ye catholyke chyrche preferrynge theyr owne gay gloses.’ But More said that the times were now more dangerous than ever. Modern heretics – he referred to ‘new named bretherne’,
‘evangelycall fraternyte’, ‘our evangelycall Englysshe heretykes’ – had become too pernicious to be left unburnt. They mocked the mass, denied the sacraments, scorned the Eucharist and insulted the saints; they wished to destroy the Church and replace it with their own vileness. Even their interest in the Bible condemned them. ‘Of all wretches,’ More wrote, ‘worst shall he walk that, forcing [caring] little of the faith of Christ’s church, cometh to the scripture of God, to look and try therein whether the church believe aright or not.’
More flew at their immorality. The Messenger remarks that ‘it would do well that priests should have wives’. This sparks off a sentence so long and full of fury that it is almost unreadable: ‘For Tyndall [sic] (whose books be nothing else in effect but the worst heresies picked out of Luther’s works and Luther’s worst words translated by Tyndall and put forth in Tyndall’s own name) doth in his frantic book of obedience (wherein he raileth at large against all peoples, against all kings, against all prelates, all priests, all religious, all the laws, all the saints, against the sacraments of Christ’s church, against all virtuous works, against divine service, and finally against all things in effect that good is) in that book I say Tyndall holdeth that priests must have wives.’
He relied on sarcasm to mock the case for married priests. For ‘this fifteen hundred years’, he said, none had the ‘wit or grace to perceive that great special commandment’ until God had revealed ‘this high secret mystery to these two godly creatuyres Luther and Tyndall’. This was done, he said, lest the ‘holy friar’, Luther, ‘should have lost his marriage of that holy nun, and Tyndale [sic] that good marriage that I think him toward …’. There is no evidence that Tyndale considered marriage, although we have seen that he wrote of it with striking gentleness. But many reformers had wives, some ex-nuns like Katherine Luther, and envy may have mingled with More’s spleen when he wrote of them. He thought it to be a personal failing in himself that his yearning for
a wife had outweighed his youthful desires to become a priest. In his own eyes, he was a failed celibate and a failed clergyman, and he seemed specially tormented that these heretics should have their cake and eat it, as it were, by combining ordination and matrimony. Lutheran ‘harlots’ were turning the Church into a brothel, he said. He wrote savagely of Luther’s ‘open lyvyng in lechery wyth his lewd lemman the nun’.
Tyndale was worse. He had ‘sucked out the most poison he could find’ in Luther’s books, and ‘in many things far passed his master’, running so madly with malice that he ‘fareth as though he heard not his own voice’. More claimed that Tyndale’s translation was ‘too bad to be amended’. The faults were so many, and so spread throughout the Testament, that it should be cast aside, as it ‘were as soon done to weave a new web of cloth as to sew up every hole in a net’. He said that Tyndale had ‘wilfully mistranslated’ the scripture and deceived ‘blind unlearned people’ by ‘teaching what he knows to be false’.
The mistranslation claim was bogus. More repeated the arguments over ‘congregation’, ‘senior’, ‘love’ and ‘repent’ for church, priest, charity and penance. ‘These names in an English tongue neither express the thing he meant by them,’ he wrote, ‘and also there appeareth that he had a mischievous mind in the change.’ In particular, More said, ‘senior’ in English ‘signifieth nothing at all, but is a French word used in English more than half in mockery’. Tyndale agreed to this when he wrote his
Answer to More.
‘Of a truth senior is no very good English, though senior and junior be used in the universities,’ he wrote, ‘but there came no better word in my mind at that time.’ Howbeit, he said, ‘I spied my fault since, long ere Mr More told it me, and have mended it in all works which since I made, and call it an
elder
.’
Other than this dispute, More made little real attempt to justify the claim of inaccuracy. It was as well, for when he came himself to translate a chapter of the New Testament, his meaning was
identical to Tyndale’s. More translated John 6 in his polemic
The Answer to a Poisoned Book
, written in 1533 to oppose an unsigned tract on the sacraments,
The Souper of the Lorde
. More used the chapter as proof that the communion bread is the literal body of Christ. The nub of the argument is in verse fifty-one, which More translated as: ‘and the bread which I shall give is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world’. Tyndale’s translation differs only in that he uses ‘will’ instead of ‘shall’: ‘and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world’. The other differences between them in the chapter are also matters of style and not of sense. Tyndale tends to use Anglo-Saxon words in preference to Latin. He has ‘
came down from
’ and ‘
wilderness
’ where More has ‘
descended
’ and ‘
desert
’. Tyndale reads more fluently than More, and seems less dated. ‘The Jews then murmured at him,’ he starts verse forty-one, ‘because he said: I am that bread which is come down from heaven.’ More writes, awkwardly: ‘The Jews murmured therefore of that that he had said: I am the lively bread that am descended from heaven.’
It may not be fair to judge More’s translation skills on this single piece of work, but it confirms that More had no right to query Tyndale’s accuracy or skill with language, and it raises its own brutal question. If More could render John 6 into English for his readers, how could he press for Tyndale’s Testament and its readers to be burnt? Why did he refer to them, as he did in his
Answer
, as a ‘corrupt canker’ whom honest folk should ‘not so mych as byd good spede or good morow whane we mete them’?
