Book of Fire (26 page)

A happiness floods through Tyndale’s stay in Hamburg. He adored the Bible, as God’s word, and it sparkled and refreshed him as writing, as a brilliant tale well told. ‘This is a book worthy to be read in day and night and never to be out of hands,’ he said of Deuteronomy. It was ‘easy also and light and a very pure gospel’ whose message is ‘a preaching of faith and love’, of deducing ‘the love to God out of faith, and the love of a man’s neighbour out of the love of God’. He found an utter freshness in the Bible. It was not musty, and it did not drone as the Vulgate did; it was a page-turner that danced and sang.

He loved both the Hebrew he was translating and the English he was writing. ‘The properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin,’ he wrote. ‘The manner of speaking is both one, so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into English word for word.’ Hebrew has a very simple sentence structure, which he caught in his translation. It coordinates clauses – ‘and … and … and’ – where Latin has a taste for complicated subordinate clauses. Where Hebrew flows into English, he said, ‘thou must seek a compass in the Latin’. Even when the right phrase was found in Latin, it was difficult to translate it ‘well-favouredly’ so
that ‘it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding’ of the English.

This lyrical joy sustained Tyndale, and saved him and his work from the dourness often bred by intense faith and moral certitude. A satirical pamphlet circulating while he was in Hamburg gave instructions on how to be Lutheran: ‘one should talk little, look sour, and not cut off one’s beard’. The portrait of Tyndale that hangs in Hertford College at Oxford shows such a man. He is dressed in black, with a black scholar’s cap above a pale high forehead; he has a yellow-blond beard and moustache, and an eyebrow is slightly raised with a glance of quizzical piety. This is a puritan, aware that he is one of God’s elect. But it is not Tyndale. It was painted after his death, by an anonymous artist, commissioned to produce an icon of a Protestant martyr. Beneath Tyndale’s hand is a Latin script that bears the propaganda message in translation:

To scatter Roman darkness by this light

The loss of land and life I’ll reckon slight.

More was sketched and painted from life by Hans Holbein the Younger, his face fine and energetic, but with a trace of cruel melancholy to the lips. We do not know the cast of Tyndale’s eyes, the set of his mouth; his profession made him a man of the shadows, and we know only, from his writing, that he was cantankerous, driven, and morally very self-assured, and that he was also lively, a wit and punster, and that he knew what it was to be happy.

While Tyndale was creating the English of the Old Testament, bigmouthed and less delicately phrased than the New, the king’s ‘great matter’ was sliding badly. Campeggio, having run out of excuses for delay, opened a legatine court with Wolsey to hear evidence over the marriage on 31 May 1529. Catherine appealed to Rome
and refused to recognise the court, but she attended the first hearing in the great hall of the monastery of the Black Friars in London. She flung herself on her knees, and pleaded with Henry to let their wedlock continue. ‘Sir, I beseech thee,’ she cried in her thick Spanish accent, ‘for all the loves that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice and right. Take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman and a stranger born of your dominion.’ She repeated, as she had to the cardinals, that the biblical constraints on brother’s wives did not apply to her, for she had come to Henry as a virgin. ‘And when ye had me at the first,’ she told the king, and the packed hall, ‘I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid, without touch of man …’

Henry raised her to her feet. After she had left the court in tears, he gave a public explanation of his actions. ‘As God is my witness, no fault in Catherine moved me,’ he said. His concern was only for the succession. His sons by Catherine were stillborn or had ‘died incontinent after they were born’. This was surely a punishment from God. The scriptures forbade a man to marry his brother’s widow, and England had need of a male heir. This was his only motive in seeking the annulment, he lied; he was not in court ‘for any carnal concupiscence or mislike of the Queen’s person or age, with whom I could be well content to continue during my life if our marriage might stand within God’s laws’.

Tyndale was one of very few people to believe the king’s explanation. Passion for Anne Boleyn led Henry by the nose, a fact almost universally recognised. It was overwhelmingly in Tyndale’s interest to attach himself to the king’s cause. To do so was to submit to royal authority, the core dogma of
Obedience
. It would strike a blow at Rome, where the unhappy pope, compelled by Charles V to deny Henry his wish, was muttering that it was better ‘for the wealth of Christendom if the Queen were in her grave’. It would bring the translator closer to Anne Boleyn, already an admirer of his work. And, of course, it would ingratiate him
with the one man powerful enough in his own right to institute reform and license the English Bible.

No obvious biblical constraint prevented Tyndale from approving of the annulment. As so often, the Bible had two conflicting views on the relevent subject of marriage to a brother’s widow. Tyndale translated both passages during 1529. Leviticus forecast that Henry would have no heir if he married dead Arthur’s wife. ‘If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing,’ Tyndale translated the verse, ‘he hath uncovered his brother’s secrets, and shall die childless’. Deuteronomy claimed quite the reverse: ‘When brethren dwell together and one of them die and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not be given out unto a stranger: but her brother in law shall go in unto her and take her to wife and marry her.’

Tyndale took the king at face value. Henry had said that it was the scriptures alone that made him wish to cast off his wife of twenty years. Tyndale found that the scriptures did not in fact compel him to do so. Therefore the marriage should continue. Tyndale had a touching and gentle respect for married love. It was not that of a naïve bachelor. He was aware of sex, and thought it a pleasure ordained by God. ‘Moreover as concerninge the acte of Matrimonye,’ he wrote, ‘as when thou wilt eate, thou blessest god and receavest thy dayle food of his hande … and knowelegest that it is his gyfte, and thankest him, belevynge his worde, that he hath creted it for thee to receave with thanks …’ Henry claimed that he still loved Catherine; he should stay with her, then, Tyndale wrote, for marriage was a divine gift: ‘Now is thy worke thorow this fayth and theankes pleasaunt and acceptable in the syght of God.’

Predictably, this verdict infuriated the king. The career of another reformer, Thomas Cranmer, shows how far Tyndale might have progressed with a more sanguine view of Henry’s motives. In the summer of 1529, as an obscure fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Thomas Cranmer suggested that the king should
canvass the universities of England and Europe for a judgement on the marriage. This proposal ingeniously bypassed Rome and the legatine court. Cranmer soon found himself a chaplain in the household of Anne Boleyn’s father, employed in writing out his opinion of the marriage, a stepping stone on his way to becoming archbishop of Canterbury.

Where Cranmer rose, Wolsey subsided, dragged down by his monarch’s unfulfilled lust. The cardinal pleaded with Campeggio to give him the decretal bull that authorised the annulment. Campeggio told him on 24 June that the pope had written to forbid its use. ‘That will be my ruin!’ Wolsey cried. At the beginning of July, fearful of Henry’s ‘inconceivable anxiety’, the cardinal pleaded personally with the queen to compromise. ‘Will any Englishman counsel or be friendly unto me against the King’s pleasure?’ she replied.

Campeggio proved a fine procrastinator. He was expected to announce his decision on the case in late July. These hopes were premature. He had already announced that he intended to adjourn the court for the summer, in keeping with the summer break enjoyed by the papal curia in Rome. On 17 July, the pope succumbed to pressure from Charles V and revoked Campeggio’s legatine commission. Henry, knowing nothing of this, attended the court on 23 July. Campeggio announced that he had discussed matters with the pope, that no hasty decision could be made, and that he was returning to Rome and adjourning the case indefinitely. Dark red with anger, Henry stamped from the hall. ‘By the mass,’ the duke of Suffolk called from the gallery, ‘it was never merry in England whilst we had cardinals amongst us!’

He meant Wolsey as well as Campeggio. The latter at once left London for Rome. As he sailed from Dover, word reached England that the pope had signed a treaty with the emperor that assured his freedom, on the condition that he never agree to the annulment unless Catherine wished it.

Wolsey’s fate was sealed. Anne Boleyn accompanied Henry on a royal progress in August, meandering through Essex, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. She complained that, through Wolsey, her youth was passing without Henry being permitted to enjoy it.

In that same month of August, the three leading Tyndale-hunters, More, Tunstall and Hackett, were in the Low Countries to negotiate a treaty at Cambra, tantalisingly close to the illegal presses of Antwerp. Tunstall tried to turn this to his advantage, so Edward Hall recounted in his
Chronicle
a few years later, by bulk buying New Testaments for burning at St Paul’s. He contacted Augustine Packington, a London mercer who knew Antwerp well and who was sympathetic to Tyndale, but pretended otherwise.

Tunstall said that he would buy all available copies at a handsome rate. Packington assured the bishop that he was in contact with ‘the Dutchmen and strayngers that have bought them of Tyndale, and have them here to sell’; he promised him that he should have ‘every boke of them, that is imprynted and is here unsold’. Tunstall was delighted – he felt that ‘he had God by the toe, when indeed he had (as after he thought) the devil by the fist’ – and commissioned Packington to ship the stock to London for a grand burning.

Packington went direct to Tyndale. ‘Willyam, I knowe thou art a poor man, and hast a hepe of newe Testamentes, and bokes by thee, for the whiche thou hast bothe indaungered thy frendes, and beggered theyself,’ the merchant told him. ‘I haue now gotten thee a Merchaunt, whiche with ready money shall dispatche thee of all that thou hast, if you thinke it so proffitable for your self.’

Tyndale asked who the merchant was. Packington told him that it was the bishop of London.

‘O that it is because he will burne them,’ Tyndale said. ‘I am the gladder, for I shall get money of hym for these bokes, to bring
myself out of debt, and the whole worlde shall cry out upon the burning of Goddes worde. And the overplus of the money, that shall remain to me, shall make me more studious, to correct the said Testament, and so newly to Imprint the same once again.’

Newly printed Testaments indeed soon came ‘thick and threefold over into England’. Tunstall sent for Packington for an explanation. ‘Surely, I bought alle there was to be had, but I perceive they haue prynted more since,’ Packington explained. ‘I see it will never be better so long as they have letters and presses. Wherefore you were beste to buy the presses too, and so ye shall be sure.’ At this, Hall recorded, the bishop smiled, and so the matter ended.

It is, of course, a suspiciously neat twist that Tunstall should thus have financed Tyndale’s future projects – ‘the bishop had the bokes, Packyngton had the thankes, and Tyndale had the money’, Hall concluded – and it is highly unlikely that Tyndale was himself in Antwerp in August. It is probable that he did not leave Hamburg until later in the year, though, as ever with our skilful fugitive, this is no more than a best guess.

Even if Packington did not get his copies directly from Tyndale, but through van Hoochstraten or the pirate printer van Endhoven, Tunstall is known to have bought Tyndale Testaments for burning in London, and there is no reason why he should not have done so again in Antwerp. When More later arrested the Testament smuggler George Constantine, he brought him to his house in Chelsea and interrogated him over Tyndale’s source of funds. The scene was described by Foxe.

‘Constantine, I would have thee plain with me in one thing that I will ask, and I promise thee I will shew thee favour in all other things wherof thou art accused,’ More said. ‘There is, beyond the sea, Tyndale … and a great many more of you. I know they cannot live without help. There are some that help and succour them with money, and thou being one of them hadst thy part
thereof and therefore knowest from whence it came. I pray thee tell me, who be they that help them thus?’

‘My lord,’ Constantine replied. ‘It is the Bishop of London that hath holpen us, for he hath bestowed among us a great deal of money upon the Testaments to burn them. And that hath been, and yet is, our only succour and comfort.’

‘Now by my troth,’ More exclaimed, ‘I think even the same, for so much I told the Bishop before he went about it.’

The fall of Wolsey was now imminent. In October, Henry had him charged with
praemunire
, the anti-clerical catch-all of falling under the influence of a foreign power, the papacy. Wolsey surrendered the Great Seal of his office on 18 October 1529. He wept in front of his household, telling his servants that he felt like an early Christian martyr. ‘If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king,’ he said, ‘He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’

Tyndale’s slavering ‘Wolfsee’ was gone, but his departure added to the exile’s perils. The cardinal was humane and compassionate. Three condemned men and women with halters around their necks had been led into Westminster Hall in the king’s presence after anti-foreigner riots in London a decade before. Four had already been hung, drawn and quartered, and seven hanged. Wolsey ‘besought his Majesty most earnestly’ to grant the survivors grace, and when Henry at length agreed, Wolsey announced it to them with tears of relief flooding down his face, as they took off their halters and flung them in the air, jumping ‘for extreme joy’.