Book of Fire (30 page)

More was unsure where Tyndale’s Testaments were coming from; indeed, with the pirate editions, Tyndale himself cannot have been certain. Most doubtless came from Antwerp, but More did not rule out the possibility that some were being printed in England. He knew that Tyndale needed funds, for printing, for messengers and books and his daily life, and that the people supplying the money were most likely to be English sympathisers. Petite was a wealthy man, and More identified him as a Tyndale benefactor who had helped with printing operations.

More raided Petite’s Quay in the early winter of 1530, with a lieutenant and armed guards, startling Lucy Petite who ‘whypped in haste’ to warn her husband – ‘come, come, my lorde chawncelor ys at the dore, and wolde speake with yow’. The house was searched, while Petite attended to More with ‘greate curtesy, thankyng hym that it wold please his lordship to visitt hym in his own poore howse’.

A copy of Tyndale’s New Testament ‘laye undernethe mr Petite’s desk’ as More searched his room, ‘yet the chawncelor saw it not, by what meanes God knoweth …’. But Petite was not to escape so lightly.

As they were parting at the door, More asked him: ‘Ye say ye have none of these newe bookes?’

‘Your lordship sawe my bookes and my closett.’

‘Yet, ye must go with Mr Lieutenante,’ More said, and turned to the officer. ‘Take hym to yow.’

Petite was led away to the Tower, where More had his prisoner ‘layd in a doungeone apon a padd of strawe, in close prison’. It was only ‘after longe sute and dayly teares’ that Lucy Petite persuaded the chancellor to allow her husband the use of a bed.

An informant, described as ‘a lytle old preest’, was said to have made a statement incriminating Petite. In it, the priest claimed that Petite ‘hadd Tyndale’s testamente in Englyshe, and dyd helpe hym and suche other to puyblish theyre hertycall bookes in Englyshe’. Petite’s health was undermined in prison – he ‘caght hys dethe by so nawghty harbor of the lord chawncelor’ – before he was allowed to face his accuser. The priest broke down, however, and withdrew his evidence: ‘Mr Petite, I never saw yow afore this tyme; how should I then be able to accuse you?’

Petite could not be prosecuted without this key witness, and More had little option but to release him. Petite emerged from prison a sick man, with a ‘payne came over his cheste lyke a barre of yron’. He died two years later, and More’s wrath pursued him to
the churchyard, where ‘preestes powred sope ashes upon hys grave, affirmyng that God wold not suffer grasse to grow upon suchye an heretyckes grave’.

As we shall see, evangelicals claimed that More broke the law in his treatment of others whom he suspected of dealing or sympathising with Tyndale. In several cases, as with Philips, he illegally detained them at his house in Chelsea.

He was rightly proud of his estate. His friend Erasmus said that it was ‘neither mean nor subject to envy, yet magnificent and commodious enough’. That More should have taken his work home with him, as it were, and imprison heretics in the bosom of his family, shows the extent of his obsession. Chelsea was very much a family home. He often had there with him his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, and his eleven grandchildren; Hans Holbein had rooms there for many months while painting his fine portraits of the family, and scholars, actors, divines and, on occasion, the king dined and debated at what Erasmus described as More’s little ‘Plato’s Academy’ in Chelsea.

The property ran from the present King’s Road to the Thames, bordered by Beaufort Street to the west and Old Church Street to the east. The large gardens had apple trees, roses and a collection of herbs. The gatehouse had a flat lead roof, which More would climb for the views across the river to the fields of Battersea and the line of the Clapham hills. A landing stage allowed him to use his barge to travel to Westminster at any state of the tide.

He had a gallery, library and chapel built. On Fridays, when he had time, he retired to these buildings to spend the day in meditation and prayer. He assembled the family in the chapel morning and evening, to recite prayers and psalms, and he heard mass daily. He attended Chelsea Church by the river on Sundays. He paid for its communion plate, and for the building of its south aisle, and he
sang in the choir, wearing a surplice like a common singing-man. The duke of Norfolk, visiting to dine with him during his chancellorship, was shocked to find him wearing his surplice. ‘God’s body, my lord chancellor!’ he cried. ‘What! A parish clerk! A parish clerk! You dishonour the king and his office.’ More replied that his king could not be offended that he was serving his other master, God. Animals were a passion. Erasmus recalled that More kept many varieties of birds, and an ape, a fox, a weasel and a ferret in a little menagerie. He had different breeds of dog, and sat with his favourites on the gatehouse.

He was, of course, less fond of heretics. The garden had a ‘tree of Troth’ which More used as a whipping post. The porters’ lodge in the gatehouse was fitted out with stocks, and with chains and fetters, to pinion suspects while he interrogated them.

More said that the flogging charges were the invention of a Cambridge book dealer, Segar Nicholson, whom he arrested and kept in his house for four or five days in 1530 for selling banned books by Tyndale and others. Nicholson claimed that he had been whipped at the tree in the garden, and that cords had been wound round his head and tightened until he fainted. More denied it. Nicholson ‘neuer hadde eyther bodely harme done hym,’ More wrote, ‘or fowle worde spoken hym whyle he was in myne house’. He added that Tyndale claimed that while Nicholson was being beaten, ‘I spyed a little purse of hys hangynge at his doublette … and put it in my bosome’; More said that he had never taken a groat – 4d – ‘by all the theuys, murderers and heretykes that euer came in my handes’.

He claimed that only two heretics had been flogged at his orders. One was a boy in his service who came from a heretical family – the father had known George Joye – and who had denied the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. ‘I caused a servant of mine to stripe him like a child before mine household,’ More wrote, ‘for amendment of himself and example of such other.’

The other was a local lunatic, ‘which after that he had fallen into the frantic heresies, fell soon after into plain open frenzy beside,’ More wrote mockingly; the man would creep up behind a woman in church, and lift up her skirts and throw them over her head. He was pointed out to More as he passed the Chelsea house. The chancellor had him seized, tied to the garden tree and publicly flogged. ‘They striped him with rods until he waxed weary and somewhat longer,’ More wrote with evident self-satisfaction.

He agreed that he had often sentenced men to be flogged for robbery, murder, or ‘sacrilege in church, with carrying away the pyx with the blessed sacrament, or villainously casting it out’. But he denied that he had commanded any other heretics to be flogged, ‘notwithstanding also that heretics be yet much worse than all they’.

This stretches the truth. Evangelicals often made off with the communion bread, or ground it underfoot, or committed other ‘sacrilege in church’ in protest against Catholic dogma. We shall see that three suspects close to Tyndale were flogged or racked in More’s presence, that the use of the stocks in Chelsea amounted to torture, and that More made free with threats of violence. He never denied that he held prisoners at Chelsea, ‘for suretie’; rather, he was proud of it.

In April 1530, More introduced a bill dealing with beggars and vagabonds. As a writer, in
Utopia
he had denounced cruelty and punishment as a way of dealing with vagrancy. As lord chancellor, he condemned any healthy man or woman found outside his native parish, who had no licence to beg or proof of how he earned his living, to be stripped naked, tied to a cart-tail and whipped publicly through the streets ‘till his body be bloody by reason of such whipping’.

He acted to extend his powers to punish Tyndale’s readers. The Testament, and now the Pentateuch, were circulating at a growing
pace. Bishop Nix at Norwich was alarmed to hear rumours that the king secretly welcomed the success of the books. He therefore wrote to Henry to warn him that, unless these stories were scotched by a royal proclamation, his diocese would fall to the reformers, its long coastline being so handy to the smugglers across the North Sea.

Henry summoned a conclave of thirty bishops and divines to meet at Westminster. More attended as the only layman, and his ‘dylygent and longe consyderacyon’ were praised by the grateful clergy. On 24 May, Archbishop Warham and the others issued a Public Instrument for the ‘abolishing of the Scripture and other Books to be read in English’. It listed the ‘Heresies and Errors collected by the Bishops out of the Book of Tyndale named
The Wicked Mammon
’. The first was the reformers’ touchstone – ‘Faith only justifieth’ – but the others were distortions. Tyndale was quoted as saying, for example, that ‘Christ with all his works did not deserve heaven’; this apparently shocking claim was achieved by hiding half of Tyndale’s sentence, for what he actually wrote in
Mammon
was: ‘Christ did not deserve heaven (for that was his already).’

Three or four of the divines at the conclave favoured the publishing of an English Bible. Word reached Tyndale at Antwerp that More made sure that they were overruled. The bishops had ‘disputed before the king’s grace that it [translating] is perilous and not meet,’ Tyndale noted, ‘where Master More was their special orator, to feign lies for their purpose.’ The conclave’s decision was given visible force by the bishop of London, who caused ‘all his New Testaments which he had brought, with many other books, to be brought into Paul’s churchyard in London, and there openly burned …’.

The royal proclamation was printed in June. More’s hand can be seen in its linking of heresy and treason. The king condemned
Mammon
and
Obedience
and other ‘blasphemous and pestiferous
English books’, adding that they had been brought into the realm for the purpose of sedition and revolt. Henry could hardly denounce his native tongue or the scriptures, and he paid lip service to the notion of an English Bible. He dealt first with Tyndale’s work. He demanded that his people abandon ‘all perverse, erroneous and seditious opinions, with the New Testament and the Old, now being in print’. Then, and only then, would he allow a translation to be made by ‘great, learned and catholic persons’. Henry warned that, in the meantime, all books of scripture in English were to be surrendered to the bishops’ officers within fifteen days.

By using a proclamation to ban heretical books, and by denouncing Tyndale’s work as ‘
seditiosa dogmata
’, so that the offence of ownership included sedition, More was able to deal with offenders personally in the Star Chamber. The
camera stellata
, a great chamber at Westminster with a starred ceiling, housed the king’s council when it sat as a judicial tribunal to prevent abuses of the courts and to hear cases of public disorder, including riot, libel and sedition. More, as chancellor, was able to deal with offenders personally, bypassing the bishops’ courts. He had several suspect booksellers arrested in the summer of 1530. Some he sent to the Tower, others he fined. He ordered Thomas Patner, for example, a London merchant, to be held in the Fleet prison on suspicion of distributing Tyndale’s Testaments. Patner was eventually released for lack of evidence, only to be rearrested again on the instructions of Bishop Stokesley. A servant of Patner then drafted a petition to lay before parliament to ask for his master’s release. When More heard of this, he warned the servant that he would prosecute him for contempt of court as a ‘frivolous suitor’ if he went ahead with the petition. Patner remained in prison throughout More’s chancellorship.

More was fascinated by the game of heretic hunting. He perfected a web of spies and informers in London, and it excited him
to know intimate details of those he had watched. He knew, for example, that a heretic met friends in secret ‘at the sygne of the botell at Botolfes Wharfe’. This was an inn near London Bridge. He knew that the landlady, the ‘good wyfe of the botell of Botolphs’, walked wth a limp; he knew, too, that she had allowed two runaway nuns to sleep ‘in an hygh garet’ of the inn, smuggling in two men to lie with them. She was a garrulous woman, ‘nat tong tayed’; he knew that because ‘I have herd her talke my selfe’. He was aware that the good spy must be meticulous in his descriptions. He noted that the heretic living at Botolph’s Wharf had been seen ‘in a merchaunts gowne wyth a redde Myllayne bonet’.

A hothouse of fear and suspicion was thus created. As well as the glamorous suspects taken to the house at Chelsea, arrests took place at a humble village level. One Simon Wisdom of Burford was found with ‘three bookes in English, one was the gospels in English, another was the psalter, the third was the Sum of the Holy Scripture in English’. A couple, John and Cecily Eaton, were denounced by ‘certain in the parish’ to John Longland, the fierce bishop of Lincoln, because they did not look up when the Host was raised during the sacrament, and for saying in a butcher’s house when the church bells were rung, ‘What a clampering of bells is here!’ John Eaton was found to have ‘Jesus’s Gospels in English’. One James Algar had insulted the pope by following the biblical reference ‘Thou art Peter’ with another: ‘Get thee after me Satan.’

Occasionally, as in 1530, one of the bigger fry was caught. ‘Christopher, a Dutchman of Antwerp’ was arrested ‘for selling certain New Testaments in English to John Row aforesaid bookbinder, was put in prison at Westminster and there died’. This unfortunate was Christoffel van Ruremund, who was running unbound pirate copies of Tyndale into England. More had to wait for more senior men, but he had a stroke of good fortune with the arch-heretic in Antwerp.

Tyndale, with the best of intentions, was engaged in the high-risk enterprise of further irritating Henry VIII.

Over the summer of 1530, Tyndale was busy on a work he called
The Practice of Prelates
. It was printed in the late summer of that year. The false ‘Hans Luft’ colophon did not give a month of publication. Its main thrust was wholly favourable to the king and disturbing to the chancellor. Tyndale took a gallop through history to show how the papal lust for power had corrupted the Church and the clergy, and led to the humiliation of princes and the misery and ruin of the laity.