Book of Fire (36 page)
Certainly, More was aware of the fugitive’s movements. He
warned ‘all good crysten folke … to forbere and etsyew hys company’. He had also unearthed the details of Vaughan’s secret mission to Tyndale, again through Constantine, and he added a chilling rider about Vaughan. ‘For that Englishman which shall be found to be familiar with him there,’ he warned, ‘may thereby bring himself in suspicion of heresy, and haply hear thereof at his returning hither.’ It appears from this that More had agents watching Vaughan in Antwerp; they were instructed to inform on any who fraternised with him.
Vaughan wrote to Thomas Cromwell in a state of considerable fear on 14 November 1531. He reported that he had been informed that Constantine ‘hath of late declared certain things against me before my lord chancellor’. He begged Cromwell to find out what Constantine had betrayed. ‘Peradventure he hath declared that I spake with Tyndale,’ he said. ‘If so he have done, what hath he herein declared, that I myself have not signified to the king’s highness?’
On 9 December, three days after Constantine had arrived back in Antwerp, spreading a tale of woe about his ordeal, Vaughan again wrote to Cromwell. He said that, if the fugitive had accused him of being a Lutheran, ‘I do not thereat marvel’. He had been ‘credibly informed’ that More, in his examination ‘of the said George and all other men’, showed ‘evident and clear desire in his countenance and behaviour to hear something of me, whereby an occasion of evil might be fastened against me.’ As well as that, he said, George was afflicted by the ‘imminent peril and danger wherein he was, abiding prisoner in my lord’s house’, and was also ‘vehemently stirred’ with the remembrance of his poor wife in Antwerp, ‘remaining here desperate, bewashed with continual tears and pinched with hourly sorrow …’
The result of the pressure piled on Constantine in Chelsea, Vaughan said, had brought him ‘to accuse whom they had longed for, rather than to be tied by the leg with a cold and heavy iron like a beast …’. Such perils and fears were enough to ‘make a son
forget the father which gat him’, and to say whatever the lord chancellor wished him to. Vaughan begged that the king should put a stop to these ‘tortures and punishments’, because they forced his subjects to flee the realm and to ‘inhabit strange regions’ where their faults multiplied, ‘so that in the end it shall cause the sect to wax greater’. Although he begged that the king ‘shall fatherly and lovingly reform the clergy of his realm, Vaughan claimed that ‘whatsoever the world babble of me, that I am neither Lutheran nor yet Tyndalin’.
He wrote of the ‘dangerous occupations’ of being a secret agent. His conversation had to be that of the men he was with; ‘among Christians I have been a Christian, among Jews like to them, among Lutherans, a Lutheran also’. Yet, for all his loyalty to the king, he complained, ‘I hear everywhere how diligently my lord chancellor inquireth of all those he examineth in cases of heresy, for me – what are my manners, my opinion, my conversation, my faith.’ Why did More take such pains, he asked. What thought he to hear? He was a hunted man, like Tyndale, ‘suspected above all men’; he was weary, and he wanted no more than that ‘I might come to England, and live in a corner of the realm for the residue of my short time …’.
Vaughan wrote to Cromwell once more, on 30 December 1531. He repeated that more Lutherans, both men and women, were fleeing England for fear of punishment. He warned that ‘by this means it is likely that new Tyndales shall spring, or worse than he’. He refused to inform on them – ‘whose persons nor names I know not nor will know’ – and said that he was ‘utterly determined from henceforth never to intermeddle, or to have any communication with any one of them’. With that, this most decent of spies quit the Tyndale case for good.
More denied that Constantine had been tortured. He said that his prisoner had merely been set in the stocks, and was not struck so
much as a tap on the forehead. It was obviously in Constantine’s interests to claim that he had been tortured, as an excuse for his betrayals, but More is probably accurate in this case, and Constantine turned King’s Evidence under the threat of the stake rather than actual torture.
Others were less fortunate. Richard Bayfield was a leading trader in the Testaments and the other Tyndale books, a Cambridge graduate and a former Benedictine monk at Bury St Edmunds, who had taken up evangelical ideas. He had abjured in front of Tunstall in 1528, thus exposing himself to the fire if he lapsed, and had then fled to the Low Countries. Here, he helped Tyndale and John Frith, the survivor of the Oxford fish cellar, who was now working with Tyndale. Bayfield ‘brought substance with him’, so Foxe recorded, and ‘sold all their works and the works of the Germans, both in France and England’.
Bayfield ran at least three large cargoes of Tyndale’s books into England. On his first trip, at midsummer in 1530, he landed illicitly on the east coast and brought the books to London by way of Colchester. The following November he shipped another consignment to St Katherine’s docks, less than a thousand yards downriver from the Tower of London. More had wind of this operation and most of the cargo was seized. At Easter 1531, avoiding the Essex coast and the London docks, Bayfield landed in Norfolk and brought his books to London along graziers’ roads.
Betrayed, he was seized and held in the Tower, shackled to the wall of his cell by his neck, waist and legs, in darkness. More’s strange obsession with married heretics resurfaced. He falsely claimed that Bayfield, ‘beynge both a preste and a monke, went about two wyves, one in Brabande [Brabant], a nother in Englande’. Bayfield ‘fell to heresye and was abiured, and after that lyke a dog returnyng to his vomyte,’ More wrote, ‘and beyng fledde ouer the see, and sendynge from thense Tyndales heresyes hyther with many myschevouse sortes of bokes’. The previous
abjuration made the sentence inevitable. On 4 December 1531, More wrote with brutal economy, Bayfield ‘the monk and apostata’ was ‘well and worthely burned in Smythfelde’. He added: ‘Of Bayfeldes burnynge hath Tyndale no great cause to glory’, claiming that ‘though Tyndales bokes brought hym to burnynge’, the dead man was a coward who was ‘well contente to have foresworen agayne’ had he been given the chance.
Less than three weeks later, the London leather seller John Tewkesbury shared the same fate. He was also betrayed by Constantine. Tewkesbury was held in the porter’s lodge at More’s Chelsea house, so Foxe wrote, pinioned ‘hand, foot, and head in the stocks’, for six days without release. Foxe claimed that More had Tewkesbury whipped at ‘Jesu’s tree’ in his garden, ‘and also twisted his brows with small ropes, so that the blood started out of his eyes’. This was, of course, the torture also described by Segar Nicholson. Tewkesbury was then sent to the Tower and racked until he was nearly lame.
More led two public examinations of Tewkesbury. He found his prisoner very obstinate. ‘He couvered and hyd yt [his heresies] by all the meanes he coulde make,’ More wrote, ‘and labored to make euery man wene that he had neuer holden any suche opynyons.’ But the lord chancellor’s informers had done their work well. ‘In hys howse was founden Tyndales boke of obedyence, and hys wykked boke also of the wykked mammoma,’ More gloated, noting that, after the discovery, Tewkesbury said ‘at hys examynacyon, that all the heresyes therein were good and crysten fayth, beynge in dede, as full of false heresyes, and as frantike as euer heretyke made any syth cryst was borne’. How did More winkle that out of him? For later, ‘when he was in the shyryffes warde, and at the tyme of his deth,’ More remarked, ‘he wolde not speke of hys heresyes any thynge but handled hym selfe as couertly as he coude …’.
As was now usual, More taunted Tyndale over Tewkesbury’s
death. His agents had told him that ‘Tyndale reioyceth in the burnyng of Tewkesbery’, and he commented with malicious sarcasm that ‘I can se no very grete cause why but yf he rekened it for a grete glory that the man dyd abyde styll by the stake when he was faste bounden to it.’ The only reason that Tewkesbury did not recant, More said, was because, as the prisoner himself had said, ‘I have abiured by fore, there uis no remedy wyth me but deth’.
Of the death itself, Tewkesbury was ‘burned as there was never wretche I wene better worthy’. More – then the chief executive officer of England – rejoiced that his victim was now in hell, where Tyndale ‘is like to find hym when they come together’, with ‘an hote fyrebronde burnynge at hys bakke, that all the water in the worlde wyll never be able to quenche’.
The next victim was James Bainham. A barrister of Middle Temple, Bainham had roused suspicions by marrying the widow of Simon Fish, author of the notorious
Supplication for the Beggars
, who had died in 1528. He came from a good Gloucestershire family, which Tyndale may have known. As a lawyer, he was said to be ‘very diligent in giving counsel to all the needy, widows, fatherless and afflicted, without money or reward’; although this is Foxe’s description, Bainham’s acceptance of a terrible death hints at the selflessness of his soul.
Soon after his wedding, Bainham was arrested by a sergeant-at-arms in his chambers in Middle Temple on More’s orders. He was charged with denying transubstantiation, questioning the value of the confessional and mocking the power of the papal keys. He was also accused of asserting that ‘if a Turk, a Jew, or a Saracen do trust in God and keep his law, he is a good Christian man’, a sentiment so tolerant that it was held to smack of heresy. He was taken to the Chelsea house in December 1531. When More saw he ‘could not prevail in perverting him to his sect’, Foxe claimed, he had Bainham whipped ‘at the tree in his garden, called the tree of Troth, and after sent him to the Tower to be wracked’. Foxe says
that More was present in the Tower as the racking took place, and that More continued the torture of Bainham ‘until he had in a manner lamed him’. This was because Bainham refused to implicate ‘the gentlemen of the Temple of his acquaintance, nor would show where his books lay’. More called him ‘Baynam the iangler’, the babbler whose talk meant nothing. When Bainham’s wife denied that she and her husband had kept Tyndale Testaments at their house, she ‘was sent to the Fleet, and their goods confiscated’.
Feeble with torture and fear for his wife, Bainham was brought before Stokesley and abjured. His shame proved unbearable. After a month, he attended a secret meeting of evangelicals at a warehouse in Bow Lane. He asked forgiveness ‘of God and the whole world’ for what he had done, accepting upon his shoulders ‘the heavy burden of the cross’. The next Sunday, he attended mass at St Augustine’s Church. He rose in his pew, with Tyndale’s lethal Testament in his hand, and ‘declared openly, before all the people, with weeping tears, that he had denied God’. He prayed to the congregation to forgive him, and to beware of his cowardice in abjuring; ‘for if I should not return to the truth,’ he told them, ‘this Word of God would damn me, body and soul, at the day of judgment’. He then begged everybody ‘rather to die than to do as he did, for he would not feel such a hell again as he did feel for all the world’s good’.
He had, in effect, sentenced himself to death by appearing in a church with the English Testament. No mercy was possible for a relapsed heretic and Bainham did not seek it. Instead, he wrote a letter to Stokesley, telling the bishop what he had done. Like Bilney, he made no attempt to flee or disguise himself.
His interrogation in front of More and Stokesley illuminates the battle lines of the Reformation, and fascinates as an account of the courage that can stem from religious faith.
Bainham was asked if a person should honour and pray to dead saints. ‘Jesus Christ the just is the propitiation for our sins,’ he
replied, ‘and not only for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world.’ To pray to saints thus had no purpose. What, then, did St Paul mean when he wrote: ‘Let all the saints of God pray for us’? Paul, Bainham said, meant living saints, not the dead, because ‘they which be dead cannot pray for him’.
Was it necessary for his salvation that a man confess his sins to a priest? ‘Sins are to be forgiven of God,’ Bainham replied, ‘and a man need not go to any confession.’
What did he mean by saying that the truth of holy scripture had been hidden for eight hundred years until now? ‘I mean no otherwise,’ he said, ‘but that the truth was never, these eight hundred years past, so plainly and expressly declared unto the people, as it hath been within these six years.’
What had happened in the last six years to make him say this? ‘The New Testament now translated into English, doth preach and teach the word of God,’ he said, ‘and before that time men did preach but only that folks should believe as the church did believe, and then if the church erred, men should err too.’
This claim that the Church had purloined the Bible for its own false purposes was the very heart of the matter. Bainham added a comment that crackled and spat with the threat of the fire. ‘Howbeit the church of Christ cannot err,’ he said, ‘and there are two churches. That is, the church of Christ militant, and the church of Antichrist, and that this church of Antichrist may and doth err, but the church of Christ doth not.’
To say this directly into the face of the lord chancellor was brave, or reckless, indeed. Bainham was now asked if he knew of anyone who had ‘lived in the true faith of Christ’ since the apostles. ‘I knew Bayfield,’ he said of More’s recent victim. ‘He died in the true faith of Christ.’
What did he think of purgatory? ‘If any such thing as purgatory after this like had been moved to St Paul,’ came Bainham’s unyielding response, ‘he would have condemned it for heresy.’
And what of vows on holy orders? On the celibacy of priests? ‘Vows of chastity, and all godliness, is given of God by his abundant grace, which no man himself can keep, but it must be given him of God,’ he replied. If a monk, friar or nun could not keep their vow of celibacy, ‘they may go forth and marry … for there are no other vows, than the vow of baptism’.
Did he think that Luther, a friar, had done well in taking a nun out of religion and marrying her? Bainham was noncommittal on More’s favourite topic. ‘I think nothing of it,’ Bainham replied. The interrogator persisted. Was it lechery by Luther, or no? ‘I cannot say so.’
