Book of Fire (40 page)
A pro-Catherine lobby appeared in exile in the Low Countries. It included Fathers William Peto and Henry Elstow, two Greenwich Franciscans who had fled to Antwerp. They were a mettlesome pair. Peto had preached a sermon in the Chapel Royal
in which he warned the king that the royal preachers were ‘not afraid to tell of licence and liberty for monarchs which no king should dare even to contemplate’. He warned Henry to his face that, unless he took good heed, ‘the dogs [will] lick your blood as they licked Ahab’s’. When Elstow defended his colleague, the earl of Essex, sitting with the king, rebuked him: ‘You shameless friar! you shall be sewn up in a sack and thrown into the Thames, if you do not speedily hold your tongue!’ Elstow was defiant: ‘Make those threats to your fellow courtiers. As for us friars, we make little account of them indeed …’ From Antwerp they wrote a treatise on the validity of Catherine’s marriage and distributed tracts supporting her cause. Cromwell reactivated Stephen Vaughan as an agent to find out what More was doing to support them.
‘Master More hathe sent often tymes, and lately bookes unto Peto in Antwerp, as his book of the confutacion of Tyndale, and Frythe his opynyon of the sacrament, with dyvers other bookes,’ Vaughan reported. ‘I can no further lern of More his practises, but if you consider this well, you may perchance espye his crafte.’ He confirmed that the friars ‘be so much helpen out of England with money, but I cannot learn by whom’. It seemed that More might be sending the friars money through a London merchant, Antonio Bonvisi, a close friend of his who had recently been a sponsor at the baptism of his grandchild. Cromwell did not inquire further. More’s connections with Antwerp did not yet seem significant.
Frith seemed in little danger in the Tower, but More’s
Letter
and his own
Answer
still hung darkly over him. A royal chaplain named Dr Currein preached a sermon on the Eucharist in front of Henry. Whether More instigated it we do not know, but it is probable that Currein had read the
Letter
. In his sermon, Currein said that it was no marvel that errors abounded over the real presence in the sacrament when there was a prisoner in the Tower at that very moment
who was ‘so bold as to write in defence of that heresy, and no man goeth about his reformation’. The sermon struck the king’s sensitive spot, and he ordered Cranmer and Cromwell to have Frith brought for trial.
On 1 June, Whit Sunday morning, Anne, clad in silver and red velvet, her hair spilling over her shoulders, was crowned queen by Archbishop Cranmer at Westminster. Chapuys thought the spectacle ‘a cold, meagre and uncomfortable thing’; the crowds watched in silent hostility and few raised their caps or cheered.
The archbishop now had another duty to perform. He sent one of his gentlemen, and a Welsh porter, to bring Frith from the Tower to his palace in Croydon to be examined. As they started the journey on a boat to Lambeth, Cranmer’s gentleman advised Frith to be prudent and non controversial, if only for the sake of his wife and children across the sea; while Cranmer and Cromwell wished him well, he had enemies who wanted him burnt. Frith replied that, if he had twenty lives, he would give them all for the truth.
As they continued their journey on foot, they passed the woods of Brixton. Cranmer’s man suggested that Frith make off into the woods and travel home east to his native Kent, while he and the porter would first search the woods to the west towards Wandsworth before raising a general hue and cry. Frith refused the offer. He said he would simply walk on to Croydon and give himself up. Before he was taken on the Essex shore, he said, he had tried everything to escape; but now that he was face to face with his enemies, he felt he had to testify to his faith and remain true to God.
He was held overnight in the porter’s lodge at Croydon. He held resolutely to his belief that the sacramental bread and wine were no more than symbols of Christ’s Body and Blood. He added that he did not condemn transubstantiation, provided that
the eucharist was celebrated ‘without idolatry’, meaning that no obeisance should be shown to the pyx or the cup. Cranmer saw him in private three times to ask him to ‘leave his imagination’, but he would not. On 17 June 1533, Cranmer wrote that: ‘We had to leave him to his ordinary.’ That meant that he was given over to the mercies of Stokesley, the bishop in whose diocese he had been taken. On 20 June, Frith appeared in front of Stokesley, Gardiner and Longland in St Paul’s Cathedral. He again refused to abjure. ‘The cause why I die is this,’ he said, ‘for I cannot agree … that we should believe under pain of damnation, the substance of the bread and wine to be changed into the body and blood of our Saviour.’ He signed his heretical answers in his own hand: ‘I, Frith, thus do think, and as I think, so have I said, written, taught, and affirmed, and in my books have published.’ Stokesley declared him guilty for having denied that the doctrines of purgatory and transubstantiation were necessary articles of faith. He was relaxed to the secular power for execution on 23 June.
From Antwerp, Tyndale sent a last letter to his friend urging strength in facing the fire. ‘Dearly beloved,’ he wrote, ‘fear not men that threat, nor trust men that speak fair: but trust him that is true of promise, and able to make his word good. Your cause is Christ’s gospel, a light that must be fed with the blood of faith. The lamp must be dressed and snuffed daily, and that oil poured in every evening and morning, that the light go not out … If when we be buffeted for well-doing, we suffer patiently and endure, that is thankful with God; for to that end we are called. For Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow his steps, who did no sin. Hereby have we perceived love that he laid down his life for us: therefore we ought to be able to lay down our lives for the brethren …
‘Let not your body faint. If the pain be above your strength,
remember: “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, I will give it you.” And pray to your Father in that name, and he will ease your pain, or shorten it … Amen.’
In a grim postscript, Tyndale gave details of the agony of other Bible-men: ‘Two have suffered in Antwerp unto the great glory of the gospel: four at Riselles [Lille] in Flanders: and at Luke [Liège] one at the least hath suffered; all that same day. At Roan [Rouen] in France they persecute; and at Paris are five doctors taken for the gospel. See, you are not alone.’
There was one positive note. Tyndale recorded that George Joye had printed two leaves of Genesis, and sent one copy to the king and the other to the new queen, asking for a licence ‘that he might so go through all the bible’. Hopes were high that Henry and Anne might permit translations to be sold in England, and ‘out of that is the great seeking for English books at all printers and book-binders in Antwerp’. But this was rumour, and too late to save Frith. His wife might, as a last resort, have begged him to abjure. She did not. ‘Sir,’ Tyndale closed his letter, ‘your wife is well content with the will of God, and would not, for her sake, have the glory of God hindered.’
The prisoner was held in Newgate prison, his neck bound to a post by an iron collar. On 4 July 1533, he was taken to Smithfield with Andrew Hewitt, a young tailor’s apprentice who had also been betrayed to More by Holt. The rector who addressed the crowd forbade them to pray for the prisoners, no more than they would for a dog. At this, Frith smiled and asked God to forgive the rector. Foxe says that the wind blew the flames away from Frith, so that his dying was prolonged, but he showed no sign of pain.
More had said of Frith’s work that he wished ‘to plukke as I truste the moste gloryouse fetters from hys gaye pecoks tayle’. No doubt he felt that he had succeeded.
On 11 July, Clement declared Cranmer’s validation of the new
royal marriage to be void. The pope ordered Henry to put Anne away and warned that any child of the liaison would be illegitimate. He also excommunicated the king, though this was not yet put into effect. Matters were on the move.
‘A fellow Englishman, who is everywhere and nowhere’
T
o the burning of his dearest friend in England, Tyndale had now to add a sharp increase in the danger in Antwerp. Catholic loyalists were angry and militant at the headway that reform was making in the city.
The process was much the same in the Low Countries as in England. Converts were among merchants and skilled tradesmen. A list of early heretic suspects in nearby Bruges showed a cabinetmaker, a ribbon weaver, a miller, a shingler and a shoemaker, who met to read the Bible and discuss the scriptures. A fish seller, turning informer to save his neck, told how a butcher had led him into a field where he found a dozen young men and women. One of them preached that ‘everyone should beware of evil and improve his life’, a girl handed out black cherries and the little group dispersed. The informer agreed to allow his house to be used for meetings. Eight or nine people came and one of them preached ‘evil unseemly sermons’.
A group of Antwerp Catholics sent a long and detailed letter to the chancellor of Brabant in 1533, giving details of local Lutherans and other heretics. They described renegade monks and nuns who spread reform and the officials who tolerated them. They also
complained about the foreign exiles who lived in their midst, and who used local printers to produce their evil books.
In particular, the letter referred to a printer who lived in the Camerstraat, within the old gate and next to the Venne Henne, near the ‘churchyard of our lady’, of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal. The writers told the chancellor that, if he went into the printer’s inner room and opened the chests stored in it, ‘shall you find books full of heresy in the English tongue, and also others’. They added a note that most probably referred to Tyndale. ‘And the printer will also show you,’ they claimed, ‘a great heretic and doctor, who for his heresy has been driven out of England.’
They insisted that the chancellor take action. ‘We have given you material enough,’ the letter concluded. ‘Do as they have done in Spain. Purge the town. Strengthen the laws; make half-yearly searches after heretics. We write because our spiritual and lay heads have no care for these things.’
The letter was put in front of the council and Margaret, the queen-regent, asked for a report to be made. A priest named in the letter was arrested, taken to the state prison at Vilvoorde Castle, and burnt at Brussels the following year, in 1534. Two laymen, who had attended a church declared to be a nest of heresy by the informers, were beheaded in Antwerp. The printer Adriaen van Berghen was interrogated in 1533 but managed to extricate himself. Three years later, he was condemned for selling Lutheran books and was forced to make his penitential pilgrimage to Cyprus; returning to his old ways, he was later arrested at Delft and executed. Another Antwerp printer, Jacob van Liesvelt, was also later beheaded for printing Bibles in Flemish.
England, in contrast, was becoming more benign. From her coronation to her death, Anne Boleyn protected and promoted evangelicals, and favoured Tyndale’s scriptures and other writing. The red-headed child she gave birth to on 7 September 1533
profited her little, for it was not the male heir that Henry longed for, and a hurried ‘s’ had to be filled in after ‘Prince’ in the document read out by the chamberlain to proclaim the event; but, as Queen Elizabeth, the child was to become the most significant Protestant queen in history.
Anne had commissioned Nicholas Udall, a survivor of the Oxford fish cellar affair, to write verses for her coronation in June. Udall was no glum puritan but a racy man who wrote
Ralph Roister Doister
, the first comedy in English. He had abjured and stayed at Oxford, though his views remained heretical enough to prevent him from taking his MA until the following year, when he was appointed headmaster of Eton. William Betts, a former scholar of Gonville Hall at Cambridge (a college known for its evangelical streak) and another veteran of the affair, became one of Anne’s chaplains in 1533. So, too, did the notoriously evangelical preacher Hugh Latimer, soon to be elevated to the see of Worcester.
Nicholas Shaxton had been forced to recant in 1531 by the cruel Bishop Nix after being found with heretical books in the Norwich diocese. Two years later, he found himself appointed treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral and Anne’s almoner; by 1535, he was bishop of Salisbury. When Nix heard the news, he was appalled that a man so much more dangerous than little Bilney should find favour with the queen. ‘Christ’s mother!’ he is said to have cried. ‘I fear I have burnt Abel, and let Cain go!’ Shaxton was another Gonville Hall man. ‘I hear no clerk that hath comen out lately of that college,’ Nix remarked grimly, ‘but savoureth of the frying pan, though he speak never so holily.’ First fruits were still payable on acquiring a bishopric, although they went now to the king and not the pope. As poor evangelicals, neither Latimer nor Shaxton had enough money, and Anne lent them £200 each for this.
She was so eager to have the reformer Matthew Parker at court
with her that John Skip, another of her evangelical Cambridge chaplains, had to write to him twice in a day. ‘I pray you resist not your calling, but come in any wise to know further her pleasure,’ Skip wrote to him. ‘Bring with you a long gown and that shall be enough until your return to Cambridge.’ Parker, later to become the second Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, was duly appointed chaplain to the queen. Anne was to trust her infant daughter Elizabeth to Parker’s pastoral care a few days before she was beheaded.
‘I have carefully chosen you to be the lanterns and light of my court,’ Anne told her chaplains, as Latimer recorded. She asked them to watch over the morals of her household staff and to teach them ‘above all things to embrace the wholesome doctrine and infallible knowledge of Christ’s gospel’. To keep them from frivolity, Latimer wrote, she kept an English Bible open on her desk in her chamber, which her servants were all encouraged to read. A copy of Tyndale’s 1534 New Testament, with its preface discreetly removed, and with her name and title on the edges of the leaves, survives in the British Library. The daughter of William Locke, an evangelical mercer who supplied the court with fabrics, recalled that when her father ‘used to go beyond the sea’ in his youth, ‘Queen Anne Boleyn caused him to get her the gospels and epistles’.
