Book of Fire (5 page)

The Lollards kept reform ideas alive, and, despite the flames and pits that pursued them, they had undergone a revival since Tyndale’s birth. Cells persisted in Buckinghamshire. In 1506, Bishop Smyth dealt with sixty cases at Amersham and twenty at Buckingham. Two were burnt. The others recanted and did penance. Bishop Fitzjames of London prosecuted more than forty Lollards in 1510, and a further thirty-seven in 1517. On each occasion, four relapsed heretics were burnt in the Lollard pit; the death sentence was mandatory for those who had recanted once and then resumed their heresy. Several Lollard cells were denounced to Archbishop Warham in Kent, particularly around Tenterden, Cranbrook and Benenden. In 1511 and 1512, the archbishop obtained fifty abjurations and handed five to the secular powers for burning. During the same period, Bishop Geoffrey Blythe of Lichfield dealt with seventy-four alleged heretics, a third of them women. Seven ‘godly martyrs’, including a widow, were burnt at Coventry in 1519.

This was as yet no great threat to the Church. Few or none were learned, so Foxe said, being ‘simple labourers and artificers, but as it pleased the Lord to work in their knowledge and understanding by reading a few English books, such as they could get in corners’. Illiterates learnt Bible passages off by heart in English; some of the Buckinghamshire heretics could reel off the Epistle of St James and the Apocalypse.

But the Lollards persisted with the ideas for which Wycliffe had been cursed. The charges against them were generally a combination of the heresies condemned a century before at Constance: reading the scriptures in laboriously hand-copied English manuscripts, disbelief in transubstantiation, and mockery of pilgrimages, purgatory, saints’ images and relics, and laughing at the notion that a cash payment to the Church or the pope could release a soul from purgatory. They laughed, too, at church bells, as peals of vanity. ‘Lo, yonder is a fair bell, and it
were to hang about a cow’s neck in this town’, one was accused of saying.

They had, too, a leavening of men whose time was coming, merchants, traders, prosperous shopkeepers, lively men with money and ambition. They travelled and spread their ideas. Four London heretics were found to have attended a Lollard meeting at Amersham; one was a goldsmith, another was Thomas Grove, a well-off butcher who was able to slip the large sum of £20 to Dr Wilcocks, the vicar general of the diocese of London, so as to avoid doing public penance, which might have ruined his reputation and his business. John Hacker, a water-bearer of Coleman Street in London, journeyed to Burford and to Buckingham and Essex to distribute heretical manuscripts. In London, he was associated with John Stacey, a prominent member of the Tilers’ and Bricklayers’ Company. Stacey kept a man in his house to ‘write out the Apocalypse in English’, the costs being met by John Sercot, a grocer.

A scholar like Tyndale, a university man, might seem on a different plane to these rougher and more practical men; but they shared ideas with him, they made up a natural constituency for reform, and they were very brave. ‘Christ sitting at supper could not give his disciples his living body to eat,’ John Badby, a tailor of Evesham in Worcester, said at his trial. In so doing, in front of two archbishops, eight bishops, a duke and the lord chancellor, he condemned himself to death. The Host was displayed to him by a prior as he was bound to the stake at Smithfield. ‘It is the consecrated bread and not the body of God,’ Badby cried, and the fire was lit.

It needed a bolt of spiritual lightning to fuse Tyndale and the Lollards into a new evangelical force and this was provided by Martin Luther. On 31 October 1517, about a year after Tyndale had gone to Cambridge, Luther nailed ninety-five theses attacking the Church to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg in eastern Germany.

The immediate cause of Luther’s fury was a papal indulgence, a remission of the punishment for sins in return for a cash payment, which was being sold in Germany to raise money for the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome. Luther denied that the pope had the power to remit any guilt, and that it was mere ‘human doctrine’ to preach that a soul flew out of purgatory at the moment that a coin rattled into a Church coffer.

The obscure Saxon raised a whirlwind. ‘Nobody,’ Luther boasted, ‘will go to hear a lecture unless the lecturer is teaching my theology, which is the theology of the Bible, of St Augustine, and of all true theologians of the Church.’ In fairness, he should have credited Wycliffe, for he went beyond the Lollards in only one major dogma.

In these final years of Catholic hegemony, popes and prelates reached the heights of magnificence. Nicholas V had summoned his cardinals to his deathbed in 1455, and told them that the loyalty of the ‘uncultured masses’ of believers was best obtained through giving them ‘something that appeals to the eye’. Ideas and theology carried little weight; a popular faith ‘sustained only on doctrines’, he assured them, would ‘never be anything but feeble and vacillating’. But if the Holy See was ‘visible’, if it was ‘displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself’, then belief could ‘grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another’, and the Church would be ‘accepted and revered by all the world’.

His successors were dazzling in their visibility. Julius II, pope when Tyndale went up to Oxford, laid the cornerstone of the Basilica of St Peter’s, tapped the genius of Raphael and Bramante, and commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a force and beauty that seemed divinely planted indeed. He also fathered three daughters, contracted syphilis, wore
silver armour as he led papal armies in his vendetta against the Borgias, and launched the indulgence that drew Luther’s wrath. He was succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the owner of a menagerie: Persian horses, a panther and two leopards accompanied his processions, together with an elephant, Hanno, whose portrait he had painted by Raphael. These men were indisputably great Renaissance princes, open to every manner of temporal vice and excess; but they were also Christ’s vicars on earth, vulnerable to the spiritual assaults that Luther – and then Tyndale – were to heap upon them.

At home, Cardinal Wolsey was the grandest priest ever seen in England. He paid a visit of typical grandeur to Cambridge in 1520, a man of ordinary birth who combined the vast secular power of lord chancellor with the spiritual authority of a
legatus a latere
, the special envoy, of the Holy See. The university addressed him as Majestas, a fitting title, for he was plundering both State and Church to build a new foundation of exquisite grandeur on the Oxford water meadows, which he named Cardinal’s College for himself,
¹
and a palace at Hampton Court that outdid the king. Wolsey had attitudes to match his papal masters. ‘How think you?’ he said when criticised for flaunting his wealth. ‘Were it better for me, being in the honour and dignity that I am, to make coins of my pillars and poleaxes and to give money to five or six beggars than to maintain the commonwealth as I do?’

This was anathema to a Bible-man like Tyndale, who believed that priests should share the poverty of the apostles. Tyndale dubbed him ‘Wolfsee … this wily wolf, I say, and raging sea, and shipwreck of all England’. Wolsey was prey to ‘all manner of voluptuousness, expert and exercised in the course of the world’, Tyndale wrote in a racy character sketch, ‘utterly appointed to semble and dissemble, to have one thing in the heart and another in the mouth … there was no man so obsequious and serviceable, and in all games and sports the first and next at hand …’

Thomas Wolsey, cardinal, lord chancellor and papal legate, was the grandest priest England had ever seen. His palaces, jewels, feasts and retinue spoke of a Church in which the worldly was overwhelming the spiritual. Tyndale mocked him as ‘Wolfsee … this wily wolf, I say, and raging sea, and shipwreck of all England’. But he was a humane man, who preferred compromise with heretics to burning them at the stake.

(Popperfoto)

Beneath the brilliant display of the Church – the altar cloths of silk, velvet and sarcanet, the robes and vestments of damask and linen, the chalices and cups of jewelled silver – lurked a rottenness. Solemn warning had been given by delegates at the Church Council at Basle eighty years before. Henceforth, they had resolved, ‘all simony shall cease … All priests shall put away their concubines [or] shall be deprived of his office, though he be the Bishop of Rome … The abuse of ban and anathema by the popes shall cease … The popes shall neither demand nor receive any fees for ecclesiastical offices. From now on, a pope should think not of this world’s treasures but only of those of the world to come.’ For their pains, the delegates were denounced as ‘apostates, blaspheming rebels, men guilty of sacrilege, gaolbirds’, and ignored.

Nepotism continued to flourish. Leo X was an abbot at the age of seven, a canon at eight and a cardinal at thirteen. Simony, the sale of office, accelerated and new bureaucracies were invented to extend the business. Leo X traded in 2150 Church appointments with a value of three million ducats. Forgery was rampant in the sale of relics, where demand far outstripped supply as private collectors vied with the clergy for trophies. A bishop of Lincoln, frustrated at his cathedral’s lack of valuable objects, bit off a piece of the finger of St Mary Magdalene displayed at Fécamp. Erasmus pointed out that enough wood to build a battleship was said to have come from the True Cross; as well as its sliver of the cross, the abbey of St Denis outside Paris claimed to have part of the crown of thorns, a holy nail, the hand of St Thomas and the chin of St Mary Magdalene.

In Tyndale’s own childhood diocese of Worcester, the bishopric was held successively by three Italians from 1512. They lived in Rome, on the fat of their Worcester stipends, and never set foot in England. The rector of Slimbridge, in whose parish Hurst Farm lay, was an absentee appointed by Magdalen College at Oxford. From 1509, the living was held by John Stokesley, whom we shall
meet later as a heretic-hunter; there is no record of his having visited it. Many English priests were so ill-educated that Tyndale claimed that twenty thousand of them could not have translated into English the line from the Paternoster: ‘
fiat voluntas tua sicut in coelo et in terra
’, ‘thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven’.

Leo was little worried by the lack of reform, or by the professor of theology at the obscure new university of Wittenberg. Luther appeared to be a throwback to the old heresies for which Wycliffe and Huss had been burnt. To a large degree, he was; but he had arrived there by a different route. In his mid-thirties, the stocky son of a prosperous and godly copper miner from Eisleben, he suffered a spiritual crisis. His life was earnest; he prayed, he fasted, he carried out penances and made lists of his sins. ‘And yet my conscience kept nagging,’ he wrote. ‘It kept telling me: “You fell short there … You were not sorry enough … You left that sin off your list.”’ Redemption, he feared, was denied him. He sought to ease the pain in his soul with ‘human remedies, the traditions of men’. His efforts seemed only to increase his troubles. He read and reread Augustine and Paul, until, of a sudden, six words of Paul – ‘the righteous shall live by faith’ – bit into his conscience ‘as flashes of lightning, frightening me each time I heard them …’.

A thought followed, of deep ill omen to traditional faith: ‘If we as righteous are to live by faith, and if the righteousness of faith is to be for salvation to everyone who believes, then it is not our merit, but the mercy of God.’ Man was too steeped in vice and sin to save himself. No penance, good works, fasting, pilgrimage, indulgence or alms-giving – none of the traditional medicines of the Church – could redeem him. Righteousness was a gift promised by Christ to all who had faith in him. It flowed directly from God, without the priestly or institutional intercession of the Church. The Christian was justified
per solam fidem
, by faith alone. A mortal assault on the Church followed from this. Luther rejected its ‘human remedies’; its traditions, the papacy paramount
among them, were a cowl that concealed faith. Its greed and decadence, its shameless use of ‘the threat of the stake and the shame of heresy’ to terrify its critics, and the ‘loose blabber’ of its priests, prevented the faithful from understanding the manifest things of God.

As he pondered his insights, Luther ‘felt as though I had been reborn altogether and had entered Paradise’. In the same moment, he wrote, ‘the face of the whole of Scripture became apparent to me’. This immodest claim might have remained mere bravado without the printing press. The hand-copied book was an expensive and fragile rarity, prepared by a team of scribes and illuminators. Lollard tracts and their bulky Bibles were individual labours of love, not mass items sold at a profit. The press stood supply and cost on their head. Luther was a writer of verve and dash, a populariser and born pamphleteer who exploited it to the full.

The first documents printed with movable type were, ironically enough, indulgences published by Johann Gutenberg at Mainz in 1445. Fittingly, his next venture was the Vulgate Bible. Using a metal typeface designed by the professional scribe Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg printed a run of three hundred copies on six presses. The technical quality was excellent from the outset. Experiments with colour printing began with the first dated book, a fine Psalter produced in 1457. Mainz was sacked in 1462, and fleeing print workers took the new technology with them. The wandering Germans were in Rome by 1464. By the end of the decade, they had set up at the Sorbonne in Paris, and, at Venice, had added lower case type and italic to the original Roman capital letters.