Book of Fire (50 page)

Much of the skirmishing was on the old battleground of faith and works. Tyndale claimed that good works simply declared a man’s goodness; they did not make him good, ‘just as the fruit of the tree shows, and does not create, the healthiness of the stock’. Latomus admonishes him: ‘The simile is a bad one; for the bearing of the fruit weakens the tree, but good acts strengthen the mind; a fountain and its water would suit your purpose better.’ Tyndale returns to the attack. Good works, he says, are not needed by God, and they benefit him no more ‘than the bitter draught, drunk by a patient, benefits the physician who prescribes it’. Latomus admits that: ‘I agree with you here.’ But he adds that God ‘rewards us as if he needed our works … [I]f good men merit no reward of God, what are we to say of sinners?’ Tyndale held that ‘In work we ever sin, and our thoughts are impure’, or so Latomus paraphrased him. ‘Therefore we live by faith as long as we are in the flesh; and by faith we overcome the world.’ To Tyndale, citing I John 5, this is the ‘victory which overcometh the
world, even our faith, our faith in God through Christ’; for through it ‘the love of him who overcame all the temptations of the devil shall be imputed to us’. To Latomus, this position collapses when it is examined; ‘it cannot stand, it is riddled with difficulties.’

Other subjects were raised. Latomus worked his way through the sacraments, prayers to saints, fasting, images, papal authority. More had defended these great Church traditions with emotion and at the cost of his life. Latomus made much use of quotations from the ancient Fathers – ‘that you may see,’ he told Tyndale, ‘how great and of what nature are the men, whom you have deserted for Luther’ – but his arguments were dry and donnish.

The nub of the case, and its passion, lay in Tyndale’s attachment to the Christ he had rediscovered in the gospel, and in his certainty that salvation lay in faith and in the love that God manifests through the Son. Latomus rightly identified this conviction as Bible-based. ‘If, as you write, you desire to be instructed,’ he remarked to Tyndale, ‘be careful not to regard the sacred text as a storehouse of arguments for your part.’ But that, of course, was precisely what Tyndale did believe; for him, the Bible was the sole storehouse of divine truth. Latomus urged him to think again. ‘Consider, I beg of you, Tyndale,’ he wrote, ‘to what absurdity you are come to by leaving the well trodden paths and the teachings of the fathers.’ There is sympathy in that remark, and pity; and acceptance that things had run their course. He knew that Tyndale would not abjure, and it may be that he admired him for it.

In his third book – the exchange of writings went on for several months – Latomus said that he had accepted the conclusion of Tyndale’s last treatise, where the latter said that he had laid out his opinions ‘with a good conscience’. If Tyndale’s beliefs were true, Latomus replied, then ‘you are rightly displeased with those that imprison you in the name of the pope and emperor, and treat you as a malefactor’. But there was another side to the matter, of ‘what
we believe, what we hold’, with equally good conscience; and it was upon this – ‘what we have learned in the catholic, orthodox, and, if you will permit the word, also Roman church’ – that the prisoner would be judged.

Any hopes of help from England slowly slid away in the early months of 1536. Catherine of Aragon died on 8 January. She wrote Henry an affectionate last letter, addressed to ‘My dear lord, king and husband’, forgiving him the hurts he had done her, praying him to protect their daughter Mary, and concluding: ‘Mine eyes desire you above all things.’

Her letter pricked Henry’s conscience. A few days later, Queen Anne miscarried a stillborn son; the male heir who would have guaranteed her survival eluded her. Henry turned against her and her evangelical sympathies ceased to carry weight. The king was said to have fallen in love with Jane Seymour, whose ‘disposition was tempered between the gravity of Catherine and the gaiety of Anne’. In April, Chapuys informed the emperor of a plot to destroy Anne, which he welcomed for the damage it would do to the reformers’ cause. ‘Whoever could help in its execution would do a meritorious work,’ the ambassador wrote, ‘since it would prove … a remedy for the heretical doctrines and practices of the concubine – the principle cause of the spread of Lutheranism in this country.’

The same month, on 13 April, the ever-optimistic Stephen Vaughan thought of Vilvoorde in a letter he wrote to Cromwell. ‘If now yow sende me but your lettre to the privye counsail, I could delyver Tyndall from the fyre,’ he said, ‘so it come by tyme, for elles it will be to late.’ Cromwell could recognise a lost cause. We know of no reply, nor of any further English petitions to the imperial council at Brussels.

On May Day 1536, the king rode off abruptly from a tournament at Greenwich, leaving the queen behind. She was arrested
the next day and brought up the Thames to the Tower. A secret commission investigated charges of adultery with her own brother, Lord Rochford, whose wife had turned on him and who ‘prejudiced the king with her own extravagant apprehensions and filled his head with many false reports’. Four commoners, Norris, Weston and Brereton, all royal servants, and Smeton, a musician, were also said to have enjoyed the queen’s favours. All denied it except Smeton, who confessed in a misguided attempt to curry favour.

Anne’s uncle, Thomas Howard, the duke of Norfolk, presided over the judges and announced the verdicts. All were found guilty of high treason. The day before her execution, Anne sent a message to the king, asserting her innocence, recommending their daughter Elizabeth to his care, and thanking him for ‘advancing her first to be a marchioness, then to be a queen, and now, when he could raise her no higher upon the earth, for sending her to be saint in heaven’. An executioner was sent specially from France, where a sword rather than the brutal English axe was used for beheading. On being told of his skill, she laughed and said it was as well, for she had a short neck.

She was brought out to Tower Green a little before noon on 19 May 1536. On the scaffold, she is said to have given a book of devotions to one of her maids of honour. Two books owned by the Wyatt family vie for the honour. One, now in the British Library, has metrical versions of thirteen psalms translated into English by John Croke, the same metrical psalms later chanted by puritan troopers in the English civil war. The other has twelve evangelical prayers and thanksgivings. ‘Grant us most merciful father,’ one runs, ‘the knowledge of thy holy will and glad tidings of our salvation, this great while oppressed with the tyranny of thy adversary of Rome and his faulters and kept close under his Latin letters …’ Tyndale, in his distant cell, would have approved of that.

She prayed on the scaffold, and said simply: ‘To Christ I commend my soul.’ After execution, Anne’s body was thrown into an elmwood crate, made for shipping arrows to English soldiers in Ireland, and buried in the chapel of the Tower. Eleven days later Henry married Jane Seymour.

Anne’s death was seen as a grave blow to the English Bible and Cranmer tried to gloss over her support for it. The archbishop admitted to Henry that: ‘I loved her not a little, for the love which I judged her to bear towards God and his gospel.’ But, he hastened to add, ‘if she be proved culpable, there is no one that loveth God and his gospel that ever will favour her … for then was never creature in our time that hath so much slandered the gospel’. Cranmer begged the king not to allow his rightful anger to colour his views of the Bible. ‘I trust that your grace will bear no less entire favour unto the truth of the gospel, than you did before,’ he pleaded, ‘forsomuch as your grace’s favour to the gospel was not led by affection unto her, but by zeal unto the truth.’

Nicholas Shaxton was more forceful. He was the evangelical whom Anne Boleyn had helped make bishop of Salisbury, and whom Bishop Nix of Norwich wished he had burnt in place of Bilney. He wrote to Cromwell begging him ‘
in visceribus Jesu Christi
’ – ‘in the very guts of Christ’ – to continue to uphold the gospel as Anne had exhorted him to do. He may have asked him, too, to intercede for Tyndale. Cromwell could do nothing for the prisoner, and the king would not.

Phillips was another matter. Tebold had supplied Cromwell with evidence that Phillips was slandering the king, as a ‘tyrant’ and ‘despoiler’. This was treasonable talk, and Cromwell used it to try to have Phillips seized.

Orders were issued in the king’s name on 23 March 1536 to the consul in Nuremberg to ‘intercept and send to England’ two English criminals believed to be at large in the city. These were James Griffith, described as ‘of low birth, guilty of treason,
robbery, manslaughter and sacrilege’, and ‘a rebel named Henry Philipp’ who was thought to be ‘on his way from Flanders to Italy’. The following day, Henry wrote to Charles V to say that the ‘rebels’ Phillips and Griffith, who had committed ‘grievous crimes’, had taken refuge in the emperor’s dominions, where they ‘stir up causes of dissension’. The king asked for them to be delivered up for punishment.

The intelligence was correct. Phillips had left Flanders, his money now gone, and believing Tyndale to be safely incarcerated, and was making his way to Italy. On 3 May, the English agent in Rome, Sir Gregory de Casalis, wrote to Cromwell to inform him that Phillips had surfaced in the city, where he was seeking out a powerful cardinal and the pope. As Tyndale’s betrayer, Phillips could expect to be rewarded in Rome; he was also claiming to be a relation of Thomas More, who was a martyr in Roman eyes.

De Casalis was Henry’s man in Italy. He began in royal service by buying high-grade war horses in Naples for the king’s personal use, and distributed royal gifts of falcons to influential Italians and Frenchmen. Henry and the pope had used him as a trusted go-between. His easy access to the curia had been shown in a letter to Wolsey. ‘Hearing that a post was to be dispatched today,’ he wrote, ‘I have been with the pope.’ Henry had knighted him, and used him over the annulment. De Casalis made little progress there, of course, and the king showed his displeasure by cutting back on payments to him. ‘If greater regard is not had to my expenses,’ de Casalis complained, ‘no Englishman coming to Rome will find me at my home, but that I have moved to the nearest hospital.’ He had ingratiated himself with Cromwell, and with Queen Anne, hoping that ‘she will not wrongfully condemn such an old and faithful servant’. He made the transition smoothly and remained the king’s agent until 1537.

In his report on 3 May, de Casalis said that Phillips ‘aspires to the pope’s friendship’. He said that Phillips was introduced to the papal court by Cardinal Caracciolo, who ‘commends him as learned and noble, and as a kinsman of Thomas More’. The cardinal had added that Rome was indebted to More, ‘persecuted by the king for asserting the authority of the Holy See’.

Caracciolo was a senior member of the curia and he was closely allied with Charles V. He owed the emperor his career; Charles had used him on diplomatic missions to Venice, and had appointed him imperial chancellor of Milan. ‘Being pressed by the imperialists,’ Gregory de Casalis had reported to Cromwell on 1 June 1535, ‘the pope has promoted to the cardinalate the protonotary Caracciolo …’ The cardinal was described as ‘a good servant of the emperor’.

Why did Phillips make straight for Caracciolo when he came to Rome? Perhaps because More had described him as a potential friend at the Roman court; certainly because he was likely to prove sympathetic. Caracciolo was the emperor’s man, and Charles V had every reason to be grateful to More’s memory, and to his surviving friends and relatives. Had he not written to More to thank him personally for the support he had given to his aunt over the annulment? Caracciolo’s own interest in More was such that another cardinal, Nicholas of Capua, had sent him a letter on 12 August 1535 which included ‘an account of the death of Sir Thomas More just received from England’.

Why, too, did the cardinal describe Phillips to the pope as ‘a kinsman of Thomas More’, as well as ‘learned and noble’? It is most unlikely that Caracciolo simply accepted the word of a stray Englishman that he was an aristocrat and a relation of More. De Casalis was not taken in for a moment, and Caracciolo was no fool. He had at least ten years’ experience of survival in the dangerous swill of Italian politics; he had been chancellor of Milan, one of the liveliest places in Europe, and he
was currently negotiating a peace settlement between Charles V and Francis I of France. He promoted Phillips, it seems, because he was satisfied that there was a link between the young man and the martyred lord chancellor of England. To support Phillips was a way of recognising More, as well as rewarding Tyndale’s betrayer, and Caracciolo was confident enough that this would please both emperor and pope to commend Phillips to the pope.

The new pope had equal grounds to be generous to Phillips. Clement VII, indecisive to the last, had died in 1534. His successor, Paul III, had the usual vices of Renaissance pontiffs. He was the brother of a papal concubine, a stylish nepotist, a promoter of bullfights and horse races, a lecher known as ‘Cardinal Petticoat’, and the father of three sons and a daughter, whom he shamelessly entertained with his daughters-in-law at Vatican banquets. But he had virtues as well. He was a patron of art and scholarship, who enriched the Vatican Library and appointed Michelangelo architect-in-chief of St Peter’s; he encouraged Church reform and favoured new orders, issuing the papal bull that founded the Jesuits. He was firm in his defence of Catholicism and the pursuit of heretics like Tyndale; he revived the Inquisition and condemned Henry VIII for the execution of Bishop Fisher and More. He had created Fisher a cardinal in May 1535, as a warning to the king not to treat him as a traitor; but Fisher was dead before the traditional red hat arrived – ‘the hat came as far as Calais, but the head was off before the hat was on’ – and More followed shortly after.

But for de Casalis, Phillips might well have received the payment or pension he sought from the pope. De Casalis told the papal secretary that Phillips was ‘of humble birth and a great scoundrel’, adding that if such a man was allowed to have his way with the curia, ‘all the thieves in England will come too, and say they were driven out for the sake of the Holy See’. The secretary
was ‘obliged for the hint’, so de Casalis reported to Cromwell, and Phillips was frustrated.