Book of Fire (6 page)
A measure of the fall in prices is given by printed volumes with hand illustrations. They cost eight times as much as those with plain printed text. By 1500, a Venetian artisan could buy four printed volumes for one week’s salary. Bankers and merchants
invested heavily in print shops and paper mills. Graduates from the new universities – two dozen were founded in Europe in the fifteenth century – provided readers as well as typesetters, proofreaders, editors, authors and translators. Controversial titles soon proved to be bestsellers. Erasmus’s
Praise of Folly
, wounding to the papacy, ran to forty-three editions in his lifetime. Humble readers were snapping up copies of religious tracts and sermons. The major constraint, in an age of rapidly growing literacy, was the high price of paper, which made up two thirds of production costs. The humblest reader could afford religious tracts. A fraud investigation in Seville – indulgence printers were in the habit of running off extra copies and selling them on their own behalf – uncovered a single printer who held stocks of more than eighty thousand sheets of prayers, rhymes and devotional woodcuts.
Scores of thousands of pamphlets written by Luther came off the German presses, and they were soon flooding into England. By 1521, the English Church was so alarmed at the scale of smuggling that Wolsey presided over a grand burning of Lutheran books at St Paul’s Cross in London. A few weeks later, another bonfire was lit at Cambridge.
Henry VIII himself was tempted into attacking Luther – Wolsey ‘furnished the court with chaplains of his own sworn disciples,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘to be always present, and to dispute the vanities, and to water whatsoever the cardinal had planted’ – and put his name to a treatise defending Catholic orthodoxy against Lutheranism. The English printer Richard Pynson published the king’s
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum
in 1521. The actual author of this work, which won Henry the title of Defender of the Faith from the pope (the Latin abbreviation of
Fid. Def
. appears on English coins to this day), was Thomas More.
The battle lines of the coming conflict were being drawn up. More, humanist and author, but also rising lawyer and government officer – he was knighted in 1521 – appointed himself as the
great lay champion of orthodoxy. Tyndale was coming to the end of his time at Cambridge. We do not know how or with whom he spent his time there. Foxe says merely that he was ‘further ripened in God’s word’. More wrote later that Tyndale at this time was known ‘for a man of right good living, studious and well learned in scripture, and in divers places in England was very well liked, and did great good in preaching’. It was the only kind thing that More ever said of him. We do not know who was his informant.
We know that other reformers were Cambridge men, and that they were said to meet at The White Horse Inn: Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Bilney and others whom we know that Tyndale met later – Robert Barnes, Miles Coverdale and John Frith. Perhaps Tyndale joined in their talks at The White Horse; perhaps not.
What is certain is that all of them, except Coverdale alone, were burnt for their beliefs; and that, at some time while he was at Cambridge, Tyndale was exposed to Luther’s ideas and took his own first steps to the stake.
A
fter he left Cambridge, Tyndale became tutor to the children of a Gloucestershire landowner. He arrived with the Walsh family in the midsummer of 1522. He was now aged about twenty-seven, and the months he spent in this rolling wool country set up the rest of his life. He discovered his vocation and he had the first warnings of the perils that went hand in hand with it.
His employer, Sir John Walsh, the future high sheriff of the county, was a good-natured ex-courtier who had served as ceremonial champion to the young Henry VIII at the coronation in 1509. The king remained fond of him, spending a night at his house with Anne Boleyn when a royal progress brought him nearby. Sir John was married to Anne Poyntz, an heiress from a leading county family, whom Tyndale affectionately recalled as ‘a stout and a wise woman’.
The Walshes lived at Little Sodbury Manor, a rambling and friendly house of soft grey stone and mullioned windows that still stands in quiet splendour amid its lawns and ancient yews on a steep west-facing slope of the Cotswolds. Its buildings were grouped round a courtyard, now the west lawn, with one of the
finest great halls in England set beneath a steep-pitched roof. ‘Walche,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘is Lord of Little Sodbyri, and hath fayr place there in the syde of Sodbyri high hill and a park.’ The manor was only a dozen or so miles along the lanes from Slimbridge and North Nibley, and the landscape of pasture and copses was familiar to Tyndale from his childhood. He worked and slept in a heavily beamed room under the eaves at the back of the house, so tradition has it, whose window looks out on to a steep hill. At the summit, where stumps of earth walls trace the remains of a Roman camp, the eye is drawn to Stinchcombe Hill and Nibley Knoll, and across the watery green of the Severn vale to the purple and black loom of the Welsh mountains.
The site was inhabited in the Bronze Age; it was mentioned as a border post against Welsh marauders by the Roman historian Tacitus at the end of the first century. Its name – Sod, or South, and Bury, or Camp – is derived from Saxon words. The manor house itself, one of only two definite homes that we know of in Tyndale’s fugitive life, reflected some of the vicissitudes of English history. Its Saxon owner was expelled after 1066 by a conquering Norman, Hugo Maminot. It passed in time to Hugh le Despenser, an avaricious courtier created earl of Winchester by Edward II, and hanged at Bristol when his royal patron was deposed and murdered in 1327.
Unstable times had returned more recently. When the manor’s great hall was built in the mid-fifteenth century, a spyhole, or ‘squint’, was set into a gargoyle on the wall to the left of the fireplace so that the room could be observed through it from an upper chamber. In the space of a fortnight in 1471, it witnessed the visits of the Lancastrian Margaret of Anjou, and her enemies Edward IV and Richard of Gloucester, as they billeted themselves in the house before riding on to clash at the battle of Tewkesbury. The house had passed to Sir John Walsh’s father through marriage a few years later.
Sir John knew Tyndale’s brother Edward well. The two men later served together on various commissions in the county. The young tutor was treated as a member of the family and his duties were light. The eldest Walsh boy, Maurice, was no more than seven (he was fated, as it transpired, to die of burns as an adult after a ‘fiery sulphurous globe’ rolled in through the parlour door and struck him as he sat dining during a thunderstorm) and he was only in the first stages of reading and writing and Latin grammar.
The tutor thus had time in plenty to indulge his passion for debate and preaching. A private chapel stood in the grounds of the manor. It was used as a parish church by villagers who did not attend the grand church of St John the Baptist three miles away in Chipping Sodbury, where Sir John Walsh lies in a side-chapel. The chapel fell into ruins and in 1859 its stones and simple pulpit were moved down the slope into the small hamlet and rebuilt as the church of St Adeline.
Tyndale roamed much further afield to find larger audiences. He went, so Foxe says, ‘specially about the town of Bristol, and also in the said town in the common place called St Austin’s Green’. This was a patch of open ground in front of the old Augustinian convent in Bristol, now called College Green, where wandering preachers gave al fresco sermons and harangued passersby. In a tradition dating back at least a hundred years, preachers walked or rode round the country, speaking in fields, churchyards or on commons and greens, the public spaces in towns and villages. A licence was needed to preach in each diocese that the wanderer visited, at least in theory, but the rule was difficult to enforce and was frequently ignored.
Sermons were preached in English. They were the only part of an otherwise Latin service that most worshippers could understand; indeed, many priests had only a dim grasp of the meaning of the liturgy, and would have been hard pressed to compose half a sentence in Latin. In its core element, however, the English
sermon relied on the Latin Bible. A preacher began with an
exordium
, or introduction. He passed to the text of the day, taken from the Bible, before completing the sermon with his peroration. This tradition of preaching a sermon on a text gave the single biblical verse, or part of a verse, a compelling power. One phrase, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’, was particularly popular with Lutheran preachers in 1522, as the encapsulation of the new doctrine of justification by faith; as one verse, ‘thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them’, was favoured by their enemies.
Worshippers thus knew that the Bible was a treasure chest, from which the preacher plucked a single gem of wisdom to flash before them each sermon time. But at all other times, except for the handful who could read Latin, the scripture was locked away in a dead language. As a preacher himself, Tyndale had special reason to resent the Church ban on translation into English.
Bristol was promising ground for a radical preacher. It was a great seaport, second only to London in the value of its trade, and ships’ crews and travellers opened it to Continental thoughts and fashions. We cannot be sure whether Tyndale met Lutherans among the German and Dutch merchants and sailors in the city, nor how extreme he was in his open-air preaching over the winter of 1522–3. But there was already enough force and passion in his ideas to shock and anger the senior clergy of the Gloucester diocese. They did not, of course, compromise their dignity by mingling with unwashed laymen to hear him at St Austin’s Green. He came to their ill-tempered notice over dinner conversations in the panelled hall at Little Sodbury. The Walshes kept one of the best tables in the county, and ‘divers great beneficed men, as abbots, deans, archdeacons and other learned men’ were regularly invited to dine. Tyndale sat with the guests.
The table talk often turned to Luther and the scriptures, and the young tutor ‘did many times therein show his mind and learning’,
arguing with his elders and winning points by producing a Vulgate Bible and showing them the passage ‘of open and manifest scripture’ that proved them to be wrong. This did not endear him to them. Divers and sundry times, Foxe reports, ‘the great doctors of divinity waxed weary and bare a secret grudge in their hearts against Master Tyndall’.
They could not be openly hostile while they were enjoying his employers’ hospitality. A group of them therefore invited the Walshes to a banquet, where they felt free to pour poison into their ears. Lady Walsh was impressed that such rich and well-read men found Tyndale to be a dangerous and misguided young man. She tackled him when she returned home. ‘There was such doctor, he may dispend £200 by the year,’ she said, ‘another one hundred pound, and another three hundred pound, and what think ye, were it reason that we should believe you before them so great, learned and beneficed men?’ Tyndale was in no position to answer – he was indeed inexperienced, and fortunate if the Walshes paid him as much as £5 a year – and he did not try to do so.
Instead, he won the family over by translating Erasmus’s book
Enchiridion Militis Christiani
into English. This, at least, is what Foxe claims. Foxe’s informant for this period in Tyndale’s life was probably one Richard Webb, a priest who grew up in Chipping Sodbury. Webb knew Tyndale personally and he was living nearby in his rectory at West Kingston at the time. No manuscript has been found of what would have been Tyndale’s first work as a translator – the first known edition of the
Enchiridion
in English was not printed for another ten years – but there is no reason why Foxe should be mistaken. It was in character for Tyndale to set himself such a project. He had a side that was bookish, vague, naive, ‘for in the wily subtleties of this world’, it was said of him, ‘he was simple and inexpert’. But he was also a doer, pragmatic and alert, who saw a chance – a gift to the Walshes that was also a
dummy run as a translator – and took it. If he was scholarly, he was also bold and decisive.
The
Enchiridion
was an apt choice. Erasmus had written it in 1501 at the request of a Frau Poopenruyter, who wanted to reform her adulterous and dissolute husband, a German arms dealer. It took the form of a handbook for the good Christian soldier, advising him how to acquire and buckle on the spiritual armour of God. In it, Erasmus stressed that the great Christian weapons are prayer and knowledge of the scriptures, especially the New Testament, and above all the gospels and the epistles of Paul to the Romans and Corinthians. Erasmus also took some sideswipes at the state of the Church. He was sharply critical of the greed and superstition of the clergy, and flayed the Schoolmen for their dullness and casuistry. Their writing was unintelligible, he said, and Christians would find all they needed in the scriptures. ‘Honourest thou the bones of Paul hid in a shrine,’ he wrote of the cult of relics, anticipating Luther by more than fifteen years, ‘and honourest thou not the mind of Paul hid in his writings?’ Through study of the scripture, and personal faith and piety, the humblest soldier could open himself to Christ.
Tyndale agreed with this, ferociously so, and it seems that the Walshes were impressed enough with his translation to become reconciled to his ideas and to turn against his critics. After the Walshes had read the book, Foxe reports, ‘those great prelates were no more so often called to the house’, and when they did come they found that they were no longer greeted with the ‘cheer and countenance’ of past visits. They rightly sensed that this ‘came by the means of Master Tyndale’ and soon ‘utterly withdrew’ and came no more to the manor.
They planned their revenge, ‘clustering together … to grudge and storm against Tyndale, railing at him in alehouses and other places’. They claimed that Tyndale was preaching heresy and denounced him secretly to the Gloucester chancellor, the chief
administrator of the diocese, a harsh and ambitious man named John Bell. Bell had a reputation as a skilled interrogator of Lollards and other suspected heretics; four years later, he was temporarily drafted to London to examine German merchants accused of Lutheran sympathies.
