Book of Fire (7 page)

Bell summoned Tyndale to appear before him in the early part of 1523. No formal charges were laid against him, only that unnamed accusers said that he was ‘an heretic in sophistry, an heretic in logic, an heretic in his divinity’. Tyndale had no means of preparing for an examination that might turn into a staging post on his way to a Lollard pit. He was determined but frightened. He refused to deny his ideas and beliefs, but he never sought out martyrdom, either now or later, as some did. He may already have decided on his mission in life – he was within a few weeks of declaring it for the first time – and he wanted badly to survive to complete it. He told Foxe’s informant that he had grave doubts about the ‘privy’, or secret, accusations made against him, ‘so that he in his going thitherwards cried in his mind heartily to God, to give him strength fast to stand in the truth of his word’.

Local priests were present at the hearing, but, as in most heresy hearings, the accusers remained anonymous. None stepped forward when Tyndale demanded to face those who had given evidence against him. The chancellor ‘thretened me grevously, and revyled me,’ Tyndale recalled, ‘and rated me as though I had bene a dogge’. Tyndale insisted that he had said nothing that was not justified by the New Testament. Bell had no witness to put against him, and was forced to let him go with a severe scolding.

The incident was not to be forgotten. As the examination was taking place in Gloucester, Thomas More was working in London on a polemic against Luther. He did so on behalf of Henry VIII in reply to a tirade Luther had written suggesting, among other pleasantries, that the king was a pig who should be rolled in his own dirt. More’s
Responsio ad Lutherum
outdid the German in crudity
and frenzy. He wrote in Latin, and his command of its colloquialisms underscored how familiar the language was to English writers,
¹
and how rarely they wrote in their own vernacular. More described Luther as
merda
,
stercus
,
lutum
and
coenum
, respectively shit, dung, filth and excrement; he said he was a drunkard, a liar, an ape and an arsehole whom the Antichrist had vomited onto earth.

This was more than the work of a civil servant – More was by now a councillor attendant – eager to please his master. He was obsessed by Lutherans. His loathing had an edge that, in the context of his other characteristics, in particular his usual calm and kindliness, was abnormal. It was violent, vengeful and unbridled, an aberration that he was starting to extend from Luther himself to his followers. It was always likely that this fury would one day attach itself to William Tyndale. When it did, More would dig up the Gloucester affair, and fashion it into a weapon.

The Gloucester clergy remained the immediate danger. Tyndale said that they continued to meet in alehouses to ‘affirm my sayings are heresy’ and inventing others ‘of their own heads which I never spake’. He found them ‘a full ignorant sort’. Many were incapable even of reading their missals. The rest, he said, were only interested in two books. One was a manual of female anatomy, over which they would ‘pore night and day’ with the excuse that it was ‘all to teach the midwives’; the other was a tome that gave them tips on gathering ‘tithes, mortuaries, offerings, customs, and other pillage’.

Tyndale was scarcely exaggerating. The county was known as ‘God’s Gloucestershire’ for its supposed piety, but John Hooper, a contemporary of Tyndale at Oxford, found ‘inhospitable, nonresident, inefficient, drunken and evil-living incumbents’ in every deanery when he later became bishop.
²
Hooper carried out a survey of 311 of his clergy. Nine priests did not know that there were Ten Commandments. Thirty-three did not recall where in
the Bible the commandments were to be found, most of them plumping for the New rather than the Old Testament, and 168 could not remember what they were. Ten could not recite the Lord’s Prayer, and thirty did not know that Jesus Christ was its author. John Trigg of the parish of Dursley received a typical punishment. He was obliged to stand on a bench, wearing only a shirt, to declare: ‘I suffer this penance because I cannot say one of the commandments of almighty God.’

At a meeting with a sympathetic ‘ancient doctor’
³
who lived nearby, Tyndale was confident enough to open his mind. He had probably known the doctor at Oxford, and ‘to him he durst be bold enough to disclose his heart’. Their conversation turned to Rome and the pope.

These were increasingly risky subjects. A few months before, in September 1522, Martin Luther had flouted the papal ban on translations by publishing the September Testament, his German New Testament. Luther was now writing furiously to the pope that the Roman See ‘is more scandalous and shameful than any Sodom or Babylon … its wickedness is beyond all counsel and hope … under your name the poor people in the world are cheated and injured’. The papal legate in Germany was warning the pope that the whole country was in revolution. ‘Nine tenths shout “Luther!” as their war cry,’ he wrote, ‘and the other tenth cares nothing about Luther, and cries: “Death to the court of Rome!”’ The pope himself, Adrian VI, a Dutchman and the last non-Italian incumbent until 1978, had succeeded Leo X only a year before. He was already dying, however, worn out by the task of restoring some honour to an office so debased by Julius and Leo. ‘For many years, abominable things have taken place in the Chair of Peter,’ Adrian admitted wearily, ‘abuses in spiritual matters, transgressions of the Commandments, so that everything here has been wickedly perverted.’

The Church in England knew well enough that the ceremonial
burning of Luther’s works at St Paul’s in 1521 had done nothing to contain the Lutheran infection. It continued to spread, with more books and pamphlets smuggled in from Germany and the Low Countries. Churchmen filled great offices of state – the lord chancellor, Wolsey, the grandest figure of all, was also the pope’s legate and archbishop of York – and the Church’s anxiety spread to government. The authorities were in a state of high alert for signs of Lutheranism. Attacks on the pope were a classic symptom of the plague.

Tyndale made some remark on the papacy critical enough for the doctor to respond: ‘Do you not know that the pope is the very Antichrist, whom the Scripture speaketh of?’ He added a word of warning to the young man. ‘Beware what you say,’ he cautioned, ‘for if you shall be perceived to be of that opinion, it will cost you your life.’

In the late spring or early summer of 1523, Tyndale first mentioned his plan to translate the Bible. He was disputing with a ‘certain divine, reputed for a learned man’. At one stage in their argument, Foxe wrote, the divine said: ‘We were better off to be without God’s laws than the pope’s.’ Tyndale blazed ‘with godly zeal’ at this blasphemy – ‘God’s laws’ meant the scriptures, and ‘the pope’s’ meant canon law – and he replied that he defied the pope and all his laws. ‘If God spare my life,’ he added, ‘ere many years I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.’

The insult to the pope was at once reported around the diocese and there was talk of re-examining the young tutor for heresy. Tyndale found that he had become ‘so turmoiled in the country where I was that I could no longer dwell there’. He feared that the Walshes would also become embroiled and he asked Walsh for permission to leave: ‘Sire, I perceive that I shall not be suffered to tarry long here in this country, neither should you be able to keep me out of the hands of the spirituality,’ he said, ‘and also what
displeasure might grow thereby to you by keeping me, God knoweth.’

Sir John gave him his blessing, and he left for London. The die was cast.

The ‘causes that moved me to translate’ the gospels, Tyndale wrote later, were so simple that he ‘supposed it superfluous’ to explain them. ‘For who is so blind to ask why light should be showed to them that walk in darkness, where they cannot but stumble,’ he wrote, ‘and to stumble is the danger of eternal damnation?’ Who could be ‘so despiteful that he would envy any man so necessary a thing’? The word of God was the light, he said, and ‘who is so bedlam mad to affirm that good is the natural cause of evil, and darkness to proceed out of light, and that lying should be grounded in truth and verity, and not rather clean contrary, that light destroyeth darkness, and verity reproveth all manner of lying?’

The months at Little Sodbury had given him a motive and a precedent for his task. He was convinced that the local clergy were too corrupt and foolish to lead their flocks to salvation; his dealings with them had shown him ‘how that it was impossible to stablysh the laye people in any truth, except ye scripture were playnly layde before their eyes in their mother tongue, and they might se the processe, ordre and meaninge of the text’.

Luther’s September Testament was a blueprint for him to follow. The book’s earthy and vigorous German made it an instant bestseller. Luther had made it as colloquial as possible, visiting an abattoir to get exact German terms from the slaughterers, and rummaging through jewel boxes for the same purpose. ‘I aimed to make Moses so German that no one would suspect that he was a Jew,’ his friend Albrecht Dürer said of the woodcuts used to illustrate the new bibles.

The first edition of four thousand copies had sold out before Christmas and printers were already cashing in on the demand by
running off pirate editions. ‘Even the tailors and shoemakers, and indeed women and simple idiots … read it as eagerly as if it were the fountain of all truth,’ Johannes Cochlaeus, a Catholic loyalist, reported with distaste in Germany. ‘Some carried it in their bosoms and learnt it by heart.’ This was bad for the Church – Cochlaeus complained that Bible readers ‘without timidity … debated not only with Catholic laymen, but also with priests and monks’ – but it was precisely the readership and the effect that Tyndale hoped for.

He knew that the Church would condemn him, but he had already been exposed to the malice of his fellow clergy in Gloucestershire, and he had survived. If the Church thought his ideas to be heresy, lay people like the Walshes had found them sympathetic. He had, too, put his talent for translation to the test. The
Enchiridion
was proof in itself of the colossal impetus that the printing press was giving to the written word; it had been through twenty-three Latin editions in the six years before Tyndale translated it. He had scholarship, and Greek and Latin, and he could learn Hebrew. He wrote a plain and powerful English, soaked with the cadence and rhythm he had learnt in his Oxford rhetoric classes. He was brave. Above all, he was inspired by the love of Christ and the gospels.

Tyndale and his age came to the Bible, and to Christ, with a raw hunger and amazement, as if the astonishing story of the brief passage of the Son of God on earth was new to them, and as if it was only when they were released from the Latin that the words of Christ’s Passion struck home. ‘What are these new doctrines? The gospel?’ Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon had asked the year before. ‘Why, that is 1,522 years old.’ But it was old only in the technical sense that it had been written long before.

In Latin, it was the priestly text of a religion whose true substance was the Church and its liturgy and tradition. Translated into a living language, devoured from cover to cover, read secretly in
corners or aloud with trusted friends, its impact was wholly new; troubling, a cause of spiritual collapse and ecstasy, a divider of families, a breaker of kingdoms. ‘We will try everything by the touchstone of the gospel,’ Melanchthon said, ‘and the fire of Paul.’ Read in that light, the Bible was a force with the power of apocalypse.

What was not in it was quite as important as what was. Readers found that many powerful institutions and beliefs were not directly blessed by God at all, but only by tradition and the Church. The Bible made no mention of the papacy, or of bishops or hierarchies. It was silent on the celibacy of priests. It did not state that the sacramental bread and wine was ‘transubstantiated’ into the body and blood of Christ at communion. It did not encourage the cult of saints and relics, from which the Church derived much income and prestige; on the contrary, it warned that: ‘Thou shalt not make any graven image, nor bow down to it, nor worship it.’ It made no promise that a pilgrimage or a cash payment to a pardoner would result in the forgiveness of sins. The word ‘purgatory’ appeared nowhere in it; it was a twelfth-century invention. Yet, to escape its supposed clutches, men and women left large sums to chantry priests to perform ‘trentals’, series of thirty intercessionary masses for their souls. Henry VII had made special efforts to avoid purgatory; the old king ordered ten thousand masses for his own soul at 6d apiece, twice the standard fee.

Anyone who went through the scriptures in the 1520s was certain to remark on these and other omissions, all of which appeared to reflect badly on the Church. Radicalism was in the air – the English authorities cited ‘the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of people to erroneous opinions’ as an additional reason for banning translations – and readers knew what to look for. It was a fact, not a papal invention, that a widely read Bible was a danger to the Church. Serving Catholic priests – a category
that covered both Luther and Tyndale – lost their faith simply by reading it. One such was Menno Simons, a twenty-eight-year-old who had ‘never touched’ the scriptures during his first three years as a priest. While handling the bread and wine in the mass, however, Simons had the troubling notion that they were not the flesh and blood of Christ. He attributed this to the devil trying to separate him from his faith. ‘I confessed it often, sighed, and prayed,’ he wrote, ‘yet I could not come clear of the ideas.’ He spent his time drinking, playing cards and brooding.

‘Finally, I got the idea to examine the New Testament diligently,’ he said. ‘I had not gone very far when I discovered that we were deceived …’ He was ‘quickly relieved’ to find that his doubts were justified, finding no evidence that the bread and wine were anything but mere symbols of Christ’s passion. He heard of a new sect, the Anabaptists, who rejected infant baptism and were rebaptised as adults. ‘I examined the scriptures diligently and pondered them earnestly,’ Simons wrote, ‘but could find no report of infant baptism.’ He realised that his new beliefs on baptism and the sacraments now made him a heretic in the eyes of his Church. He had become so, he wrote, ‘through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, through much reading and pondering of the scriptures, and by the gracious favour and gift of God …’ The experience was overwhelming. Simons abandoned the lusts of his youth and his search for ‘gain, ease, fame and the favour of men’; he was a hunted fugitive until his death. He thought it a bargain, for ‘if I should gain the whole world and live a thousand years, and at last have to endure the wrath of God, what would I have gained?’