Book of Fire (8 page)
Tyndale had that same exhilaration. He wrote of being embraced by the light of ‘Evangelion (that we call the gospel) … a Greek word and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad and maketh him sing, dance and leap for joy …’ To translate it was an act of affection and rapture.
T
yndale needed a patron to support him while he worked on the translation. ‘As this I thought,’ he wrote, ‘the bishoppe of London came to my remembrance, whom Erasmus praiseth exceedingly … for his great learning. Then thought I, if I might come into this mannes service, I were happye. And so I gate me to London.’
He arrived in the city to see Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop, in or around July 1523. He was armed with a letter of introduction that Walsh had given him to a courtier he knew well, Sir Henry Guildford, the king’s Controller of the Household, and until recently the Master of Horse.
Tyndale duly called on Guildford. The courtier was an amateur scholar, and Tyndale presented him with a translation from the Greek of an oration by Isocrates that he had recently finished at Little Sodbury. Guildford received him warmly and said that he would mention him to Tunstall. He evidently did so, because he then advised that Tyndale should write to Tunstall to beg for an appointment to see him. Tyndale delivered the letter to one of the bishop’s servants and waited for a reply.
On the face of it, Tunstall was an admirable choice as a potential
patron. He seemed to be the very model of a liberal scholar. After studying at Oxford, Tunstall had gone on to read law at Padua, where he was friendly with Aldus Manutius, founder of the famous Aldus publishing house in Venice. He knew Erasmus – who of importance did not? – and had helped the great man with the second edition of his Greek New Testament while he was on his diplomatic mission to the Low Countries. Tunstall had some Hebrew, as well as Greek, and a book he had written on arithmetic remained a standard work for students for many years.
His time in Italy had shown him that the pope as well as the Church would benefit from reform. ‘I saw myself,’ he recollected with some disgust, ‘when Julius, then being bishop of Rome, stood on his feet and one of his chamberlains held up his skirt, because it stood not as he thought with his dignity that he should do it himself, that his shoe might appear, while a nobleman of great age prostrated himself upon the ground and kissed his shoe.’ His friends found him generous and tolerant. More, to whom he gave a much-treasured piece of heart-shaped amber with a fly suspended in it as a keepsake, described him in
Utopia
as a man ‘out of comparison’. Erasmus went further. ‘Our age does not possess a man more learned, a better or a kinder man,’ he wrote. ‘I seem not to be alive now that he is taken from me.’
Above all, Tunstall met Tyndale’s key criterion. As bishop of London, he had the power to lift the Constitutions of Oxford and authorise the translation of the scripture. Tyndale had high hopes. ‘I was beguiled,’ he said, that his approach to the bishop was ‘the next way upon my purpose’. In fact, he had hopelessly misjudged both the man and the circumstances.
Tunstall was not solely a cleric. He was part lawyer, part diplomat and part politician, like his soul mate, Thomas More. The two men were bound together by friendship, political experience and a deep loathing for heresy. They displayed the latter in the Hunne
affair, and their views on this great
cause célèbre
should have warned Tyndale of the futility of approaching Tunstall.
Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London and later Durham, whom Tyndale sought out when he arrived in London in 1523. The young tutor was foolish to think that Tunstall would aid him to translate the Bible. The bishop was a traditionalist, and a close friend of Thomas More, who found him a man ‘out of comparison’. Thwarted, Tyndale left England for the Continent, cursing Tunstall as a ‘still Saturn … a ducking hypocrite’.
(Bridgeman Art Library)
Early in December 1514, the body of a rich London tailor named Richard Hunne had been found hanging by the neck in a cell of the Lollards’ tower, the ecclesiastical prison maintained by the bishop of London in the west churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three years before, Hunne’s son Stephen had died at the age of five weeks. The infant’s body was taken to St Mary’s Church in Whitechapel for burial, where Thomas Dryfield, the priest at St Mary’s, demanded a ‘mortuary’ for performing the service. By tradition, a priest could demand to be given a piece of property belonging to the deceased.
‘Mortuaries’ figured prominently in lay grievances against the Church. Wycliffe had condemned them in his day, as gouging the poor when they most needed the consolation of religion, and Londoners were notoriously anti-clerical, alert for any excuse to attack the clergy. Dryfield nonetheless insisted that Hunne give him the bearing sheet in which the baby Stephen had been wrapped for his christening. Hunne refused. He argued that, by English common law, a corpse cannot own property. He refused to let the sheet go.
The little scrap of cloth aroused passionate interest. If it was won by the priest, it would signify the continuing subservience of the laity to the priesthood and the Church. If Hunne kept it, common law would have triumphed over the canon law of the Church, for canon law had recognised the validity of mortuaries for centuries.
Dryfield sued Hunne for the sheet in the Bishop’s Court, the ecclesiastical court where cases involving the Church were tried under canon law. The case was heard by Cuthbert Tunstall, then chancellor to the diocese, in May 1512. Tunstall ruled in favour of Dryfield. Hunne refused to part with the sheet. When he attended his parish church, St Margaret’s in Bridge Street, Dryfield greeted him with the formula: ‘Hunne, thowe arte accursed and thow
stondist accursed.’ Hunne was thereby excommunicated from the body of the faithful and his soul consigned to hell. Hunne retaliated by charging the priesthood with violating
praemunire
, a fourteenth-century statute upholding the rights of the common law courts and the king against the pope and the Church courts.
This development thoroughly alarmed Tunstall and senior churchmen. Bishop Fitzjames, Tunstall’s predecessor as bishop of London, brought formal charges of heresy against Hunne. More was convinced that Hunne had Lollard friends ‘that were wont to haunt those midnight lectures’ at which manuscript copies of Lollard Bibles were read out. He accused Hunne of publicity seeking; the tailor was ‘high-minded and set on the glory of a victory’, he said, and ‘he trusted to be spoke of long after his days and have his matter called Hunne’s case’.
The case indeed became notorious, to the anger of More and Tunstall. Hunne was arrested and interrogated by the bishop and his officers on Saturday 2 December 1514. He was then locked away in the Lollards’ tower for the weekend. In the early hours of Monday he was found hanging dead in his cell. A coroner’s jury was summoned. It found there was no evidence that Hunne had killed himself. He could not have inserted his neck into the noose in which he was found; his wrists showed signs of having been bound, the only stool in the cell was too far from his body for him to have used it, and there were marks of manual strangulation around his neck. The jury declared that Hunne had been murdered.
The bishop declared the jurors to be ‘false, perjured caitiffs’ and continued with the heresy case against Hunne. Canon law, as in the case of Wycliffe, permits trials of the dead. An English translation of the Bible was said to have been found among Hunne’s papers. More claimed that he had seen it, and that Hunne had written notes in the margin on the ‘heresies’ it contained, thus proving ‘what naughty minds the men had, both he that so
noted them and he that so made [the manuscript]’. More said that the prologue to the Bible contained a condemnation of the mass.
Hunne’s corpse was charged with calling the pope ‘Satan’ and ‘Antichrist’, and with condemning papal indulgences and the veneration of images. The trial was held in the Chapel of Our Lady at St Paul’s on 16 December, in the presence of More and Tunstall. Hunne was duly condemned and his property was declared forfeit to the crown, thus depriving his family and surviving children of a fortune More estimated at 100,000 marks. Four days after the trial, the body was burnt at Smithfield.
The coroner’s jury was not easily cowed, however. The jailer of the Lollards’ tower, one Charles Joseph, had fled from London to the countryside on the day Hunne’s body was found. A warrant was issued for Joseph, and he was arrested two months later and brought to the Tower of London. Under interrogation, he admitted to the jury that at midnight on 3 December, on the direct orders of Dr William Horsey, chancellor to Bishop Fitzjames, he and the cathedral bell-ringer John Spalding had entered Hunne’s cell. They found him lying in his bed and strangled him. The jury indicted Horsey, Spalding and Joseph for murder.
A few months before Hunne’s death, Leo X had repeated the canon law principle that no layman had rightful jurisdiction over a clerk or cleric in any case of any nature. ‘Clerk’ was a broad term, covering any individual whom the Church deemed to be fulfilling a vocation. This included men with menial jobs on Church property, including bell-ringers and jailers. If a man had a tonsured head and read a little Latin, he was adjudged a clerk – and was safely beyond the reach of a coroner’s jury and the gallows if he could mumble a few words from the Latin Bible.
Parliament, however, in anti-clerical mood in 1512, had passed a law against ‘criminous clerks’ that made unordained clerks subject to the common law courts in cases of murder committed in
churches, in the home of the victim, or on the king’s highway. Londoners, in increasingly angry mood, demanded that the accused men appear in a common law court. The bishop wrote desperately to Wolsey, asking him to intercede with the king on Horsey’s behalf. ‘For assured am I that if my chancellor be tried by any 12 men in London,’ he wrote, ‘they be so maliciously set in favour of heretical depravity that they will cast and condemn my clerk though he be as innocent as Abel.’ The appeal worked. Horsey was kept in prison until London’s anger died down; he then pleaded not guilty to the King’s Bench, and was released.
In the face of the evidence, Tunstall and More continued to insist that Hunne was a suicide. More said flatly that Hunne ‘hanged himself for despair, despite, and for a lack of grace’; he claimed that Hunne was frantic to find that ‘in the temporal law he should not win his spurs’ so that ‘he began to fall in fear of worldly shame’. For good measure, More later cited an Essex carpenter who said that he had met Hunne at a conventicle of heretics in London. That the Essex man was a convicted felon and perjurer did not concern More in the least; all, to him, was fair in the war against heretics.
More may have discussed the morality of this with Tunstall while they were together in the Low Countries. More’s humanism in
Utopia
has a strangely submissive streak when it comes to the Utopian priesthood. The secular authorities in his imagined island commonwealth let priests go free no matter what they might have done. ‘Neither,’ he wrote of the treatment of priests, ‘do they think it right to touch with mortal hand anyone – guilty of whatever horrible deed – who has been set aside as a gift to God in such a singular manner.’
More’s respect for the clergy was high, close to grovelling; Tyndale had none. Neither was More’s friend Tunstall a better prospect. He, too, was deeply hostile to Lutheranism. While on a diplomatic mission to Worms in 1521, he had urged the king to
ban the import of Luther’s treatise
De Babylonica Captivitate
, which attacked the Church for subjugating the laity. The same year, Tunstall had collaborated with the violently anti-Lutheran bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, in the polemic
Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio
.
Tunstall’s reply to Tyndale’s petition was some time in coming. The bishop was a member of the House of Lords and Convocation – both honours went with the job – and he also had personal and secular ambitions as the Keeper of the Privy Seal. High politics kept him busy over the summer. Parliament had met in London in April of 1523, in Blackfriars, the seat of the Dominican friars on a site between the river and Ludgate. Tunstall had delivered the King’s Speech at the opening, to a splendid company of notables. Henry VIII himself had sat healthy and handsome on his dais, while below him were ranged the spiritual lords, the archbishops, bishops and abbots, and the temporal lords, barons and earls, with the judges sitting on their woolsacks between them, and, standing at the bar of the lower House of Commons, Tunstall’s friend, Thomas More, the Speaker.
The members of the Commons were in sour and angry mood. Wolsey had squandered the funds carefully built up by Henry VII on feckless Continental wars, and was now looking to parliament for cash to fritter on another French campaign. He had taken the precaution of making sure that More, a most loyal servant of Church and crown, was elected as Speaker of the House. More allowed the cardinal to enter the Commons with a large and intimidating retinue, although several MPs had argued that he should have brought only a handful of retainers. Made bolder, Wolsey demanded the tremendous subsidy of £800,000, and, gaining much comfort when More clashed with his colleagues and supported the demand, declared that he would ‘rather have his tongue plucked out of his head with a pair of pincers’ than reduce it. The ‘grettiste and soreste’ arguments ensued, for none could
remember ‘that ever there was geven to any oon of the Kings auncestors half so moche at oon graunte’, but Wolsey held out and won. He was delighted with More’s soothing role as Speaker, and arranged for the king to give him a fee of £100 and a lucrative post as a collector of subsidies. More was duly grateful to the cardinal, assuring him that ‘I shal be dayly more and more bounden to pray for your Grace’; he used the money to invest in land, buying twenty-seven acres on the Thames at Chelsea, where he was building a great house.
