Book of Fire (9 page)

The subsidy was assessed at 4s in the pound on all the property in the kingdom. Convocation, the assembly of senior churchmen, balked at it as much as the Commons. The influence of Tunstall and the grander bishops was telling, and Convocation grudgingly granted a heavy tax on every benefice in the country. The laity conveniently forgot that clerics were as hard hit as themselves. The tax was being levied by the pope’s cardinal, and the papal reputation took a further popular battering.

It was not until September that Tunstall found time to deal with the obscure young man from Gloucestershire who wished to translate the Bible. He was polite but firm. ‘My lorde answered me,’ Tyndale recollected, ‘his house was full, he had mo then he coude well finde, and advised me to sek in London, wher he sad I coude not lacke a service. I … understode at the laste … that there was no rowme in my lorde of London’s palace to translate the newe testament.’

Tyndale had arrived in London with a single letter of introduction and his grand project as an unemployed priest with no living, no means of support and no friends. His introduction had now failed him. He turned on the bishop – ‘still Saturn,’ he wrote, ‘that so seldom speaketh, but walketh up and down all day musing and imagining mischief, a ducking hypocrite, made to dissemble’ – as he turned on all who blocked him.

He was not fair, or reasonable, when he was crossed. Tunstall’s palace may well have been full with provincial clergy who were in town for Convocation. Neither did it occur to Tyndale that his request was outrageous. The bishop of London was one of the most powerful men in the country. Tyndale, an unknown minor cleric whose last post was as a child’s tutor, had asked if he could live in this awesome person’s palace. Once installed, Tyndale had said, he intended to do something that had been punishable by death for more than a hundred years.

Tunstall might have ridiculed his plan, or had him flung into his episcopal dungeons for heretical intent. Instead, he was remarkably civil. But Tyndale’s attack on him, however ill deserved, did not spring from spite or malice. It came from anger, from fury that the bishop would deny his countrymen the means of salvation, the Bible, in a language they could understand. It was, in its way, the wrath of God and it was, like Tyndale himself, righteous.

He had now to find another patron. While he was waiting for the bishop’s decision, Tyndale had preached some sermons in the church of St Dunstan-in-the-West in Fleet Street. Among the congregation was Humphrey Monmouth, a kindly and wealthy cloth merchant living in the London parish of All Hallows at Barking. Monmouth was connected with the Christian Brethren, a loose and secretive ring of London merchants sympathetic to the new ideas in Germany, who imported and distributed the writings of the reformers and supported scholars and translators. Lollards helped them pass on books and ideas; Tunstall complained that to the Lollards’ ‘vast army of heresies new weapons had been added by their recent Wycliffite offspring’ on the Continent.

Monmouth was to pay for his loyalty and friendship to Tyndale some five years later with an examination by Thomas More and a stint in the Tower. Here, in the presence of Tunstall, he signed a petition to Wolsey denying that he was a heretic, and begging to
be released from the Tower before his business was ruined. In his petition, he explained how he had met ‘a priest called Sir William Tyndal’ – priests were often addressed ‘Sir’ as a courtesy – ‘otherwise called Hotchens’. He said that he had heard Sir William preach two or three sermons at St Dunstan’s, ‘and after that I chanced to meet with him, and with communication I examined what living he had. He said he had none at all, but he trusted to be with my lord of London in his service; and therefore I had the better fantasy of him.’

On getting the bad news that Tunstall ‘had chaplains enough, and … that he would have no more at that time’, Tyndale had returned to see him. ‘He besought me to help him,’ Monmouth said, ‘and so I took him into my house half a year; and there he lived as a good priest, as me thought.’

Monmouth seems to have become a ‘scripture-man’ who began to ‘smell the gospel’, the phrase used of Lollards, more than a decade before he met Tyndale. As a result, or so it was said, his Lollard-flavoured talk had offended a poor neighbour whom he liked well, lending him money and often having him at his table. The neighbour refused to visit him any more, cut him dead in the street and reported him to the bishop’s officers as a heretic. Monmouth was deeply hurt and seized on a chance meeting in a narrow lane to find out what troubled him. The poor man tried to brush past but Monmouth caught his hand and stopped him. ‘Neighbour, whence is this displeasure against me?’ he said. ‘What have I done to you? Tell me, and I will be ready to make amends.’ Overcome by this gentle and loyal greeting, the poor man fell to his knees and begged Monmouth’s forgiveness; and so, the story has it, they ‘loved one another as well as ever they did afore’.

This kindness added to the unspoken obligation to look after kindred spirits that was shared by those who held dangerous beliefs. It was natural for him to have helped Tyndale. He drew a sober and scholarly picture of his young guest’s lifestyle. ‘He
studied most part of the day and of the night at his book,’ Monmouth said, ‘and he would eat but sodden meat by his good will, nor drink but small single beer.’ Sodden meat was served plain and without sauces, and small beer was thin and weak. Tyndale was able to survive on very little indeed, a necessary virtue for his project. Monmouth noted that ‘I never saw him wear linen about him in the space he was with me.’ He made do with wool even for his shirts, though it scratched his skin.

By his own account, Tyndale did not spend all his time in London closeted with his books. ‘And so in London I abode almost a year,’ he wrote, ‘and marked the course of the world, and heard our praters (I would say our preachers) how they boasted themselves and their high authority, and beheld the pomp of our prelates, and how busied they were …’

London showed how frail was Tyndale and how great his enemy. The clergy were inescapable. They were the largest owners of property and the biggest employers in the city. The manor of Stepney, one of the estates that Tunstall enjoyed as bishop, stretched clean across modern London from the county of Essex in the east to Barnes and Wimbledon in the south west. The canons of St Paul’s owned a further thirteen manors, running northwards from what are now the office blocks of Holborn past St Pancras station and on to the smart residential streets and shabby housing estates of Islington.

London had more churches than any other city in Europe. Its skyline was dominated by spires and towers, the houses meek beneath them. There were more than 120 parish churches, sixteen of them named for St Mary within the single walled square mile of the old city, and thirteen grand conventual churches. A monastery with a convent garden stood on almost every major artery; there were sixteen priories, nunneries and friaries, and the same number of charitable hospitals and refuges. The church bells made by the
Whitechapel bell foundry were famous; young bloods would ring them for hours to keep warm in winter, and lay bets on who could make them heard at the furthest distance. The city had several holy wells, Clerkenwell, Sadler’s Well, Monkwell, guarded by hermits, where the sick took the waters in the hope of healing.

Beneath the orthodox surface – the chantries and shrines, and the teeming relics, Westminster Abbey displaying blood from Christ’s wounds, milk from the Virgin, a hair of St Peter, pieces of the cross and a beam from the holy manger – were uneasy reminders of the fates reserved for heretics. London was almost as renowned for the number of its prisons as for its churches. Lambeth Palace, the residence of the archbishop of Canterbury on the south bank of the Thames, had a Lollards’ tower built by Archbishop Chicheley a century before to hold suspected heretics during their interrogation and torture. The outer and inner doors were oak, and the cells were lined with wood, into which iron rings were driven so that prisoners could be suspended above the floor. Tunstall had cells available for the same purpose in his residence at St Paul’s and at his other palace in Fulham.

The authorities could also dispatch religious suspects to sixty whipping posts, stocks and cages, and to a dozen common prisons, of which Newgate, the Old Compter in Bread Street and the Fleet were merely the most notorious. A viewing gallery stood outside the lowest and dankest storey of the Fleet, at the site where Farringdon Street now runs down to the Thames. From here the rich watched the antics of the inmates, while a prisoner rattled an alms box at the grating, crying: ‘Pity the poor prisoners.’ The Tower of London itself, built of alien, creamy Caen stone by William I, a symbol of Norman conquest that Londoners had resented ever since, penned heretics as well as traitors of sufficient note.

Burnings took place at Smithfield, open ground to the north of the priory of St Bartholomew the Great. This was home to the
annual Bart’s Fair, a fortnight of wrestling, bowling, archery contests, freak shows, dancing bears, and dancing people in canvas tents, acrobats, jugglers and miracle plays. Horses were sold there on Fridays, and whistling birds and puppy dogs, and herds of cattle, pigs and sheep were driven up from the country to be slaughtered. Then, as now, Smithfield was London’s meat market, and in more ways than one, for the adjacent Cock Lane was the haunt of prostitutes, a place of ‘bawdy-house keepers, night-walkers, robbers, women of ill-fame’.

An open field, in front of St Bartholomew’s hospital, played host to the condemned. It had been the ritual place for duels and ordeals by battle in medieval days and it remained the home of the stake. Condemned heretics were chained to the stake by heavy irons at the feet, waist and chest. Bundles of faggots made of kindling wood interspersed with dried reeds were piled up around them to waist height or above. Large crowds circled the stake, and were sometimes held back by men with halberds or on horseback. Benches were put up for people of quality who wished to watch the spectacle. The senior official cried ‘Fire the faggots! …
Fiat justitia!
’ as the signal for justice to be done. At these words, the executioner tested the direction of the wind with his torch, and then lit the reeds on the windward edge of the pyre.

It was rare for a victim to die swiftly of asphyxiation or smoke inhalation, since the fire was set in the open air and the smoke and fumes were dispersed on the wind. Death was by multiple burns and shock, and it was often prolonged. Foxe recorded that a later heretic took forty-five minutes to die, noting that ‘when the left arm was on fyre and burned, he touched it with his right hand, and it fell from his bodye, and he continued to pray to the end wythout moving’.

For the moment, the Smithfield ashes were cold. Wolsey was not a man-burner. Tyndale knew full well, however, that ‘greater
excommunication’, or the fire, was the penalty demanded by the English Church for translators of scripture.

Even were he not betrayed while working on the Bible, he could not have published it. London had no more than seven printers, all of them tightly controlled, and none would have considered printing it. In 1524, Tunstall summoned the London printers and booksellers to meet him. He warned them of the penalties for handling heretical books and issued the first licensing order for imported books. No book was to be brought into the realm without episcopal permission. No new work could be published without the consent of a board of censors. Its members were the cream of the English Church: Wolsey, Archbishop Warham, fierce Bishop Fisher and himself. Foreign printers had the lion’s share of London publishing. They relied on a statute of 1484 which had specifically exempted printers and booksellers from the ban which prohibited other foreign craftsmen from working in the city. This privilege was justified by the slow development of the trade, and the scarcity of English-born printers. It could be withdrawn at any time, however, and the Stationers’ Company was lobbying hard for the removal of the exemption. The big foreign printers were careful to behave.

Lutheran books and tracts were thus coming into London from Germany and the Low Countries, and on a rising scale, as Tyndale saw. The printing industry across the Narrow Sea was flourishing. Cologne had double the number of printers as London, and Antwerp five times as many. Parts of Germany were Lutheran, and welcomed English exiles, and printers in Catholic areas were willing to publish Lutheran material for profit.

Monmouth, who had travelled as far as Rome and Jerusalem, had excellent contacts with merchants from the print-rich regions. He introduced Tyndale to Lutheran Hanseatic merchants at the Steelyard. Since Henry III in 1259, these ‘merchants of Almaine’, or Germany, had enjoyed a monopoly on the import of foreign
corn and other valuable privileges. They were permitted to ‘bring hither as well wheat, rye and other grain, as cables, ropes, masts, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, linen cloth, wainscots, wax, steel and other profitable merchandise’. They made loans to the crown and Londoners were obliged to show them a respect they rarely wasted on foreigners. Each Christmas and Easter, the Steelyard men paid a token toll of two grey cloths and one brown, with 10 pounds of pepper, five pairs of gloves and two vessels of vinegar. They were otherwise free of all subsidies to the king.

The Steelyard itself was a large complex situated where Cannon Street station now stands on the north bank of the Thames, with a quay, warehouses and a great stone hall with arched gates. Here, the traders worked, dined and entertained. They were, for Tyndale, heaven-sent. They knew bankers, printers and shippers throughout northern Germany and the Low Countries. They were experienced in the transfer of funds. They were also sympathetic to his cause. The Steelyard was at the centre of illegal Lutheran book imports and its members were adept at book smuggling.

A small group of Monmouth’s friends raised some initial money for Tyndale’s project: we do not know who or how much. When he was in the Tower, Monmouth admitted that ‘I did promise him £10’. He added that this was ‘to pray for my father and mother their souls and all Christian souls’. This was untrue – Tyndale was notorious for his attacks on chantry priests and all who made money through prayers for the dead – but Monmouth claimed it to distance himself from the financing of the Bible. Monmouth added that ‘afterwards [Tyndale] got of some other men £10 sterling more’, and that funds were transferred to him in Germany by a Steelyard merchant named Hans Collenbeke.