Book of Fire (23 page)

He mocked the Church’s attempts to justify the ban on translating the scripture for the common man. The churchmen said that reading the Bible needed a pure and quiet mind, and that laymen were too cumbered with worldly business to understand it. ‘This weapon strikes themselves,’ he retorted, ‘for who is so tangled with worldly matters as the prelates?’ They said that laymen would interpret it each in his own way. ‘Why then do the curates not teach people the right way?’ For the most part, he claimed, the clergy had no more idea of what the Vulgate Bible meant than the infidel Turks; all they did was to ‘mumble up’ so much every day, as ‘the pie and the popinjay’ – the magpie and the parrot – ‘speak they know not what, and fill their bellies withal’.

His conclusion was dangerous to the Church, for the readers of
Obedience
would be sure to pass it on to friends whom they trusted. ‘They tell you that scripture ought not to be in the mother tongue,’ he wrote, ‘but it is only because they fear the light, and desire to lead you blindfold and in captivity.’ This, he said, had a shocking consequence. By suppressing Christ’s gospel, the Church was making of Christ ‘not the light of the world, but its darkness’.

In this, the Church blasphemed. ‘We do not wish to abolish teaching and to make every man his own master,’ Tyndale warned, ‘but if the curates will not teach the gospel, the layman must have the scripture, and read it for himself, taking God for his teacher.’

If the book urged defiance to the clergy in the preface, however, it moved on to encourage submission to the ruler.
Obedience
was
Tyndale’s response to the blame that ‘our holy prelates and our ghostly religious’ meted out to the reformers for making men to ‘rise against their princes … and to make havoc of other men’s goods’.

The Church and its apologists were having some success in linking reform with anarchy. Thomas More argued that the apparent
libertas
of Luther led to
licentia
. The blood and atrocity of the Peasants’ War in Germany had claimed at least seventy thousand lives. More blamed this ‘cruell insurreccyon’ on the ‘heretykes of his [Tyndale’s] own secte’. In fact, Luther had condemned the uprising. He wrote a powerful tract
Against the Murdering Thieving Hordes of Peasants
, and urged the princes to ‘stab, smite and slay’ all the rebels they could, saying that the times were so extraordinary that ‘a prince can win heaven more easily by bloodshed than by prayer’. Nonetheless, More claimed that it was Tyndale’s Lutheran friends who ‘bare awaye all that euer they founde’, and ‘dyspyghted the sayntes images’.

Tyndale retorted that the damage did not stem from reformers preaching the word of God. How could it, when God ‘is not the author of dissension and strife, but of unity and peace and of good order’? No, he said, it was ‘the bloody doctrine of the pope which causeth disobedience, rebellion and insurrection’. In their greed, and their lust for power, churchmen were sucking the laity dry, and usurping the authority that God had given on earth to kings and princes.

Each day, more prelates, more priests, more monks, friars, canons and nuns were ‘sprung out of hell’ to the ceaseless ‘pattering of prayers’. They did not take away sin; on the contrary, ‘sin groweth as they grow’. In a brutal passage, using five verbs for the same purpose, he said that the Church exploited the laity like animals. ‘The parson sheareth, the vicar shaveth, the parish priest polleth, the friar scrapeth, and the pardoner pareth,’ he wrote. ‘We lack but a butcher to pull off the skin.’

He turned the famous sermon given by Bishop Fisher of Rochester at St Paul’s Cross in 1521 against the Church. Fisher had argued that Luther, having burnt the pope’s bulls and decretals, would have burnt the pope himself if he had him in his power. ‘A like argument,’ Tyndale replied, ‘which I suppose to be rather true, I make: Rochester and his holy brethren have burnt Christ’s Testament: an evident sign verily that they would have burnt Christ also, if they had him.’ As to the pope, and his claim to be the heir to the powers of St Peter, Tyndale snapped that the apostles ‘preached not Peter but Christ’. The pope had authority to do no more than preach God’s word. In any event, Tyndale said, St Paul was greater than Peter, ‘in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prison more plenteously’. This was an important claim to establish, since the evangelicals’ theology rested fair and square on Paul; and Paul had proved his apostleship with preaching and suffering, where the pope and his bishops proved theirs ‘with bulls and shadows’.

It was the king, Tyndale stressed, and not the pope, whom God had ordained to have no superior on earth. The king ‘is in this world without law and may at his lust do right or wrong and shall give accompts but to God only’. Kings and governors must be obeyed, because God has chosen to rule the world through them. ‘Who soever resisteth them resisteth God,’ Tyndale insisted. This obedience was demanded even in the extreme case of the Christians who had fallen under Turkish Muslim rule, a fate that was befalling the Hungarians as he wrote. ‘It is not lawful,’ he wrote, ‘for a Christian subject to resist his prince though he be an heathen man.’

The one restraint on the king was that he must govern by God’s laws. If he commands anything that breaks divine law, his Christian subjects must neither rebel, nor go against God. This was a form of passive resistance and Tyndale applied it to his own translation of the Bible and consequent heresy. Ideally, he said, a
king would judge heresy cases himself, instead of relying on the verdict of priests. He accepted that reality was different. ‘Emperors and kings are nothing nowadays but even hangmen unto the pope and bishops,’ he wrote, ‘to kill whom soever they condemn without any more ado, as Pilate was unto the scribes and pharisees and the high bishops, to hang Christ.’ A Christian faced by this terror must disobey ungodly commands, but he must not resist by force. If the king, at the bidding of his bishops, made the reading of the English Testament a treason against the State, and punished it by prison and the fire, the true believer must stand firm and accept every penalty for Christ’s sake. This principle of Christian obedience, Tyndale said, ran throughout the family and society. The child owed obedience to the parent, the wife to husband, the servant to master, the subject to ruler.

Sudden gentleness, and affection, often breaks through the black gales of Tyndale’s argument, and it did so here. ‘Be as fathers unto your tenants,’ he urged landlords, ‘yea, be unto them as Christ was to us, and show unto them all love and kindness … For even for such causes were ye made landlords; and for such causes paid men rent at the beginning.’

He wrote with the same tenderness of ‘matrimony or wedlock’; typically, he used the shorter Old English word as well as the Latin. He said that the Church was wrong to treat it as a sacrament, because it did not ‘signify any promise that ever I heard or read of in the scripture’. But it was a fine and noble state, ‘ordained for a remedy and to increase the world’, and it was an equal partnership, ‘for the man to help the woman and the woman the man with all love and kindness …’. Husbands must love their wives, ‘as Christ loved the congregation’, and ‘be courteous unto them … and overcome them with kindness’.

Misogyny was part of the age – a much reprinted handbook to witchcraft,
Malleus Maleficarum
, or the
Hammer of the Witches
, described a woman as ‘a foe to friendship, an inescapable
punishment, an evil of nature painted in fair colours’ – as was the view that a wife was the chattel of the husband. Tyndale was free of this, and free of the sense of guilt that had attached itself to sex and marriage at least since Augustine 1100 years before. Wedlock ‘hath a promise that we sin not in that state, if a man receive his wife as a gift given to him of God, and the wife her husband likewise’; sex was like ‘all manner meats and drinks’, in that there is no sin in their enjoyment, if ‘we use them measurably with thanks giving’.

It was a rite of passage for ordained reformers to marry. Luther had most famously married a nun, so that both husband and wife broke their original Catholic vows of chastity, a betrayal Thomas More thought so obscene that he wrote that Luther ‘
volutatur incestu
’, ‘writhes in incest’. Tyndale was rare in remaining unwed. As a hunted creature, he may have felt it unfair to ask a wife to endure his perils and rootlessness, although other exiles like Frith were married. We do not know; the only certainty is that he wrote of women with fondness and respect, and that, sharp as ever, he made a fool of the Church by posing its dogma of a celibate priesthood against its insistence that matrimony is a sacrament. ‘If wedlock be holy,’ he asked of the clergy, ‘why had they lever [rather] have whores than wives?’

Obedience
arrived in England in the autumn of 1528, at much the same time as Cardinal Campeggio, by now in London, received a message from the pope urging him to find any excuse for delaying the decision on the divorce. Anne Boleyn was unaware of this setback, but she was quick to see that
Obedience
, with its message of the authority of kings over popes, might appeal to Henry VIII.

She obtained a copy of
Obedience
, which Foxe says she lent to her waiting woman, Anne Gainsford, after she had read it. The girl’s suitor, George Zouch, snatched it from her hands in play. The young man found it interesting, too much so, because he
was caught reading it during a service by Richard Sampson, the dean of the King’s Chapel. The dean was shocked that a heretical work had reached court, and confiscated the book and gave it to Wolsey.

Told of the loss, Anne Boleyn vowed that ‘yt shalbe the deerest booke that ever deane or cardynall tooke away’. She begged Henry on her knees to have it restored to her. She then marked passages in the margin with her fingernail, and ‘besought his grace most tenderly to read’ them. This he did, supposedly saying ‘thys booke ys for me and all kynges to reade’. The story was corroborated in a biography of Anne written at the end of the century by the grandson of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, who knew and may have been in love with Anne. She must have chosen her passages well. Parts of the book will have pleased Henry, but he was doctrinally conservative and other aspects were certain to infuriate him. A section of the book – ‘how they which God made governors in the world ought to rule if they be christian’ – was aimed directly at the king. It urged him to count the money that the pope and clergy had cost him since he was crowned. ‘I doubt not but that will surmount the sum of forty or fifty hundred thousand pounds,’ Tyndale estimated. ‘The king therefore ought to make them pay this money every farthing, and fetch it out of their mitres, crosses, shrines and all manner treasures of the church, and pay it to his commons again …’ Henry was later to follow up this suggestion.

For the moment, however, he retained a proprietorial interest in the validity of the seven sacraments. He had, after all, received his title of Defender of the Faith from the pope in honour of
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum
, the book he had written – or had ghostwritten by Thomas More – in defending the orthodox dogma. A slyer and foxier man – a ‘juggler’ as it was put then – would have recognised this well-known fact, and avoided any mention of the sacraments. Had he touched up
Obedience
to please the king, Tyndale might at the least have expected the hunters to be called
off the chase. Wolsey, more vulnerable each day to royal anger over the papal foot-dragging on the annulment, would not have dared pursue him on his own initiative.

But Tyndale was incapable of compromise. It was his prime virtue, for from it came his persistence and the implacable honesty of his translation; a man who ducks and weaves in his life might shift and trim in his prose. He sailed straight into the dispute on the sacraments, and sank any prospect of royal favour with thunderous and heretical broadsides. He accepted only the Eucharist and Baptism as genuine sacraments blessed by the scripture. The other five – confirmation, penance, extreme unction, orders and matrimony – were given short shrift as clerical inventions not to be found in the Bible. ‘Penance,’ he wrote with hallmark brevity, ‘is a word of their own forging to deceive us.’

The trawl for readers of the Testament continued. A suspect from Essex was examined in front of Tunstall on 15 October 1528. His was a typical case, although his name is missing from the record of the examination. His father-in-law had taught him the first chapter of James by heart in English, a standard Lollard practice. A butcher from Coggeshall taught him the second chapter. He met John Tyball, whom we have already encountered, at Steeple Bumpstead, who ‘read Paul’s epistles and the evangelists to him, and taught him heresy’. The reference to Paul indicates that Tyball was a Lutheran. A group met at a local shipwright’s house to read Tyndale’s Testament. The man gave six names, including two friars and the Steeple Bumpstead curate, Richard Fox. He admitted that he had gone to London at Whitsun the year before, in 1527, where he had bought a Tyndale Testament from a friar named Baron, whom he had found reading a Testament ‘to a young gentleman with a chain round his neck’. He paid 3s for it. He gave five addresses where he had read it. Two of them were widows’ houses, for women were quite as evangelical as their menfolk.

The Testaments had a startling multiplier effect. Here, a single copy had passed on the infection through readings in at least five places. Individuals were equally contaminating. Richard Fox was also named by one Robert Hemstede, who confessed and abjured his heresy on the sacraments. He said that it was Fox who had told him that Christ’s body and blood were not physically present in the Eucharist. Hemstede said that he was afraid that Fox was leading him to the heresy that ‘the men of Colchester be in’, Lollardy, but the curate had scoffed at him. ‘What, man, art thou afeard?’ the curate retorted. ‘Be not afeard. For those serve a better master than ever thou diddest.’

Robert’s relative Thomas Hemstede confessed that his wife had taught him the Paternoster, Ave Maria and the Creed in English. Richard Fox then made him a churchwarden at Steeple Bumpstead, acknowledging him as a fellow evangelical by calling him ‘brother in Christ’ and ‘a known man’. Fox taught him, and a ploughwright named William Boucher, that the sacrament of the altar ‘is not the very body of Christ, but done for a remembrance of Christ’s Passions’, and that pilgrimages were to no effect. The proof of this, the curate said, was to be found in Tyndale’s Testament. Hemstede named twelve lay persons, including his wife, his natural son, and three Augustinian friars. All, he said, had been taught by Fox.