Book of Fire (25 page)

Though he argued that Tyndale’s botched work was fit only for the flames, More was careful not to condemn the principle of an English Bible outright. An acceptable translation might one day be made by ‘some good catholic and well learned man’, he agreed, provided that the Church approved it. But only bishops should be allowed to buy copies, he said, and they should lend them only to the most trustworthy men. He suggested each bishop need not
spend more than £10 on this; assuming a cost of 6s per complete copy, More was estimating that a diocese could get by on thirty or so Bibles. As an added precaution, he suggested that the bishops lend only a part of the Bible to each reader, so that one had John, but not Acts, and another Ephesians, but not Revelation, and so forth.

Simple Christians should be kept away from it. More said that the scripture was tricky – ‘a fly may wade in, but an elephant can drown’ – and would overtax uneducated minds. In particular, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the key to the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, contained ‘such high difficulties as very few learned men can very well attain’. Tyndale was wrong to claim that it was necessary to read the Bible, More said. Christ had revealed to his Church all that was needed to gain salvation. The pronouncements of the Church were the Word of God as surely as any verse in the scripture. In a largely illiterate world, it was natural and just that they should be passed on orally, ‘bye onely wordes and prechynge … by mouth amonge the people’. In any event, More denied that Tyndale’s Testament was the Word of God. ‘If Tyndale’s testament be taken up,’ he wrote, ‘then shall false heresies be preached, then shall the sacraments be set at naught, then shall fasting and prayer be neglected, then shall holy saints be blasphemed, then shall Almighty God be displeased, then shall he withdraw his grace and let all run to ruin … then will rise up rifling and robbery, murder and mischief, and plain insurrection … then shall youth leave labour and all occupation, then shall folk wax idle and fall to unthriftiness, then shall all laws be laughed to scorn …’ Then, in short, society would suffer extreme breakdown; the Church, the fountainhead of law and authority, would be destroyed, and with it the continuity of the centuries would be shattered. Tyndale was guilty of a dual crime. Spiritually, he challenged Christ’s true Church, and, in temporal terms, he was ruining the peace of the realm.

Tyndale was thus a heretic and a traitor, and, to More, the burning of heretics was ‘lawful, necessary and well done’. Faint hearts might say that it was wrong to send heretics to the stake, because Christ had told Peter to ‘put up thy sword’; but More reminded them that St Augustine and other Fathers of the Church had agreed that Christian princes ‘have been constrained to punish heretics by terrible death’. Others might say that Christians, having themselves been persecuted by Jews and pagans, should not persecute others. ‘That,’ said More, ‘is no reason to look that Christian princes should suffer the Catholic Christian people to be oppressed by Turks or by heretics worse than Turks.’ It was wrong to make a ‘covenant’ with the heretics. They must be ‘punyshed by deth in ye fyre’.

It may seem wrong, and perhaps it is wrong, that More should have been canonised in 1935, and it is, at the very least, bizarre that he should have been further elevated in 2000 to become the patron saint of politicians. Politicians persecute opponents readily enough without having More dangled in front of them as a role model.

In his diagnosis, however, if not in his cure, More was correct. He guessed accurately and very quickly that the ‘evangellycalls’ were a lethal threat to established order. The Christian religion had, over many centuries, come to mean the Church. Scholastic theology might be dull and nitpicking – More described it as ‘milking a billygoat into a sieve’ – but it remained a Church monopoly and it did not endanger civil peace. Scripture had become a priestly text submerged beneath more than a thousand years of Church traditions, and Church law and lore. More saw very clearly the dangers of blowing the dust off it, and promoting it afresh as the gauge of human conduct.

Tyndale and his fellow Bible-men, as More suspected, were indeed fuelling future wars of religion. These caused, in the regions
where they were most virulent, a carnage as great as that of the Black Death, the bubonic plague of the mid-fourteenth century, and infinitely more prolonged.

If Luther had not directly incited the German peasants to rebel, his attacks on papal authority were certainly one of the triggers of the uprising. The rebels made use of his September Testament to attack serfdom – ‘Here is neither lord nor servant’, they quoted St Paul in their pamphlets, ‘We are all one in Christ’ – and extended his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to make a naked call to anarchy: ‘True Christian faith needs no human authority.’

The notorious case of Thomas Müntzer showed how prone evangelicals were to religious dementia. Müntzer was a young chantry priest who fell under Luther’s influence at Wittenberg. He became the pastor of the small Saxon town of Allstedt in 1523. Here, in classic reformer style, he married, composed liturgies in German and translated Latin hymns into the vernacular. He fell out with Luther, calling his old mentor the ‘Pope of Wittenberg’, and took to signing himself ‘God’s messenger’. He believed that he had been given the divine task of exterminating all priests and godless rulers. ‘The living God is sharpening his scythe in me,’ he rejoiced, ‘so that later I can cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers.’ In his sermons, he drew on the book of Daniel to proclaim the coming apocalypse, and styled himself Jehu, after the Lord’s chosen executioner who had trampled the queen-whore Jezebel to death beneath the hooves of his horse.

Expelled from Allstedt, Müntzer moved to Mühlhausen where he hung a white sheet with a rainbow painted on it in his church, as a sign of his covenant with God. Bodyguards carried a red crucifix and a naked sword in front of him when he walked through the streets. His sermons fed conservative fears of evangelically inspired revolution. Müntzer spoke of lords stealing all creatures as their property; the ‘fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the ground have all got to be theirs … they oppress all people,
and shear and shave the poor ploughman and everything that lives’.

A peasant force of eight thousand had camped near Mühlhausen in May 1525 during the uprising. Müntzer agreed to lead them, while the princes raised an army against them. Reformers used biblical references as weapons, and Müntzer loosed one against the princes. ‘God spoke of you and yours in Micah 3’, he wrote, leaving them to look up the reference and see that they were rulers ‘who hate the good, and love the evil … who eat the flesh of my people; … therefore it shall be night unto you, that ye shall have no vision’. After 1551, when the printer Robert Stephanus of Geneva introduced numbered verses, the process was refined so that specific verses – here Micah 3: 1–6 – could be used as ammunition. In their reply, the princes were careful to accuse Müntzer of being the ‘perverter of the Gospel’ who was rebelling, not against themselves, but ‘against our Redeemer Jesus Christ with murder, fire and other disrespect of God …’. They offered to spare the peasants if they would turn over the ‘false prophet’ to them.

Müntzer persuaded the peasants that he was ‘the sword of Gideon’ and that he would ‘catch all the bullets in his coat sleeves’. As the princes moved their artillery and cavalry on to the battlefield, a rainbow appeared. The peasants took it for a miracle. They appeared to be in a divine coma as the guns opened fire. A chronicler recorded that they sang ‘Now we pray the Holy Spirit’, and neither resisted nor fled, but stood still ‘as if they were insane’. Five thousand were reported killed. Müntzer was found hiding in an attic. He signed a confession and a recantation, and was beheaded. His head was put on a lance and placed in a field as a warning of the perils of evangelism.

Luther was, as we have seen, quite as alarmed by these excesses as was More and dubbed Müntzer the ‘Satan of Allstedt’. Tyndale,
too, was careful to distance himself from rebellion by preaching submission to authority in
Obedience
. But More, a practising lawyer and politician who was deeply involved in maintaining law and order, was well aware of the powerful and destabilising forces that flowed from the evangelicals, with their vernacular Bibles and their contempt for tradition. The
Dialogue
was printed in July 1529, by his brother-in-law ‘at the sygne of the meremayd’ at Cheapside in London, at the moment when the word ‘Protestant’ was being coined. It was used to describe the Lutheran princes and cities who had signed a
Protestatio
opposing the Catholic majority at the diet or parliament of Speyer in April of that year. Reformers differed greatly in their own doctrines – already Lutherans, Zwinglians and Anabaptists were at one another’s throats, and a score of new sects would soon arise – but the general term ‘Protestant’ was now applied to them all.

Fear of the ‘newefanglede’ Protestants joined with the advance of an old enemy to play on Catholic nerves. The Muslim forces of Sultan Suleiman, the Ottoman emperor, had conquered Christian Belgrade, Croatia, Rhodes and central and southern Hungary in the past decade. On 23 September 1529, two months after the
Dialogue
was published, Turkish horsemen reached the walls of Vienna, raising pikes with Austrian heads impaled on them. Churches tolled ‘Turk-bells’ in warning, and columns of smoke from burning villages rose ‘like a forest from horizon to horizon’. The Viennese defenders were outnumbered by at least ten to one, but they were brilliantly led by the veteran soldier Count Nicholas von Salm, who had a fine view of enemy movements from the top of the spire of St Stephen’s Church. The critical assault came on 12 October, when breaches were blown in the walls near the Carinthian Gate. Turkish beys and pashas were seen from the spire throughout the day as they beat their men forward with the flats of their swords, ‘crying loudly to heaven and each other of the greatness of God and the glory of Islam’. It was a final effort and
it failed. Two days later, the watchmen on the walls saw flames shoot up as the Turks fired their tents and slaughtered their prisoners, male and female, save those young enough to fetch a good price as slaves. The Muslims, venting their spite in the Christian villages along their line of retreat, created such revulsion that English parsons prayed each Good Friday for more than a century that ‘all Jews, Turks, Infidels and Hereticks’ should be punished as murderers of Christ and haters of God.

The Viennese were fortunate. It took the Hungarians 150 years to be rid of Moslem rule,
¹
while, to the west, Catholics and Protestants played out Tyndale and More’s verbal assaults in grisly reality. More’s sense of Armageddon – he wrote breathlessly of ‘domesday’ – had much to feed it. He insisted in the
Dialogue
that the evangelicals must be ‘oppressed and overwhelmed in the beginning’. It made perfect sense, from his standpoint. But he was late. The ‘beginning’ was now past.

Tyndale’s name was mentioned in open court in England as a heretic and a rebel for the first time in January 1529. Hackett’s point – that sedition was an extraditable offence, where heresy was not – had been taken. It was as well that Tyndale had taken himself to Hamburg.

The shipwreck on the Dutch coast had cost him ‘both money, his copies and time’, Foxe says. He lost all his books, and was ‘compelled to begin all again anew’, to the ‘doubling of his labours’. The reference books he will have had to replace include the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, Hebrew grammars and the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, said to be the work of seventy-two translators – hence ‘LXX’ or Septuagint – at Alexandria in the third century BC.
²
These were expensive books. He had also lost his money in the wreck, and had to pay for another passage to Germany. More and Tunstall personally interrogated those suspected of sending funds to Tyndale, his brother John Tyndale and Humphrey Monmouth included.

They established how £20 was sent over the sea to Tyndale – the two payments mentioned by Monmouth that went courtesy of the Steelyard merchants to Hamburg – but they failed to find out who was supplying the larger amounts he needed for printing contracts and to recover from the shipwreck.

Tyndale arrived in Hamburg early in 1529. It was safer than Antwerp. Johann Bugenhagen, whom Tyndale had known as a scholarly pastor in Wittenberg, had moved to Hamburg in October 1528 to organise the reformed church. The reformation was formally established by the city fathers in February 1529. Bugenhagen was a sympathetic figure who had helped Luther with the German Bible translation, and Tyndale had comfortable lodgings with the ‘worshipful widow’, Margaret von Emerson.

He spent most of the year working on the Pentateuch, the books supposedly written by Moses himself, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
³
His grasp of Hebrew was remarkable for a man who had learnt it while a fugitive. He knew none when he left England. There were no English Jews for him to learn from; hundreds had been hanged in violent pogroms in 1278, and the survivors were expelled from the kingdom twelve years later. The first professor of Hebrew was not appointed at Cambridge until 1524, after Tyndale had gone. It is most likely that he began studying it when he was at Wittenberg, and honed his skills during his stay at Worms.

Some books existed to help him in his task. Hebrew Bibles had been published in Italy for almost sixty years. The first great Christian scholar of Hebrew, Johannes Reuchlin, had published
De Rudimentis Hebraicis
in 1506. He added to this Hebrew grammar and lexicon with an edition of the seven penitential psalms in Hebrew and a treatise on Hebrew accents. Reuchlin, though he was tried for heresy, remained a devout Catholic, but his work was invaluable to a translator. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible, or
Complutum
, was financed by Cardinal Ximines de Cisneros,
founder of the university of Alcala, and Inquisitor General of Spain. The Old Testament had the Hebrew, Vulgate and Septuagint text in parallel columns. Volume VI of this immense undertaking was a Hebrew vocabulary with a short Hebrew grammar published in 1515. The Italian scholar Pagnini, who was translating the Hebrew and Greek originals into an entirely new Latin Bible, compiled a Hebrew dictionary which was published in Lyons in 1529, possibly in time to benefit Tyndale. Luther’s own German translation of the Pentateuch had been published four years earlier in a fine edition illustrated by Lucas Cranach the Elder.