Book of Fire (27 page)
Sir Thomas More had looked on, dressed in black, saying nothing. He was now told that he was to become the first lay chancellor of England for almost a century. He was sworn in at a ceremony in the lofty hammer-beamed Westminster Hall on 26 October. He gave his word that he would not ‘suffer the hurte nor disherytyng
of the king or that thye rightes of the crown be decreysed by any mean’. Henry reminded him at once that the great royal hurt was the failure to obtain the annulment. ‘His grace moved me agayne,’ More wrote, ‘to loke and consydre his great mater.’
More was now the highest officer of the executive government, and the supreme figure in the law of England. He described the post as a gift from God. ‘The more I realise that this post involves the interests of Christendom, my dearest Erasmus,’ he wrote to his friend, ‘the more I hope it turns out successfully.’ He was Tyndale’s greatest enemy, and he was a man-burner.
I
n the begynnynge God created heauen and erth. The erth was voyd and emptie, and darknesse was vpon the depe, and the Spirete of God moued uponne the water, Then God sayde: let there be lyghte …’ Thus, in the first English rendering to be made from the Hebrew, Tyndale opened Genesis.
The preface bore his initials, ‘W. T. to the Reader’, for it was pointless by now to disguise his identity. The colophon made the familiar claim – ‘Emprented at Marlborow in the lande of Hesse, by me Hans Luft, the yere of our Lorde 1530 MCCCCC. xxx the .xvij dayes of Ianvarij’ – but it was the work of van Hoochstraten in Antwerp. Van Hoochstraten had more reason than ever to falsify the book’s origins. An edict issued by the imperial authorities in Antwerp on 7 December had warned that henceforth no one was to write, print or cause to be written or printed any new book ‘upon what subject soever’, without first obtaining letters of licence. The penalty was to be ‘pilloried, and marked besides with a red-hot iron’, or to have an eye put out or a hand cut off at the discretion of the judge, who was to see that sentence be ‘executed without delay or mercy’.
Tyndale printed his translation of the Pentateuch, the Old Testament books of Moses, at Antwerp in 1530. A false colophon claimed that it was ‘emprented at Marlborow in the lande of Hesse’ to throw his pursuers off the scent. He could only afford to illustrate Exodus, using a secondhand woodcut of Aaron (above) dressed in the robes of a high priest, and others showing the ornaments of the tabernacle. He bought the woodcuts from an Antwerp printer who had used them before in a Flemish Bible.
(British Library)
Each of the first five books of the Old Testament was printed separately with its own prologue, so that the flat sheets could be shipped to England in parts for the reader to bind into a whole book. Genesis and Numbers were set in the Gothic bastard black-letter type, familiar to readers of the New Testament,
Mammon
and
Obedience
. The other books were printed in Roman type. Van Hoochstraten was probably using two presses simultaneously in order to finish the contract and to be rid of incriminating page formes as quickly as possible.
Only Exodus had illustrations, a woodcut of Aaron dressed in the robes of a high priest, and ten others showing the ornaments of the tabernacle. The woodcuts had been used before, by the Antwerp printer Willem Vostermann in the Flemish Bible he had published two years before. Vostermann happily printed large numbers of anti-Lutheran pamphlets, as well as evangelical works, but his secondhand woodcuts were doubtless cheap, and that counted for more than his dubious religious loyalties.
Tyndale had probably sailed back to Antwerp to supervise the printing in late November or early December 1529. An epidemic of the sweating sickness broke out in Hamburg then, and this may have helped to convince him that it was best to leave Germany. He was based in Antwerp from now until his capture, leaving the city at times when he felt threatened, though we do not know for where.
It did not take long for the Church, and the new lord chancellor, to discover that the heretic was at work again. A denunciation issued by Archbishop Warham at a meeting of divines on 24 May 1530 spoke of ‘the translation of scripture corrupted by William Tyndale, as well in the Old Testament as in the New’. Informers must have spotted smuggled copies before then. A royal proclamation the following month mentioned both Testaments as heretical works ‘now in print’.
*
Tyndale had now written, financed, published and distributed four books in the six years since he had left England. He had produced the greatest body of work so far printed in English, and in doing so he had created a modern English prose that matched every emotion and nuance of thought in the New Testament, a book whose force and beauty changed the lives of many who read it. He had also remained a free man, an equally remarkable feat, able to cope with the strains of being hunted and rootless. He had grown greatly in confidence.
No longer did he submit his translation as unworthy and humbly beg forgiveness for his errors. His preface to Genesis recalled that he had ‘desired them that were learned to amend if ought were found amiss’ in his New Testament. This had no effect on ‘our wily and malicious hypocrites’. They wished to ‘keep the world still in darkness’, and – here Tyndale galloped off on his moral high horse – to peddle their ‘vain superstition and false doctrine’, to ‘satisfy their filthy lusts, their proud ambition, and insatiable covetousness’, and to ‘exalt their own honour above king and emperor’ and, if that were not enough, ‘yea, and above God himself’. He challenged ‘our prelates those stubborn Nimrods’ to ‘burn this book’ – Genesis – but only if ‘it seem worthy when they have examined it with the Hebrew’, so that they first ‘put forth of their own translation that is more correct’.
The marginal notes alongside the immortal prose of the biblical text snap and fizz against the pope and clergy. When Moses says angrily to the Lord that ‘I have not taken so much as an ass from them’, Tyndale asks: ‘Can our priests so say?’ In Numbers 23, Balaam asks: ‘How shall I curse whom God curseth not and how shall I defy whom the Lord defieth not?’ Tyndale snipes from the margin: ‘The pope can tell how.’ Where Exodus 22 commands that ‘ye shall trouble no widow nor fatherless child’, he adds his own warning to heartless priests: ‘Let all oppressors of the poor take heed to this text.’
Both More and Tyndale produced invective by the yard. More was more profligate, spraying it for page after page, sometimes rambling on as though his mind had fallen asleep in the early Chelsea hours, and his hand kept moving on some ghostly planchette; he was more malicious, too, and more personal than Tyndale. There were fewer constraints on More, of course; Tyndale had limited funds to pay his printing bills, and had to publish in secret, whereas More had a lord chancellor’s income and a brother-in-law who was a printer.
There are wonderful words and phrases that run through their work and their disputes. Some, alas, have disappeared. A
gorbelly
was a fat man, often to be found in a
sottys hoffe
, a drinking den, where he became
sowe-drunke
, and a
nodypoll
was a blockhead who was often
apysshe
, or fantastically foolish. A
prym
was a pretty girl, and a
galyarde
a high spirited young man, with an eye for
caterwaywynge
, lechery. Some fine expressions have survived.
Huker muker
was the early form of hugger-mugger, or in secret, as a
iack an apes
was a ridiculous fellow. To
play mumme
was already to stay silent, while to be on
tenter hokes
referred to the hooks that kept the cloth under tension in a tenter, or press, and
aloufe
, soon to be aloof, came from
aluff
, to windward, unattainable. Tyndale has
brainpan
for head, and
goggle-eyed
, as well as the vanished
fainty
and
flaggy
; More has
out of a fryenge panne in to the fyre
, a
mone made of grene chese
and
as bare as a byrdys ars
.
Bychery
was ever bitchery, but some words have changed with time. A
Cokney
was not a Londoner, but a pet or a child who was tenderly brought up;
gossipes
were simply female friends, and
mynyons
were favourites.
More produced a list of the insults that Tyndale and his ilk hurled at Catholics: ‘tormentours … traytours … Pylatys … Iudass … Herodys … Antecrystes … horemasters and sodomytes … iuglers … Crystekyllers … serpenters … scorpyons … meryre quellers … bloodsupers’ who were ‘abomynable … shameles …
pevysshe … faythlesse … and starke madde’. For all this, and its heroic, no-hold’s-barred vigour, sixteenth-century vilification can pall. Tyndale knew a thousand ways to skin the pope, and More to flay the heretic, and they used them all, several times over, so that they penetrate the modern mind – free of the awe of those words,
pope
,
heretic
, and their terrible accoutrements,
inquisitor
,
stake
,
fire
– with the shrill inconsequence of a faulty burglar alarm.
It is when Tyndale gives the reader advice – ‘as thou readest therefore think that every syllable pertaineth to thine own self, and suck out the pith of the scripture, and arm thyself against all assaults’ – that his genius returns.
What, after all, is the Bible for? He tackles the ‘use of the scripture’ in a special prologue to Genesis. All of the Bible serves ‘to strength thy faith’, or, in darker mode, ‘to fear thee from evil doing’; there is no story or gest in it, ‘seem it never so simple or so vile unto the world’, but that ‘thou shalt find therein spirit and life and edifying’, for this is God’s scripture, ‘written for thy learning and comfort’. A precious jewel, he says, is no more than straw to the man who does not know its value. We must thus desire God, to make us understand and feel why the Bible was given to us, so that ‘we may apply the medicine of the scripture, every man to his own sores …’
The scripture is a true light that shows us ‘both what to do and what to hope’; it is a defence from all error, and a solace and consolation. This comfort, Tyndale said, was to be found in the plain text and literal sense. ‘Cleave unto the texte and the playne storye,’ he advised his readers. This was a crucial point. For a thousand years and more, Christian congregations had heard the scripture only as a series of disconnected brief texts on which their priest hung his sermon. Long discourses were spun off a verse or a parable. Scholars argued on the meanings behind the apparent meaning – ‘idle disputers and brawlers about vain words,’ Tyndale said, ‘ever gnawing on the bitter bark without and never attaining
to the sweet pith within’. To Tyndale, the Bible is to be read as a whole, and the words accepted for what they are; for it tells a tale that any man or woman can understand, without being ordained, or studying theology.
Those who thought themselves great clerics, he said, saw many of the stories in the Bible as though they were mere inventions like ‘a tale of Robin Hood’ that had to be seen as allegories. But they were real to Tyndale; they were ‘written for our consolation and comfort, that we despair not, if such like happens to us’. We are no better than Lot, and no holier than David, who ‘brake wedlock and … committed abominable murder’; what happened to them was in the scripture as an example for us so that if ‘we yet fall likewise, that we despair not but come again to the laws of God and take better hold’.
Horrors abound in life. Virgins have been ‘brought into the common stews, and there defiled’; martyrs have been bound up ‘and whores have abused their bodies’. Why? The judgements of God are ‘bottomless’. Tyndale says such things are ‘chanced partly for examples, partly God through sin healeth sin’. Terrible events are needed to cure pride. Here Tyndale steers the reader into Protestant propaganda. Those of ‘the pope’s sect’ rejoice ‘fleshly …’. They think that ‘heaven came by deeds and not by Christ’, and that performing good works justifies them and makes them holy. But, he says in a classic statement of justification by faith, salvation comes from the ‘inward spirit received by faith and the consent of the heart unto the law of God’.
He pumped into the reader the urgency and life that he brought to his own work of translation. Now, in a simple book, at an affordable price, the word of God existed in English for ‘all men until the world’s end’; such a thing had never happened before, and Tyndale’s prologues tingle with the excitement of the new. ‘Then go to and read the stories of the bible for thy learning and comfort,’ he says, ‘and see every thing practised before thine
eyes …’ In these pages, the reader can find the love and compassion of God, and His anger. ‘All mercy that is shewed there is a promise unto thee, if thou turn to God,’ Tyndale says, directly and intimately to the reader. ‘And all vengeance and wrath shewed there is threatened to thee, if thou be stubborn and resist.’
