Book of Fire (37 page)
Were the bread and wine of the sacraments not the body and blood of Christ? The king was at his most sensitive on this point. Henry remained proud of his treatise defending the traditional view of the sacraments; he flew into a rage when evangelicals meddled with it, as Bainham did now. ‘The bread is not Jesus Christ, for Christ’s body is not chewed with teeth,’ Bainham replied. ‘Therefore it is but bread.’
He confessed that he had a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament, but denied that he had offended God by keeping it and using it. He also admitted to having a full set of Tyndale’s other works –
Mammon
,
Obedience
,
Prelates
and the
Answer to More’s Dialogue
– but said he never saw any errors in them. He added that ‘the New Testament in English was utterly good’, and added that he did not know that Tyndale was a ‘naughty fellow’.
Bainham could not be saved in this world, but More and Stokesley felt obliged to purge his soul before they had him burnt. He was taken first to the bishop’s coal cellar at Fulham Palace, a place where many episcopal prisoners were kept. He was locked in irons, put in the stocks and left to reflect on his fate for several chilly March days. When this failed to produce any remorse, he was taken back to Sir Thomas More’s house at Chelsea. Here, he was chained to a post for two nights, and whipped, before being returned to
Fulham to be ‘cruelly handled the space of a week’. After a further fortnight of whippings in the Tower, Bainham remained unredeemed, and charity was deemed to have run its course.
Bainham was delivered to Sir Richard Gresham, the sheriff, who had him carried by his officers to a cell in Newgate. He was burnt on the last day of April 1532. Stokesley sent a Dr Simons to his cell in Newgate ‘to convert him, and to wait upon him to the stake’. Simons feared the crowd might beat him, however, and slipped away, for Bainham was a popular man whose execution angered Londoners. There were many horsemen about the stake at Smithfield, indicating a well-bred audience. Bainham embraced the stake, and then stood on the pitch barrel, with a chain about his waist held by sergeants of the guard.
‘I come hither, good people,’ he said to the crowd, ‘accused and condemned for a heretic, Sir Thomas More being my accuser and my judge.’ He then spoke of the beliefs for which he was to die. Foxe claims that he ticked off all the main evangelical articles. ‘First, I say it is lawful for every man and woman, to have God’s book in their mother tongue. Second, that the bishop of Rome is Antichrist … there is no purgatory, but the purgatory of Christ’s blood, for our souls immediately go to heaven and rest with Jesus Christ for ever …’
At this, the town clerk, Master Pave, said: ‘Thou liest, thou heretic! Thou deniest the blessed sacrament of the altar.’ Bainham retorted that he did not deny the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, but only ‘your idolatry to the bread, and that Christ God and man should dwell in a piece of bread …’. At that, Pave ordered: ‘Set fire to him and burn him.’
As the train of gunpowder came towards him, Bainham lifted up his eyes and hands to heaven, and said to Pave: ‘God forgive thee, and show thee more mercy than thou showest to me. The Lord forgive Sir Thomas More! and pray for me, all good people …’
With that, the fire ‘took his bowels and his head’.
The following week, Pave bought ropes, climbed into a high garret in his house and tried to hang himself.
Tyndale’s friends and sympathisers could be burnt but the man himself continued to dance just beyond More’s reach. In the autumn of 1531, Henry had asked the imperial authorities for his extradition to England, on the grounds that he was living in subterfuge in the imperial dominions, from where he was sending seditious books to England.
The appeal fell on deaf ears for Charles V had no reason to grant Henry favours. The humiliation of his aunt Catherine did not amuse him. Henry, too, had recently accused the emperor of forcing the pope to recall the annulment case to Rome. And, for good measure, it was an open secret that Tyndale had earned Henry’s anger through his support for Catherine’s cause.
The imperial reply was therefore curt. No proof had been tendered that Tyndale had committed an offence serious enough for him to be extradited. ‘The general opinion’, the letter noted tartly, ‘is that Tyndale is only persecuted for his attachment to the Queen’s cause, which it is thought all the best men in England favour.’ If evidence did exist, it should be sent for the emperor to peruse. In its absence, Tyndale would stay put.
Private and illegal means – betrayal, kidnap – were now the only solution. The king ordered that Tyndale be seized and brought to England.
S
ir Thomas Elyot, ambassador at the imperial court, was too intelligent to fool himself for long. He was a scholar as well as a lawyer and diplomat who had recently published
The Boke Named the Governour
, the earliest English treatise of moral philosophy. His time at Oxford had overlapped with Tyndale’s and he may have known his quarry. Tyndale certainly knew of Elyot and his mission to trap him. The ambassador soon concluded that his task was near impossible.
He wrote to the duke of Norfolk, who was attending the opening of the imperial diet at Regensburg, on 14 March 1532. He said that the king had ordered him to remain in Brussels ‘some space of time for the apprehension of Tyndale’. He complained that Tyndale was elusive and highly skilled at concealing himself, and that he had feared he had gone to ground. ‘He is in wit movable,’ Elyot added wearily, ‘semblably so is his person uncertain to come by; and as far as I can perceive, hearing of the king’s diligence in the apprehension of him, he withdraweth him into such places where he thinketh to be farthest out of danger.’
Elyot paid agents to loiter round print shops and keep their ears open for gossip. He lavished more than he could afford in bribes – his
allowance was 20s a day, and he was spending twice that, and he was also losing on the exchange rate – but still to no effect. He resigned his post in frustration and returned to lick his wounds in Cambridgeshire in June 1532. By then he had spent eight months fruitlessly seeking to have Tyndale extradited or kidnapped. The crown was tardy in paying his expenses, and in November he asked Cromwell to intervene as he was heavily in debt. He said that the experience of looking for Tyndale ‘is now grievous unto me’, as he had incurred a serious debt of 600 marks beyond his allowance. To make matters worse, his failure meant that ‘the King’s opinion of me is diminished, for many are advanced to be councillors whose services were not as important as mine’. He asked that his losses be made good. ‘I gave many rewards,’ he explained, ‘partly to the emperor’s servants to get knowledge, partly to such as by whose means I trusted to apprehend Tyndale, according to the king’s commandment.’
We can locate Tyndale in 1532 no better than could Elyot, a man with the advantage of being alive at the time, and with money and a king’s commission behind him. It is significant that the ambassador was convinced that Tyndale knew that he was looking for him. Tyndale had been on the Continent for seven years by now. Local Lutherans had an effective intelligence system – their lives depended on knowing the identity of informers and anticipating the actions of the authorities – and Tyndale was also able to tap sympathetic expatriate merchants. Only once did Tyndale fail to identify a danger.
Whether, as Elyot suspected, Tyndale escaped by moving from place to place, we do not know. In his rare letters to England, he avoided using an address and dropped few clues as to his whereabouts; and even so, at least one of his correspondents in London, Humphrey Monmouth, took the precaution of burning the letters. It helped, of course, that writing was a solitary trade, and could be practised in hiding and in disguise. Martin Luther had begun his
translation of the scriptures concealed in a room of the Wartburg Castle in Saxony, dressed as a country gentleman and renamed ‘Squire George’. He was already well known, a bluff, beefy figure; but, though he became depressed at being cooped up – he imagined the cawing of the crows and rooks that gathered beyond his window to be the echoes of his soul, and on his sorties from the castle he saw hunters out for hare and partridge as priests trapping the souls of the poor – he escaped detection.
It is possible that Tyndale was in Antwerp for at least part of 1532, and likely that he wrote two expositions that year, one on
The Testament of W Tracie
, and the other
Upon the v, vi, vii Chapters of Matthew
. If, of course, we knew now through some document where Tyndale was lodging and writing, then Thomas More and Elyot and the others who sought him would probably have unearthed him too: his fieldcraft as a fugitive remained impeccable. It must have added to More’s frustrations that he knew Antwerp so well himself. Seventeen years before, he had stayed with Pieter Guilles – or Petrus Aegidius, as he preferred to be known, in the Latin style then fashionable with the humanists – in the city; he had been inspired to write
Utopia
when he met Guilles and Raphael Hythlodaye, a young man just back from a long sea voyage, while walking back to his inn after attending mass at Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal. Guilles, who was secretary of the City of Antwerp, had bought a house that still stands at the end of a small alley known as the Spanjepandsteeg, off the Hofstraat. Tyndale must have lodged within a thousand yards or so of this place that More knew intimately, and from where Erasmus had sent More a famous double portrait of himself and Guilles as a token of his friendship. No such portrait existed to aid the search for Tyndale.
The exposition on Matthew shows how Tyndale survived the strain of his solitary and outcast life by welcoming it as a gift from
God. More’s efforts to stamp out the evangelicals before they got a grip on English life foundered on their ability to see their sufferings as a reflection, however dim, of Christ’s passion. Tyndale wrote on the verse in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are ye when they revile you and persecute you.’ Here, he said, ‘seest thou the uttermost, what a Christian man must look for’.
A man might preach and prosper long enough, he said, if he did not ‘meddle with the pope, bishops, prelates and holy ghostly people’. He compared true preaching with ‘salting’, however, and said that all that is corrupt must be salted, and ‘those persons are of all other the most corrupt, and therefore may not be left untouched’. This brought the true preacher persecution, and it was good for a man not to suffer lightly for righteousness. He must be flung into the nethermost depths, Tyndale wrote, so that ‘no bitterness or poison be left out of thy cup’; he should be ‘excommunicate and delivered to Satan’, deprived of fellowship, cursed down to hell, ‘defied, detested and execrate with all the blasphemous railings, that the poisonful heart of hypocrites can think or imagine’, and brought to death. ‘Yet let not thine heart fail thee neither despair, as though God had forsaken thee, or loved thee not,’ Tyndale added, ‘but comfort thyself with old ensamples, how God hath suffered all his old friends to be so entreated, and also his only and dear son Jesus; whose ensample, above all other, set before thine eyes, because thou art sure he was beloved above all other …’: Christ was mocked as he hung on the cross – ‘Save thyself, thou that savest others’ – as the evangelicals were now. Yet he was beloved of God, and so is Tyndale’s reader. ‘His cause came to light also, and so shall thine at the last,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘yea, and thy reward is great in heaven with him for thy deep suffering.’
Writing on the seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’, Tyndale again showed his rare respect and gentleness for women. The ‘true heart of his wife’ is the ‘preciousest
gift that a man hath of God in this world’, he said, ‘to abide by him in wealth and woe, and to bear all fortunes with him.’ The adulterer robbed the husband of this bounty, for ‘after she hath once coupled herself to thee, she shall not lightly love him any more so truly, but haply hate him …’. By making the woman sin, too, the adulterer ‘hast untaught her to fear God’. Every husband, Tyndale said, should think his wife ‘the fairest and best-conditioned … for God hath blessed thy wife and made her without sin to thee, which ought to seem a beautiful fairness.’
Tyndale returned to the theme of the power of princes.
Matthew
is less generous to the ruler than
Obedience,
possibly as a result of Henry’s renewed attempts to trap the author. Though ‘every man’s body and goods be under the king’, Tyndale wrote as before, ‘yet is the authority of God’s word free and above the king’. He made clear his hostility to dictatorship – ‘no king, lord, master, or what ruler he be, hath absolute power in this world’ – and said that the authority of rulers ‘is but a limited power’ which obliged them to ask forgiveness of their people when they sinned against them. He also claimed that, in matters of conscience, the spiritual power – he was careful not to say ‘the Church’ – had primacy. The king ‘is as deep under the spiritual officer, to hear out God’s word what he ought to believe, and how to live, and how to rule,’ he wrote, ‘as is the poorest beggar in the realm’.
With his majestically poor sense of political timing, Tyndale wrote this at the moment when Henry VIII was subjugating the spiritual power in England to his command. Tyndale was still claiming that the clergy ‘wax at once rougher than a hedgehog’ when people threatened their perks and income, and ‘consume them to powder’; but when it came to the king, the clergy flattened their quills and obeyed.
Parliament had met in session in mid-January 1532, and the legislation promoted by Cromwell ran strongly against the clergy and in
favour of reform. More had said to his son-in-law that, ‘high as we seem to sit upon the mountains treading heretics under our feet like ants’, he hoped the time would never come when Catholics and Lutherans lived side by side and tolerated each other. The situation had become graver still than that. The Church as More knew and loved it was under fresh assault by the king and Cromwell.
