Book of Fire (44 page)

‘After this day,’ an MP’s brother wrote of the Act, ‘the Bishop of Rome shall have no manner of authority within the realm of England.’ The heretics and ‘newe men’ against whom More had fought for so long now had their triumph. A cascade of further Acts – of Supremacy, Annates, Appeals, Peter’s Pence and Dispensations – stripped the pope of titles, monies, privileges, visitations and powers of appointment. A new heresy law ended the system of ecclesiastical jurisdiction that More had struggled to maintain. No longer was it an offence to speak ill of the pope. The changes might seem technical and remote; headship of the church apart, liturgy and theology had hardly changed, and a contemporary visitor to a service in a parish church might think himself still to be in 1434. More knew, however, that the old faith was bruised and bleeding internally, and he feared that the time was close when ‘it shall seeme that there shall bee than no chrysten countreyes left at all’. He attended Sunday mass at St Paul’s on 12 April
1534; after he left, an official of the royal council handed him a summons to appear at Lambeth Palace the next morning to swear the Oath of Succession.

More returned to Chelsea and spent the night in prayer. The next morning he attended mass in Chelsea parish church. Then he bade his family goodbye and walked to the jetty at the edge of his garden, on the north bank of the Thames close to where Battersea Bridge now stands, and his boatmen rowed him downriver to the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth. There he was taken in front of Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer, Thomas Audley and William Benson, the abbot of Westminster. He read a copy of the Act of Succession and carefully compared it with the Oath. He then said that ‘unto the oath that is here offered to me I cannot swear, without the jeoparding of my soul to perpetual damnation’. Audley replied that ‘we are all sorry to hear you say thus’; he added that ‘it will cause the King’s highness to conceive great suspicion of you and great indignation toward you’. Audley showed More a printed roll with the signatures of those who had sworn from the Lords and Commons. ‘I myself cannot swear,’ More said, ‘but I do not blame any other man that has sworn.’

For the next four days More was held in the custody of the abbot of Westminster. On 17 April he was taken by river to the Tower, landing at the Traitor’s Gate, where he was met by his ‘good friend and old acquaintance’ Sir Edmund Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower. He was lodged in one of the apartments kept for the prisoners of consequence – ‘at the lest wise it was strong ynough’ he remarked of its thick walls – and his servant John à Wood was permitted to attend him. Three days after his arrival, he had a terrible reminder of the reversal in fortune that he and Catholic loyalists had undergone. Elizabeth Barton, and five priests who had supported her, were taken from their cells in the Tower and tied to hurdles. They were dragged through the filth and mire of the London streets to Tyburn, where Marble Arch
now stands. Here, the ‘holy maid’ was hanged. Each priest was hanged until he was half dead; his penis was then cut off and thrust in his mouth, before his stomach was opened up and he was eviscerated and decapitated. The heads were parboiled and set on poles on London Bridge.

More, who had wished heretics the dreadful death of ‘the shorte fyre’, now faced the traitor’s equal agony of hanging, drawing and quartering. He feared ‘duresse and harde handelinge’ and ‘violent forceable waies’, and he discovered ‘my fleshe much more shrinkinge from payne and from death, than me thought it the part of a faithfull Christen man’.

The sea change in England passed Tyndale by. His ever faulty political antenna failed to register that, as the Reformation deepened into the fracture and schism of Western Christendom, he might now be safer in London than in Antwerp.

More, the great enemy, was locked away in the Tower, dispatched there by Cromwell and Cranmer, men sympathetic to Tyndale’s cause, and by Audley, the weathervane of the king’s whims. By contrast, Antwerp was becoming more dangerous as Charles V, humiliated by his inability to repress Lutheranism in Germany, redoubled his efforts to strangle it in his hereditary dominions. These included the Low Countries, where penal ordinances of increasing severity were let loose on heretics of every hue. The possession of vernacular Bibles or any book proscribed by the ultra-orthodox theologians of Louvain, the attendance of any meeting of heretics, ‘disputing about Holy Scripture’, and ‘want of due respect to the images of God and the Saints’, attracted capital punishment. ‘
Les hommes par l’épée, les femmes par la fosse, les relaps par le feu
’, the ordinance ran, ‘the men beheaded by the sword, women buried alive in a ditch, the relapsed burnt’.

Informers were promised liberal rewards and a share in the confiscated goods of convicted heretics. Lax officials were warned of
the severe consequences of dereliction of the duty to search for heretics. The Inquisition, established in the Low Countries but not in England, had the right to arrest, torture, confiscate property and execute heretics without right of appeal.

The citizens of Antwerp guarded their freedoms and tolerances as best they could. A printer publishing any work without a licence, a category into which all Tyndale’s writings fell, in theory faced a minimum sentence of the branding of a cross so deeply that it could not be effaced, to which the judge could add the removal of an eye or a hand; in practice, they continued to print without asking the permission of the theologians of Louvain.

Within the confines of the English House, Tyndale was effectively protected by the freedom from arbitrary arrest extended to English merchants. Outside it, there was little reason for an imperial officer to take notice of a foreign heretic who was, in local terms, of no consequence. Any officer who did investigate Tyndale, moreover, would find that he had favoured the cause of the emperor’s aunt in the annulment debate.

Tyndale was thus vulnerable to the imperial writ, but only if someone with influence and money activated it. No one in the Low Countries had reason to do so. The powerful officials who enjoyed office in England wished him well, not ill. As the summer and autumn of 1534 passed into winter, More remained in the Tower. His legal situation deteriorated further after parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in November. This confirmed the king to be ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England, called
Anglicana Ecclesia
’. At the same time, a new Treason Act made it an offence subject to the death penalty to ‘maliciously wish, will, or desire, by words or by writing’ to deprive the king of any of his titles or dignities, or to call him ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel’. A man could thus be executed for high treason if he refused to swear that he believed the king to be head of the English Church, on the grounds that he had denied one of the king’s titles.

Like Frith, however, in whose death he had rejoiced, More enjoyed substantial privileges in the Tower. He walked in the gardens. His daughter Meg visited him. She failed to persuade him to take the Oath – they wept together and chanted the Litany – but her maid Dorothy Colley ran errands from the Tower for him. He was able to arrange for straw mats to be laid on the floor and hung on the walls. His friend Antonio Bonvisi sent him a camlet gown for warmth; he wrote to thank him for it. Bonvisi was the friend whom Vaughan and Cromwell suspected of providing money to the diehard Catholic friars Peto and Elstow in Antwerp. A frisson of suspicion might have stirred Tyndale had he known that More retained a link with Antwerp, but he did not know.

More had books and pen and paper. He exchanged letters with Fisher, his fellow prisoner in the Tower. More’s old friend Cuthert Tunstall, and Stokesley, his replacment in London with whom More had worked closely in his heretic hunts, had surrendered and taken the Oath easily enough. Of all the bishops, only Fisher had refused, and in his correspondence with More the go-betweens were Fisher’s servant Richard Wilson and, remarkably, George Golde, the servant of Edmund Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower. Security was lax indeed. More wrote perhaps the finest of all his works,
A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation
, in his cell. He also started his last work
De Tristitia Christi
, On the Sadness of Christ. The authorities became suspicious of his activities. Towards the end of 1534 he was put in harsher confinement. He wrote to his daughter that he was being held in ‘close keping’ because of ‘some newe causeless suspicion’ and ‘some secret sinister informacion’. He warned her that ‘some new sodain searches may happe to be made in every house of ours as narrowly as is possible’. For a time, he was allowed no visitors and prevented from attending daily mass in the chapels of the Tower. He wrote a memorandum to himself about perjury, concluding that it would be wrong to betray a secret lawfully entrusted to him. What secret?

De Tristitia
was smuggled out of the Tower. It was eventually taken to Spain, where it was deposited in the reliquary closet of the Chapel of Relics of the Royal College of Corpus Christi in Valencia. It was written in Latin, though More’s granddaughter Mary Bassett translated it into English. At the end of the original copy of this translation, William Rastell, More’s nephew and printer, wrote: ‘Sir Thomas More wrote no more of this work. But when he had written this far, he was in prison kept so straight all his books and pen and ink and paper were taken from him, and soon after he was put to death.’

The work is unfinished – it breaks off with the words ‘and they laid their hands on Jesus’ as Judas led the soldiers to arrest him – but it tells us what More was thinking.

His writing blazes with hatred of heretics. He compares them to Judas. Like Judas, he says, who betrayed Christ with a kiss, heretics claim love for Christ while continuing their treacheries against him. Judas is like the heretic facing the fire. Even after the moment of betrayal, he can repent and God will welcome him back if he desires it, but he is too steeped in evil to abjure.

Sustaining himself in his own wretchedness in the Tower – ‘
tristician timorem tedium et dirae mortis horrorem
’, ‘sadness, fear, boredom and horror of ghastly death’ – More described his feelings on the fate of the heretic: ‘The air longs to blow noxious vapours against the wicked man. The sea longs to overwhelm him in its waves, the mountains to fall upon him, the valleys to rise up to him, the earth to split open beneath him, hell to swallow him up after his headlong fall, the demons to plunge him into gulfs of ever-burning flames …’

At the close of 1534, Thomas More was thinking of William Tyndale, and what he wished to happen to him.

On 21 May 1535, the day of his betrayal, Tyndale had sixteen months more to live. More had a little over six weeks.

That spring, a charming young Englishman arrived in Antwerp. Henry Phillips – he called himself Harry – was in his middle twenties. He came from a good family. He was the third son of Richard Phillips, a Dorset landowner who served as a Member of Parliament and who had a profitable appointment as customer of the port of Poole. Harry’s nephew Edward Phillips was to become Master of the Rolls; he also built Montacute, the most exquisite Tudor mansion in England, which remained in the family until it passed to the National Trust in 1931. Harry was well schooled. He peppered his letters with Latin tags and referred often to his literary leanings. He graduated from Oxford as a Bachelor in Civil Law in February 1533. He had grace and presence, a ‘comely fellow like as he had been a gentleman’. He had a servant with him in Antwerp, ‘but wherefore he came, or what purpose he had been sent thither, no man could tell’.

Tyndale was relaxed enough by now to enjoy a social life among the merchants, and he was often ‘desired forth to dinner and supper amongst merchants’. He met Harry Phillips and took a shine to him. He brought him back to his lodgings in the English House and invited him to dine with him on several occasions. He allowed him to see his books ‘and other secrets of his study’. Thomas Poyntz, however, sensed that something was amiss with Phillips. When he asked Tyndale how he had met him, Tyndale replied that Phillips was ‘an honest man, handsomely learned and very conformable’. The last was the word evangelicals used for those who conformed to their own beliefs. Poyntz became even more uneasy when Phillips asked him to walk with him to show him the layout of the town. Phillips made a point of showing Poyntz that he was well moneyed, though whence the money came he did not say. He also said that he ‘bare no great favour’ to Henry VIII. But Poyntz could not pin down his suspicions.

If Harry Phillips had ever been what he appeared to be – friendly, honest, scholarly and true – he ceased to be so after he left
Oxford. He robbed his father of a sum of money entrusted to him to settle an obligation, and thereafter lived off his wits. Having squandered the money, he wrote to his mother ‘piteously begging’ her to intercede with his father on his behalf. He said that he had ‘chanced to fall into play’ while he was in London to deliver his father’s money to a Mr Medlee. He had lost £3 or £4 gambling and, fearing his father’s wrath, had not dared to come home. Later he also lost his ‘spending money’, and ‘by fortune he was driven he whist not whither’.

In fact, he had come to Louvain, the centre of hardline Catholic sentiment, a clue, alas, that Tyndale and Poyntz were missing. At some stage late in 1534, Harry Phillips came into a considerable amount of money, some of which he had used to enrol in the university of Louvain on 14 December 1534. Louvain, and its university, were strictly and energetically Catholic. Had Tyndale suspected that his young friend had connections with Louvain, he would have dropped him at once.

But Tyndale, so worldly in his writing, and so artless with men, was easy prey. It is sad that he should have treated Harry Phillips with the same honest affection as he had John Frith; perhaps the cause was the same, the paternal instinct of a childless man who had written so tenderly of matrimony, a state denied to him by his fugitive life. Two of Phillips’s genuine interests – he had a great flair for languages and a love of literature – coincided with Tyndale’s own. Their backgrounds, too, of the West Country and Oxford, were similar, and Tyndale must have enjoyed speaking the language in which he laboured all day with somebody new. On his side of the Narrow Sea English was very seldom heard.