Book of Fire (49 page)

The procurer general and an official from the imperial chancery interrogated Poyntz each day for a week. They were interested in general intelligence on the English court as well Poyntz’s suspected heresy, for they asked him ‘of the king’s affairs as of the message concerning Tyndale, of his aiders and of his religion’. After this long examination, Dufief drew up two dozen articles or charges, and delivered them to the commissioners appointed to hear his case. A copy was given to Poyntz, who was allowed to have an advocate and proctor to help in his defence. He was given eight days to reply to the articles against him; the prosecution was to have eight days to respond to that, and so matters would drag on at eight day intervals ‘till the process were ended’. Poyntz was forbidden to send messengers or letters anywhere, except by the Brussels town post, where Dufief could intercept and read what was sent; he was not allowed to send or receive correspondence in any language but Flemish; and he was to speak Flemish at all times so that his captors knew what was being said.

One exception was made to the last rule. A Carmelite provincial was invited to dine at the house where Poyntz was being held, and he brought a young English novice with him. The novice had ‘much pretty talk’ with Poyntz about the deaths of Thomas More and John Fisher, whom the young man held to be martyrs; he was clearly being used as an
agent provocateur
to winkle an indiscretion out of Poyntz. For weeks, Poyntz played cat and mouse with the commissioners, using excuse after excuse to delay answering their list of charges. He ‘trifled them off,’ Foxe recorded, ‘from Hallowtide until Christmas even, with dilatories from eighth day to eighth day’. On the morning of 24 December, the commissioners warned him that he would be condemned whether he had replied to them or not. He now used an advocate to help him
ensure that his replies were unsatisfactory enough to warrant further delays and questions.

He was alarmed to find that, whenever the commissioners visited him, Phillips ‘accompanied them to the door, in following the process against him, as he also did against Master Tyndale’. Poyntz had now been detained for three months, and he realised that he would most likely be executed if he did not flee. At the beginning of February 1536, at night by a method that Foxe did not specify, Poyntz broke out of the house where he was being held and hid until the city gates of Brussels were opened at dawn. A hue and cry was raised for him, but he knew the countryside well and slipped through to the coast and found a boat for England. One of his captors, John Baers, was given a heavy fine of £80 by the imperial council for his negligence in allowing the escape of ‘a prisoner accused of Lutheranism, named Thomas Poyntz, an Englishman’.

Poyntz was banished from the Low Countries. He lost his business, his property and his family, for his wife, Anna van Calva, was Flemish and refused to bring the children to join the impoverished merchant in England. He inherited the manor of North Ockenden on his brother’s death a decade later, but he seems to have been too poor to live there. He had gladly ruined himself for his friend.

Poyntz was gone and Cromwell’s entreaties had been ignored. Tyndale was helpless and imprisoned in wretched conditions. The castle at Vilvoorde was notoriously damp; dank vapours from the moat and the Zenne added to the sluicing Flemish rains. He had to pay for his own food and the other expenses of imprisonment. An account was kept by Adolf van Wesele of the money paid out by him for ‘the keeping of a certain prisoner named Willem Tintalus, Lutheran … for a year and one hundred and thirty five days, at forty stivers the day’. A stiver was worth about one English penny, and his jailers took their cut of his daily 3s 4d before a pittance was used to buy his food. Cash was raised by selling the
prisoners’ assets. Tyndale’s were the tools of a heretic’s trade – grammars, Bibles in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and illicit ones in English and German – and would not have been easily sold. Some of his possessions survived. Works he had written on the sacraments, and on the controversial will of William Tracey, were recovered by his friends from some hiding place in the English House, and later published.

We know from his prison letter – ‘I ask to be allowed a lamp … the Hebrew bible, Hebrew grammar and Hebrew dictionary’ – that he wished to devote his imprisonment to working on the Old Testament. If he did translate more, and the time he spent in Vilvoorde was enough for him to have completed the Bible, the work has not survived. Any writings found in his cell may have been burnt on the day of his execution, as had happened to John Huss.

The most grievous loss to the English-speaking world was with the poetical books. Tyndale’s death robbed us of the beauty that he would have brought to Psalms and the Song of Solomon. Among the
Sarum Use
epistles from the Old Testament, that he translated and published in his 1534 revised New Testament, is the most exquisite rendering of the second chapter of the Song of Songs, the epistle on the visitation of our lady.

‘I am the floure of the felde,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘and lyles of the valeyes. As the lyle amonge the thornes so is my beloved amonge the daughters … Beholde my beloved sayde to me: up and haste my love, my dove, my bewtifull and come away, for now is wynter gone and rayne departed and past … Up haste my love, my dove, in the holes of the rocke and secret places of the walles. Shew me thy face and let me hear thy voyce, for thy voyce is swete and thy fassyon bewtifull.’

King James’s men did well enough, perhaps, but see what is lost; speak it aloud and hear what is lost. ‘
Up and haste my love, my dove, my bewtifull and come away
…’ Tyndale continues to flow, where
the King James Version stutters with less urgency and command: ‘
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away
.’ Tyndale writes: ‘
For now is wynter gone and rayne departed and past
.’ It is a sentence warm with the promise of spring. King James bumbles: ‘
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over, and gone.
’ That is a weather report. Tyndale has the intimacy of direct speech: ‘
Beholde my beloved sayde to me
…’ King James’s divines are crabbed and formal: ‘
My beloved spake, and said unto me
…’
Beholde
catches the eye and ear, and lifts what Tyndale’s beloved then
sayde to me
, where King James’s beloved both
spake
and
said
in dull repetition.

We know Tyndale’s Isaiah only from the fragments in the same epistles. ‘For heaven shall vanyshe awaye as smoke,’ he writes in the epistle on the first Friday in Advent, ‘and the erthe shall weare awaye as a vesture, and the in habiters therof shall peryshe awaye after the same manner, but my salvacion shall endure ever, and my ryghteousness shall not perishe.’ For the King James committee, the earth did not
weare awaye
but
waxed old.
Its
in habiters
became the clumsy
they that dwell therein
; and the Lord’s righteousness
shall not be abolished
rather than the more cadent
shall not perishe
.

There are moments in the epistles where Tyndale is outdone. ‘He is despised and rejected of men,’ reads the King James in Isaiah 53, ‘
a man of sorrows
…’. For that echoing phrase, Tyndale has the duller ‘
one who has suffered sorrow’.
He has ‘
as a sheep led to be slain
’ where the King James excels with ‘
brought as a lamb to the slaughter’.
But in other places – ‘with his stripes we are healed’, ‘sins as red as scarlet’, ‘the Lord shall rise as the sun over thee’ – the epistles show the brilliance that we would now enjoy in the final Old Testament books but for Harry Phillips.

The investigation of a suspect heretic, particularly one as distinguished as Tyndale, was a lengthy business. He was first examined by the procurer general, Pierre Dufief, and a notary. They
questioned him under oath on his career, his writing and his beliefs. This preliminary set of interrogations lasted, in Poyntz’s case, for a week; the process with Tyndale was more complex, and will have lasted at least a fortnight. It established that the prisoner had a case to answer. The queen-regent, the emperor’s aunt Margaret of Austria, then appointed a set of commissioners to try the case. One or more of them was present at each subsequent interrogation.

Dufief was the main member of the commission, and the archives show that he was paid the handsome sum of £128 for his services. He had a reputation for venality as well as cruelty; he benefited from the sale of goods confiscated from his prisoners, and extortion and embezzlement seem to lie behind his eventual removal from office. He was joined by three theologians, Ruard Tapper, Jacobus Latomus and Jan Doye. Each was a doctor of divinity, and a canon at Louvain, the stamping ground of Catholic diehards and Phillips’s base camp. It was their task to prove that Tyndale’s beliefs amounted to heresy. The theologians shared a payment of £149 with Willem van Caverschoen, the secretary to Jacques de Lattre, the inquisitor general of the Low Countries. Four privy councillors made up the rest of the commission; one of them, Godfrey de Mayers, was well rewarded with £54, probably for doing much of the legal work.

These were experienced and inflexible men. Tapper was almost fifty, a veteran professor, recently appointed as chancellor of the university of Louvain, and dean of St Peter’s, the most fashionable church in the town. He had been active against heretics since 1523, when he was the theological assessor at the trial of Augustinian monks of Antwerp. After the Tyndale case, the pope gratefully appointed him inquisitor general of the Low Countries. His colleague Jacques Masson, who had adopted the Latin name of Jacobus Latomus, was a professor of fifty-nine, a brilliant scholar and a future rector of Louvain who disliked Erasmus and the liberal humanists as heartily as he did Luther.

The three canons shared More’s enthusiasm for the fire. The theological faculty at Louvain, of which each was a member, had sent a letter to the archbishop of St Andrews in 1528. It congratulated him on the burning of the Scottish protomartyr Patrick Hamilton as a ‘worthy deed’ that had ‘given us great courage’. A certain horror attaches to this letter, because Hamilton had visited Louvain as a nineteen-year-old while studying on the Continent, and the theologians who revelled in his death will have known him as a teenager.
¹

Henry Phillips was active, ‘following the suit against Master Tyndale’, moving between Louvain, Vilvoorde and Brussels, at hand if needed, sometimes accompanying the commissioners to the door of Tyndale’s cell. It seems that he was one of the two Englishmen whom Poyntz recorded as translating passages of Tyndale’s writing from English into Latin, to aid the commissioners, who had no English. The other may have been Dr Buckenham, the former prior whom Phillips had identified to Tebold as his friend at Louvain.

Translation took time. Cromwell’s intervention in September 1535 had also to be attended to. It was unlikely that the articles of accusation were drawn up until the end of 1535; Mozley thought that January 1536 was possible. Tyndale’s writings were thick with self-incriminating evidence. He wrote that faith alone justifies, and that salvation flows from grace and forgiveness of sins offered in the gospel, and not from good works; he denied the freedom of the will, the existence of purgatory, and the papal supremacy; he held that Church rulings based on human traditions cannot bind the conscience; he proclaimed the inefficacy of prayers to the saints, pilgrimage, and confession to priests.

Each of these was proof of heresy. It is doubtful whether a full confession and abjuration would have saved him. More had been at pains to claim that Tyndale had already abjured in his Little Sodbury days, in 1523, in front of John Bell, the chancellor of the
Gloucester diocese. More wrote in his
Dialogue Concerning Heresies
that Tyndale had escaped Bell only because he ‘glossed his words with a better sense, and said and swore that he meant no harm’. The assertion that Tyndale ‘swore’ was fabricated by More to ensure that, if Tyndale faced a later trial, he would be treated as a relapsed heretic, for whom the death sentence was automatic. Tyndale was aware of More’s intention, and he stressed in his
Answer to More
that he was never asked to make an oath. ‘He sware not,’ he wrote of himself, ‘neither was there any man that required an oath from him.’

In the event, the question of a previous abjuration was not raised because it was irrelevant. Tyndale – like More himself – refused to try to buy his life with his conscience and remained steadfast in his beliefs. He refused the offer of an advocate and a proctor, and undertook his own defence. Foxe reported that ‘much writing’ and ‘great disputation’ passed to and from between Tyndale and the Louvain theologians.

The process was conducted in private, but Latomus sent an account of his dealings with Tyndale to a friend. From his cell, Tyndale wrote a long paper – Latomus calls it ‘a book’ – on his central belief,
sola fides justificat apud Deum
, faith alone justifies before God. The theologians responded with their own book, in which Latomus claimed that ‘we took away his key, and put another in its place’. Tyndale had ‘no reasonable answer to make’, Latomus recalled with self-satisfaction, ‘yet preferred to make a show of replying rather than to acknowledge his error’. Tyndale’s reply obliged the divines to write again at length. ‘We plainly overturned his foundations and demonstrated the absurdity of his opinion’, Latomus wrote. Nonetheless, because Tyndale asked for elaboration, and ‘we were unwilling to decline any request of his’, a third book of arguments against Tyndale was prepared.

The exchanges, or at least Latomus’s account of them, were better tempered than those between Tyndale and More. A
scholarly civility was kept, for each side hoped, however forlornly, to convert the other. No whiff of torture entered the debate. In such trials it became common to rack the prisoner between each question put to him, while the inquisitor kept up an endless chant – ‘Tell the truth, for the love of God’ – through bloodless lips. The duke of Alva imposed this fate on scores of evangelicals in the struggle to maintain Catholicism and Spanish rule in the Low Countries; but the duke, and his
Bloedraad
, or Bloody Council, were still some years off. Latomus and his colleagues put their questions to Tyndale with the courtesy due to a fellow scholar, and they replied meticulously to the points he raised in return. If they had a patronising air – ‘reflect upon all this,’ they advised Tyndale, ‘and you will clearly see the absurdity in which you are landed’ – it reflected their strength as divines admired by society and by the emperor himself, and the weakness of the wretched prisoner who opposed them.