Book of Fire (17 page)
Those who pirated Tyndale’s work used satirical colophons; one, poking fun at More, claimed to be ‘Printed in Utopia’; another claimed that it was ‘Printed in St Peter’s at Rome
cum privilegio apostolico
’, while a third was ‘Printed in Basle by Adam Anonymous’. All were set in the familiar Gothic bastard type – Gothic came in three main types, ‘accounting’, ‘breviary’ and ‘bastard’ – in octavo on poor quality paper. Tyndale objected only when alterations were made to his text.
He found his recompense, no doubt, in the zeal of his readers. The experience of reading God’s word was perilous, exciting, intoxicating, and illegal. ‘It is proved lawful of God, that both men and women lawfully may read and write God’s law in their mother tongue,’ an anonymous pamphleteer wrote, ‘and they that forbid this show themselves heirs and sons of the first tormentors, and worse, and they show themselves the very disciples of Antichrist … in stopping and perverting of God’s law.’
By the 1580s, people were already looking back to ‘the fervent zeal of those Christian days’ with awe and nostalgia. The old generation seemed ‘much superior to these our days and times’; they manifested this by ‘sitting up all night in reading and hearing, also by their expences and charges in buying books in English …’ The readers included barrel-makers, weavers, tailors, monks, curates, journeymen, nail-makers, pewter-workers, furriers and carpenters, and their wives, sisters and daughters. ‘It is a religion of the little people,’ a chronicler said.
The greatest person in the realm remained utterly opposed to the new doctrine. Henry VIII made it clear that he remained a traditionalist in dogma, hostile to Tyndale and his translation. In his
Reply to Luther
, he castigated the German for associating ‘with one or two leude persons borne in this our realme for the translatyng of the Newe testament in to Englysshe as well as with many corruptions of that holy text as certayne prefaces and other
pestylente gloses in the margentes for the advancement and settynge forthe of his abhomynable heresyes entendynge to abuse the gode myndes and devotion that you oure derely beloved people beare towarde the holy scripture’.
Henry VIII, ominously for Tyndale, was immensely proud of his title of
Fidei Defensor
, Defender of the Faith. This was his reward from the pope in 1521 for writing a defence of the Catholic sacraments against Luther. In Church politics, in his break with Rome, and the subordination of the clergy, Henry was a revolutionary. In theology, however, he was intensely conservative and his rage against ‘abhomynable heresyes’ made him highly dangerous to Tyndale.
(Popperfoto)
In particular, the king shared with his people a deep belief in Christ’s real presence in the sacrament, and a loathing of those, like Tyndale, who denied it. Thomas Ashby, an Augustinian canon of Bridlington, wrote of this credence in his commonplace book:
The bread is flesh in our credence
The wine is blood without doubtance.
They that believe not this with circumstance,
But doth thyemself with curious wit enhance,
To hell pit shall they wend,
There to torment without end.
Ashby wrote, too, of his belief in miracles, of Hartlepool sailors rescued by the saints, and of the Gascon pilgrim who came to the shrine of St John of Bridlington and, overcome with curiosity, opened the reliquary containing the saint’s head. Angry at being disturbed, the saint afflicted the wretched pilgrim with terrible pains in his head and arms as he travelled south to Huntingdon. Here, he turned back to Bridlington to beg the saint’s forgiveness, and was restored to health.
Books on the saints outnumbered any other type. Of fifty-odd books published by Wynkyn de Worde around the turn of the century, thirty were of this type. Between 1490 and 1530, at least twenty-eight editions of the
Hours of the Blessed Virgin
were printed in England. The chief English collection of pious legends and miracles, John Myrc’s
Liber Festialis
, went through nineteen editions between 1483 and 1532. The
Golden Legend
, a collection of lives of the saints by the Italian archbishop and hagiographer Jacob of Voragine, went through successive editions after Caxton
first printed it in 1483. Wynkyn de Worde also published John of Tynemouth’s
Sanctilogium Angliae
in 1516 with lives of the English saints. The last great English hagiography, the
Martiloge
, by the Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford, was published in 1526.
Bible-women, and Bible-reading artisans, roused a particular horror. ‘Even silly little women want to pass judgment on the Bible as they might on their needle and thread,’ one traditionalist wrote. Cochlaeus and More both noted the eagerness of women readers. ‘Despicable women, proudly rejecting the supposed ignorance of men,’ Cochlaeus wrote, were looking to the Bible rather than the Church for evidence of God’s purpose; some of them ‘carried it in their bosoms and learnt it by heart’ and within a few months thought themselves so well versed in scripture that ‘without timidity they debated not only with Catholic laymen, but also with priests and monks’.
Even after English Bibles had been legalised and officially distributed, in 1543, social and sexual misgivings remained. Noblemen and gentlemen were allowed to read the scriptures aloud in English to all in their households. Noblewomen, and burghers, could ‘read for themselves but for no one else any text in the Bible’. A statute was enacted to ban the reading of the English Bible absolutely to ‘women, artisans, apprentices, and companions working for those of an equal or inferior rank to yeomen, farmers and manual labourers’.
Wolsey thus had royal and popular support when he tried to attack the Testament traffic at source. The cardinal sent instructions to Sir John Hackett, the English ambassador in the Low Countries, to take legal action against printers, booksellers and shipping agents involved in the trade. Hackett received the letter on 21 November 1526. By January 1527, he had collected up enough copies to provide for book burnings in Antwerp and Bergen-op-Zoom. Hackett also forwarded a request from Wolsey
to Margaret, the regent of the Low Countries, to have van Ruremund arrested and his presses destroyed.
But Hackett ran foul of local law. Imperial officials pointed out that heresy was not an extraditable offence under the treaty signed between England and the Low Countries in 1506. Treason and sedition were another matter, and the English made frequent requests for the return of traitors and rebels who had fled to the Continent. But the local courts were competent to deal with heresy, and any English heretic who was detected could be tried and burnt on the spot. Van Ruremund’s lawyer denied that his client had printed any book with heresies. He added that the emperor’s subjects should not be judged by the laws of other countries, and demanded that van Ruremund be set free.
Hackett wrote to Wolsey on 12 January 1527 to say that he had become so frustrated at the legal wranglings that he thought of buying up all the Testaments and sending them to London; but, ‘when my choler was descended’, he decided to consult the regent herself first. Van Ruremund was found guilty, perhaps through her pressure, but his stocks of books were not confiscated. Hackett asked Wolsey for evidence of treason by evangelicals so that he could produce documentation for the local courts.
Hackett went on with his uphill task. He received intelligence of a cargo of testaments, only to arrive at the port in Zeeland a few hours after the ship had sailed for Scotland. He was told that two thousand English books were being offered for sale at the April 1527 Frankfurt Book Fair but was too late to intervene. On 21 May 1527 Hackett heard that ‘some new printers’ in Antwerp were taking new pirate editions of the Testament to the Bergen market. He hastened to Bergen. A copy of the king’s statement and a warning that all Tyndale works should be delivered up was read out to the Englishmen in Bergen by the deputy of the English Nation, the association of English traders and agents resident in the Low Countries.
In England, Archbishop Warham was discreetly buying up ‘all the boks of the Newe Testament translated into Englesshe and pryented beyonde the Sea, aswel those with the gloses ioyned vnto them as th’oder withoute the gloses’. He was confident that he was blocking both the Cologne fragments with their glosses and the Worms volumes. On 26 May 1527, Warham wrote to the bishops of his province, asking them to share his current expenses of £66 9s 4d. Some of the money was no doubt spent on informers, and the cost of buying bound copies will have been at least double that of the printed sheets. Even if he laid his hands on fewer than five hundred copies, however, he amassed enough for impressive bonfires. The fierce Bishop Nix of Norwich pledged ten marks, or £6 13s 4d, in his reply, and congratulated Warham for his ‘gracious and blessed deed’.
In Germany, Tyndale was parting – on bad terms – with William Roye.
R
oye had left Tyndale in Worms after the completion of the Testament. ‘He went and gat him new friends,’ Tyndale wrote. ‘And there when he had stored him of money, he gat him to Argentine [Strasbourg] …’ In May 1527, while Hackett roamed further to the north looking for him, Tyndale was visited in Worms by Jerome Barlow, a renegade friar from the same Franciscan monastery at Greenwich as Roye. He said that he wanted to ‘get his living with his own hands’, and to feast no longer on the sweat and labour of the laity, whom the clergy had ‘taught not to believe in Christ, but in cut shoes and russet coats’. Tyndale warned him of Roye’s ‘boldness’ in drawing attention to himself and Jerome promised to have nothing to do with him. ‘Nevertheless, when he was come to Argentine,’ Tyndale recollected, ‘William Roye (whose tongue is able not only to make fools stark mad, but also to deceive the wisest, that is at first sight and acquaintance) gat him to him, and set him a-work to make rhymes, while he himself translated a dialogue out of Latin into English, in whose prologue he promiseth more a great deal than I fear me he ever will pay’.
Some time after his meeting with Barlow, Tyndale moved from
Worms. He may have felt that Hackett was getting too close to him, or Cochlaeus may have disturbed him. Marburg, the city eighty miles to the north west to which he is thought to have moved, was certainly safer for a Bible-man. It was ruled by Philip the Magnanimous, landgrave of Hesse, a Lutheran who was actively seeking a defensive league of Protestant princes and cities. Hesse was emerging as a sovereign state with a Lutheran university, churches and schools.
In England, high-profile arrests were being made to try to staunch the flow of Testaments. Wolsey first attacked a group of Cambridge scholars, and ‘little Bilney’ was the most prominent victim. Thomas Bilney was a fellow of a Cambridge college, Trinity Hall, a trained lawyer and an ordained priest who was licensed to preach in the flat and fenny diocese of Ely.
He was, so the future martyr Hugh Latimer wrote, ‘meek and charitable, a simple good soul, not fit for this world’. Bilney criticised the Schoolmen for their drab theology, and delivered ‘many sermons against prayers to saints and image worship’. He had a way with people. Under his influence, Latimer, originally ‘as obstinate a papist as any’, found that ‘I began to smell the word of God, forsaking the school doctors and such fooleries.’ Bilney was ‘of but little stature and very slender of body’, but his evangelism and work for the poor and sick had made him much loved. He was ‘very fervent and studious in the Scriptures, as appeared by his sermons [and] his converting of sinners’, so much so, indeed, that he was twice physically removed from the pulpit in Norwich while in full flow.
His description of reading the First Epistle to Timothy shows the extraordinary impact the Bible could make on people who, in an age steeped in the ancient religiosity of the Church, now came across the word of God itself. The Bible was, of course, more ancient than the Church, but its effects were wholly new, and
devastating, and his rapture would ultimately cost little Bilney his life. ‘It did so exhilarate my heart, being before wounded with the guilt of my sins, and being almost in despair,’ he wrote of his discovery of St Paul and justification by faith, ‘that immediately I felt a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch that my bruised bones leaped for joy.’
The fears of those who wished the Bible to remain locked away – Tunstall, More, the pope – were confirmed by this experience. Here was another instance of an ordained man who lost his old faith by reading it. Scripture, Bilney continued, became ‘more pleasant unto me than the honey or the honeycomb, wherein I learned that all my travails, all my fasting and watching, all the redemption of masses and pardons, being done without trust in Christ, who only saveth his people from their sins, these, I say, I learned to be nothing else but even … a hasty and swift running out of the right way’.