Book of Fire (21 page)
The reforms in place in Zurich by 1528 far exceeded those of Luther. Relics and images were stripped from churches and sold or smashed. Altars were bared of decorations. Organs were dismantled. Hymns were replaced by the singing of metrical psalms. Ministers wore ordinary clothes and faced the congregation. Worship was daily with a plain liturgy and interminable sermons. People ‘spend the time of the sermon voluptuously in inns’, the city council complained. ‘[S]ome of them even ridicule and abusively insult the Word of God and its proclaimers … Everybody is to be obediently present at the third ringing of the bells. Nobody is to evade this.’
But of course they did. They were found wandering on the bridges, along the moats and down alleys at sermon-time. It was
decreed that all sermons should begin at the same time to make it easier to enforce attendance. The death sentence was imposed on heretics. The Zwinglians did not burn. They drowned. The year before, in 1527, a young Anabaptist had been led to the fish market and taken aboard a boat with his hands tied. As he ‘sang with a clear voice “
In manus tuas, domine, commendo spiritum meum
”’, the executioner pushed him into the waters of the Zurich lake.
The Bible could be quoted to elevate misdemeanours and simple pleasures into ‘intolerable crimes’. Drinking, card-playing, singing, ‘dancing and like dissolute behaviour’, the wearing of slashed breeches – all these were to be censored by elders appointed to ‘keep watch over the lives of everyone, to admonish in love those whom they see erring and leading disorderly lives and, whenever necessary, to report them to the body which will be designated to make fraternal correction …’.
And there was a joy in English Catholicism that Tyndale wilfully overlooked. The hundreds of religious guilds in towns and villages were societies of real spirituality. They maintained schools and almshouses, and gave their members a dignified funeral and intercessionary masses. Tyndale mocked their collective chantries and their mystery plays, but the plays brought colour and entertainment to the living, and the chantries reassured even the poorest that their souls would be prayed for after their death. He ridiculed the building of St Peter’s at Rome, too, as papal pretension, but the villagers of Louth had just completed the building of a 300-foot steeple of soaring grace that pierced the skies above the Lincolnshire flatlands like a sword of faith. It took them fourteen years, and £305, a small fortune. They held a ceremony when the weathercock was lifted into place. The parish priest, Will Ayleby, ‘hallowed the said weathercock and the stone that it stands upon … and the kirkwardens garte ring all the bells, and cawsed all the people to have bread and ale, and all to the loving of God, Our Lady and All Saints’.
It was no doubt nonsense, as Tyndale said, for people to raise their eyes to look at the Host during the Eucharist. Many did so because they believed they would prosper and avoid blindness and sudden death that day. But it gave them comfort. Long after its monks had been dispersed, secret pilgrimages were made at night to the site of Mountgrace Priory in the oakwoods beneath the windwracked Cleveland Moors by ‘divers and sundry superstitious and popishly affected persons’ who found a haunting spirituality amid the crumbling cells of its departed solitaries.
There was Tyndale’s love of the gospels; but there was Catholic love, too, of long tradition, of the scented beauty of the mass and the cadence of Church music, of the colour and pomp and circumstance of Church processions, of the consolation of confession and the companionship of pilgrimage, of all those things – cherubims and seraphims, gargoyles and grotesques – that, as Pope Nicholas had said, held the eye.
Mystic hermits like Richard Methley, who died in 1528, found the same rapture in the damp English woodlands that Tyndale found in the Bible. ‘In the beginning thou shalt feel some penance or pain, but ever after thou shalt live like a throstle-cock or a nightingale for joy, and thank God,’ Methley wrote of his solitude. ‘God visited me with great force, for I languished in such love that I almost expired … As men in peril of fire are only able to ejaculate the single word “fire”, so, as the language of love grew stronger, I could scarce think at all, but merely formed in my spirit the words “love, love, love”; and at last, ceasing even from this, I wondered how I might wholly breathe out my soul, singing in spirit through joy …’
I
t took
Mammon
only a few weeks to get from Antwerp to England – Tunstall was picking up copies by June 1528 – and More denounced it as ‘a very
mammona iniquitas
, a very treasury and wellspring of wickedness … by which many have been beguiled and brought into many wicked heresies’. It was promptly added to the list of banned books.
Wolsey moved directly against the evangelical exiles on 18 June. He ordered Sir John Hackett to secure the arrest and delivery of Tyndale, Roye and an English merchant named Richard Herman. Hackett was instructed to make a formal application for extradition to Margaret, the regent of the Low Countries and, like Queen Catherine, an aunt of Charles V.
The information about Herman came from one of Tunstall’s best catches. He had arrested Robert Necton, a major bookseller in London and East Anglia, in March 1528. Necton had confessed that he had ‘bought at various times many of the New Testaments in English’ from a Mr Fyshe, who lived at Whitefriars in London, and who in turn had them off ‘one Harmond, an Englishman, beyond the sea’. Harmond was otherwise known as Herman. Necton said that he had been introduced to Fyshe by ‘vicar
Constantyne’. He had sold five Testaments to one William Furboshore, a ‘singing-man’ in Stowmarket, for ‘seven or eight groats apiece’, or between 2s 4d and 2s 8d. He implicated the unfortunate Thomas Farman of Honey Lane, saying that he had bought ‘eighteen New Testaments of the smaller size’ from the rector’s servant, and adding that he had ‘much resorted’ to Farman’s sermons. Necton went on to say that ‘about Christmas last a Dutchman, now in the Fleet, offered to sell him 200 or 300 English testaments, at 9d each; but he did not buy, only sending him to Mr Fyshe’. Necton said that he had first obtained ‘the chapters of Matthew’, referring to the sheets that Tyndale had salvaged from Cologne. He then spoke of two sizes of Testaments, ‘great’ and ‘small’ volumes, referring to the original Worms copies and the van Endhoven pirate edition.
Hackett wrote to Wolsey on 14 July 1528. He said that ‘my Lady [the regent] has caused great diligence to be made for the apprehension of the three heretics’, but Tyndale and Roye ‘could not be found’. Another English priest was taken, a mass priest from St Botolph’s in London called Akyrston, whom Hackett was told ‘has born a fagot at home, but for all that cannot refrain his tongue from evil speaking’. Of the big fish, there was no trace.
He had done better with the bookseller. Hackett went on to say that he had ‘caused Ric. Harman to be arrested at Antwerp … and his wife, as suspected of the same faction’. Herman’s goods and books ‘are inventoried in the emperor’s hands’. Hackett said that it was vital to have him extradited, ‘for he is the root of great mischief’. He said that it would be best if the king or Wolsey ‘write for his delivery as a traitor’. They would then have ‘two strings to our bow’. Hackett feared that Herman would ‘escape with a slanderous punishment’ if he was charged with heresy, because he would be able to recant. ‘But they cannot pardon him for treason against the King,’ he wrote, ‘in consequence of the statutes of intercourse dated 1506.’ This was the extradition treaty between England and
the Low Countries, which obliged each country to return the other’s traitors where the evidence warranted it. He advised Wolsey that it ‘would be a good thing if Lutherans were included with traitors’, so as to make extradition easier. He argued that they were traitors anyway, ‘for as soon as they have passed the sea they know neither King nor God’.
Hackett wrote a personal note at the end of the letter. ‘As for myself,’ he said, ‘my heart is much better than my purse.’ He was paying out large amounts of cash to try to pick up Tyndale’s scent.
At the end of August 1528, Wolsey sent another hunter over the sea, John West, a friar observant from Greenwich. He had been in the same monastery as Roye and Barlow. It was wrongly thought that Roye was still with Tyndale, and that, when West tracked down his former Greenwich colleague, he would lead them to Tyndale.
West lodged himself in the Franciscan monastery in Antwerp and set to work. He first asked Sir John Style, the ranking expatriate Englishman, to get into Herman’s house and look at his correspondence and books. Style told Hackett when he wrote to him on 2 September 1528 that he was at first faced with ‘crafty delays’. When he finally got permission to search the house, he found that the seals placed on it when Herman was arrested had been broken. As he started searching, local people came and said that it was shameful that the king of England’s lackey should be allowed to rummage through an Antwerp merchant’s house. There were no books in the house. Style presumed that they were in the custody of the court.
He did, however, find four letters in English which were relevant to the case. One was from a Richard Halle, a London ironmonger, asking for two copies of Tyndale’s New Testament. A letter from John Sadler of London, dated 3 September 1526, warned of news that English Testaments were to be ‘put down and burnt’. Thomas Davy, of Cranbrook in Kent, urged Herman to
keep his faith in Christ, and told him that none could speak of the New Testament in English ‘on pain of bearing a fagot’. A final letter from another Cranbrook man, John Andrews, dated 20 February 1527, asked about the supply of Testaments. Style added a postscript to his letter. ‘Harman’s wife is a mischievous woman of her tongue,’ he wrote, ‘and as ill of deeds.’
West confirmed this account in his own letter to Hackett, written the same day. He noted with satisfaction that John Andrews had already been arrested and was in the Fleet prison in London. He also advised Hackett that ‘I trust to catch another priest, come out of England, called Constantinus, who dresses like a secular.’
His main news was of a promising lead on Tyndale. West said that he had spoken with a local bookbinder and bookseller called Francis Byrkman who told him that Roye and Barlow, with ‘Hucthyns otherwise called Tyndale’, had written the book that had recently so angered the king and Wolsey. This referred to
Rede me
. West’s bookbinder was wrong to think that Tyndale had a hand in it, but he was right to say that ‘one John Schott, a printer of Strassburg, printed them’ and that there is ‘yet another whole pipe of them at Frankfurt’ waiting to be sold at the autumn fair.
Byrkman was, in fact, actively trading in pirate copies of Tyndale’s work on his own account. After his death two years later, as we have seen, a judgement was secured in Antwerp against his heirs over an unpaid balance owed by Byrkman for the delivery of more than seven hundred pirate Tyndale Testaments. Byrkman thus had firsthand knowledge of illegal printing; he had made money from the evangelicals’ books and he suggested a way of snaring them to make more. He wanted West to write him a letter commissioning him to buy up copies of
Rede me
. ‘If he buyeth them,’ West wrote, ‘he intended to send Roye with the other two to receive there the money for the books, and then I and Mr Herman Ryng of Cologne shall take them there.’ ‘Ryng’ was Hermann Rinck, the senator who sold his services to the English
crown, and who had aborted Tyndale’s Cologne print run in 1525.
Another friar observant, named Flegh, was sent out from London to provide back-up for West. The two friars set out from Antwerp for Cologne in mid-September, changing out of their monastic dress so that their quarry would not recognise them. Wolsey commissioned Rinck on 21 September to ‘buy up everywhere books printed in English and to seize Roye and Hutchins’. Rinck replied to the cardinal accepting the proposition on 4 October 1528. The heretics had not been at Frankfurt since Easter and the fair next to Lent, he said, ‘nor is it known whither they have gone, and whether they are alive or dead’.
Their work, on the other hand, was all too evident in books that ‘are crammed with heresy, offensive to your grace, and make the king odious to all Christians’. He was referring primarily to
Rede me
, thinking it to be written jointly by Tyndale and Roye. Something could be done about them, but Rinck warned that it would be expensive. He said that he had learnt that ‘those very books had been pawned to the Jews at Frankfurt for a certain sum of money’, and he had been thinking of buying them up ‘on my own account’ even before he had heard from the cardinal, doubtless to sell them on to English agents at a good profit. But the printer – Rinck confirmed that it was John Schott of Strasbourg – insisted that interest must be paid to the Jews, that he himself wanted to be compensated for his labour and the cost of the paper, and that he would sell them to the highest bidder.
Rinck said that he had ‘spared no labour or expense’ – after almost five hundred years, the whiff of the gravy train in his letter is as fresh as ever – in distributing ‘gifts’ to ‘the consuls of Frankfurt and some of the senators and judges’ in return for authority to collect books by Tyndale and Roye wherever he could find them. All the books were now safely in his hands, he said, with the exception of two copies which he had given to West to take to Wolsey. Rinck claimed that, unless he had intervened, the
books were to have been bound and concealed in paper covers, packed in bundles of ten, and then covered with flax. They were then to have been ‘craftily and without suspicion transported across the sea to Scotland and England’, there ‘to be sold merely as blank paper’. Rinck claimed that the printer had been forbidden to print any more copies, and that he had taken an oath to obey ‘and also to send me the original written copy’. Rinck assured Wolsey that he ‘will make the most strenuous efforts to arrest the aforesaid Roy and Hutchins … and find out where they live’.