Book of Fire (33 page)

He thus offered never to write again, to return to England, to submit himself to torture and death at the king’s pleasure, all this if only the Bible – in whoever’s translation the king chose, and in ‘plain text’ without glosses or notes – could be given in English to the people. Henry was closer to permitting the English Bible than he himself realised; but he would not do so at the urging of a
Tyndale. And Tyndale, being Tyndale, could not resist a sting in the tail of his conversation with Vaughan. The king could be assured, he said, that whatsoever ‘I have said or written in all my life against the honour of God’s word, and so proved’, he would utterly forsake and renounce ‘before his majesty and the whole world’, abhorring his errors and embracing the truth. He added a waspish rider. ‘But if those things which I have written be true, and stand with God’s word,’ he said, ‘why should his majesty, having so excellent gift of knowledge in the scriptures, move me to do anything against my conscience?’

On 19 June, after a further meeting, Vaughan reported to Cromwell that he had told Tyndale ‘what the king’s royal pleasure was, but I find him always singing one note’. Unless Henry authorised an English Bible, Tyndale would not budge. Vaughan added that Tyndale was publishing a translation of the prophet Jonas in English, and that it ‘passeth any man’s power’ to stop it from being printed. Vaughan returned to England soon afterwards.

He was back in Antwerp in the autumn of 1531 and wrote two (unanswered) letters to Cromwell, one of which on 14 November contained a copy of ‘another book lately put out by Tyndale, being
An Exposition upon the First Epistle of John
’ which had been published in Antwerp in September. ‘I have taken in hand to interpret this epistle,’ Tyndale wrote in it, ‘to edify the layman, and to teach him how to read the scripture, and what to seek therein.’ It was not enough for a father and mother to beget a child, he said; they had to care for it until it could help itself, and ‘even so it is not enough to have translated … the scripture, into the vulgar and common tongue, except we also brought again the light to understand it’. The exposition was mainly concerned with portraying God as love. ‘Blind reason saith, God is a carved post, and will be served with a candle,’ he wrote, ‘but scripture saith, God is love, and will be served with love. If thou love thy neighbour, then art thou the image of God thyself …’

Jonas
had already undergone its rites of passage. It appeared on a list of forbidden books proclaimed at St Paul’s Cross in Advent 1531, and it was mauled by More. ‘Jonas was never so swallowed up with the whale,’ the lord chancellor wrote, ‘as by the delight of that book a man’s soul may be so swallowed up by the devil, that he shall never have the grace to get out again.’
John
received the same treatment. Had the ‘blessed apostle’ known what sense would be made of his work, More presumed on his behalf, he ‘had liefer his espistle had never been put in writing’.

Momentous events had unrolled in England over the period of Vaughan’s fruitless endeavours in Antwerp. Henry had summoned the Convocation of the clergy from Canterbury to Westminster on 21 January 1531. He said that the pope’s delays and quibbles over his marriage had cost him £100,000. He demanded restitution, claiming that every bishop and priest who had submitted to Wolsey’s authority had abetted the cardinal’s
praemunire
, and was thus liable to life imprisonment and the forfeiture of their property to the crown. Convocation jibed at the huge sum for a few days, but submitted and prayed the king for pardon. In return, they asked for the traditional privileges of the clergy to be reconfirmed.

Cromwell advised his master to refuse. Instead,
praemunire
was extended to include the ecclesiastical courts, on the grounds that the king should govern his realm ‘in concert with his lords and commons only’. On 7 February, Henry addressed parliament and demanded that he be recognised as the ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English Church and clergy’. More remained silent over this body blow to Rome – though Chapuys reported that ‘the chancellor is so mortified at it that he is anxious above all things to resign his office’ – and it was left to John Fisher, the fierce book-burning bishop of Rochester, to fight the Church’s corner. Royal supremacy, Fisher rightly argued, was ‘a tearing of the seamless coat of Christ in sunder’. He said that it involved abandoning
union with the see of Rome. ‘We renounce the unity of the Christian world,’ he warned, ‘and so leap out of Peter’s ship, to be drowned in the waves of all heresies, sects, schisms and divisions.’

The bishops had a clause added to the formula. The king was to be supreme head ‘
quantum per legem Dei licet
’, ‘as far as God’s law allows’, but this was mere face-saving and all knew it. When the title was put to it on 11 February, Convocation responded with angry silence. Archbishop Warham lamely announced ‘
Qui tacet consentire videtur
’, that the silent were seen to agree, and the English Church, which had recognised the pope as its head since Gregory the Great had sent St Augustine to evangelise England almost 950 years before, fell under a new master.

Anne Boleyn was exhilarated that her lover was now, so to speak, both king and pope. Rome could now be bypassed over the annulment. ‘The woman of the king,’ Chapuys noted with disdain, ‘made such demonstrations of joy as if she had actually gained Paradise.’ Her father, now elevated as earl of Wiltshire, showed the family sympathy to reform by stating that the scriptures showed that ‘when God left this world He left no successor or vicar’. When an attempt was made to murder the fractious Fisher, suspicion fell on the Boleyns, who despised him for his resistance to the royal supremacy and the annulment. The bishop’s cook, one Richard Rouse, added a white powder to the soup served to Fisher and his household. Several men died, though Fisher drank only a small amount of the soup, and escaped with severe stomach pains. Henry made a point of having the wretched Rouse boiled to death; ‘nevertheless,’ Chapuys noted, ‘he cannot wholly avoid some suspicion, at least against the Lady and her father’.

Tyndale did not share the Boleyns’ excitement over the humiliation of the pope and clergy. ‘Our king had destroyed the Pope,’ the reformer John Hooper was to comment shrewdly, ‘but not Popery.’ It was never likely that Henry would approve of the
leather-bound copy of Tyndale’s
Answer
that Vaughan had forwarded to him. Henry remained theologically conservative in everything save papal supremacy. He was as sensitive as ever to any deviations in the dogma of the sacraments, and, though the pope had awarded it to him, still boasted of his title as
Fidei Defensor.

The
Answer
had no truck with ‘penance, pilgrimages, pardons, purgatory and praying to posts’ – posts being the mocking word Tyndale used for crucifixes – and condemned the Church’s ‘dumb ceremonies and sacraments’ out of hand. Henry’s response, which Cromwell recorded in a letter to Vaughan, was predictable. ‘His highness nothing liked the said book,’ he wrote, ‘being filled with seditions, slanderous lies, and fantastical opinions … to seduce, deceive and sow sedition among the people of this realm.’ Tyndale, the king railed, lacked grace, virtue, learning, discretion and every other good quality; he was ‘malicious, perverse, uncharitable and indurate’.

Though Tyndale had finished writing the
Answer
by the end of January 1531, it was not printed until July. A marginal note gave a crisp guide to the text: ‘More, a lying papist.’

In his
Dialogue
, More had his questioner say that the reformers ‘hath some that preach sometime, but ye will not suffer them; ye punish them and burn them’. To this, More replied: ‘Nay, they be wiser than so; for they will rather swear on a book that they never said so.’ This was, of course, a deadly insult. More was claiming that the reformers had no honour or courage; faced with the stake, they rolled over and abjured.

Tyndale punned on ‘more’ in his reply. ‘And when he saith, he never found nor heard of any of us, but that he would forswear to save his life,’ he wrote. ‘Answer: The more wrath of God will light on them that so cruelly delight to torment them, and so craftily to beguile the weak.’ He went on to point out that More’s insult was untrue. More knew that he was lying, Tyndale said,
because ‘he hath heard of sir Thomas Hitton, whom the bishops of Rochester and Canterbury slew at Maidstone; and of many that suffered in Braband, Holland and at Colen, and in all quarters of Dutchland, and so daily. And when he saith that their church hath many martyrs, let him shew me one, that died for pardons and purgatory, that the pope hath feigned.’ More had indeed heard of Hitton.

The war over the use of the word ‘congregation’ ground on. ‘Wheresoever I may say a
congregation
,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘there may I say a
church
also; as the church of the devil, the church of Satan, the church of wretches, the church of wicked men, the church of liars, and a church of Turks thereto. For M. More must grant (if he will have
ecclesia
translated throughout all the new Testament by this word church) that church is as common as
ecclesia
. Now is
ecclesia
a Greek word, and was in use before the time of the apostles, and taken for a congregation among the heathen, where was no congregation of God or of Christ. And also Lucas [Luke] himself useth
ecclesia
for a church, or congregation, of heathen people thrice in one chapter … Let, therefore, M More and his company awake by times, ere ever their sin be ripe; lest the voice of their wickedness ascend up, and awake God out of his sleep, to look upon them, and to bow his ears unto their cursed blasphemies against the open truth, and to send his harvestmen and mowers of vengeance to reap it.’

Translating the Old Testament had given Tyndale a sonority of menace and insult – ‘the harvestmen of vengeance’ – that sweeps the reader along well enough. Some sharper blows accompanied the general pounding. ‘But how happeth it that M More hath not contended in like wise against his darling Erasmus all this long while?’ he asked. ‘Doth he not change this word
ecclesia
into
congregation
, and that not seldom in the new Testament?’ This was indeed true. Erasmus and More were the closest of friends or ‘darlings’ – it was Erasmus who had given More his lasting tag as
a man ‘
omnium horarum
’, a ‘man for all seasons’ – and translating from the Greek into Latin he had used
congregatio
for
ecclesia
.

The core of the
Answer
was a pithy rebuttal of More’s placing of tradition above scripture. ‘Judge therefore reader,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘whether the pope with his be the church, whether their authority be above the scripture, whether all they teach without scripture be equal with the scripture, whether they have erred …’

It was absurd, he said, for More to claim that ignorant laymen and women could not divine the truth in the scriptures without the help of the Church. Mankind was born with a spiritual sense. ‘Who taught the eagles to spy out their prey?’ Tyndale retorted. ‘Even so the children of God spy out their lord, and trace out the paths of his feet and follow; yea, though he go upon the plain and liquid water, which will receive no step, and yet there they find out his foot; his elect know him, but the world knoweth him not.’

More had followed the classic Catholic position in his
Dialogue
. He said that scripture must be read or listened to with care. Only ‘if we be not rebellious, but endeavour ourselves to believe, and captive and subdue our understanding to serve and follow faith’, could it be properly seen. And even then the scripture was no more than an adjunct to Church tradition and doctrine; it merely gave ‘fast and firm credence to the faith that the church teacheth, in such things as be not in the scripture, and to believe that God hath taught his church those things without writing’.

This, of course, skirted round the great issue of the Reformation. Tyndale and his like attached no credence whatever to Church teachings of ‘such things as be not in the scripture’. On the contrary, they believed that what the Church taught outside the Bible was wicked and self-serving and inspired by the devil. They had the same contempt for the things that, as More put it, ‘God hath taught his church without writing’. How had God managed this feat? The New Testament, as Tyndale had written on his title page, was ‘written, and caused to be written, by them
whyche herde yt’, yt being the word of God. Who had heard these later things that God had taught? How had they heard? Why had they not written them down?

These taunts were to an extent mere goading by Tyndale. He knew well enough what Catholic apologists like More actually meant. For fourteen hundred years, the Church had been the guardian of the Christian spirit. It had distilled the thoughts of the great men of the past, the ancient Fathers and colossal figures like Augustine, Bernard, Gregory and Aquinas, into a tradition whose patina and polish, so laboriously acquired, sparkled like some antique altar of silver and ebony. The spiritual immensity of the Church seemed reflected in its gigantic constructions. A cathedral, with its chantries, baptistry, shrines, relics, stained glass, organ, gargoyles, tombs, pulpit, its spire and nave, had a sense of immortality to it. So, too, did the Church hierarchy, an equally magnificent edifice, with its popes, cardinals, bishops, chancellors, abbots, priors, legates, nuncios, prothonotaries, archdeacons, pastors, monks and friars, its canon lawyers and its church courts.

Compared to this, the Bible was no more than a relic of dusty parchment. To More, the Christian religion was so identified with the Church that it seemed natural that God should whisper truths into its collective ear. The Church had acquired God’s word through osmosis, as it were, by a gradual and unwritten absorption over the centuries.

This view was entirely sensible, and it had long since proved its worth in sustaining the Church. It depended, however, as More admitted, on holding reason ‘captive’. This was easy meat for Tyndale.