Book of Fire (34 page)
More ‘peppereth his conclusion, lest men should feel the taste’, Tyndale wrote, ‘saying, “If we endeavour ourselves, and captive our understanding to believe.”
‘O how beetle-blind is fleshly reason! The will hath none operation at all in the working of faith in my soul, no more than the
child hath in the begetting of his father; for, saith Paul, “It is the gift of God”, and not of us. My wit must conclude good or bad, ere my will can love or hate. My wit must shew me a true cause, or an apparent cause why, ere my will have any working at all.’
It was a powerful point, but one that More retained the power to answer by the fire.
M
ore read the
Answer
over the late summer of 1531. He was a proud man, and what he read stung him. He at once set to work on his reply,
The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer
. It was a work of devotion to the old religion, or of obsession, for he took all of Tyndale’s points, one by one, and wrote of them at such rambling length that he seemed to be trying to smother them by the weight of words alone.
By day, More was chancellor, involved in the legal, diplomatic and parliamentary affairs of the realm, and snared in the royal pursuit of the annulment and the bending of the Church to the will of the king, approving of neither policy, but warned, so Chapuys wrote, that he would be ‘thrown into the Thames’ if he did not accept both. By night, after the brief respite of the river journey from Westminster to Chelsea, and a simple supper, he sat down to dash off page after page of his
Confutation
in furious storms of ink.
The first three volumes of the book were completed by the early months of 1532. The final six volumes appeared a year later. In all, the
Confutation
ran to half a million words. It was six times longer than the
Answer
, and More’s biographer, Nicholas Harpsfield, noted a few years later how he had thrown everything
into the hunt, so that Tyndale ‘scuddeth in and out like a hare that hath twenty brace of greyhounds after her, and were afeard at every foot to be snatched up’.
The book was intended to stem the advance of ‘Tyndales great Mayster Antecryst’, and the odds appeared to be greatly in More’s favour. Tyndale and his readers were a poor and hunted handful. More’s side enjoyed all the strengths of a long-established Church – power and privilege, vast estates, income from rent rolls, tithes, legacies, indulgences, masses, dirges, hallowings – and the loyalty of the great majority of worshippers. Convocation had been forced to accept the king as its supreme head, but in the same month, February 1531, it showed that the clergy still had sharp teeth. The squire of Toddington in Gloucestershire, William Tracey, left a will in which he said that salvation came through Christ alone, and that none of his estate should be used to pay a priest to say prayers for his soul. Tyndale had known Tracey in his Gloucestershire days, finding him ‘a learned man’ who knew the works of St Augustine ‘better than ever I knew a doctor in England’. Convocation, outraged at the Lutheran slant to the will, and at the danger it posed to clerical income, condemned it as impious and heretical. Tracey’s corpse was duly dug up and burnt by the bishop of Worcester’s chancellor.
1
Yet the ‘evangelycalls’ survived, and their ‘newfanglynes’ was proving to be a formidable foe. More’s
Confutation
was prodigious, but its length, and the ‘monotonous fury’ of its thousand-plus printed pages of barbs, insults, ribaldries, carpings and cavils, revealed the author’s uneasy intuition that it might serve as an obituary for England’s old faith. More admitted that some people found that ‘my writyng is over longe, and therfore to tedyouse to rede’. He explained that he had to hammer each point home, so that his audience ‘shal not nede to rede over any chapyter but one,’ but it should have worried him that Tyndale’s message was so much briefer and plainer.
The
Answer
and the
Confutation
make war on all fronts. They pitch faith against works, the direct inspiration of the scripture against the traditions and teachings of the church, private prayer against the pomp of public worship, redemption through Christ against salvation through the Church and its sacraments.
More said that there was room for only ‘one fayth in the howse of god’, and that faith, blessed by tradition, made lustrous by the souls of the saints, resided in ‘the comen knowen catholique chyrch’. The Church interceded between man and God; it contained all that was necessary for salvation; and its customs and usages had the force of God’s truth behind them. Its purpose was secular as well as spiritual. More helped to govern the secular state. He knew how frail it was, how subject to plots, dynastic crisis, spoilt harvests, debts, plagues and riots. As the body of Christ on earth, the Church was universal and all-embracing. It gathered all ranks and conditions of men and women, and glued them into the common society and civilisation of Christendom.
Fear of apocalypse, and a collapse of the known world, haunted More. If the Church was broken, he warned, it would be the signal that ‘the great archeheretyke Antycryste come hym selfe whyche as helpe me god I fere be very nere hys tyme’.
It was absurd and wicked, he said, for Tyndale and ‘such fond fellows’ to ‘bid all the world believe them upon their bare word, in the understanding of holy scripture, against all holy saints and cunning doctors of fifteen hundred years passed’. These ignorant ‘newe men’ jested and railed against ‘all good works, against all religion, fasting, prayer, devotion, saints, ceremonies and sacraments’. They ‘praise lechery between friars and nuns’ – More reminded his readers incessantly that, in marrying the Cistercian Catherine von Bora, Luther ‘toke out of relygyon a spouse of Cryste’ and that it was said ‘that Antecryste sholde be borne betwene a frere and a nunne’ – and made ‘open shameless blasphemy’.
He was shocked that Tyndale had written that Sunday need not
be the day of rest – ‘we be lords over the Sabbath’ – and that spoken confession to a priest was unnecessary and harmful. ‘He that, after Tyndale’s doctrine, repenteth without care of shrift, and dieth in a false heresy against his holy housel’, More responded, ‘such folk be finally reprobates, foreknown unto God before the world was wrought, that they would finally for impenitence fall utterly to nought’.
Tyndale had imagined a Christian woman shipwrecked on an island among people who knew nothing of Christ. In this emergency, he felt, she could act as a priest, preaching and saying mass. More was horrified. Not a sparrow falls to earth, he retorted, without it being part of God’s providence. ‘There shall be no woman fall a-lande in any so farre an Ilande where he will have his name preached and His sacraments mynystered,’ he claimed, ‘but that god can and wyll well inough provide a man or twayne to come to lande wyth her.’
More drew a veil over Henry’s new position as supreme head of the English Church, preferring to remember the younger, slimmer and more devout figure who had written the ‘most erudite, famous book against Luther’ a decade before. The king ‘nothing more effectively desireth’ than the preservation of ‘the true catholic faith’, More said, and ‘nothing more detesteth than these pestilent books that Tyndale and such other send into the realm, to set forth here their abominable heresies withal’.
He took care not to mention the pope at all in the sensitive context of the governance of the Church. ‘For the avoiding of all intrickation whereof, I purposely forbare to put in the pope as part of the definition of the church, as a thing needed not,’ he explained rather lamely, ‘since if he be the necessary head, he is included in the name of the whole body …’
The king was ‘fain for the while’ to allow the English Bible, More said, because the onslaught of heresy meant that even good and innocent books were dangerous. ‘Evil folk’ would
draw false morals from it ‘to the colour and maintenance of their own fond fantasies’, and, ‘turnynge al hony into posyn’, would do deadly hurt to themselves and ‘sprede also that infeccyone farther a brode’. Things had reached such a pitch, he said, that if anyone translated his ‘darling’ friend Erasmus’s
Praise of Folly
in English, or ‘some workes eyther that I have my selfe wryten ere this … I wolde not onely my derlynges books but myne owne also helpe to burne wyth my own hands’. His own
Utopia
was presumably among the books he was prepared to throw on the bonfire.
Tyndale himself had the devil’s mark on his forehead, More said; he was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, an abominable beast who wishes his followers ‘to die in the quarrel for the defence of his glory’.
Time and again, More compared Tyndale’s works to the plague. ‘Our Lord send us now some years as plenteous of good corn as we have had some years of late plenteous of evil books,’ he prayed. ‘For they have grown up so fast and sprung up so thick, full of pestilent errors and pernicious heresies, that they have infected and killed I fear me more silly simple souls then the famine of the dear years have destroyed bodies.’ Hunger and disease were signs of God’s wrath with the nation for allowing heresies to be smuggled in and circulated.
He was at pains to establish that Tyndale was seditious, and a traitor as well as a heretic. Trained barrister that he was, More found the chink in
Obedience
. Tyndale had written that, if the prince orders the subject to violate God’s law, the subject must disobey and meekly suffer martyrdom, though he must not resist the prince by force. More found this to be seditious, because Tyndale condoned disobedience to the ruler on the grounds of conscience. He added that it was seditious for Tyndale to protest that heretics were put to painful deaths. More said that princes
were right to punish heretics ‘accordynge to iustice by sore payne-fule deathe, both for ensample and for infectyon of other’.
At times, More’s passion for heretic-burning runs almost out of control. ‘There should have been more burned by a great many than there have been within this seven year last past,’ he wrote. ‘The lack whereof, I fear me, will make more burned within this seven year next coming, than else should have needed to have been burned in seven score …’ The proffered regret – ‘I fear me’ – is false; More looked forward to the fires, and fantasised on the punishments he would inflict on Tyndale and Luther. ‘If the zele of god were amonge men that shold be,’ he wrote, ‘such rayling rybalds that so mokke wyth holy scrypture, shold at every exposycyon have an hote iren thruste thorow theyr blasphemouse tonges.’
He gloried meantime in the death of Hitton and others of Tyndale’s friends who had gone to the stake. ‘Tyndale’s bokes and theyr owne malyce maketh them heretykes. And for heretikes as they be, the clergy dothe denounce them. And as they be well worthy, the temporaltie dothe burne them,’ he purred, and then added the terrible words, ‘And after the fyre of Smythfelde, hell dothe receyue them, where the wretches burne for euer.’
The formula of direct dialogue, or question and answer, was used again in
Confutation
, with More replying to remarks made by Tyndale in his
Answer
and elsewhere.
‘Marke whyther yt be not true in the hyest degree …’ says Tyndale, while More butts in. ‘Tyndale is a great marker,’ he says. ‘There is nothynge with hym now but marke, marke, marke. It is a pytye that the man were not made a marker of chases in some tenys playe.’
The reference to tennis is apt, because the author has complete control over the supposed conversation, scoring points effortlessly, able to write in his own clever lobs or, as here, a brutal smash:
Tyndale: ‘Iudge whyther yt be possible that any good sholde come oute of theyr domme ceremonyes and sacramentes.’
More: ‘Iudge good crysten reader whyther yt be possible that he be any better than a beste oute of whose brutyshe bestely mouth, commeth such a fylthye fome.’
A one-sided match like this soon becomes dull to watch. Tyndale was quite as tedious in the dialogue he inserted in his
Answer
, where, of course, it is More who is pummelled:
More: ‘What harm shall he care to forbear, that believeth Luther, how God alone, without our will, worketh all the mischief that they do?’
Tyndale: ‘O natural son of the father of all lies …’
There is a touch of the ayatollah to that response. Tyndale was more economical with his insults than More, but just as savage. He compared More to Judas in the
Answer
. ‘But verily,’ he wrote, ‘I think that as Judas betrayed not Christ for any love that he had unto the highpriests, scribes and phariseehs, but only to come by the wherefore he thirsted: even so Master More (as there are tokens evident) wrote not these books for any affection that he bare unto the spirituality, or unto the opinions which he so barely defendeth, but to obtain only that which he was a hungerd for.’ He later filled in what More’s belly slavered for, ‘to get honour, promotion, dignity, and money, by help of our mitred monsters’.
In his
Exposition upon the v, vi, vii Chapters of Matthew
, covering the Sermon on the Mount and published in Antwerp two years later, in 1533, Tyndale used his most purple prose to lash out at More’s supposed greed. ‘Covetousness,’ he wrote, ‘maketh many, whom the truth pleaseth at the beginning, to cast it up again, and to be afterward the most cruel enemies thereof … after the ensample of Sir Thomas More, knight, which knew the truth, and for covetousness forsook it again … Covetousness blinded the eyes of that gleering fox more and more, and hardened his heart against the truth, with the confidence of his painted poetry, babbling eloquence, and juggling arguments of subtle sophistry …’
This is nonsense. More was not covetous. He had amassed something of a fortune, but he had a large family to maintain, and his lofty office obliged him to keep up appearances. The frugal Tyndale once boasted that he would be happy to live on £10 a year, but he was neither a married man nor lord chancellor of England. When the clergy later offered More a huge sum to thank him for his support, he refused to accept it from them. ‘Loke I for my thanke of god that is thyre better,’ he said, ‘and for whose sake I take the labour and not for theyres.’ The young humanist who wrote
Utopia
had changed into a reactionary, it is true, at least as far as heretics were concerned, but Tyndale was wrong to think that greed had played any part in the process.