Book of Fire (35 page)

Ignorance, however, was a factor that did. For all his verbosity, More never truly understood or got to grips with the reformers. Tyndale distinguished between Catholicism, which he called ‘an hystorycall fayth’, and his own, ‘a felynge fayth’. This intensity, and the belief in the ‘sure felynge’ that ‘god shall wryte yt in theyr hertes wyth his holy spyryte’, passed More by. He felt, intuitively and rightly, that Tyndale’s ideas were immensely dangerous to the Church, but he failed to tackle the core doctrine of justification by faith. The issues into which More poured his energy – pilgrimages, relics, confession, fasting, even transubstantiation and good works – were sideshows compared to Bible-based faith.

Faith was Tyndale’s engine. The Church, to him, was ‘the whole multitude of all repenting sinners that believe in Christ, and put all their trust and confidence in the mercy of God, feeling that in their hearts God for Christ’s sake loveth them …’. They have this faith ‘without all respect of their own deservings, yea, and for none other cause than the merciful truth of God the father, which cannot lie, hath so promised and so sworn’. This faith is ‘everlasting life, and by this we be born anew and made the sons of God’. It is ‘the mother of all truth … the foundation laid of the apostles and prophets … the rock whereon Christ built his congregation’.
It was, too, a fortress. ‘Against the rock of this faith can no sin, no hell, no devil, no lies, nor error prevail.’

A passage in Tyndale’s
Answer
reads as though it is a primer for an evangelical about to face the interrogator. It begins by stating that it is a plain and evident conclusion, ‘as bright as the sun’s shining’, that the truth of God’s word does not rely on the truth of men or of the Church.

‘And therefore, when thou art asked, why thou believest that thou shalt be saved through Christ, and of such like principles of our faith,’ it continues, ‘answer, Thou wottest and feelest that it is true.

‘And when he asketh, how thou knowest that it is true; answer, Because it is written in thine heart.

‘And if he ask who wrote it; answer, The Spirit of God.

‘And if he ask how thou camest first by it; tell him whether by reading in books, or hearing it preached, as by an outward instrument, but that inwardly thou was taught by the Spirit of God.

‘And if he ask, whether thou believest it not because it is written in books, or because the priests so preach; answer, No, not now, but only because it is written in thine heart, and because the Spirit of God so preacheth, and so testifieth unto thy soul.’

An accused who defended himself along these lines faced death, as Tyndale well knew. ‘And thus good night and good rest!’ he admitted. ‘Christ is brought asleep, and laid in his grave; and the door sealed to; and the men of arms about the grave to keep him down with pole-axes …’

It was an apt lesson for More’s harsh new age. Poor ‘little Bilney’, the comforter of lepers who had escaped Wolsey in 1527, and who had abjured in front of Tunstall in 1529, did not survive the new lord chancellor. Bilney had such black dog depressions after his abjuration that his friends at Cambridge feared to leave him on his own lest he harm himself. On a night early in 1531 he
announced that he was leaving Trinity Hall to ‘go up to Jerusalem’, the words Jesus had used when he set out from Galilee on his final journey to the cross. Bilney began preaching in the fields of Norfolk to crowds who came out to listen to him. He gave out copies of Tyndale’s Testament and
Obedience
. More was told that he gave one to a Norwich anchoress. Informers reported that Bilney had described how priests ‘take away the offerings, and hang them about their women’s necks; and after that, they take them off the women, if they please them not, and hang them again upon the images’.

These were the actions of a man who was seeking out death. As an abjured heretic, he was certain to be burnt if he relapsed. The urge to martyrdom was as old as the faith itself. To die in imitation of Christ was the noblest of all fates in itself, and it had long been observed that it also served to spread the dead man’s beliefs among the living. Pliny the Younger, adopted son of the great natural historian and the Roman governor of Bithynia, had noted in about
AD
112 that persecuting Christians for their ‘depraved and extravagant superstition’ was fine in theory, but in practice produced ‘the usual result of spreading the crime’. Tertullian, one of the Fathers of the Church, confirmed this a century later. ‘The blood of martyrs,’ he said, in a famous adage that Thomas More ignored, ‘is the seed of the Church.’

Bilney was duly seized in March 1531 and brought in front of Bishop Nix of Norwich. He was convicted of heresy and ‘relaxed’ to the secular power. Foxe says that More sent down the writ to burn him. Bilney practised for his martyrdom in his cell by burning his fingers in a candle, constantly repeating Isaiah’s words: ‘When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burnt.’ It was nearing harvest time, and he compared himself to the straw in the fields. ‘Howsoever the stubble of this my body shall be wasted’ by the fire, he told himself, ‘yet my soul and spirit shall be purged thereby: a pain for the time, whereupon notwithstanding
followeth joy unspeakable.’ While he was waiting to be bound to the stake, in the Lollards’ sandpit at Norwich, on 19 August 1531, Bilney repeated the creed as proof that he died as a true Christian, and offered up a prayer: ‘Enter not into judgement with thy servant, O Lord, for in thy sight no living flesh can be justified.’

The day, to his misfortune, was windy enough to damage the harvest crops. The executioner first set his torch to the reeds round the stake. These made a great flame in the breeze which disfigured Bilney’s face. He held up his hands and cried ‘Jesus!’ and ‘Credo!’ The flame was ‘blown away from him several times, the wind being very high’, and ‘for a little pause, he stood without flame, the fire departing and recoursing’. It was many minutes before the wood caught solidly afire, and, so More wrote with satisfaction, God ‘of hys endles mercy brought hys body to deth’. Bilney’s little body shrank as it burnt and roasted. Eventually the executioner struck out the staple holding the chains to the stake, so that the body fell into the bottom of the fire.

In the
Confutation
, More claimed that Bilney had recanted his heresy at his trial, falling to his knees in front of Dr Pelles, the bishop of Norwich’s chancellor, begging to be absolved from the sentence of excommunication, and confessing that he deserved to die. On the morning that he was to be burnt, More said that Bilney asked to receive the sacrament in bread alone, rather than the bread and wine of Lutheran practice. Dr Pelles objected, thinking him insincere, but, ‘finally perceiving him to be of a true, perfect faith’, administered the sacrament. More claimed that Bilney took it reverently, reciting the collect ‘
Domine Iesu Christe
’, beating his breast at the words ‘peace and concord to thy church’ several times, and crying to God for mercy for his grievous errors ‘in that point’. He confessed that the ‘false delyght of Luthers & Tyndales bokes’ had brought him into their ‘secrete secte and scatered congregacyon’ until ‘god of his goodnesse opened his eyes’ and he saw that ‘if he dyed in those heresyes’ he was doomed for
ever ‘in the fyre of hell’. He then ‘turned to the trewe fayth agayne, and exhorted them all vnto the same’.

This was, to More at least, brilliant proof of the efficacy of the fire in saving the soul of the heretic. He said that Bilney, having recanted, was able to suffer his purgatory at the stake. Christ ‘hath forwythe from the fyre taken his blessed soul to heauen,’ More surmised, ‘where he now prayeth incessantly for the repentance and amendment of all such as have been by his means while he lived, into any such errors induced or confirmed’.

More’s account was self-serving and false. It suited him, of course, to imagine Bilney in heaven praying for those he had led into heresy on earth. Criticism of the
ex officio
nature of heresy trials was growing; liberals thought it unjust that a man could be tried for his life on the evidence of anonymous accusers at a hearing that had no open witnesses. The Bilney case, as painted by More, showed the machinery of persecution to be in perfect order and even humane. The fire was no more than a prelude to heaven for the penitent heretic; Bilney’s body might be destroyed, but his immortal soul was saved by his trial and by his admission of guilt.

This, as More knew full well, was not how those who had witnessed the trial and burning remembered events. Bilney had been well loved by people in Norwich, and there had been trouble at the trial. Bilney, far from being quiescent, had appealed for his case to be taken to the king, on the grounds that the supreme head of the Church of England was no longer the pope or his nominee, but Henry VIII himself. Members of the audience shouted that the appeal removed Bilney from ecclesiastical jurisdiction. They demanded that he be handed over to Edward Reed, the mayor of Norwich. Reed seemed willing to accept responsibility, but nobody was certain quite what the king’s brand new title involved. The mayor asked Dr Pelles for an explanation; the bishop’s chancellor replied that, whatever the title might mean, it did not justify the removal of a suspected heretic from the traditional jurisdiction
of the Church. So the trial continued, and Bilney was judged a contumacious heretic, and relaxed to the secular authorities.

None of the Norwich laity who watched Bilney die saw anything that made them think that he had recanted. Their outcry was loud enough for More to summon witnesses to the Star Chamber for interrogations in the late autumn of 1531. The Norwich men were clearly intimidated by the venue and the lord chancellor; they suffered from convenient lapses of memory and difficulties of hearing, but they refused any suggestion of a retraction. James Curatt, an alderman, told More that he had walked with Bilney to the stake and had stood close by him. He had not heard Bilney say anything, beyond the cries of ‘Jesus!’. This might be because he had stepped briefly away to tie his shoe, he said, but he had heard no strong words of recantation.

Reed was summoned before More on 1 December 1531 and again on 5 December. The mayor agreed that Dr Pelles had given Bilney a paper to read out at the stake. However, if Bilney had read it, he did it either silently or so softly that neither Reed nor anyone else heard him. Reed was asked if he had heard Bilney exhort the people to obey God, the ministers of the Church, and the law. He said he had not. After the execution, Dr Pelles had brought a paper to Reed. The doctor claimed that it was a copy of the one Bilney had read at the stake, and asked the mayor to notarise it with the town seal. Reed smelt a rat. He showed Pelles’s paper to other aldermen. They said that it was not the one that had been thrust into Bilney’s hand before the burning, and confirmed that Bilney had not been heard to read it out.

No hint of this appeared in More’s account of Bilney in the
Confutation
.

18

‘The Lord forgive Sir Thomas More!’

M
ore’s abiding passion remained the taking of Tyndale and the destruction of his friends. When anyone who had been at Antwerp appeared before him, More ‘most studiously would search and examine all things belonging to Tyndale, where and with whom he hosted, whereabouts stood the house, what was his stature, in what apparel he went …’.

The attempt to win over Tyndale had been abandoned before Vaughan returned to England in June 1531. Vaughan had no contact with the exile after he came back to Antwerp the following November. The plan was now for Sir Thomas Elyot, the new English ambassador at the imperial court, to have Tyndale seized by force and shipped to London for punishment.

More’s greatest successes followed the arrest of the renegade priest and colporteur George Constantine, whom one of More’s agents – ‘a faythfull seruant of mine’ – had located.

Constantine was a Cambridge canon lawyer who had fled to the Low Countries in 1528, where the friar John West had searched for him without success. He met Tyndale in Antwerp, returning to England on a trip to sell banned books in 1531. He was arrested
and taken to More’s house at Chelsea where the lord chancellor had him locked in the stocks in the porter’s lodge, and interrogated him over several days. As a member of the royal council, More was able to use the statutes against Lollardy that authorised political officers who were not priests to interrogate heretics in the presence of a clergyman.

More recorded joyfully that Constantine ‘uttered and dysclosed dyvers of hys companyons’, and revealed details of the smuggling of ‘those develkyshe bokes whyche hym selfs and other of hys felowes hadde brought and shypped’. More learnt the names of the shipmen and the secret marks placed on the fardels, or crates, of freight in which the Testaments were hidden. He wrote happily of ‘Rycharde Necton whyche was by Constantynes deteccyon taken and commyted to Newgate’. Unless ‘he happe to dye before in pryson,’ More chuckled, Necton ‘standeth in grete paryll to be [dead] ere long, for hys fallynge agayne to Tindales heryses burned’. More said that he was also ‘fortuned to iuntercepte my selfe’ a letter written to Constantine by the bookseller Johan Byrte, leading to the latter’s arrest.

It is likely that Constantine also leaked details of an exile’s life in Antwerp. He did not come to trial, however. He escaped, or so he and More claimed, by breaking the stocks and climbing over the Chelsea garden wall. On 6 December 1531, the fugitive made his way safely back to Antwerp.

More claimed that he was not even angry when he was told that his prisoner had gone. He simply told his porter to mend the stocks, and cracked a joke with him that he should lock up well ‘lest the prisoner try to steal back in’. This is out of character for More, a man who never relaxed when it came to heretics, nor forgave those who outsmarted him. It is likely that More allowed Constantine to escape, as a reward for his betrayals, and it is probable that he had him followed as he ‘fled’ back to Antwerp.