Book of Fire (39 page)

It was at this moment of greatest vulnerability that Frith, like Hitton before him, was taken in October 1532 by the sea at Milton Shore near Southend, in Essex. The arrest was made by servants of Stokesley, but neither he nor More had, as they hoped, custody of the prisoner. Cromwell arranged for Frith to be kept in loose detention, unshackled, in the Tower of London.

There was still every chance that Frith would remain safe. Cromwell wished him well. The king was impressed by reports of his learning and charming demeanour; the duke of Norfolk thought there was ‘no fitter or better qualified man to send abroad on an embassy to a great prince’. Henry had sailed for France with Anne Boleyn on 10 October, at the time of Frith’s arrest, for talks with Francis I on the annulment. The lovers stayed in interconnecting bedrooms in the Exchequer Palace in Calais, and the Milanese ambassador referred to Anne as ‘the king’s beloved wife’, convinced by their intimacy that they had already married in secret. By December, Anne was pregnant; before dawn on 25 January 1533, a small number of guests assembled in the king’s
private chapel in Whitehall Palace to celebrate her wedding to Henry. Unofficial word was soon out. Chapuys heard Anne say that she had ‘an inestimable wild desire to eat apples’, which the king had told her was a sign of being with child; Anne denied it, but the ambassador noted that ‘then she burst out laughing loudly’.

The royal couple needed every theologian they could muster to attack the pope and his refusal to grant the annulment. Frith was thus partly protected by events. He was treated with great favour at the Tower. He was released over Christmas 1532, and lodged by Stephen Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester, at his palace in Southwark, a ‘fatherly favour’, More said, as Gardiner had been Frith’s tutor at Cambridge. A manuscript printed by John Strype, the eighteenth-century ecclesiastical historian, claimed that the underkeeper at the Tower, a man named Thomas Phelips, ‘lett hym go at liberty in the nyght to consult with godly men’. Among them was More’s old victim John Petite, who at first took his visitor for a ghost, so amazed was he that a man could walk out of the Tower.

Frith certainly received letters, from Tyndale among others, and he wrote freely. One short work was titled
The Bulwark against Rastel
, John Rastell being More’s brother-in-law, and a printer, dramatist and pageant promoter. Frith wrote of the conditions in which he was held in the Tower. He had pen and ink and paper, though only ‘secretly’. It was a nerve-racking business to write – ‘for whensoever I hear the keys ring at the door, straight all must be conveyed out of the way’ – and he begged his readers to pardon ‘my rudeness and imperfection’. But materials were smuggled into the Tower, and his completed writings were smuggled out.

One of these writings was Frith’s undoing, and it gave More the leverage he needed to destroy him. Frith was asked by a friend to write down his views on the Lord’s Supper. This was a very dangerous subject indeed, and Frith knew it. ‘Albeit I was loth to take
the matter in hand,’ he wrote later, ‘yet to fulfil his instant intercession, I took upon me to touch this terrible tragedy, and wrote a treatise, which, besides my painful imprisonment, is like to purchase me most cruel death.’ We do not know who this ‘friend’ was. He may have been an
agent provocateur
directly employed by More; he certainly knew one of More’s agents intimately enough to pass on to him the treatise that More used to send Frith to the stake.

The Last Supper, of course, is the origin of the Eucharist and the sacraments. Catholics believed – still believe – in transubstantiation. They hold that the communion bread and wine change their substance into the very Body and Blood of Christ, and that only their ‘accidents’ – their colour, taste and texture – continue to be perceptible to the senses. Luther proposed consubstantiation, a hybrid in which bread and wine, Body and Blood, coexist in union
.
Luther gave the simile of iron put into a fire, in which the two are united in red-hot metal. Zwingli denied outright the bodily presence of Christ at communion. He believed that the sacraments remain bread and wine, and that Christ is only spiritually present at communion in the hearts of the worshippers. ‘The mass is not a sacrifice,’ he wrote, ‘but a remembrance of the sacrifice and assurance of salvation which Christ has given us.’

Zwingli and Luther had held a bad-tempered colloquy at Marburg in October 1529, which Frith had attended. It ended in furious argument and bad blood. As in much else, both sides used passages from the Bible to justify their differences. The Zwinglian Johannes Oecolampadius cited Jesus from the passage in John 6, which Tyndale had translated as: ‘I am the living bread which came down out of heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever. And the bread that I will give, is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.’ This, Oecolampadius argued, was purely symbolic, since Jesus had added: ‘It is the spirit that quick-eneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I speak unto
you are spirit, and are life.’ The communicant does not partake of Christ’s body in the bread, but shares in his spirit. ‘You must prove that the body of Christ is not here, when the Word says, “This is my body”!’ Luther shouted at Oecolampadius. ‘I do not want to hear reason … God is above all mathematics. The words of God are to be adored and observed with awe. God commands: “Take, eat, this is my body.”’ He condemned the Zwinglians – ‘your spirit and our spirit do not go together’ – as blasphemers.

The sacraments set fellow reformers at one another’s throats. The effect on Henry VIII, as More well knew, would be explosive. Tyndale recognised the danger from afar. In a letter from Antwerp that was smuggled into the Tower in January 1533, Tyndale pleaded with Frith to steer as far clear of the subject as possible. ‘Mine heart’s desire in our Saviour Jesus,’ Tyndale wrote to his friend, ‘is that you arm yourself with patience, and be cold, sober, wise, and circumspect; and that you keep a-low by the ground, avoiding high questions that pass the common capacity … Of the presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament meddle as little as you can …’ Tyndale’s own view was that it was an ‘indifferent thing’ whether Christ was present in the sacraments or not. It ‘hurteth no man’ to believe that ‘the body of Christ is everywhere, though it cannot be proved’. If he was required to do so in his interrogation, Frith could ‘show the phrases of the scripture, and let them talk what they will’.

For his part, Tyndale said he taken steps to prevent the subject being raised by the exiles. ‘George Joye would have put forth a treatise of the matter, but I have stopped him as yet,’ he said. ‘My mind is that nothing be put forth, till we hear how you shall have sped.’

The letter went on to give some news from Antwerp. Tyndale said that Stokesley had a servant called John Tisen, ‘with a red beard, and a black reddish head’, whom he knew because he had taught him at Oxford fifteen years before; Tisen ‘was seen in
Antwerp, but came not among the Englishmen: whither he is gone, an ambassador secret, I wot not’. It was an affectionate letter. It addressed Frith as ‘Brother Jacob, beloved in my heart’ and assured him that ‘there liveth not another in whom I have so good hope and trust, and in whom mine heart rejoiceth, and my soul comforteth, as in you’. He told Frith that he would give him any help he might need, for ‘my soul is not faint, though my body be weary’. He was anxious that Frith should be discreet, and act ‘in fear, and not in boldness … and not pronounce or define of hid secrets, or things that neither help or hinder, whether they be so or not so’, because he would be lost without him. ‘God hath made me ill-favoured in this world, and without grace in the sight of men, speechless and rude, dull and slow-witted,’ Tyndale wrote. ‘Your part shall be to supply that lacketh in me …’ Then he cut himself short: ‘Abundance of love maketh me exceed in babbling.’

It was too late to warn Frith to be silent on the sacraments. A copy of his little treatise, in which he denied the real presence of Christ, was acquired by William Holt. A London tailor, Holt was one of More’s agents who often posed as a Bible-man, and he immediately took the copy to Chelsea. More boasted of receiving three copies in all, and a copy of Tyndale’s letter as well. Though gone from office, he was keeping his network of informants well oiled.

More used all his skills to ensure that the treatise – a ‘draught of dedely poysen’ – would bring Frith to the fate he had planned for him. ‘I fere me sore that Cryst wyll kyndle a fyre of fagottes for hym,’ he wrote with demonic glee, ‘& make hym theirin swete the bloude out of hys body here, and strayte from hense send his soule for ever into the fyre of hell.’

More had to be circumspect. He was in no position to bludgeon Frith with an open and publicly circulated denunciation; he was no longer chancellor, and he had lost the king’s favour. He had to target very accurately. To do so, he wrote
A Letter of Sir Thomas
More, Knight, impugning the erroneous writing of John Frith against the blessed Sacrament of the Altar.
It was circulated privately to leading figures in the realm. He claimed that Frith’s theology was too perverse to reveal to the general public. ‘I wolde wysshe,’ he wrote piously, ‘that the comon people sholde of suche heresyes never here so myche as the name.’ This was not true, of course. More had already published volumes of material on heresy, and was continuing to do so with his
Confutation
.

More knew that Cromwell thought of Frith as a potential supporter of the Boleyn marriage. His task was to use Henry’s loathing of unorthodox views on the sacraments to set the king against them both. A private letter was the most subtle way of achieving this. In it, More was careful to remind Henry of the title of Defender of the Faith that he had been awarded for his defence of the sacraments. He stressed that Frith’s book was ‘a false folysshe treatyce agaynste the blessed sacrament of ye aulter’. He flattered the king for being ‘lyke a moste faythfull catholyke prynce for the avoydynge of suche pestylente bokes’, reminding Henry that his duty to protect the realm against heresy was increased by his position as supreme head of the English Church.

The very mention of Luther still irritated the king beyond measure; More said that Frith was many times worse than the German. In the few pages of his treatise, More wrote, Frith had piled up all the poison spewed out by Wycliffe, Oecolampadius, Tyndale and Zwingli. Frith was not content to say that the sacrament was bread, as Luther had; he said, ‘as these other beasts do’, that it was nothing but bread. More’s imagery of fire dances through his
Letter
like bloodlust; heresy is a fire that ‘begynneth to reke oute at some corner … burneth up whole townes, and wasteth whole countrees … lyeth lurkynge sly; in some old roten tymber under cellers & celynges’.

It took some time for Frith to obtain a copy of the
Letter
, but he did so, and his reply to it was smuggled out to Antwerp and
published after his death. For his part, More found out that Frith had seen the
Letter
, and that he had replied to it. ‘Howbeit he got mine answere, I can not tel of whome,’ More wrote, ‘and since I have herde of late that … he hath begun and gone a grete way in a newe boke agaynst the sacrament.’ The Tower was very porous.

In his
Answer
to More, Frith again ignored Tyndale’s advice and plunged once more into the sacrament. He was wholly honest – ‘I neither will nor can cease to speak,’ he wrote, ‘for the Word of God boileth in my body like a fervent fire’ – and wholly self-incriminating. He repeated that the communion words ‘
Hoc est Corpus Meum
’, ‘This is My Body’, were to be understood in the spiritual and not the literal sense. He treated the subject with gentle wit – ‘for I have good experience,’ he pointed out, ‘that my body cannot be in two places at once, both in the Tower and where I would have it beside’ – but he was firm that Christ could not be simultaneously on heaven and in earth.

He also defended his dear friend whom More had denounced as a beast. ‘Tyndale, I trust, liveth,’ he wrote, ‘well content with such a poor apostle’s life’, existing on as many farthings a year as More had pounds sterling, and for all that ‘more worthy to be promoted than all the bishops in England’ for his learning and judgement.

He recalled how Tyndale had written to him to say of his Bible translation that, ‘I never altered one syllable of God’s word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in the earth, whether it be honour, pleasure or riches, might be given me.’ Frith asked his readers to judge whether these words ‘be not spoken of a faithful, clear, innocent heart’. He repeated the pledge of ‘my brother William Tyndale and I’, that, if the scriptures were published in English, he ‘will promise you to write no more’. If this condition was not granted, ‘then will we be doing while we have breath …’.

That little remark – ‘while we have breath’ – now seems the very stuff of boastful melodrama. It was not then, of course; it was a simple vow made the more poignant by the fact that Frith’s final breath was likely to be an inhalation of smoke and flame.

Events outside the Tower continued to favour the reformers. The papal nuncio ordered Henry in the pope’s name to recall Catherine to court. Henry refused, on the grounds of ‘her disobedience and severity towards me’. Anne and Henry held a great banquet at Whitehall on 24 February 1533; Henry, like a boisterous young bridegroom, was lecherous and incoherent with drink by turns. Clement and Charles V agreed a new alliance, the pope promising the emperor that his aunt’s case would be heard in Rome and not in England. On 7 April, Henry summoned his council and gave them the startling news that he had married Anne two months before, and that she was pregnant with the heir to the throne. More momentous news followed. On 12 April 1533, the eve of Easter Sunday, ‘Anne Bulleine, Marques of Pembroke, was proclaymed Queene at Greenewych, and offred that daie in the Kinges Chappell as Queene of Englande.’

She was not a popular queen. A London congregation walked out in high dudgeon when the priest ordered them to pray for her; a man hauled into court for describing her as ‘the scandal of Christendom, a whore and a harlot’ was expressing the popular feeling. Catholic loyalists were deeply disturbed by the combination of Anne and Cranmer, who had given her elevation his blessing as archbishop. John Fisher, the fiery bishop of Rochester, secretly appealed to the emperor to invade England; Charles was too busy fighting the Turks to oblige.