Book of Fire (42 page)

He was unhappy with the next verse, on the light of the world: ‘… it lighteth
all them which
are in the house.
Se that youre light
so shyne before men …’ In the revised version, it lighteth ‘
all that are in the house
’, and readers were admonished: ‘
Let your light so shyne
before men …’ The next verse starts awkwardly in the 1526 edition: ‘Ye
shall not thynke
that I am come to
disannul the lawe
, or the prophets: No I am nott come to
disannul
them, but to fulfyll them.’ Disannul was a legal, Franco-Latin term with little punch; ‘ye shall not thynke’ was a mouthful. Both went in the 1534 edition, replaced by: ‘
Think not
that I am come to
destroy the lawe
, or the prophets: no I am nott come to
destroy
them but to fulfill them.’

Where he had it right, as in the next verse, he left it be: ‘For truely I saye vnto you, till heven and erthe perisshe, one iott or one tytle of the lawe shall not scape, tyll all be fulfilled.’
Not one jot or tittle
is in the language still.

To the Lord’s Prayer he made the smallest of changes and an addition. The 1526 passage reads: ‘O our father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name; Let thy kingdom come; thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit ys in heven; Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade; And forgeve vs oure treaspases, even
as we forgeve them which treaspas vs
; Leede vs not into temptacion, but delyvre vs ffrom yvell. Amen.’ He changed ‘forgeve them which treaspas vs’ to ‘
forgeve other men theire treaspases
’, and he added ‘
And
’ before ‘leede vs not into temptacion’ to improve the flow. The 1534 addition came with the doxology, or glorification, before the Amen: ‘For thyne is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen’

Tyndale’s revision of his original New Testament in the 1534 edition was almost always for the best. ‘In the beginnynge was that worde,’ he had opened John’s Gospel in 1526, ‘and that worde was with God, and that worde was God.’ He used ‘the worde’ in 1534, since ‘that worde’ begs the question of ‘what word?’ This happy change, passed down through the King James Version of 1611, is with us still.

(British Library)

He changed ‘
Beholde
the lyles off the felde, howe they growe’ to the more thoughtful ‘
Consider
the lyles off the felde’. An awkwardness hangs to the 1526 advice to: ‘Care not therfore for
the daye foloynge for the daye foloynge shall care ffor yt sylfe
; eche dayes trouble ys sufficient for the same silfe day.’ This disappears in 1534: ‘Care not thene for the
morrow, but lete the morrow care for yt silfe
…’ The plodding ‘O ye
endued with
little faith’ of 1526 became the gossamer ‘O ye
of
little faith’. The change in the opening verse of John’s gospel is minimal –
that
becomes
the
– but the result is startling. ‘In the begynnynge was that worde,’ he wrote in the first edition, influenced by the Vulgate, ‘and that worde was with god, and god was thatt worde.’ A fresh drumroll comes with the revision: ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God.’ It is also clearer, for the instinct when confronted by ‘
that
Word’ is to ask ‘
what
Word?’. A famous passage of 1526 – ‘No man can serve two masters … ye can nott serve God and mammon’ – he left unchanged.

When Tyndale had almost completed his work, an edition of a pirate revised Testament ‘was spyed and worde brought me’. He had been beaten to the post at his own task. ‘George Ioye secretly toke in hand to correct it also by what occasyon his conscyence knoweth,’ he wrote, ‘and prevented me, in so moche, that his correccyon was prynted in great nombre, ere myne beganne.’ The edition was being printed in Antwerp by the widow of Christoffel van Ruremund, who had died in prison in London after being arrested for smuggling Tyndale Testaments.

Pirate copies of his work did not much bother Tyndale. He knew Joye and thought it dishonest that he had revised the Testament ‘seeing he knew I was correcting it my selfe’; but that apart, ‘I toke the thinge in worth as I have done dyvers other in tyme past’. He was prepared to let it go until, with his own edition at the printers, he saw a copy of Joye’s work. He was ‘astonyed’ to
find that it was ‘in such wise altered’ from his original that he wondered ‘what furye hath dryven [Joye] to make socke chaunge and to call it a diligent correccyon’. He added a second foreword to his own revised edition – ‘Willyam Tindale, yet once more to the Christen reader’ – dissociating himself from Joye’s work. He included the colophon of the pirate work, ‘printed now again at Antwerp, by me widow of Christopher of Endhoven in the year of our Lord 1534 in August’, so that his readers could recognise and avoid it.

The Revelation of St John was a favourite with readers. Tyndale illustrated it with twenty-two woodcuts in the 1534 edition of his New Testament. They include this vivid block of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

(Bodleian Library)

He would not have minded had Joye brought out his own book with his own name on it. It was quite lawful, he said, for a man to translate a work, whether or not it had been translated before, provided he put his name to it. As ‘the foxe when he hath pyssed in the grayes [badger’s] hole chalengeth it for his awne’, so it was acceptable for others to ‘take my translacions and laboures, and chaunge and alter and corrupte at their pleasures, and call it their awne translacions, and put to their awne names’. But it was wrong ‘to play boo pepe after George Ioye’s manner and take another man’s translacion and put out and in and chaunge at pleasure, and call it a correcyion’. Joye was stung by the criticism and published his own
Apology
to put his side of the affair.

Joye was a fellow exile who had fled to Antwerp after being investigated for heresy. He was a Cambridge man, a former Fellow of Peterhouse, who fell foul of the prior of an abbey near Bedford. The prior secretly informed John Longland, the rigorous bishop of Lincoln, that Joye harboured Lutheran ideas. Joye was ordered to London in the early winter of 1527 to be examined by Wolsey. He was in some danger – little Bilney was one of the other suspects appearing in front of Wolsey – but he seems to have been more concerned at the weather and the affront to his status. ‘I got me to horse when it snowed, and was cold,’ he complained of his journey to London. Worse, when he arrived at the cardinal’s palace, no one knew who he was or why he was there; he was eventually told to
go to Longland’s palace, where he was given neither board nor lodging. ‘I thought thus with myself, I am a scholar of Cambridge under only the vice-chancellor’s jurisdiction and under the great God the Cardinal,’ he wrote, ‘and … I will take a breath ere I come to these men again.’ So indeed he did. ‘I got me to horse,’ he continued, ‘and conveyed myself toward the sea side.’ He crossed the Narrow Sea in December 1527, settling in Antwerp.

Here he set to work as a translator. He produced the first printed edition of the Psalms in English in 1530. The following year, he translated the Book of Isaiah, which was printed for him by Martin Lempereur in Antwerp. His translation of Jeremiah was printed by van Ruremund’s widow, using the van Endhoven alias, in May 1534.

Van Ruremund had set up his print shop in Antwerp in 1522. He and his brother Hans specialised in liturgical works and printed widely for the English market. It was natural for them to pirate Tyndale’s Testament as a potential bestseller. Christoffel van Ruremund copied his first pirate edition from the 1526 Worms original in a small sextodecimo volume, adding a Calendar at the beginning, Concordances, or parallel references, in the margin, and a Table of Contents at the end. No Englishman was at hand to correct the setting, Joye said, and van Ruremund made ‘many more faults than were in the copy, and so corrupted the book that the simple reader might ofttimes be tarried and stick’. Joye claimed that more than two thousand copies were printed in this edition. They must have made up a good proportion of the books burnt in Antwerp and Bergen-op-Zoom in January 1527, after Wolsey had instructed Sir John Hackett to act against the printing and distribution of English Testaments. Robert Ridley mentioned the following month that ‘many hundreds’ of them had been ‘burnt beyond the sea’.

When it had sold out, a bigger volume with a larger typeface was printed, to make a total of some five thousand pirate copies.
Woodcuts were used to illustrate the Apocalypse, but Joye said that the printers produced it ‘also without a corrector’ and that the volume was ‘much falser than their first’.

Tyndale had promised to revise his first translation, Joye said, but he ‘prolonged and deferred’ so much that a third pirate edition in small format was produced in Antwerp. It was ‘much more false than ever it was before’. Joye claimed that he had been approached by the printer to correct it. ‘I suppose that Tyndale himself will put it forth more perfect and newly corrected,’ he said that he had replied, ‘which, if he do, yours shall be nought set by, nor never sold.’ Despite this, the printer had gone ahead and printed two thousand copies, and ‘had shortly sold them all’.

Van Ruremund ventured to England to sell his editions and was picked up in More’s wave of arrests. Foxe reported that in 1531 ‘Christopher, a Dutchman of Antwerp’ was arrested ‘for selling certain New Testaments in English to John Row bookbinder’ and ‘was put in prison at Westminster and there died’. His widow maintained the workshop in Antwerp. She continued to produce banned books for the English market until the end of the decade, including translations of Savonarola and Zwingli, when she changed to safer publications – almanacs and news-sheets.

The Tyndale Testament was a great money-spinner, and the widow prepared to print a fourth pirate edition in 1534. All the long while Tyndale slept, Joye said, ‘for nothing came from him, as far as I could perceive’. He again said that if Tyndale amended his work, the pirate edition would not sell a copy. The van Ruremund printers did not agree. ‘For if [Tyndale] print two thousand, and we as many,’ they said, ‘what is so little a number for all England? And we will sell ours better cheap, and therefore we doubt not of the sale.’

Joye realised, or so he wrote, that ‘whether I had corrected their copy or not, they had gone forth with their work, and had given us two thousand more books falselier printed than ever we had
before’. He was also confident that the market in England, with Anne Boleyn as queen and Cranmer as archbishop, was better than ever. ‘Now there was given, thanked be to God,’ he said, ‘a little space to rest unto Christ’s Church after so long and grievous persecution for reading the books.’ In the absence of any news from the translator himself – ‘what Tyndale doth I wot not, he maketh me nothing of his counsel’ – Joye decided to go ahead and correct the Testament in the press.

The explanation in the
Apology
is so lengthy that it smacks of a guilty conscience. So, too, does Joye’s pious attack on ‘Tyndale’s uncharitable and unsober pistle’, and the self-righteous appeal to God to ‘Deliver me from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue’. He accused Tyndale of standing ‘high in his own opinion’, a man so arrogant and convinced of the perfection of his work that ‘he must be the Almighty himself’. Tyndale had a party of supporters, Joye said, who looked on him as their master, and resented any who disagreed with him, while Tyndale himself was only ‘patient when every man say as he saith, and look up and wonder at his words’. Joye accused Tyndale of plagiarism, saying that his Exposition of Matthew was written by Luther, with Tyndale only translating it and ‘powdering it here and there with his own fantasies’. Malice and envy were Tyndale’s ‘two blind guides’; Joye added that Tyndale had attacked him because ‘he has long nourished hatred and malice against me, though outwardly he has feigned to love me’.

Some of Joye’s barbs strike home. He said that he preferred the scripture to be purely and plainly translated, with ‘neither note, gloss nor scholia’, so that the reader ‘might once swim without a cork’; and it is true that the margins of Tyndale’s work sometimes resemble a battleground in his war against the pope. But the overall portrait – of a crabbed, malicious and self-satisfied pedant – is devalued by Joye’s own record, of persistently falling out with his acquaintances, and by the affection in which Tyndale was held by
those close to him, such as Frith. It cannot be said, however, that Joye acted out of greed. Van Ruremund’s businesslike widow paid him a pittance for his work – 4½d for every sheet of sixteen pages, or a total of 12s.