Book of Fire (45 page)
After spending three or four days in Antwerp, Phillips went to the imperial court at Brussels, where he arranged that the procurer general, the imperial attorney and other government officers should go to Antwerp to seize Tyndale. This, so Foxe surmised, was ‘not done with small charges or expenses, from whomsoever it
came’. A resident of the English House was a sensitive person to arrest, given the importance of English trade, and it is likely that Phillips had to grease some important palms. He also had to make sure that the victim was lured outside the House before being arrested.
A short while later, Phillips’s servant came to the English House. Poyntz was sitting by the door and the man asked if Master Tyndale was there. He said his master was coming to see him. Poyntz’s presence may have delayed matters, for nothing more was heard of Phillips until the merchant left for a month to attend to business at Barrow, eighteen miles from Antwerp.
Phillips returned on 21 May. He told Poyntz’s wife that he wished to dine with Master Tyndale, and she confirmed that he was working in his study in the House. He asked if she had some good meat. ‘Such as the market will give,’ she replied. He went out, supposedly to the market, in fact to position the officers he had brought from Brussels in the lane by the House. He returned at noon. He went to Tyndale’s study and asked him to lend him 40 shillings, saying that he had lost his purse in the street that morning. It was easy to get money from Tyndale, so Foxe wrote, ‘for in the wily subtleties of this world he was simple and inexpert’. Perhaps Foxe is gilding the story here – Phillips’s 40 shillings make too neat a match for Judas’s thirty pieces of silver – but perhaps not. Phillips had stolen from his father; as we shall see, fraud and trickery continued in his future. Touching a victim for a loan was perfectly in character for Harry Phillips, that much is certain. It probably amused him.
‘Master Tyndale, you shall be my guest here this day,’ Phillips suggested.
‘No,’ said Tyndale. ‘I go forth this day to dinner, and you shall go with me, and be my guest, where you shall be welcome.’
At dinnertime – they ate early in those days, well before noon – the two men left the house, which was set back from the lane by a
long and narrow entry that would not take the two of them abreast. Tyndale therefore gestured for Phillips to go ahead. With a great show of courtesy, Phillips insisted that the older man lead. As they walked, Phillips, who was a head taller than Tyndale, pointed down at him to identify him to the waiting officers.
The arrest was quiet and easy. The officers told Poyntz later that they ‘pitied to see his simplicity when they took him’. Tyndale was taken to the procurer general, who gave him dinner: a distinguished scholar was not a run-of-the-mill criminal. From there he was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde, an eighteen-mile trip from Antwerp. The procurer general searched Tyndale’s lodgings in the English House. He took away all his possessions, ‘as well his books as other things’.
M
odern Vilvoorde is now a northern suburb of Brussels, off the ring road close to the city airport, a place of freight yards, shopping centres and new housing estates built on the sites of demolished factories. The only relics of the medieval town are the church and a much-patched stone tower on the Langemollerstraat.
The castle where Tyndale spent his last days was torn down at the end of the eighteenth century. It was replaced by a whitewashed penitentiary that served until the late 1940s as a landmark for travellers on the road from Brussels to Antwerp. The courtyards are now used as a park for municipal fire engines and ambulances. One cell block remains, a flaking cliff of barred windows and crumbling masonry, where firefighting and first aid equipment is stored. Some of the material from the old castle was recycled for the penitentiary. It is possible that a brick or stone survives from Tyndale’s time; and the spur of the River Zenne, where the prisoners slopped out their cells, also remains, green and stagnant.
Vilvoorde was separated from Brussels by six miles of open country when Tyndale was taken there. The castle was its major feature, built in 1374 by a duke of Brabant on the same lines as the
recently completed Bastille in Paris. It had seven towers and a river-fed moat with three drawbridges; it was dank, its walls running with damp, and secure and well guarded, for it was the main state prison of the Low Countries, and its dungeons were designed to lodge eminent men.
Here, Adolf van Wesele, lieutenant of the castle, assigned Tyndale a cell. Van Wesele was not a sympathetic old acquaintance, as Walsingham was to More. There were no walks in the gardens for Tyndale, no correspondence or visitors, no gifts of warm camlets. The last surviving words that Tyndale wrote tell of his suffering from the cold and damp, and from the darkness. The letter is in Latin, apparently to the marquis of Bergen, an imperial official whom Cromwell was petitioning for Tyndale’s release. It is not dated, but it was almost certainly written five or six months after his arrest, in the autumn of 1535.
It is a simple and patient letter, written before Tyndale knew his fate, in which his prime concern remained the scripture, and it deserves to be quoted in full. He asks ‘by the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh, which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woollen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he also has warmer nightcaps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that
it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ; whose Spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen. W Tindalus.’
There was no rush to burn him. He had time to convert his keeper and his keeper’s daughter, or so Foxe claims; others among the castle staff, impressed by his fortitude and sincerity, said to one another that if Tyndale ‘were not a good Christian man, they could not tell whom they might take to be one’. Even Pierre Dufief, the ferocious prosecutor, agreed that his prisoner was
homo doctus, pius et bonus
, a learned, pious and fine man.
While Tyndale lay quietly within the Vilvoorde walls, protests burst outside. His friends in Antwerp, led by Poyntz, complained to the imperial government that the arrest violated the privileges of the English House, and appealed to the imperial court at Brussels for clemency.
Cromwell, too, was anxious to secure Tyndale’s release. A direct appeal by the English government to the emperor was unlikely to bear much fruit, however. Charles V still owed Henry no favours, and Tyndale could serve as an ideal object lesson to other heretics, like Luther, who were nominally imperial subjects, but whom the emperor could not reach. Cromwell’s main hope was to establish what lay behind the arrest.
The plan had been well constructed and carefully carried out. It was also expensive. Harry Phillips had been penniless before he appeared in Antwerp and he was soon penniless again. Somebody had paid him to betray Tyndale – Phillips himself spoke of a ‘commission’ – and, whoever that person was, he soon disappeared from Phillips’s life.
This was not the start of the counter-reformation. It was not part of a series of attacks on English heretics in exile. It was a
one-off. No other reformer on the Continent was touched. Someone so hated Tyndale that he commissioned his arrest by an agent, who then used ‘all diligent endeavour’ to ensure that Tyndale was brought to trial and executed.
Who? This person was skilled in intelligence gathering and in the recruitment and use of agents. He had some contact or influence with the imperial authorities in the Low Countries, whose cooperation was needed in taking Tyndale and in sentencing him. He had access to funds. He wished to destroy Tyndale for the latter’s heresy; we know of nothing else, no love affairs, no money troubles, that could have been a motive. This person was English-based. Phillips made it clear that he had been recruited in England and not locally. The authorities in England no longer had any desire to harm Tyndale. On the contrary, Cranmer and Cromwell, respectively the senior officials of Church and State, were shocked by news of the arrest and tried hard to secure Tyndale’s release. Cromwell’s godson, Thomas Tebold, was setting out on a visit to Nuremberg. Cromwell often gave him intelligence assignments on his journeys, and he asked him to visit Antwerp, to make local inquiries into the arrest.
Tebold wrote to Cromwell from Antwerp on 31 July 1535 to say that he had succeeded in speaking with Phillips. ‘He that did take Tyndale is abiding in Louvain, with whom I did there speak,’ he reported, ‘which doth not only there rejoice of that act, but goeth about to do many more Englishmen like displeasure; and did advance this, I being present, with most railing words against our King, his Highness, calling him “
Tyrannum ac expilatorem reipublicae
”, tyrant and robber of the commonwealth. He is appointed to go shortly from Louvain to Paris in France, and there to tarry, because he feareth that English merchants that be in Antwerp will hire some men privily to do him some displeasure.’ That Phillips should fear retaliation shows the respect and affection in which the Antwerp merchants held Tyndale.
The same day, Tebold wrote to Cranmer, whom he also knew well. He told the archbishop that he had travelled to Louvain from Antwerp. There he had met Dr Buckenham, former Blackfriars prior in Cambridge. Buckenham was a papal loyalist who refused to accept the royal supremacy, and who had ‘passed the reme’ – fled from the realm – first to Scotland and then on to the Low Countries, ‘full indiscreetly to the continuance of his mind, and aid of the abused bishop of Rome’. Tebold noted that Buckenham had another English friar with him, and that neither of them had any visible means of support in Louvain.
‘All succour that I can perceive them to have is only by him which hath taken Tyndale, called Harry Phillips,’ Tebold wrote, ‘with whom I had a long and familiar communication, for I made him believe that I was minded to tarry and study at Louvain.’
A mysterious benefactor had supplied the two other loyalist friars, Peto and Elstow, with the funds to survive in Antwerp. Vaughan had investigated this on behalf of Cromwell. The most likely source was thought to be Thomas More, either directly or through his friend Antonio Bonvisi; this same friend had provided More with the camlet to ward off the winter chills in the Tower, and More was able to correspond with him from his cell.
Tebold said, however, that it was ‘conceived both in England and in Antwerp’ that George Joye had been Phillips’s accomplice in the taking of Tyndale. This suspicion was based on the ill feeling between the two over Joye’s unauthorised revision of Tyndale’s Testament. Tebold put this to Phillips, who said that he ‘had a commission out also for to have taken Doctor Barnes and George Joye with other’. He added that ‘he never saw George Joye to his knowledge, much less that he should know him’. This was no doubt true. Joye had left Antwerp and on 4 June was to be found in Calais, then an English-owned city, staying in the house of Edward Foxe, the king’s almoner, whom he had known at Cambridge, and through whom he was petitioning Cromwell to
be allowed to return to England. Tebold said that he mentioned this because ‘Joye is greatly blamed and abused among merchants, and many others that were [Tyndale’s] friends, falsely and wrongfully’.
Though Phillips claimed that ‘there was no man of his counsel but Gabriel Donne’, a monk from Stratford abbey in London who was studying at Louvain, it was clear that the plot originated in England. Tebold reported that Phillips was so frightened of a revenge attack by the English merchants that he had sold his books in Louvain, to the value of £20, and ‘doth tarry here upon nothing but of the return of his servant’. He had sent the servant to England with letters and the man was slow in returning; by ‘cause of his long tarrying’, Phillips ‘is marvellously afraid lest he be taken’ and the letters ‘come into Mr Secretary’s [Cromwell] handling’.
Phillips explained his wealth by claiming that he enjoyed a well-endowed position in the Church. Tebold clearly did not believe him. ‘Either this Phillips hath great friends in England to maintain him here,’ Tebold wrote to the archbishop, ‘or else, as he showed me, he is well beneficed in the bishopric of Exeter.’ No record of his holding such a benefice exists, though Phillips later sent begging letters to Dr Thomas Brerewood, the chancellor to the bishop of Exeter, seeking money to pursue his student life and university career. Tebold was right to be sceptical of Phillips’s cover story; he was right, too, to add that Phillips was certain ‘that Tyndale shall die’, a fate which he ‘procureth with all diligent endeavour, rejoicing much therein’.
No hard evidence has ever emerged to link Phillips with his paymaster. Contemporaries found nothing. As the English throne stumbled between Henry’s children, from Protestant Edward to Catholic Mary and back to Protestant Elizabeth, both sides threw up fresh martyrs who concerned them more than Tyndale. It was
only later – four hundred years later – that suspicion settled on John Stokesley.
Stokesley was the bishop of London who had been active with More in the persecution of Lutherans in 1531 and 1532. His servant, John Tisen, was seen by exiles in Antwerp in January 1533. This was the man whom Tyndale noted wore a beard and avoided other Englishmen, and whom he had known at Oxford. Another servant of the bishop, called Docwraye, a public notary, visited Antwerp for two weeks in July 1533. In addition, Foxe had made a sarcastic reference to ‘the valiant champion Stokesley’, who, while he was lying on his deathbed in 1539, rejoiced that he had sent thirty-one heretics ‘unto the infernal fire’. This, so Tyndale’s pre-war biographer J. F. Mozley wrote, makes it reasonable to see Stokesley as ‘the chief backer if not the prime engineer’ of the plot to betray Tyndale.