Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (11 page)

The Roman Church’s own version of the Bible was in Latin — the fourth-century Latin of St Jerome, whose precise meaning might
be accessible to learned priests and scholars but which floated sonorously over the heads of most churchgoers, rather like
a magical incantation, heavy on comfort and light on explanation. The Roman priesthood’s control over faith relied heavily
on its virtual monopoly of Latin, and most churchmen felt deeply threatened by the idea of people reading the Bible in their
own language and interpreting it for themselves.

But this was precisely the ambition of the young priest, William Tyndale, who was working in Gloucestershire in the early
1520s. This area, on the border with Wales, had long been a stronghold of the Lollards, the prayer-mumbling disciples of John
Wycliffe who, back in the 1380s, had argued that the Bible should be made accessible to ordinary people in their own tongue.If
God spare my life,’ declared Tyndale in a heated argument with an establishment cleric who had railed against the translating
of the Bible,‘ere many years, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall know more the Scripture than thou dost.’

The talented and scholarly Tyndale had command of eight languages, notably Greek and Hebrew, which were virtually unknown
in England at this time. He was also blessed with an extraordinary ability to create poetic phrases in his native tongue,
and his memorable translations live on to this day —‘the salt of the earth’,‘signs of the times’,‘the powers
that be and even’bald as a coot’ we owe to William Tyndale. All these vibrant expressions flowed from his pen as, through
the 1520s, he laboured to render the word of God into ploughboy language. When he could not find the right word, he invented
it —‘scapegoat’ and‘broken-hearted’ are two of his coinages. As he translated, he was helping to shape the very rhythm and
thought patterns of English:‘eat drink and be merry’ —‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ —‘fight the good fight’ —‘blessed are the
meek for they shall inherit the earth’…

To avoid the wrath of Wolsey, who was having heretics whipped and imprisoned, Tyndale had to compose his fine phrases abroad.
In 1524 he travelled to Europe, where he dodged from printing press to printing press in cities like Hamburg and Brussels
— shadowed by the cardinal’s agents, who had identifieed this prolific wordsmith as a home-grown heretic quite as dangerous
as Luther. In 1526, Tyndale managed to get three thousand copies of his New Testament printed in the German city of Worms,
and within months the books were circulating among freethinkers in England, smuggled in by Hull sailors in casks of wax and
grain. It was four years later that a copy of Tyndale’s
Obedience of a Christian Man
reached Anne Boleyn, providing encouragement for Henry’s break from the Pope.

But then in 1530, Tyndale dared to address the great question of the King’s marriage from a biblical point of view, and with
the perversity of the dyed-in-the-wool nonconformist he concluded in his book
The Practice of Prelates
that the Bible did
not
authorise Henry to jettison his wife.

It was his death sentence. The growing number of reformers
among the English clergy were advocating the use of the Bible in English, and Tyndale’s accurate and powerful translation
was the obvious version to use. But the King was infuriated by Tyndale’s criticism of his divorce and of his proposed marriage
to Anne. The English agents kept up their pursuit of the fugitive, and in May 1535 they got their man. Now aged about forty,
he was captured in Antwerp, to be condemned as a heretic and sentenced to be burned to death.

On 6 October 1536, William Tyndale was led out to his execution. As a small token of mercy he was granted the kindness of
being strangled in the moments before the fire was lit. But the executioner bungled the tightening of the rope, painfully
crushing Tyndale’s throat while leaving him still alive as the flames licked around him.

’Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!’ cried the reformer as he died.

The executioner piled on more fuel until the body was totally consumed, since the purpose of burning heretics was to reduce
them to ashes that could be thrown to the winds — no trace of their presence should be left on earth. But William Tyndale
left more than ashes:‘In the begynnynge was the worde and the worde was with God and the worde was God… In it was lyfe and
the lyfe was the light of men. And the light shyneth in the darknes, but the darknes comprehended it not.’

Y
OUNG HENRY VIII LOVED THE COMPANY OF
the learned and witty Thomas More. The King would take him up on to the roof of his palace to gaze skywards and consider
with him the diversities, courses, motions and operations of the stars’. Travelling in his barge down the Thames one day,
he decided to drop in unexpectedly on the Mores’ sprawling riverside home in Chelsea. He invited himself for dinner, then
walked in the garden with his host‘by the space of an hour, holding his arm about his neck’.

More’s son-in-law William Roper was much impressed by this intimacy with the King, but More himself had no illusions.‘Son
Roper, I may tell thee…’ he confided,‘if my
head could win His Majesty a castle in France it should not fail to go.’

Thomas More was literally a Renaissance man, playing his own part in the great’re-birthing’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. South of the Alps, the Renaissance was famously embodied by such artists as Michelangelo and Leonardo. In the north,
it was the so-called‘Christian humanists’ like More and his Dutch friend Erasmus who struck sparks off each other — to memorable
effect. In 1509, Erasmus dedicated his great work
In Praise of Folly
to Thomas (its Latin name,
Encomium Moriae,
was a pun on More’s name). More responded with his own flight of intellect,
Utopia
— his inspired combination of the Greek words for‘no’ and’place’.

Utopia
is the tale More claimed to have heard when, coming out of church one day, he bumped into an old seaman:‘his face was tanned,
he had a long beard, and his cloak was hanging carelessly about him’. This philosopher-sailor had been travelling with the
Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas would shortly be named. Having chatted with More for a while about
all that was presently wrong with the kingdoms of Europe, he started describing his experiences on the island of’Utopia’ where,
he said, there was no shortage of life’s essentials. When people went to the market, everything was free, and because of that‘there
is no danger of a man’s asking for more than he needs… since they are sure that they shall always be supplied. It is the
fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous.’

Like space travel in our own day, the sixteenth century’s voyages of discovery were stirring people’s imaginations, and
More’s
Utopia
was a sort of science fiction, a fantasy about a super-perfect society where thoughtful people had worked out a life of benevolent
equality. In this ideal’No-Place’, couples who were‘more fruitful’ shared their children with those who were not so blessed,
while lawyers were totally banned — they were a profession who disguised the truth, explained More quizzically, whose own
wealth came from his prosperous legal practice. Living according to nature, striving for health and dying cheerfully, the
Utopians offered a satirical commentary on the‘moth-eaten’ laws and the hypocrisy of European society — and More himself tried
to put some of Utopia’s ideas into practice, encouraging his daughters to debate philosophy in front of him.’Erudition in
women is a new thing,’ he wrote,‘and a reproach to the idleness of men.’

But More’s visionary thinking was tethered to a deep religious conservatism — he was steadfastly loyal to the Pope and to
the old ways of the Church. In the style of Thomas Becket, he wore a hair shirt beneath the glorious liveries of the public
offices that he occupied — though unlike Becket, he kept his prickly garment maggot-free: it was regularly laundered by his
daughter Margaret Roper. Thomas shared his royal master Henry VIII’s indignation at Martin Luther and his reforming ideas,
outdoing the King in his furious invective. In one diatribe, More described Luther as
merda, stercus, lutum, coenum
— shit, dung, filth, excrement. And for good measure, he then denounced the German as a drunkard, a liar, an ape and an arsehole
who had been vomited on to this earth by the Antichrist.

More joined Henry’s Council in 1517, the same year that Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg,
and set about waging a personal war on the new ideas for reform. He had a little jail and a set of stocks built in his garden
so he could cross-question heretics personally, and he nursed a particular hatred for the translations of William Tyndale,
whom he described as‘a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil’. When More got back to Chelsea after his work on the King’s
Council he would spend his evenings penning harangues denouncing Tyndale, while defending the traditional practices of the
Church.

But while More and Tyndale might differ over popes and sacraments, they were agreed on the subject of kings’ wives. More actually
shared Tyndale’s opinion that the Bible did not authorise Henry VIII’s annulment of his marriage with Katherine — and their
highly inconvenient conviction set both men on a tragic collision course with the King. When, after the disgrace of Wolsey,
Henry invited Thomas to become his new Lord Chancellor, More at first refused. He could see the danger ahead. He only accepted
after Henry promised not to embroil him in the divorce, leaving the’Great Matter’ to those‘whose consciences could well enough
agree therein’.

But detachment became impossible as Henry’s quarrel with the Pope grew more bitter. By the early 1530s royal policy was being
guided by the gimlet-eyed Thomas Cromwell, a former agent of Wolsey’s who, in the spring of 1534, pushed a new statute through
Parliament, the Act of Succession. This required men to swear their agreement to the settlement, rejecting the rights of Katherine
and her daughter Mary. When More refused to swear, he was promptly escorted to the Tower.

’By the mass, Master More,’ warned the Duke of Norfolk, an old friend and one of several visitors who tried to persuade him
to change his mind,‘it is perilous striving with princes…I would wish you somewhat to incline to the king’s pleasure for,
by God’s body,
indignatio principis mors est
— the wrath of the king is death.’

’Is that all, my lord?’ responded Thomas.‘Then in good faith is there no more difference between your Grace and me, but that
I shall die today and you tomorrow.’

More was led out to the scaffold early on the morning of 6 July 1535, and he kept up his graceful, ironic humour to the end.‘I
pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up,’ he said as he mounted the ladder,’and [for] my coming down, let me shift for
myself.’

Worn and thin from his months in prison, loose in his clothes, with a skullcap on his head and a long straggling beard, the
former chancellor looked not unlike the old sailor-philosopher he had once imagined telling stories of‘No-Place’ — and that
name he invented for his imaginary island remains to this day the word people use when they want to describe a wonderful but
impossible dream.

A
NNE BOLEYN SAILED DOWN THE THAMES
to her coronation at the end of May 1533 in a Cleopatra’s fleet of vessels. Anne herself rode in Katherine of Aragon’s former
barge — from which the discarded Queen’s coat of arms had been hacked away — and her costume made clear the reason for her
triumph. The new Queen had added a panel to her skirts because she was visibly pregnant. In just four months she would be
delivered of the heir for which her husband had schemed so hard.

But the child born on 7 September that year turned out to be a girl. She was christened Elizabeth, and the pre-written letters
announcing the birth made embarrassingly clear that
this had not been the plan — a last-minute stroke of the pen had made the word‘Prince’ into‘Princes [s]’. The jousting that
had been organised to celebrate the new arrival was cancelled, and it was noted ominously that Henry did not attend the christening.
Anne Boleyn might‘spurn our heads off like footballs’, prophesied Thomas More,‘but it will not be long ere her head will dance
the like dance’.