The Book of Books (4 page)

And he gave us, in English, the Beatitudes, the most radical and compelling affirmation of morality, and one of the most sublime poems in the language, which begins:

Which Tyndale's words have done.

 

The movement for a Bible in English, which had gathered for so long, now had its champion. Tyndale's version of the New Testament was the fuse. God's English could no longer be silenced. The English ruling classes panicked.

The Bishop of London, Tunstall, had a plan. He would arrange to buy up all the books at source, ship them to London and burn them on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral.

‘Well, I am the gladder,' said Tyndale, ‘for these two benefits will come thereof: I shall get money of him for those books to bring myself out of debt and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God's word.' Which is what happened and Tyndale continued rewriting and refining his work. Yet it hurt. Especially when he was accused of deliberate deceit and profanation of the Scriptures. He knew that his only aim was to educate. There was no heresy in him. He was damned out of fear and politics and not for anything he wrote or said.

The campaign to stop Tyndale intensified. In the 1520s, Sir Thomas More was called up for service. Thomas More, a renowned scholar, was an admired friend of other liberal humanist scholars across Europe, especially of Erasmus, who wrote of him in the highest terms. He said that being in More's company ‘you would say that Plato's Academy was renewed again'. He wrote of More's ‘gentleness and amiable manners'. There was More's
Utopia
, a classic. And he had at one stage, like Erasmus, approved of vernacular translations of the Bible and attempted a few passages himself. He seemed, given the hardness of the age, a kindly man.

Yet once licensed by Bishop Tunstall in 1528 to read all heretical works and refute them, he bared his fangs in swiftly written dialogues. Tyndale became his chief prey. Tyndale wanted a ploughboy to be able to read the Bible? More, who abhorred free speech, was alarmed that the Bible might be available ‘for every lewd lad'.

In this he differed from his friend Erasmus, who found himself twice snared in these disputes. Luther claimed him for a master although Erasmus opposed Luther's violent expression of their joint position and disassociated himself from the bloody consequences of the German wars. Now Thomas More saw Erasmus as an ally. Yet Erasmus wanted the Bible to be translated into every language and read as widely as possible. More's frenzy against Tyndale was nourished by his concern for the future of the ancient position of the Church and monarchy. He saw it threatened and his liberal humanism was thrown overboard.

More savaged Tyndale's translation. He even claimed it was not the New Testament but a forgery. He brought no proof and nor could he substantiate in any but the most minor way ‘its faults . . . wherein there were noted wrong above a thousand texts'.

Tyndale's reply,
Answer Unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue
, carefully refuted the false claims of Henry VIII's bulldog. More's counter-response,
Confutation of Tyndale's answer
, included descriptions of Tyndale as ‘a beast' discharging ‘a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth', a ‘hellhound' fit for ‘the dogs of hell to feed on'. He called him the son of the devil himself.

Whenever Tyndale challenged him on detail, More's method was to bluster. And he descended into a sort of madness. In his defence of Roman Catholicism, he claimed, for instance, that, as some miracles had it, the heads of saints could be buried in two places.

More was fighting for the rights of the Roman Catholic position to be infallible and to be whatever it decided it wanted to be.
He saw it as sanctified by time and service. Any change, he thought, would inevitably destroy the sacrament of Holy Truth, the papacy and the monarchy. Everything must be accepted as it had been. To dislodge one pebble would be to set off the avalanche.

The vitriol against Tyndale's translation and the burning and murdering of anyone offering the slightest disagreement to the Old Church's view show what was at stake. Power was to be taken from those who had held it for so long that they believed that it belonged to them by right. Their authority had been exercised for so many centuries that the prospect of its being diminished in any way was felt to be fatal. They wanted the populace to be subservient, silent and grateful. Anything else was unacceptable. Tyndale's print-popular New Testament had breached the fortifications of a privilege so deeply founded in the past that it seemed God-given and unchallengeable. It was not to be tolerated.

While this battle of the pamphlets was going on and Tyndale was being harried from town to town in Europe, evading both the King's spies and the agents of the Holy Roman Emperor, he began to translate the Old Testament. To do this he found a way to learn Hebrew, a language in which he rejoiced. ‘Where did Tyndale learn Hebrew?' asks David Daniell in his biography. ‘The straightforward answer is that we do not know. Because so little Hebrew was known in England in the 1520s, he must have learnt it somewhere on the Continent, where Hebrew studies were gathering pace.'

He would have had access to a Hebrew grammar and a dictionary and ‘a printed Hebrew text of scripture would not have been too hard to come by from a German bookseller.' And we know he was ‘unusually skilled with languages'. Tyndale saw a close affinity between Hebrew and the English form. ‘The manner of speaking in both is one,' he wrote, ‘so that in a thousand places there needs not but to translate it into the English, word for word.'
He found similarities with Anglo-Saxon and used Hebraic contractions and words so boldly they are now embedded in English.

To the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known as the Pentateuch or the Torah, he gave provocative marginal notes when he shipped them to England. Many of them directly criticised the Pope. Despite a shipwreck on the way from Antwerp to Hamburg in which he lost his whole manuscript and his reference books, he reconstructed the work in a few months, assisted by Miles Coverdale, a biblical scholar. His work rate was as prodigious as his erudition. References are made again and again to his working day and night. The project was always urgent, time always pressing him on.

In 1533, Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn, who was six months' pregnant. Thomas Cranmer, who arranged the marriage, became Archbishop of Canterbury and soon afterwards Thomas Cromwell became Chancellor. Wolsey, having failed to secure the divorce, was discarded. The King, now Supreme Ruler, wanted an English Bible for his new non-papist Church. All finally ought to have been ripe for Tyndale. But Miles Coverdale's version of 1539 was chosen. Tyndale was still the enemy.

We are told that Thomas Cromwell put out one or two feelers to Antwerp to help Tyndale. We know there were attempts to persuade him to return to England but, wisely, he suspected it to be an invitation to his trial and execution. He refused. But in these encounters we have a glimpse of the man, worn away, indigent, devoted to good works when not at his books. John Foxe, in his
Book of Martyrs
, wrote of him: ‘He was a man without any spot or blemish of rancour or violence, full of mercy and compassion, so that no man living was able to reprove him of any sin or crime.'

Tyndale found what he thought of as safe lodgings in Antwerp and it was there, in 1535, that the assassins finally caught him.
One of them, the leader, Henry Phillips, was an Oxford man, which might have helped him into an acquaintanceship in which Tyndale trusted. Phillips led him to ambush, and fingered Tyndale, who was seized by the officers of the Holy Roman Emperor. There was no fight. They ‘pitied to see his simplicity'.

They took him to Vilvoorde Castle and he was put in a dungeon for seventeen months. English residents in the city tried but failed to secure his release.

In the first winter, he wrote a letter to the prison governor. He asked that some things could be fetched from his belongings in his lodgings.

It seems the books at least were brought to Vilvoorde and he continued to work on the Old Testament. He was condemned officially for his belief in justification by faith. He had written that ‘the New Testament is an everlasting covenant made unto the children of God through faith in Christ and upon the deservings of Christ . . . there is an inward justification of a man before God which is by faith alone.'

He was found guilty of heresy and on 6 October 1536 tied to the stake and strangled by the hangman. His last words were: ‘Lord, open the King of England's eyes!' and then he was ‘with fire consumed'.

There will be space further to discuss his language and its influence. Here enough to say that from his New Testament and his core work on the Old came the building blocks, the character and the beauty of the King James Bible. Out of his dedication and genius came words which still line our speech and writing and thoughts today. In the history of the King James Bible there were others before and after him. But many are like myself and view William Tyndale's life and work as the founding and empowering sacrifice.

THE KING JAMES VERSION IS COMMISSIONED

W
hen Elizabeth I lay on her deathbed in March 1603, she was surrounded by some very apprehensive men. Who was to succeed her? She had been the Pope's prime official target for assassination; there had been rebellions within her own country; a great fleet, the Spanish Armada, had set out from a Catholic country, Spain, immeasurably more powerful than her own. Its aim was to invade her England and destroy her rule. But it failed. Over the years she had managed to navigate her way through the poisonous domestic conspiracies of Catholics and the resentments of Presbyterians.

Elizabeth I was probably the best educated person to sit on the throne of England. She had seen the greatest flowering of artistic, entrepreneurial and intellectual genius in her country's history. And her island realm had begun to call itself an empire.

She had been a monarch for more than forty years. Now, clearly at the end of her days, she had still not announced her successor. It was a time of murderous politics, when killing was often the preferred option for succession to a crown and paid assassins slunk around Europe like plague rats. These her last days, 22 March and 23 March in 1603, were a dangerous time for her courtiers as they watched the dying of a monarch, married to her country as she
had said. But even now it seemed that she would not declare her successor.

We are told that ‘her face became haggard and her frame shrank almost to a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to change her dresses for a week. A strange melancholy settled down upon her. Gradually her mind gave way . . . food and rest became alike distasteful. She sat day and night propped up with pillows on a stool, her finger on her lips, her eyes fixed on the floor without a word.' The Privy Council was summoned on 22 March.

She had lost the power of speech. But when yet again they asked her who should succeed her and brought up the name of the King of Scotland, she did the final service for her country. At the sound of his name she raised her wasted arms above her head and brought the fingers together to form a crown. It was done. The next morning she died ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree'.

The messengers on horses saddled and bridled in anticipation immediately raced the 400 miles north to Edinburgh up what became the Great North Road, along dark tracks, through rivers and forests, buying fresh mounts along the way, riding, bloodied and bruised, day and night to the Scottish capital to tell King James VI of Scotland that he had been proclaimed James I of Scotland and England, Ireland, Wales and France.

As they rode north, Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, went with trumpeters and heralds to the gates of Whitehall and Cheapside to proclaim that the Queen was dead, long live the King. There were bonfires to celebrate the peaceful transition and to prepare the way for the imperial funeral of Elizabeth I and the majestic journey south of the new King. New to London, he had been King of Scotland for more than thirty years. It was a crown he had inherited when he was a one-year-old child. And he had
children of his own! There would be heirs. The throne was doubly assured. This was the man who would commission the Bible known by his name.

His childhood would have been called traumatic had the word been invented. His mother was Mary Queen of Scots. She was an ardent Catholic and a magnet for conspirators against her cousin, Elizabeth I. Mary's lover had been slaughtered in front of her; rival groups had kidnapped the child and held him prisoner in grim, cold, isolated Caledonian castles. The country was racked by the clashing and tormented arguments of fanatically stern Presbyterians who demanded the King's attention and were wholly unafraid to tick him off. He declared himself a lover of Presbyterianism.

There was then the death and execution of his exiled Roman Catholic mother and a life spent in sifting the signs coming from Elizabeth in London. Out of this, remarkably, he emerged as a man very sure of himself. Perhaps his scholarship grounded him.