From the seventh century, in England, the Church’s leaders had largely been a cadet branch of the old aristocracy. By the Middle Ages, the Church was seen by the ruling classes as just another route to increase their grip on the top. With their mistresses and robes of silk, their booty and their immunity from the laws of the land, these churchly princes and prelates were not accountable to other mortals. And they guarded the Word as their ultimate weapon.
The Latin Vulgate had become an icon, as revered as a saint. Verses from it were whispered at the altar so that the common herd could hear nothing. They were separated from the crucial rituals by screens which blocked out the officiating cadre. Mystery plays and simple stories had to serve for them. The language of God was sacred and the sacred became secret and the secrecy spawned ignorance, spun fear. The traditional mechanisms of tyrannical suppression evolved over the centuries.
To throw off the language – to let in fresh air, and new words – was unthinkable. Save for a few brave and evangelical scholars. But when they tried, in all good faith and with no intention but to improve and to purify a Church to which they were devoted, they were set upon. When it feared its supremacy challenged, as it did at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Church reacted swiftly.
William Tyndale walked into the perfect storm.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FOUNDATION IS LAID
At the centre of the storm was Martin Luther. The scriptural work and political actions of this German priest had an eruptive effect. The fallout is still with us. For not only in 1517 did he attack with learning and virulence the many failings and corruptions of the Church, in 1522 he translated the New Testament into German. The Church was destabilised. The violence of his preaching was believed to have stirred up a peasants’ revolt against the princes and the states in 1524 – 5 in which more than 50,000 people were slaughtered. Out of this turbulence came the Protestant Reformation which ripped apart the Catholic monolith for ever and set a new course in European and American history and beyond which was to reconfigure the world.
He put the fear of revolution into the kings and prelates. They looked at what we might for convenience call ‘Germany’ and cowered. They feared for their titles, their booty and their lives. Few more than Henry VIII, who, in his full pomp as king, said that he hated Luther more than any man on earth. Henry’s defence of the Pope and the Catholic Church against Luther’s 1517 eruption had earned him a most coveted title, a gift from Rome, ‘Defender of the Faith’.
Henry became a militant and a fanatical Roman Catholic. With the help of Wolsey, a cardinal and Lord Chancellor of England, his spies raked the land for dissidents. Wolsey, dressed in gowns suppurating in silk and satin, his fingers glittering with precious stones, his entourage pharaonic in its splendour, relished the hunting down of those godly men. He loved to toy with them in mock and mocking trials, to have them tortured but he did not condemn people to burning at the stake. Others, including Sir Thomas More, applauded and supported Henry’s anti-Protestant zeal.
Into this London stepped William Tyndale, unblemished in his Catholic devotion and a monarchist who had argued that the King was outside the law and subject only to God’s law. Outwardly he was a gentle scholar but one who proved to have within him a will which would not be broken. He never once gave in or gave up his vow to make the Bible accessible even to ‘a plough-boy’.
At Oxford in the early sixteenth century he had been drawn to the ideas of the Lollards, who were still at large. The hand-copied manuscript translations of the Bible were still passed on, more than a century after the death of John Wycliffe, despite persecution, torture and executions. The English hunger for a Bible of their own was not to be thwarted. Tyndale was ordained priest in 1521. Despite his academic distinction, which had been developed at Oxford and was then burnished at Cambridge where he inherited the example of the recently resident Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus, he turned away from further formal study.
It is a speculation but I think that he was already preparing himself for what he knew would be an unorthodox vocation. He became a chaplain and tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh in the village of Little Sodbury in the Cotswolds, a lush and hilly area of the rich wool trade in the west of England.
He was twenty-six, a wonderfully accomplished linguist, with a gift for poetry. He was in a sympathetic community which included Christian Brethren, another name for the Lollards. Soon he was preaching in the open air outside the church on College Green and his ideas were nettling some of the local bigwigs. At one stage he was accused of heresy, and brought before the vicargeneral, who ‘threatened me and rated me as if I had been a dog’. It was a taste of what was to come. Most importantly, he had begun to take up his vocation as a translator. He was on his way and so was the King James Bible.
The much praised Greek translation of Erasmus, then thought the greatest scholar in Europe, was his ideal. And his purpose was clear: to put the Scripture plainly before the lay people in their mother tongue, that they might see and hear for themselves the words and the meaning of the Scriptures. A few years later, near his death, when he was racked by persecution, abuse, poverty and exile, he still held to his resolution, to continue his work ‘out of pity and compassion which I had and yet have, on the darkness of my brethren, and to bring them to the knowledge of Christ’.
Unsurprisingly, having flagged up his position in a country which was alarmed at all that he stood for, he found no position in London. Partly, he himself thought, because he was unimpressive and awkward in any interview about his future. Perhaps his character was too transparent for comfort, his meek demeanour thought to be camouflage. For whatever reason, aged thirty, he sailed for Hamburg in 1524. He would never again set foot in England.
It is thought that he went to Wittenberg where he met and very possibly worked with Luther – the new Satan. He certainly admired Luther. That sealed his fate. The English court turned on him and set out to silence him and to hunt him down.
He went to Cologne and worked on his first translation of the New Testament, for which he went back to the original Greek. It was finished and printed a year later. Six thousand copies were about to be shipped to London when a self-appointed spy, Johan Dobneck, alerted the authorities in Cologne and in England. He informed the Bishop of London, and, via Wolsey, Henry VIII. The English saw a dangerous association with Luther and with the brutal Peasants’ Revolt and went into a frenzy of counter-measures. Tyndale, no less determined, when tipped off about Dobneck, seized as many printed Bibles as he could and took to a boat on the Rhine. For a time, it was touch and go whether his translation would survive. It was here that Tyndale again proved his tenacity. He was determined not to have his translation banned from its destination.
Henry VIII put the English ports on alert. It has been said that he sent out the navy to search all ships coming from the Netherlands. Certainly warehouses on the Thames were raided and ransacked in the pursuit of the New Testament in the English language. Diplomatic letters and ambassadors urged the authorities in the Low Countries (Tyndale’s current location in a life on the run), to crack down on the production of this subversive and inflammatory book. The Lord Chancellor was commanded to prevent their import, clergy to prevent their circulation.
But in England there was a willing underground, stemming from the Lollards. Most of all there were Christians who wanted to read the Gospels and the Epistles in their own language. Between 1525 and 1528 it is estimated that about 18,000 copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were printed and, despite seizures, most of them got into the hands of those who wanted them. Printing made huge numbers available. Far too many to net anything but a fraction.