THE REIGN OF KING HENRY VIII during the first half of the sixteenth century indelibly changed the course of English history. And one of the stupidest fights during that reign began in 1511, just two years after Henry was crowned. In that year a boy was born to a tailor and then promptly died five weeks later. Of itself this isn’t noteworthy, especially during a time when living to thirty was a cosmic crapshoot, but the events that played out after the funerary services sent shock waves throughout the city of London, and epitomized the need for serious religious reform.
The word mortuary meant something very different in the sixteenth century than it does today. When a grieving father, Richard Hunne, took his son’s body to St. Mary’s Church to be buried, the priest asked for a mortuary after the services were completed. In this context, a mortuary is a gift to the officiating priest from the deceased person’s estate—a death tax, of sorts. But because the deceased was a five-week-old, he didn’t have much property to tax. In fact, it could be argued that a dead infant doesn’t possess any property at all, so he should be exempted from the normal ecclesiastical payoffs. Yet thinking that would make you quite a bit more compassionate than Richard Hunne’s priest.
In May 1512, this priest sued Richard Hunne in a London Bishop’s Court, a spiritual court ultimately controlled by the pope, for the sheet in which the dead child had previously been christened. And if that weren’t crazy enough, he won the case. The soon-to-be Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, ruled in favor of the priest and demanded that Hunne surrender his dead son’s sheet. What on earth would a priest even do with a young boy’s sheet? In the twenty-first century, it would probably be best to immediately abandon this line of questioning, which is fine, because the intentions of the priest are beside the point. Richard Hunne had questioned the actions of the Church. Therefore, he had to be put in his place.
Hunne stood his ground. He flat-out refused to hand over the sheet. As a result, he was publicly denounced by the Church: “Hunne, thou art accursed.” That’s right, for not relinquishing the one memento of his dead son, Richard Hunne saw his soul damned to hell for all eternity. In response, he brought a praemunire action against the priest, a provision of the law that asserted the authority of the king and his temporal courts over the pope and his spiritual ones.
Before the praemunire suit was settled, however, a raid on Hunne’s house turned up some religious books in English. The possession of said books had been outlawed more than a century earlier. The most powerful charge against him was that he “hath in his keeping diverse English books prohibit and damned by the law: as the Apocalypse in English, Epistles and Gospels in English, Wycliffe’s damnable works, other books containing infinite errors in the which he hath been long time accustomed to read, teach, and study daily.” On December 2, 1514, Hunne was formally charged with heresy, arrested, and interred in a tower in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Two days later, the London tailor was found hanging by the neck from the rafters in his cell.
The Church and its defenders, people such as Bishop Tunstall and the fiercely orthodox statesman Thomas More (more on this fellow later), declared Hunne’s death a suicide. Case closed. Move on, people. Then details of the case began to emerge. Things such as Hunne’s wrists showing evidence of being bound, the stool he used being found clear across the room—oh, and then there were hand marks on his neck, where he manually strangled himself before the hanging. The inquest investigating Hunne’s death noted these details and more: “Also we find in a corner, somewhat beyond the place where he did hang, a great parcel of blood. Also within the flap of the left side of his jacket, we find a great cluster of blood, and the jacket folden down thereupon; which thing the said Hunne could never fold nor do after he was hanged. Whereby it appeareth plainly to us all, that the neck of Hunne was broken, and the great plenty of blood was shed before he was hanged.”
All this notwithstanding, the Church stuck to its guns. In fact, it doubled down and declared Richard Hunne’s corpse a heretic. The Church tried the dead tailor’s body on December 16, found it guilty, and burned it at the stake. This was done either as punishment for heresy, or to prevent a potentially damning murder witness should zombies be real.
Scandals like this strongly turned the tide of public opinion against the Catholic Church and its clergy. For more than a century, reformers had been decrying the kinds of depravities that made the Hunne case so sensational: mortuaries, indulgences, legal favors granted to the Church, disproportionately brutal punishments, large-scale attempts to exercise control over every aspect of a person’s life from cradle to grave. Religious reformers had come before the sixteenth century, but they all lacked that certain je ne sais quoi to make their regional movements global. Enter the printing press. Curtain up on the Reformation.
BEFORE MARTIN Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, the printing press was not an ally of religious reformers. During the eighty years since Gutenberg’s press was invented, the Church had used it to print indulgences. These were, in fact, perhaps the first thing Gutenberg ever printed. Indulgences allowed sinners to pay cash in order to avoid severe penances, and in some cases guaranteed salvation from eternal hellfire. One couplet from this period goes, “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings / the soul from purgatory springs.” If purgatory was shooting out sinners like clowns from a circus cannon, Gutenberg’s press was printing off tickets for the ride.
This did not sit well with one German friar and theologian. Indulgences, simony (selling church offices), and an unholy obsession with holy relics were at the top of Martin Luther’s complaint list. This last one had been reaching plainly absurd levels for hundreds of years. The famous Dutch humanist Erasmus pointed out that there were enough wood splinters from Christ’s True Cross to fill a ship. One ballsy bishop from Lincolnshire traveled to Fécamp Abbey in France, and when he was shown its holy relic, purportedly the arm of Mary Magdalene, he promptly bit off a couple of fingers. This wasn’t a quick job, either. The bishop found it too difficult to snap the cadaveric digits with his front teeth, so he gnawed his way through them with his molars, much to the shock and indignation of his theretofore gracious hosts. For this act of cannibalistic theft, the bishop was showered with praise back in Lincolnshire, where he returned with two severed bits of St. Mary’s fingers. He was consequently canonized as a saint himself in 1220.
Relatively benign practices pushed to their extreme, corrupt, and often ridiculous ends prompted Martin Luther to write a ninety-five-point protest to his bishop and, according to then-current tradition, nail it to a church door. This list of objections in Latin was originally intended for a narrow audience—“a few of my neighbors.” Church doors were a bit like local bulletin boards for priests, circulating news or information such as the announcement of a lost kitten or objections to the supreme authority of the Catholic Church. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses was a first draft of his complaints, submitted to a close circle of academics. “My purpose was not to publish them,” he wrote to one printer. “Thus I [thought to] either destroy them if condemned or edit them with the approbation of others. But now that they are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation, I feel anxious about what they may bring forth.”
Feeling anxious was right. The insatiable machinations of the printing press were about to spread Martin Luther’s words throughout all of Europe and launch a religious revolution in his name. Luther himself thought the presses a difficult beast to control. “This method is not the best adapted to instruct the public,” he mused, “[I] should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” So he sensed in 1518 what most reality show stars in the twenty-first century learn only after they’ve humiliated themselves on national television: I should have been more careful about the shit I was saying.
Once Luther learned to embrace the printing press, his ideas spread farther and faster than he ever imagined. Luther expected a rational and scholarly discourse to follow, but Church authorities saw his move as inescapably treacherous. Publishing his first treatise in German (instead of Latin) was a major turning point in that dispute. Some historians believe the true beginning of the Reformation happened the moment Luther started printing in the common German tongue. His campaign enabled the average citizen to read (or at least hear) arguments about religion in a way he or she could easily understand.
To the Church authorities, already reeling from accusations of corruption and extortion, Luther’s printing campaign exploded onto the scene like a flurry of multinational body blows. The criticisms became so widespread, in fact, that these popular Reformation pamphlets were later dubbed Flugschriften (“flying writings”). There was no turning back. As print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein famously said, “Heralded on all sides as a ‘peaceful art,’ Gutenberg’s invention probably contributed more to destroying Christian concord and inflaming religious warfare than any of the so-called arts of war ever did.”
FIVE YEARS before Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses, a man named William Tyndale graduated from Oxford University. He was a gifted linguist, but when he went to school, he found it stifling and, at times, ludicrous. Rather than enlightening the common man on the finer points of the Bible, theologians were spending their time debating issues such as how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, or if Christ had turned himself into a mule, could that mule have been crucified for the sins of the world. All cogent points, but Tyndale cared nothing for acrobatic angels or mulish sacrifices. He cared about one thing: an English-language Bible. In early sixteenth-century England, however, that was heresy.
Up to this point, the Bible had been largely protected from the gaze of working-class yokels by that most nefarious of locks: Latin. Literacy itself would have been a huge barrier, but double padlock that sucker with a dead language and you’ve virtually guaranteed that peons won’t read it. Most Christians in the Middle Ages had no way of knowing for themselves what was actually written in the Bible.
Unfortunately, this same lock guaranteed that some of the clergy wouldn’t read the Bible, either. One survey from 1551 found that out of 311 clergy members questioned, “9 did not know how many Commandments there were, 33 did not know where they could be found in the Bible, and 168 could not repeat them.” If this seems impossibly absurd now, thank William Tyndale, who made it his life’s work to open the contents of the Bible to everyone. Tyndale reportedly told one priest, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou dost.”
The last thing the Catholic Church wanted was an “Arthur Cobbler” or “Hans Hoe” (both actual “Joe the Plumber” names for common folk) poking around in the founding documents of its religion. After all, the Hoes and Cobblers and Plumbers of the world were either too stupid or too wrapped up in their farms and shoes and online cat videos to really be able to comprehend the words of God. They were bound to misinterpret the Bible, and those erroneous views would lead to chaos. So if literacy and Latin weren’t big enough barriers, the Catholic Church in England went ahead and made it a crime punishable by death to translate, distribute, or even possess an English translation of the Bible.
“It was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth,” Tyndale wrote, “except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, and they might see the process, order, and the meaning of the text.” But by making it morally and legally forbidden to translate the Bible into English, Tyndale accused the Church of making Christ “not the light of the world, but its darkness.”
After a brief stint as a family chaplain in Gloucestershire, William Tyndale decided to follow in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Martin Luther and translate the Bible into his mother tongue. One Catholic supporter saw the danger of this and would later comment, “Even the tailors and shoemakers, and indeed women and simple idiots [now] read it.”
Yet, for laypeople, reading the Scripture in their own language was important enough that “it was said that a man would give a cartload of hay for a few sheets of St. Paul.” Robert Benet, a wool racker and water carrier, sold his looms and shears to purchase a copy of the English New Testament. Considering that the possession of said looms and shears is pretty much what qualifies you as a wool racker, that was huge. Thankfully Benet had carrying water around in buckets as a fallback career. It didn’t even matter that he wasn’t literate enough to read his English New Testament. He just carried it around with him in his belt, a symbol of his faith and the importance of the Word of God.
Because a theology degree doesn’t pay the bills (unless you’re open to kickbacks on infant funerals), Tyndale needed to find a wealthy patron to fund his Bible translation. This brilliant linguist surveyed England and homed in on a single name: Cuthbert Tunstall. Sound familiar? It should. He’s the guy who ordered Richard Hunne to give up his dead son’s sheet. Yet this is something important to note about Tyndale from the start: he was a moron. No, no, that’s a bit harsh. Tyndale was an ingenious translator—in addition to English, he could fluently translate Latin, German, Italian, French, Greek, and Hebrew—a cunning and slippery fugitive, and a master of rogue printing and international smuggling. Politically speaking, though, he struggled to rub two brain cells together. This will be an ongoing theme with him, and it started with his terribly dim idea to petition Cuthbert Tunstall, now the Bishop of London, to sponsor him while he committed the felony of translating the Bible into English.
Fortunately for Tyndale, Tunstall replied with a curt but polite no, thanks. As Tyndale recalled, “My lord answered me his house was full . . . and advised me to seek in London.” That’s nice. This seems like one of the few times you’re glad the guy in charge doesn’t take your ideas seriously. Especially considering that three years later, this bishop would preach a public sermon against Tyndale at St. Paul’s Cathedral and then oversee a mass burning of his New Testaments. (Ironically, the book burnings didn’t have the effect Tunstall had hoped for. Orthodox agents began buying up copies to be burnt, which only upped the demand and encouraged printers to issue more pirated editions.) Two years after the burning, Tunstall would launch a heretic witch hunt and interrogate people caught with Tyndale’s translation in the very chapel where Tyndale had petitioned for help.
In other countries (notably Italy and Germany), vernacular translations of the Bible were widely available within a generation of the printing press. But England had an unfortunate run-in with Bible translations in the fourteenth century, and the country wasn’t about to legalize a book that had fomented religious revolution.
While partial translations date back to the seventh century, some nine hundred years before, the version that ruined it for the Brits was produced in the late 1300s under the direction of theologian and university professor John Wycliffe. This professor started a reformation movement that would be nicknamed the Lollards. It is believed that Lollard comes from the Dutch word, lollen, which means “to mumble,” and was “used for any kind of vagabond or religious eccentric.” As with the Shakers, Quakers, and Mormons, the nickname was originally meant as derogatory, but people eventually forgot the joke, and adopted it.
What were Wycliffe’s followers all mumbling about? The English Bible, translated and painstakingly hand-copied for the use of the common man. The Lollards were known to value English-language Scripture so much that any translation automatically became associated with Lollard heresy. Common-tongue translations were officially outlawed at the 1407–9 synod at Oxford led by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel. (This archbishop, incidentally, made it onto BBC History Magazine’s “Ten Worst Britons” list of 2005, a group that includes Jack the Ripper.) As long as threats to the Church were viewed synonymously as threats to the State, the Crown would legally enforce these spiritual rulings. Despite the fierce opposition by the two most powerful organizations of the time, Wycliffite Bibles were so widely distributed and cherished that around two hundred fifty still exist today, even after a lengthy purge to burn them out of England. In comparison, only about sixty manuscript copies of Chaucer’s masterpiece of English literature from the same century, The Canterbury Tales, survive.
Of course, it wasn’t just the Bibles that the Catholic Church was interested in burning. As keepers of Christ’s flame, they felt a duty—nay, an imperative responsibility—to use that flame to melt people who did not agree with them. The idea that “simple folk” should be able to read the Scripture in their own tongue was just such a point of disagreement.
MODERN READERS have a hard time understanding the danger in allowing everyday folk to read books, especially the foundational texts of their own religion. But, for the strictly orthodox, widespread scriptural literacy was inextricably intertwined with chaos. The Wycliffite movement was gaining steam at the same time as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a shocking and bloody uprising in which rebels marched on the English capital and slew a number of royal officials. Wycliffe and his followers were not the cause of the uprising; London had the Black Death and taxes to thank for that. Religious fights over books, however, were really fights over foundational structures of power—and this right at the time when rebels were storming the Tower of London. Amid these struggles, many defenders of orthodoxy came to believe that heresy was inevitably intertwined with sedition.
Some of these reformers would be gathered up and required to cast their heretical English Bibles into great bonfires. Others were given closer ringside seats: in 1496, five resurgent followers of Wycliffe’s Lollards were burned at the stake in London with their beloved English New Testaments tied around their necks. At the time, a heretic hadn’t been burned in England for two hundred years—the last was a deacon who’d converted to Judaism—but the threat of an English Bible was enough to dust off the pyres and reopen that chapter of human barbarism. Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as a “good death” when it comes to immolation. John Foxe, the most famous of martyrologists, recorded the passing of one “heretic” who took forty-five minutes to expire in the flames. Seeing that his “left arm was on fire and burned, he rubbed it with his right hand, and it fell from his body, and he continued in prayer to the end without moving.”
Despite facing a horrendous death, courageous men and women refused to budge on issues that seem trivial to many modern observers. For example, does the wafer in Communion literally turn into the flesh of a man who lived fifteen hundred years ago when it touches your tongue? If you marked ❏No, ❏Probably Not, or ❏ Undecided, congratulations, you would have been burned at the stake. While tied to just such a stake, John Badby used his last words to affirm that “he knew well it was hallowed bread, and not God’s body.”
What separated the times of William Tyndale most markedly from those of John Wycliffe was not the burning of heretics—there was plenty more of that to come—but, rather, the reach that the printing press provided. While presses were being tightly watched in England, printed contraband was making its way from mainland Europe into the realm of King Henry VIII by means of robust smuggling networks.
In the spring of 1524, Tyndale realized that England was about the worst place he could be if he wanted to create an English Bible. He made his way to Europe and, using illegal shipping routes forged by capitalist innovators and Lollard heretics alike, spent the next decade sending a stream of inflammatory words right back into the heart of England.
TYNDALE’S FIRST target on this crusade was his most dangerous. Nothing else that he printed would cause more suffering, result in more torture, or send more Englishmen to the flames than the life and words of Jesus of Nazareth.
Because he was soon to be branded an international fugitive, it’s unclear where Tyndale was located while he translated the first edition of his English New Testament. We do know where he printed it, though. Well, at least where he attempted to print it. In 1525, Tyndale negotiated with a printer in Cologne for three thousand magnificent copies of his newly translated New Testament. Using a Greek edition (the original language of the New Testament writings) created by the internationally renowned scholar Erasmus nine years before, along with Martin Luther’s German translation and the Latin Vulgate, Tyndale’s version was to be the most complete, the most accurate, and the most beautiful rendering of God’s word into the English language ever smuggled into the country in bales of cloth.
Technically it was illegal to print the Bible in English, even in Europe. But Tyndale managed to secure a verbal contract for a hefty run of finely crafted New Testaments. Printed on decadently large quarto pages with comments and glosses to guide the reader, a detailed prologue, and woodcut illustrations, this would be the kind of Bible that any God-fearing Christian would be proud to display at home. From an “aesthetic” perspective, that’s great. From an “evidence used to burn you alive” perspective, it’s a bit impractical.
Tyndale didn’t make it very far with this first printing before a friend and correspondent of Bishop Tunstall’s showed up at the print shop. Johannes Cochlaeus was a hard-line Catholic and known English Bible hunter. With exceptionally terrible timing, Cochlaeus traveled to Cologne in 1525 looking for someone to print the works of a conservative monk and ended up on the doorstep of the man who was at that very moment printing Tyndale’s English New Testament.
But hey, just because a printer is playing both sides of the fence doesn’t necessarily mean his polemically opposed clients will come in contact with each other. As it turns out, however, sixteenth-century printing house employees were the stereotypical construction workers of their day. They worked long and dangerous hours, and treated that stress with lots and lots of alcohol. Inebriation has been known to produce the following effects in human beings: speaking in a raised voice, laughing too hard at things that aren’t funny, being sleepy and uncoordinated, and telling people in taverns that no matter how much kings or cardinals rage, “all England would in short time be Lutheran.”
Cochlaeus was most interested in that last one. So he invited the printers back to his place for another round of drinks, on him. Hurrah! In gratitude, they let slip that they were working on an English New Testament, that there would be three thousand copies, that those copies would be smuggled into England, and that they were about eighty pages into the project. Cochlaeus was “inwardly astonished and horrified,” and soon began making arrangements to seize the contraband Bibles.
Luckily, Tyndale was tipped off, so he was able to scoop up his Bible (most of the Book of Matthew, anyway) and flee Cologne. Eventually he arrived in Worms, a German city originally named after the Norse hero Siegfried, who was said to have slain a lindworm (a wingless dragon) near its borders. More recently for Tyndale, Worms was the site of Martin Luther’s trial in front of an imperial diet in 1521. At its conclusion, Luther was officially discredited, declared a “devil in the habit of a monk,” and watched as his books were officially banned. Three years later, however, the tide turned in Worms and it became a safe haven for Lutheran printing.
This time around, Tyndale played the part of fugitive seditionist better. In his first printing attempt, he conceived of a flashy quarto, a somewhat large format for a book, made when each sheet taken through the press is folded twice before binding, creating four printed leaves per sheet. In this format, the book generally ends up just a bit bigger and squarer than your average hardcover release today. Now Tyndale opted for a more subdued octavo, a book format that required folding the printed sheets once more before binding, thus producing eight leaves per printed sheet—and a smaller book. His octavo could fit in a pocket, making it easy for anyone to carry, read, and study it—also to smuggle, conceal, and sell it on the black market.
There were no prologues to these smaller Bibles, no comments or glosses, few woodcuts, and no colophon. The first complete New Testament ever to be printed in the English language was created in Germany by a fugitive linguist and a rogue printer, who took great pains to cover their literary tracks. They were so successful, in fact, that the only complete copy of Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament wasn’t identified until 1996. In Tyndale’s time, the octavo Bibles could be purchased for six days’ wages of an unskilled worker. In 1994 the British Library purchased an incomplete copy for “a little more than one million pounds.” The Library has noted with chagrin that when a famous collector “bought it . . . in the 1700s, it had cost him just 20 guineas.”
Tyndale spent more than a decade on the run. He published two editions of the New Testament and a translation of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), and he wrote, printed, and distributed numerous books, Testaments, introductions, and letters in defense of his person and beliefs. He moved around the Low Countries and was cautious about meeting anyone in person. He would not sit for portraits because they might be used to identify his face. As a by-product, almost five hundred years later, we don’t know what Tyndale looked like. There is a portrait hanging in a dining hall at Oxford University with an inscription that reads, “This picture represents, as far as art could, William Tyndale.” Translation: “Here’s a painting of a white European guy. Please pretend this is William Tyndale.”
Was Tyndale just being paranoid? Well, judge for yourself: William Tyndale is “a hellhound in the kennel of the devil.” He discharges “a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish, beastly mouth.” His English translation should be called “the testament of his master, Antichrist.” Tyndale “sheweth himself so puffed up with the poison of pride, malice, and evil, that it is more than a marvel that the skin can hold together.”
These elegant pronouncements fell from the pen of the aforementioned statesmen Thomas More, who would prove to be Tyndale’s greatest enemy and the single most dangerous man in England next to beheading-obsessed Henry VIII. Whereas other Catholic zealots were content to humble the heretics, forcing them to recant on bended knee, More brought to bear all the powers of Church and State to hunt down these “demonic agents” and send them to the stake.
Three years after Tyndale’s New Testament first spread throughout England, Thomas More became the country’s lord chancellor. A career politician, More was already famous for his brilliant and witty international best seller, Utopia, a satirical exploration of the perfect political society. Of course, you had to read Latin to gain literary entrance into that society; More prohibited Utopia from publication in English “lest it might fall into the hands of the simple and unlearned.” Even today, in some ways, access to this publication is limited to the uppermost classes of society. Early printings appear on the market these days for around $50,000 to $100,000, while the 1516 first edition last sold at auction, in 2005, for €210,000. To More’s posthumous dismay (we’re guessing), the first edition in English of his best-known work also commands prices of $50,000 to $100,000, even though it’s much later than the early Latin printings. It turns out that collectors actually like to read the text of the books they buy, and educated bibliophiles of the twenty-first century don’t often read Latin anymore.
More was one of the most strident believers that heresy was a threat to an orderly and civilized society. He felt that conflicts such as the Peasants’ Revolt demonstrated how, when they were given access to too much information, the common people inevitably became a murderous mob. He could even point to evidence more recent than the 1381 English revolt: in 1524–25 a massive uprising occurred across Germany. Some of the leaders of this Peasants’ War cited Luther’s rebellion against the Church as a key influence. With More’s new promotion to primary adviser to Henry VIII, he enjoyed immense political and judicial power. In particular, it was the duty of the chancellor to protect the state from treason, sedition, and rebellion. Bible heretics were a threat not just to the Church, but also to the State itself. More held the keys to the racks and the pyres of England, and in the name of civilization, he developed an iron stomach for burning men alive.
In the streets of London there were plenty of heretical activities that could be branded treasonous. According to one scholar, “Destroying images, posting bills, singing seditious ballads, spreading forbidden books, hiding those on the run from the authorities, taunting priests, meeting in secret conventicles, planning daring escapes, preaching in spite of persecution, the first followers of the new doctrines marked themselves as rebels as well as heretics.” Lacking only the asthmatic mask and red light saber, More became singularly obsessed with hunting down that rebel alliance.
In the twenty-five years that he served in the English Parliament, More had learned well the power of the printed word. Around 1521 he edited (and to some extent authored) Henry VIII’s attack on Martin Luther, entitled Assertio septem sacramentorum (Defense of the Seven Sacraments), which won Henry the title of Fidei defensor (“Defender of the Faith”) from the pope. Martin Luther didn’t care at all for that assertio, so he published one back, stating that Henry was “a pig, dolt and liar who deserved, among other things, to be covered in excrement.”
King Henry knighted Thomas More that same year and asked him to respond to Luther on his behalf. Presumably More would be free to print the types of things that were below the station of the king of England. Here is a highlight reel from Responsio ad Lutherum, published in 1523:
“Martin Luther is an ape, an arse, a drunkard, a piece of scurf [dandruff], a pestilential buffoon, and a dishonest liar . . . Someone should shit into Luther’s mouth, he farts anathema, it will be right to piss into his mouth, he is filled with shit, dung, filth, and excrement; look, my own fingers are covered with shit when I try to clean his filthy mouth.”
Wow. One eighteenth-century commentator described More’s tirade as “the greatest heap of nasty language that was perhaps ever put together.” That man had never seen a YouTube comment section, but point taken. To make matters worse, More was a saint—not at the time, obviously, but he would be canonized in 1935 and later, in 2000, declared the patron saint of statesmen and politicians by the Vatican. This is the same man whom scholars stop to examine for his “obsessive anality.” Congratulations, Saint Thomas, there are very few saints from whom Latin students can learn such a variety of filthy Renaissance curse words.
Between 1526 and 1535, Thomas More and William Tyndale declared war on each other. Their battles didn’t take place in fields and valleys, but on the pages of the printing press. It was a power struggle embodying the conflict of the whole of England. In order to convince the British people that he was right, More even broke form and began publishing in the common tongue. And when he jumped into the English printing pool, he cannonballed, producing a staggering half-million-word corpus of vitriol aimed at Tyndale and other heretics. Between these two men, three-quarters of a million words were written, producing one of the greatest theological debates ever printed in the English language. More and Tyndale bickered over the usual topics, such as the role of the pope, and the king’s love life, but their main fight centered on the printing and distribution of Tyndale’s English-language Bible, the humble octavo that had come to divide the powers of heaven and earth.
MORE CLAIMED that he would support a carefully screened English translation of the Bible, but that Tyndale’s translation contained as many errors as the sea had water. It is worth noting that the committee of scholars tasked by King James I to create the authorized version of the Bible in 1611 found that Tyndale’s translation was almost entirely accurate and faithful to the original texts. In reality, More’s beef with Tyndale’s New Testament came down to three words. Out of 138,000 words describing the life and works of Jesus of Nazareth—three were objectionable. Yet, to More, anything above zero was enough to make men burn.
Congregation. Elder. Love.
Congregation, a seemingly harmless word, in fact undermined an entire power structure. This word appears only three times in the New Testament, but its placement had profound implications for the pope. In a particular verse in the Book of Matthew, Jesus appears to be making his disciple, Peter, the steward of his “Church.” For hundreds of years, popes claimed to have inherited this charge, thereby serving as the rightful heirs to the leadership of all Christianity. By changing the word Church to the more abstract (but equally accurate) congregation, Tyndale dissolved that papal authority. In a single word, the pope was created, and in a single word the pope could be erased. This was not a trivial translation choice, either, but a serious power play. An entire sect of Christianity, Congregationalists, subsequently sprang up around this word.
Tyndale also chose to change the word priest to senior or elder. This created obvious threats to the current authorities. Should the Church be run by priests and bishops, or by senior members of the congregation (presbyters)? The Presbyterians arose from this word’s translation.
There is a slight linguistic difference between the words love and charity, but theologically, they are light-years apart. Tyndale argued that New Testament “love” was unattached to good works, or gifts, or charitable donations that would flow to the clergy and the Church. Because of this debate, the lord chancellor of England came to view the word love as synonymous with “heresy.”
Goodnight, my husband More’s wife could have said. I love you.
What did you say, Alice?
Oh, right. I meant, good night, husband. I feel charitable toward you in a way not independent of good works or the rightful claim of papal authority over the believers of Christ.
Simple words are not so simple. How we interpret a word depends on who says it, and why. The reformers whom More called “seditious” were using these words as weapons against those in power. They were proverbial torches thrown through the window of the Church, threatening to destroy it from the inside.
IN 1529, the same year that More was elevated to the lord chancellorship, Tyndale made his last move, to Antwerp (in modern Belgium), a haven for Protestant writers. Along with Paris and Venice, Antwerp was an international mecca for printing. It was a thriving trade city, with large amounts of capital and solid distribution networks. From the ports in Antwerp, books were being smuggled across the North Sea into England. Tyndale could blend in, write to his heart’s content, and, as long as he wasn’t too brazen about his illegal activities, relax a bit. After four years on the lam, his new lifestyle was becoming second nature. Sir Thomas Elyot, an ambassador from England, launched an eight-month investigation attempting to arrest and deport Tyndale, but he came up empty-handed and deeply in debt. “As far as I can perceive,” he wrote to the Duke of Norfolk, “hearing of the king’s diligence in the apprehension of him, [Tyndale] withdraweth into such places where he thinketh to be farthest out of danger.” The frustrated ambassador soon resigned his position and returned to England.
Henry VIII was not happy with Tyndale, even despite Tyndale’s public support of him as the highest authority in England, surpassing the pope. This was important because, at the time, Henry and Pope Clement VII were in serious disagreement over the king’s marital affairs.
More than twenty years prior, Henry had married Catherine of Aragon, a Spanish princess. Catherine was an unusually competent ruler. She previously served as the first female ambassador in European history, played a major command role in the Battle of Flodden (the largest between England and Scotland), and championed women’s education and care for the poor. Yet, no matter how adept she was in the field or at the negotiating tables of Europe, “no other success can compensate for failure in the home.” And by that standard, Catherine was a goddamned disaster. Forget sensitive compromises with Spain or giving food to the needy; if you can’t make male babies that live longer than a month and a half, your value as a woman is forfeit. So, the king went looking elsewhere for a male heir, and he found that elsewhere in the fancy bits of the ambitious twenty-four-year-old Anne Boleyn.
The wooing, engagement, and eventual royal marriage to Anne Boleyn was known as the king’s “Great Matter.” The Catholic Church refused to recognize Henry’s marriage annulment. Making up euphemisms such as “Great Matter” or “fancy bits” didn’t seem to make much difference, either. Resistance from the Church made it exceedingly difficult for someone to drop his old wife and run off with a younger, prettier secretary . . . er, lady-in-waiting. Though it was framed in admittedly more diplomatic terms, it was over this issue that Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII locked themselves in a struggle that would transmute the religious landscape of England.
Already fiercely antipapal, Tyndale was only too happy to declare the word of the king above that of the pope. But he was also anti-leaving-your-wife-for-a-younger-woman, which put him in a bit of a moral quandary.
Anne Boleyn knew of William Tyndale. In some ways, you could say that she was a fan. When you’re engaged to a king like Henry, you don’t give two Thomas More shits which books are banned by the bishops of England. You read whatever you want, whenever you want. And Anne apparently had connections in the smuggling market. Today, the British Library owns her personal copy of Tyndale’s 1534 New Testament, which was not only perused at her leisure but also reportedly “kept . . . open on her desk in her chamber, [and] which her servants were all encouraged to read.”
Anne consumed Tyndale’s works, including The Obedience of a Christian Man, which, among other things, told the Catholic Church to keep its grubby mitts out of sovereign state business. Not surprisingly, Anne was particularly partial to this tract, and some accounts say she presented Henry with her favorite passages to read. At one point, Henry even reached out to Tyndale, asking him to give in on a few theological points and return to England in the king’s full favor. Tyndale agreed to do so—in fact, he agreed never to write another polemic again—if the king would only allow an English translation of the Bible. But that, apparently, was too much for Henry to promise—for the time being, anyway.
William Tyndale was a revolutionary and a highly intelligent man, but he was also entirely uncompromising in his views. While this moral fiber makes for honorable Reformation heroes, when it comes to politics it makes for lumbering clodpates. Rather than embracing his immensely powerful new ally, Tyndale could find no justification in the Bible for divorce, and in 1530 he published The Practice of Prelates, wherein he publicly denounced the union between Henry and Anne. In a meeting with the king’s agent, Tyndale expressed surprise at Henry’s reaction: “I am informed that the king’s grace taketh great displeasure with me . . . specifically for the book name The Practice of Prelates: whereof I have no little marvel, considering that in it I did but warn his grace of the subtle demeanor of the clergy.” A little political sense would have gone a long way for Tyndale. Of course, “long way” probably should be read as “six years.” After repeating Catherine’s mistake of failing to produce baby boys, Anne herself was cast aside for a newer model. Her marriage to Henry was declared the result of witchcraft (sortilege), and after charges of adultery and incest floated around the English courts, Henry officially separated from Anne by separating her head from her body.
THOUGH BITTER enemies, William Tyndale and Thomas More did agree on one point: Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon was a crime against God. This was a dangerous position for anyone to take, but especially the king’s closest adviser. The danger was compounded exponentially when Henry finally broke from the Catholic Church and declared himself the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” This step was just too far for More. He resigned as lord chancellor, and like Tyndale, his life was now in danger for his religious beliefs.
More’s resignation didn’t necessarily stop his heretic crusade. This was a man who had built up a shadow army of informers that stalked the streets of London at night searching for that most pernicious of crimes against humanity: Bible study groups. Anyone who’s had to sit through a particularly bromidic Sunday school instructor might be inclined to agree, but in the early 1530s, those tedious lessons would have been the very height of political intrigue. Groups with heretical sympathies would meet at night to read aloud from English translations of the Bible, a criminal organization that one scholar calls the “Forbidden Book of the Month Club.” On the other side of the candlelight-flickering walls lurked More’s network—effective, brutal, quietly stealing names and rumors and unshielded comments in the dark.
Charges of heresy were not easy to beat. The accusers were often anonymous, and the definitions of “heresy” elusive and subjective. There were laws that protected heretics, which dated back to Henry IV in 1401. For example, a suspect could be held for only ten days before being delivered to an ecclesiastical authority. A bishop couldn’t hold a suspect for more than three months before trial. If the accused was acquitted, he could not be arrested on the same charges again. Six weeks after becoming lord chancellor, however, More took those laws and figuratively punted them into the English Channel. Facing rumors of torture and indefinite confinement, some people recanted and surrendered themselves to whatever punishments More could bring to bear.
Thomas More didn’t burn everyone he detained. As a heretic, you had one mulligan: recant. But if you cashed in your single recantation and were caught a second time—off to the flames with you, friend. Not that your heresy mulligan was a walk in the park. Well, in some cases it was a walk in the park, but that park was located at Thomas More’s house.
More’s home stood in Chelsea, located in central London. It was an impressive estate, containing a library, private chapel, ample guest accommodations, a menagerie, even a dock for More’s personal barge. It had lavish gardens, with “apple trees, roses, and a collection of herbs.” Yet within this garden also stood the “Tree of Truth.” Despite its name, this tree wasn’t in the habit of dropping apples of wisdom. It was more into the extraction side of the business.
Rumors began circulating that More was illegally detaining suspected heretics and torturing them on his property, presumably in an attempt to make them confess. He wholeheartedly denied the allegations. Sure, the gatehouse on his estate was equipped with stocks and chains and fetters, but c’mon, those were collectors’ items. Everyone knows an Iron Maiden is great Feng Shui, and a person’s choice of décor isn’t a crime, is it?
More did admit to arresting and detaining a merchant named Segar Nicholson, for selling contraband books. Nicholson was among the first to accuse More of torturing him at his home in Chelsea. He claimed that the lord chancellor caused him to be bound to the Tree of Truth, whipped, and then subjected to ever-tightening ropes around his skull until he lost consciousness. More dismissed the accusation, saying of Nicholson, “never had either bodily harm done him or foul word spoken him while he was in mine house.” A known seller of antichrist books was in your custody for a week and you didn’t torture him even a tiny bit? Not a single screw to a thumb, or a morning’s stretch on the rack? Sounds like someone else could use a visit to the Tree of Truth.
After he resigned his post as lord chancellor, Thomas More’s days were numbered. He still sought out heretics wherever he could find them, but his political support was withering fast. Henry was angry with him, Anne Boleyn held nothing but contempt for him, and his allegiance to the pope in Rome was becoming more and more problematic. It was only a matter of time before charges of treason found him. This happened in April 1534, when he was brought before a commission to take the “Oath of Supremacy,” which recognized Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church. To refuse was treason, and on that day, Sir Thomas More became a traitor to England.
More was charged with depriving the king of one of his titles. He was sentenced “to be hanged, cut down while still alive, castrated, his entrails cut out and burnt before his eyes, and then beheaded.” Henry, the ultimate frenemy, commuted the sentence to just decapitation. In July of the following year, More was executed. His head was boiled and stuck atop a pole on London Bridge. Had his daughter not bribed the constable of the watch, this last vestige of More would have been unceremoniously dumped into the river below.
AS THOMAS More’s falling out with the English monarchy became increasingly lethal, Tyndale was heavily engaged in his most important contribution: the second edition of his English New Testament. Published seven months after More was declared a traitor, Tyndale’s 1534 New Testament would become the gold standard of biblical translations. This more refined and accurate version spread like wildfire, revolutionizing not only religious study, but the English language itself.
The Bible is the most popular book printed in English. Tyndale’s New Testament was the great trailblazer, cutting paths through the unruly wilderness of the English language. His authoritative biographer, David Daniell, goes as far as to say that Tyndale’s work was a “liberation of language itself,” and without him, there could have been no Shakespeare: “I cannot express too strongly the revolutionary effect of this release of rhetoric into English . . . Something happened, before Shakespeare, to switch the power into English. What happened, I am sure, was the constant household reading of the Bible in English.” The translations that those households were reading owed the majority of their text to Tyndale. The Geneva Bible, the translation Shakespeare used (as did Milton, as did the Pilgrims), relied on the path blazed by Tyndale. So many of the phrases we know by heart (“let there be light,” “the spirit is willing,” “there were shepherds abiding in the field”) came from his mind. He was an extraordinary translator above all else, weaving a text of such beauty that, hundreds of years later, we still frequently stop to admire it.
Unfortunately for Tyndale, revolutionizing the English language is not a guarantor of personal safety. A couple of months before his nemesis was beheaded in London, Tyndale received a visitor to his home in Antwerp. The young man was in his twenties, came from an affluent family in Dorset, England, and had graduated from Oxford with a bachelor’s degree in civil law. He was also a gambler, a notorious thief, and a conman. And like most conmen, Henry Phillips did not break into Tyndale’s home but, rather, was invited in by the victim himself.
Tyndale had been on the run for roughly a decade by now, but the great wheels of change were turning all over Europe. Through the influence of Anne Boleyn and the new lord chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, England was becoming friendlier to Protestants every day. But the Low Countries, where Tyndale was hiding, were marching toward an ever-more-frightening state of conservative Catholicism. In 1533, for example, an anonymous letter circulated among government authorities that complained about the lack of an organized Inquisition “in the Spanish manner” to hunt heretics. Raids to arrest heretics followed soon after in the very city where Tyndale resided. His own name ended up on the list, and he had to work harder than ever to stay one step ahead of the flames.
Into these changing tides stepped Henry Phillips, who met Tyndale at a dinner for Antwerp merchants in 1535. Tyndale instantly took a liking to the well-spoken young man and invited him back to his lodgings to continue their conversation. As the two men talked into the night, Tyndale did not realize that his new BFF harbored some seriously dark secrets. Among them was the fact that he had been hired to abduct Tyndale and turn him over to Catholic authorities.
In Antwerp stood the English House, a kind of embassy for English merchants. It was here that Tyndale had sought refuge. In line with its sovereign status, the city of Antwerp couldn’t just break into the English House and start dragging out international suspects. Tyndale had to be lured outside, and it was Phillips who became the bait.
We wonder if one of the most important translators of the life of Jesus looked back and caught the similarities: a cadre of officers waiting in concealment, a dinner appointment, a nod of the head in place of a kiss, a substantial monetary reward. When Tyndale realized what was happening, he simply gave himself up without a word or a struggle. After a decade on the run, it was over.
Ever since Tyndale’s betrayal, there has been considerable debate over who orchestrated his arrest. As far as we know, Phillips never revealed the name of the person or persons who sent him to hunt down the rogue translator. Investigations at the time placed blame on various bishops in England, but the accusations are full of dead ends and contradictions. History may never know the identity of the man who doomed Tyndale, but it does know certain things about the man. For one, to cover his expenses and necessary bribes, Henry Phillips would have needed access to a considerable amount of money. His shadowy benefactor would also have been familiar with the Low Countries and their laws and procedures. In order to dig up the information about Tyndale’s whereabouts that led to Phillips’s “friendly” approach, a robust system of informants would have been necessary. Above all, despite the tides that had turned so dramatically in England, this person must have felt nothing but a continuing and burning hatred for Tyndale and his work.
Not many people in England fit the bill. Some might note that, up until the very last stages of his imprisonment, Thomas More was free to write and coordinate with friends on the outside. If Tyndale’s greatest nemesis wasn’t behind his final abduction, it was another person, his name lost to history, who closely matches Thomas More’s profile.
The betrayer Henry Phillips pops up a few times around Europe before dropping off the historical record entirely. He surfaces in Rome a year after his betrayal of Tyndale, asking for money and claiming to be kin of the now-executed Thomas More. His later years were reportedly steeped in paranoia and poverty, and he bounced around such promising careers as mercenary, highwayman, and beggar in the streets of Vienna. The martyrologist John Foxe recorded that Phillips was “consumed at last with lice.”
During the year and a half that Tyndale was imprisoned at Castle Vilvoorde (in modern-day Belgium), numerous attempts were made by friends and government officials to secure his release. Even Henry VIII asked for leniency, and the powerful Thomas Cromwell pressed tirelessly. While those petitions caused delays, in the end they fell on deaf ears. Heresy was an international offense, and Henry’s power was limited outside England. Also, Emperor Charles V, who ruled over the Low Countries, was Catherine of Aragon’s nephew. Catherine had died just three years before, dishonored and forsaken by the King of England. Charles wasn’t exactly in the mood to extend Henry any personal favors.
While Tyndale was languishing in prison, another English translation of the Bible was being prepared, by Tyndale’s friend and colleague Miles Coverdale. In his edition, Coverdale made sure to play nice with Henry VIII, noting in the dedication that “power given of God unto kings is in earth above all other powers.” In 1537, less than twelve months after Tyndale died, a new edition of Coverdale’s translation became the first English Bible officially licensed by the king. The translation was, of course, mostly Tyndale’s. However, the name of a heretic couldn’t be ascribed to a royal work such as this, so it was called the “Thomas Matthew Bible,” after two New Testament apostles. To pass the king’s inspection, Tyndale’s contribution had to be buried.
Like his greatest enemy, Thomas More, William Tyndale was condemned to die for his religious convictions. This reportedly happened near Vilvoorde, on October 6, 1536. Unlike More, whose sentence was reduced to beheading, Tyndale did not die easily. Because it couldn’t be proven that he’d been given his one heretic mulligan, the Belgian courts decided to extend to Tyndale the mercy of strangulation. While choking someone with the intent to kill normally isn’t considered a mercy, when the alternative is live immolation, it’s a godsend. Unfortunately for Tyndale, God failed to deliver on that one. If contemporary accounts are accurate, the strangulation was botched, and Tyndale was burned while yet alive and speaking. That would mean the author of one of the most important works ever printed in the English language was forced to endure a horrific death not once, but twice.
On the back of the printing press, Tyndale fundamentally altered the religiopolitical landscape of England. Small-scale English translations of the Bible had come and gone for more than a millennium, but Tyndale produced his greatest creation by virtue of Gutenberg producing his. Seventy-five years later, when the monumental King James Version of the Bible was published, Tyndale’s translation would account for 83 percent of its New Testament and 76 percent of its Old.
It is a cruel irony that the crime for which Tyndale was hunted, abducted, and brutally executed became one of the greatest English accomplishments within a few decades after his death. Perhaps, when you get yourself mixed up in one of the largest power struggles in English history, things like that are bound to happen. Today, when people blame a “scapegoat,” or encourage friends to “fight the good fight,” or compliment “the salt of the earth,” we can thank William Tyndale. Ultimately, though, when you’re hunted by religious fanatics, bloodthirsty emperors and kings, and an eloquent nemesis with a scatological fetish, even the printing press can’t prevent you from becoming the “forgotten ghost of the English language.”