CONVERTS
Assertions against Heresy
IN MARCH 1518, Thomas More received a parcel of books from his friend Erasmus. It contained a treatise on rhetoric by the humanist Richard Pace, a copy of Leo X’s bull proposing a crusade against the Turks, and ‘the conclusions on papal pardons’. Erasmus did not say so, but the author of these conclusions, known to us as the Ninety-Five Theses, was the German friar Martin Luther, who four months earlier sent them to the archbishop of Mainz, and proposed them for wider discussion. The commotion they created in Germany at first appeared a matter of relatively little importance to people elsewhere. Some ‘quarrel among friars’ was how it seemed to Pope Leo, preoccupied with the more pressing matter of the crusade.1
In England there was little immediate sense of alarm. A leading theologian – perhaps John Stokesley – was said to have declared in a court sermon that ‘Erasmus is as far outstripped by Luther in knowledge of the Scriptures as Luther is surpassed by him in style’. Erasmus was flattered. At the centre of his web of correspondence, he kept English friends abreast of developments, while presenting himself to Germans as an authority on the faraway English. In May 1519, Erasmus wrote to assure Luther that ‘you have people in England who think well of what you write, and they are in high place’. The following year, Erasmus told Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon that Cardinal Wolsey, ‘a supporter of liberal studies’, could find in Luther nothing to take offence at – ‘except his denial that the primacy of the supreme pontiff is part of the divine law’. No big deal, as the prince of humanists saw matters.
Erasmus also claimed credit for heading off moves to burn Luther’s books. Wolsey, ‘on my advice’, imposed silence on anyone planning to stir up the populace. The main culprit, so Erasmus thought, was Henry Standish, an intemperate critic of his New Testament. Compared to such ‘barbarians’, Luther’s heart was in the right place, though Erasmus could wish his ideas ‘were more courteously and moderately expressed’. Even to Thomas More, reactionary attacks on the Novum Instrumentum were at this stage more disturbing than the activities of Luther. In February 1520, he dismissed a rumour the Pope was about to withdraw approval from Erasmus: compared with this, ‘Luther’s attacks upon the Holy See would be piety itself’.2
Luther was a minority interest. He may have been the best-selling author in Germany, but the Oxford bookseller John Dorne sold only eleven copies of various works by him in 1520, a year in which customers bought 150 of Erasmus’s works. Even so, in 1521 John Longland, newly appointed bishop of Lincoln, instructed his commissary to search Oxford bookshops for Luther’s and other books ‘which young indiscreet persons will desirously read and talk of’.3
It was at Cambridge, early in 1521, that the first overt demonstration of support for Luther took place. A French student, Pierre de Valence, defaced a display copy of the papal bull of condemnation with a quotation from Psalm 39: ‘Blessed is the man whose trust is in the name of the Lord: and who hath not had regard to vanities and lying follies.’ The episode brought John Fisher to Cambridge to preach against Luther, and to pronounce sentence of excommunication against the (as yet anonymous) offender.4 It was around this time, or a little later, that, according to a famous reference in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, the ‘godly learned’ of Cambridge began consorting together at the White Horse Tavern. This was conveniently located, on present-day King’s Lane, for members of St John’s, Queens’ College and King’s College to sneak in by a back entrance. The gatherings, whenever they began to take place, were hardly top-secret, though, for opponents soon sarcastically christened the hostelry ‘Germany’.5
Interest in Luther’s ideas was not confined to a handful of university students. Already in 1520, Polydore Vergil thought a ‘large number’ of Lutheran books had come into the hands of English people. In March that year, a visitor from the West Country wrote home that there was no news in London, save that ‘there were heretics here, which did take Luther’s opinions’. When the Pope’s bull condemning Martin Luther was posted at Boxley Abbey in Kent, it was torn down by a priest named Adam Bradshawe. From his gaol cell in Maidstone, Bradshawe composed ‘seditious bills against the King’s Grace’s most honourable council’, and arranged for them to be cast into the High Street.6
We do not know if Bradshawe was long disaffected from traditional religion or only recently radicalized. Boxley Abbey, site of a miraculous rood, was an established target of Lollard criticism.7 Bishops were well aware of the differences between old Lollardy and new Lutheranism. But, paradoxically, they held to the view that all heresy was fundamentally the same thing. An instinctive response was to round up the usual suspects. In parallel with his investigations at Oxford, Longland launched an investigation into the Lollards of the Chiltern Hills; a few years later, Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London, started to crack open the networks of Essex Lollards lurking around the northern and eastern fringes of the capital.
Still, for the first half of the 1520s, the authorities in England believed, or affected to believe, that ‘Lutheran’ heresy was a distant rather than domestic danger. Luther’s own stance, after his initial protest at the end of 1517, became increasingly radical. In the course of public debates with able opponents in 1519, he was manoeuvred into denying the inerrancy of councils as well as popes, and into assertions of the sole authority of scripture. Rome issued a definitive condemnation in June 1520. Luther’s response was to burn the papal bull at Wittenberg, and to issue a provocative manifesto on The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. It claimed scripture taught not seven sacraments but three (baptism, penance, eucharist); that the mass was no sacrifice; that substance of bread and wine remained on the altar alongside the body of Christ; that the Pope was not head of the Church, but rather the Antichrist. There was no going back from this. Cuthbert Tunstall, on embassy to Emperor Charles V, marvelled at such ‘strange opinions’: ‘I pray God keep that book out of England.’8
The English response to Luther devolved upon the cardinal legate. Heresy was not really Wolsey’s forte. As a bishop he was too preoccupied with matters of state to concern himself with hunting Lollards. Whether or not Erasmus really talked him out of burning Luther’s books, Wolsey was slow to organize this symbolic ritual. He was unsure his legatine authority allowed it – perhaps the only occasion when Wolsey modestly downplayed his own jurisdictional powers. In March 1521, the Cardinal Protector at Rome, Giulio de Medici, supplied reassurances, and urged Wolsey to get a move on. Finally galvanized, Wolsey convened in London in April 1521 a conference of leading theologians. Its members included a veteran defender of the Church’s rights, Abbot Kidderminster, but also several of Erasmus’s Cambridge friends: Henry Bullock, Humphrey Walkenden, John Watson.9 Whatever the hesitations of Erasmus himself, humanists were not programmed to sympathize with Luther. The country’s brightest humanist stars, John Fisher and Thomas More, were soon to reveal themselves as his most implacable English opponents.
On Sunday 12 May 1521, copies of Luther’s books were consigned to the flames in a splendid ceremony at the cross outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Wolsey showed up – two hours late – to be greeted by the cathedral clergy, so the Venetian ambassador noted, ‘as if the Pope in person had arrived’, and solemnly excommunicated Luther and his followers.10 Yet for all his customary glitz and glamour, Wolsey was not the real star. John Fisher, the austere theologian-bishop, preached for two hours against Luther and his doctrines. He defended papal primacy, and the ceremonies and traditions of the Church. But already Fisher could see, with greater clarity than others, that this was not really the heart of the matter. Luther’s challenge struck much deeper and more insidiously. At its root was a beguiling claim: ‘that faith alone without works doth justify a sinner’. If this were so, what need then for the grace of the sacraments, for deeds of Christian charity, for ecclesiastical discipline? It was, Fisher reflected, ‘a perilous article, able to subvert all the order of the Church’.
Within three weeks, Richard Pace, dean of St Paul’s and royal secretary, translated Fisher’s oration into Latin, and sent it to Leo X for him to see ‘what sort of members the Catholic Church has in this kingdom, so remote from the rest of the world’. The Pope was predictably pleased. More significant were efforts made by Fisher to have his sermon printed, as he delivered it, in English. It appeared from the press of Wynkyn de Worde in the autumn of 1521, was reprinted the following year, and again in 1527.11 The case for traditional religion was to be presented to the people, Fisher’s numerous quotations from the Vulgate translated for the benefit of lay readers. A battle for hearts and minds was under way.
Fisher’s sermon was not Pope Leo’s only literary gift from England in 1521. Wolsey had sent the King a copy of the Babylonian Captivity, and on 16 April Pace came across him reading it, and full of indignation at its impieties. Henry had already started to write against Luther on indulgences, but with papal encouragement he now set about a more comprehensive confutation.
As ever with Henry, the motives were mixed. Wolsey and Pace were immediately calculating the diplomatic advantages of a royal book, sent not only to Rome, but ‘into France and other nations’. It was a golden opportunity for reviving the stalled negotiations over a papal title. And even at a moment of danger for the faith, Henry was determined his royal rights were not to be compromised. The King liked the look of the papal bull, but told Pace he would have it ‘well examined and diligently looked to’ before permission was granted for publication in England.12
Henry’s Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Defence of the Seven Sacraments) – the first book ever written for the press by an English monarch – was completed in time for Wolsey to brandish a manuscript copy at the book-burning of May 1521. It was printed in London in July, and copies soon winged their way to Rome. In gratitude, Leo X invested Henry with the title of Fidei Defensor, defender of the faith. The King would ever after keep faith with the title, if not with the faith itself. Henry’s foray into theology was a publishing phenomenon, with editions rapidly appearing at Rome, Strassburg and Antwerp, along with two translations into German. It was hailed internationally as a major vindication of orthodoxy, and frequently reprinted.13
The success owed more to the celebrity status of the author than the intrinsic quality of the book. Yet the Assertio was a robust and competent polemic, restating scriptural and patristic proofs for all seven sacraments. Perhaps significantly, the basis of papal primacy was not a subject Henry felt moved to develop at length, declaring merely, ‘I will not wrong the Bishop of Rome so much, as troublesomely, or carefully to dispute his right, as if it were a matter doubtful.’
Henry also postured as the astute humanist scholar, taking issue with Luther over the gender of Hebrew nouns. And he wanted readers to know he was no blind obscurantist, admitting he could see no reason in principle why the Church should not offer communion in both kinds to the laity. He waxed more passionate about the subversive implications of Luther’s understanding of faith and liberty, which threatened to undermine all authority of princes and prelates. But Henry regally reined in his distemper: ‘I forbear to speak of kings, lest I should seem to plead my own case.’
And it was Henry’s own case, rather than, as suggested then and later, a book ghostwritten for him by Fisher, Pace or More; even, some said, by Erasmus. Nonetheless, it is likely Wolsey’s 1521 conference of theologians played a part in preparing materials, and in later years Thomas More, while denying he inveigled Henry into producing the book, admitted to having been its editor, ‘a sorter-out and placer of the principal matters therein contained’.14
Luther, in a reply published at Wittenberg in 1522, gave full vent to his stockpiles of colourful vituperation. Henry was a ‘stupid and sacrilegious king’, an ‘ass’, ‘dunghill’, ‘lying buffoon’, ‘spawn of an adder’, a ‘mad fool with a frothy mouth and whorish face’.15 Even friends felt he had gone too far. But the Wittenberg reformer, no respecter of earthly personages, was wholly unrepentant.
Vindication of the King’s honour became an additional motive for writing in support of orthodoxy. John Fisher composed a learned Defensio Regiae Assertionis (Defence of the King’s Argument) for European consumption. This complemented his 1522 Sacri Sacerdotii Defensio (Defence of the Holy Priesthood), and 1523 Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio (Confutation of the Argument of Luther) – a penetrating critique of Luther’s doctrines of sola fide (faith alone) and sola scriptura (the bible alone). With both the King and the learned bishop of Rochester lighting the way, England was hailed as a beacon of orthodoxy: leading German controversialists like Johan Eck, Thomas Murner, Jerome Emser and Johan Cochlaeus praised Fisher’s work or wrote in Henry’s defence. The Franciscan Murner came to England in the summer of 1523, hopeful for royal patronage; Eck visited in 1525.16
Fisher handled the serious theology, but the job of responding to Luther in kind – to which the King could not be seen to stoop – fell to Thomas More, the street-smart lawyer. Under the pseudonym ‘William Ross’, More published a lengthy Responsio ad Lutherum, which conveyed low personal invective in elevated humanist Latin – a text disconcertingly full of sewage, shit, vomit, poison, pimps, asses and pigs.17
Luther was an ogre, from a faraway land. Fisher, More and Henry wrote against him in Latin, to discredit him in the eyes of an elite European readership, and to burnish England’s credentials for Catholic fidelity. They were joined by a host of lesser luminaries: Edward Powell, Henry Bullock, Edward Lee, William Melton and Catherine of Aragon’s Spanish confessor, Alphonsus de Villasancta. When Luther’s associate Johann Bugenhagen published in 1525 a hopeful Epistola ad Anglos (Letter to the English), on the basis of reports that ‘in England too the gospel of the glory of God has been well received’, More firmly slapped him down. If, by ‘the gospel’, Bugenhagen meant the faith of Christ and the evangelists, then it had been received everywhere in England for a thousand years. If he meant the ‘new, destructive, absurd doctrines’ dreamt up by Luther and spread around by himself, ‘there is hardly anyone in England who welcomes that gospel of yours’.18
That was probably true, or almost true, at the time of writing. After Longland’s sweep through the Chilterns in 1521, there is an almost complete absence of documented heresy cases before the end of 1525. Thomas Batman, hermit of St William’s Chapel near Rochester, appeared before Fisher in December 1524, and admitted to Lollard-sounding critiques of shrines and images, and having praised changes taking place ‘beyond the sea’. Another isolated case was that of Roger Hackman. At the church ale in North Stoke, Oxfordshire, in 1525, he tactlessly announced that ‘I will never look to be saved for no good deed that ever I did, neither for any that ever I will do, without I may have my salvation by petition, as an outlaw shall have his pardon of the King.’ Perhaps this was an assertion of justification by faith; perhaps a tortuous expression of the orthodox teaching that both faith and works were necessary for salvation. Either way, the authorities were becoming vigilant, and wary of theological speculations on the part of the laity.19
In the autumn of 1524, an official system of licensing came into operation, when Tunstall summoned London booksellers before him to warn them against the sale or importation of heretical texts. No new works were to be published or imported without prior permission from Tunstall, Wolsey, Warham or Fisher.
The bishops meant business. On 7 October 1525 Wynkyn de Worde was charged with printing without permission a text called The Image of Love, and, along with its translator, John Gough, was summoned before the Vicar General of London. The Image was a fairly innocuous work of Christocentric devotion, written by the Observant Franciscan John Ryckes as a New Year’s gift for the Bridgettine nuns of Syon. Yet its strictures on finding the true image of love, ‘not in painted cloths and carved images’, but in scripture, sounded suspicious in these distrustful times. Thereafter, London printers towed the line, staying away from subversive or controversial publications.20
Through the first half of the decade, the new heresy still seemed to be what Fisher called it in his sermon of 1521, ‘a thick black cloud’, lowering on the distant horizon. No storm had broken in England, but that was soon to change.
In the spring of 1523, a young priest called William Tyndale arrived in London from the country. After a stint at Oxford, Tyndale had returned to his native Gloucestershire to serve as a chantry priest and then as chaplain and tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh, at Little Sodbury, half a day’s ride to the north-west of Bristol. His university days coincided with the publication of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum. Tyndale, like other young idealists, was caught up in the excitement of the humanist spring, with its promise of a simpler, purer Christianity.
Walsh was in the habit of entertaining local clergymen to dinner: ‘sundry abbots, deans, archdeacons, with other divers doctors and great beneficed men’. The table talk often turned to the ideas of Luther and Erasmus. Tyndale was not shy of challenging the opinions of his elders and betters, or of trying to win his employers to his ways of thinking. Lady Walsh wondered why she should take her lowly chaplain’s opinions over those of ‘a doctor which may dispend £100, and another £200, and another £300’. Tyndale was preparing his answer: a translation into English of Erasmus’s Enchiridion. After the Walshes read it, clergymen were no longer so often invited to the house, or so welcome when they turned up.21
Tyndale soon set his sights on a yet more ambitious project: a translation into English, and for the press, of the New Testament itself. It is sometimes suggested that Tyndale’s scriptural interests were a Lollard inheritance from his native Gloucestershire. But an interest in vernacular scripture was far from exclusive to Lollards, and the evidence for anything more than a patchy Lollard presence in the county is thin.22 More likely, Tyndale’s attraction towards scripture was initially an orthodox one, tilted in reformist directions by his discovery of Erasmus. Tyndale is recorded as debating with a learned Gloucestershire divine, badgering him with references to ‘God’s law’ until the priest swore in exasperation that ‘We were better to be without God’s law than the Pope’s’. Tyndale responded: ‘I defy the Pope and all his laws!’ and added that, ‘if God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture’ than the petulant priest did. The exchange has the pious ring of posthumous production. But if Tyndale did say it, he surely knew he was echoing the Paraclesis of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum.23
The impression of these early years from the later Protestant historian John Foxe, and from Tyndale’s own accounts, is of an unswerving fidelity to the cause of the Gospel, and near-martyrdom at the hands of reactionary priests. But this obscures the extent to which discussion and debate were clearly taking place within the social and religious settings of late medieval Catholicism. Before the Gloucestershire clergy lost patience with the Walshes’ zealot of a chaplain, there were many lively arguments about the interpretation of scripture, ‘reasoning and contending together’.24
Tyndale’s next step reinforces an impression of someone eager to reform the system from within. He sought the patronage of Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, hoping he would license his New Testament translation, in accordance with Archbishop Arundel’s 1409 Constitutions. Once again, the influence of Erasmus seems key: Tyndale approached Tunstall because of praise lavished on him by the great humanist. Through an introduction from his master, Tyndale employed the offices of the controller of the royal household, Sir Henry Guildford, and prepared a translation from the Greek orator Isocrates as an example of his skill. Tyndale was not brushed off as dismissively as modern accounts usually suggest. Tunstall favoured him with a personal reply (it’s unclear if they met face to face), and while the bishop explained he had no room for another chaplain in his household, he spoke warmly enough about prospects for employment within the city. There is no suggestion the bishop immediately suspected him of nefarious heresy.
For nearly a year, Tyndale sought for patronage in the capital, and his bubbling Erasmian reformism began to cool, harden and crack. At the best of times, London was a demoralizing place for an unemployed priest, let alone an argumentative idealist looking at a succession of closed doors. Tyndale came to the realization that not only was there ‘no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England’.25
In the spring of 1524, Tyndale left for Hamburg, his passage paid by a wealthy member of the Drapers’ Company, Humphrey Monmouth, with whom Tyndale left the manuscript of his English Enchiridion. Monmouth heard Tyndale preach at St Dunstan-in-the-West and, impressed, took him into his household. According to Foxe, Monmouth was already ‘a scripture man’, who had ‘begun to smell the gospel’. But he does not look like a classic Lollard. Monmouth asked Tyndale to say masses for the souls of his parents, he possessed papal pardons acquired on a pilgrimage to Rome, and he gave financial support to various priests and religious houses of unquestioned orthodoxy. Yet it is clear that he knew and approved of what Tyndale was doing under his roof in translating the New Testament. The consciences of affluent Catholic layfolk – urban, literate and reformist, at ease with educated clergymen and impatient with ignorant ones – would be a key battleground in the struggle about to commence.26
Tyndale’s movements in 1524 are obscure; it is possible he visited Wittenberg and met Luther. In 1525, he was in Cologne, where, assisted by a runaway Observant named William Roye, he attempted to oversee production of a printed edition of the New Testament of which he now had a complete manuscript text. Before the end of the year, news of this reached Edward Lee at Bordeaux, en route to diplomatic duties in Spain. France, Lee reported, was already ‘somewhat touched with this sect’; England, he thanked God, ‘is yet unblotted’. But Lee feared the arrival of Tyndale’s translation. He warned Henry: ‘this is the next way to fill your realm with Lutherans. For all Luther’s perverse opinions be grounded upon bare words of Scripture, not well taken nor understood.’ Christian faith in England ‘cannot long endure if these books may come in’.27
In the meantime, there was a hitch. Johan Cochlaeus, a leading anti-Lutheran polemicist, was in Cologne to oversee production of a new book. He caught wind of Tyndale’s plans and went to the city authorities, after hearing some printers boasting how ‘all England would soon be Lutheran’. Tyndale and Roye, with copies of an incomplete text, fled up-river to Worms, a place where, Cochlaeus sneered, ‘the people were in the full frenzy of Lutheranism’.28
The Worms edition completed in early 1526 was less elaborate than the unfinished Cologne version, which seems to have got no further than Mark’s Gospel. It was physically smaller (octavo, or pocket size), and lacked the marginal notes and Prologue accompanying the earlier text, which were based closely on Luther’s editorial material for the German New Testament of 1522. It was, nonetheless, a remarkable achievement: the first translation of the core texts of Christianity into English from the Greek in which they were originally written. The English of Tyndale’s translation was lively and idiomatic, occasionally eccentric, but it mirrored the familiar patterns and cadences of English as it was spoken by his contemporaries.29
Even without marginal glosses and introductions, the Worms New Testament was a subversive document. Tyndale ended the text with an epilogue assuring readers that if they believed these ‘words of health’, they would be ‘born anew, created afresh, and enjoy the fruits of the blood of Christ’. He supplied a primer in Luther’s theology of justification, patiently explaining the distinction between Law and Gospel. The moral commandments of God (Law) were designed to elicit a sorrowful acknowledgement of sinfulness, and a recognition that it was in fact impossible to fulfil the Law’s demands. But when a believer turned to the promises of the Gospel, ‘so shalt thou not despair, but shall feel God as a kind and merciful father’.30
This was a manual for short-circuiting the Church’s established mechanisms of consolation and assurance – in particular, the system of sacramental penance, with its cyclical pattern of sin, confession and absolution. Orthodox theologians did not fear there was anything in the New Testament that undermined or contradicted the sacraments and rituals of the Church, though they were all too aware scripture could be falsely translated, falsely interpreted, falsely expounded. Yet the long-standing prohibitions on translation allowed reformers to repeat a tendentious, yet nigglingly plausible claim: the clergy kept scripture from the people because they did not want them to discover its true content and meaning.31
The meaning of scripture, Tyndale told purchasers of his Testament, was ‘plain and manifest’. There were admittedly some ‘doubtful places’, but these could be explicated through comparison with other passages. The conventional method of interpretation involved a four-fold approach: a passage would be scrutinized for allegorical, tropological (moral) and anagogical (prophetic) meanings, in addition to its literal ones. For Tyndale and his allies, this was simple obfuscation.32
But plain and manifest meanings of scripture are truth claims, not verifiable facts, and translations are invariably acts of interpretation. Some of Tyndale’s linguistic choices, like those of Erasmus in Latin, were controversial, and to orthodox sensibilities, downright shocking. Tyndale’s New Testament was no monument to neutral scholarship. It was a theological argument.
Several choices in particular outraged Tyndale’s critics, confirming their opinion that what was being smuggled into England was not the New Testament of Christ, but a pernicious mockery of it – ‘Tyndale’s Testament’ or ‘Luther’s Testament’.33 By rendering the Greek word charis (gratia in the Vulgate), as ‘favour’ not ‘grace’, Tyndale downplayed the importance of grace-giving sacraments. Making agape into ‘love’ rather than ‘charity’ (caritas) shifted focus away from acts of charity – good works.
Other translations hit directly at structures of ecclesiastical authority. Presbyteros, a term of early Christian leadership, was transliterated as presbyter in the Vulgate, and gave rise to the English word ‘priest’. Tyndale initially had it as ‘senior’, subsequently changed to the less foreign-sounding ‘elder’. Ekklesia (Latin, ecclesia; English, church) became ‘congregation’. Most crucially, the Greek verb metanoeite was rendered as ‘repent’, instead of, as the Vulgate had it, ‘do penance’ (poenitentiam agite). It signalled an interior turning to God in the heart, rather than restorative action through the sacrament of confession. In an angry and alarmist letter of February 1527, Tunstall’s chaplain Robert Ridley protested to Warham’s chaplain Henry Gold that ‘by this translation, shall we lose all these Christian words: penance, charity, confession, grace, priest, church’. The interlocking elements of an entire framework of faith and practice were being recklessly unscrewed and discarded.34
That was how things appeared to Thomas More, who pursued Tyndale relentlessly over the bad faith, in every sense, of his New Testament translations. Tyndale countered with accusations of rank hypocrisy: had not More’s ‘darling’, Erasmus, in his translation from the Greek, used ‘congregatio’ for ‘ekklesia’, as well as Latin equivalents of ‘elder’ and ‘repent’? For More, that was beside the point. Erasmus was not advocating the abandonment of confession, or redefinitions of priesthood and the Church. Tyndale was not a heretic for translating scripture, or even for translating it incorrectly. His translation was toxic because it was made, like Luther’s, with blatant heretical intent.35
Tyndale’s New Testament was an instrument of aggression towards the Church and traditional religion. The bishops, including Tyndale’s erstwhile best hope, Cuthbert Tunstall, had no hesitation in banning it. But the champions of tradition were acutely aware of the attraction exerted by the translation on people who – initially at least – thought of themselves as loyal Catholics. Tyndale, so More believed, deviously began with this ‘thing that had a good visage’. Another anti-Lutheran writer took it for granted that good people were ‘desirous to have the gospel in their mother tongue for the erudition and comfort of their souls’. Questioned by the authorities in May 1528, Tyndale’s patron Humphrey Monmouth claimed he did not suspect anything was amiss about Tyndale until he heard Bishop Tunstall preach that the New Testament was ‘naughtily translated’. Remarkably, the revised edition of Tyndale’s New Testament, printed by Martin de Keyser at Antwerp in 1534, with restored notes and Lutheran prologues, also contained an appended lectionary of Old and New Testament texts to be read in church on Sundays and feast days ‘after the use of Salisbury’, just as many Wycliffite bibles earlier did (see p. 118). Tyndale’s New Testament cheekily marketed itself as an aid to devotion for mass-going Catholics.36
The vernacular New Testament was a game-changer, catching the authorities on the back foot. Orthodox writers often accepted that translation was in principle meritorious, while insisting the current climate was simply not propitious for it. In 1527, and again in 1530, Henry VIII promised to allow people an English version, but only when he might ‘see their manners and behaviour meet, apt and convenient to receive the same’. In the meantime, a heretical translation existed, and heretics appealed to its authority. As one Catholic author bitterly complained, they endlessly repeated ‘the Word of God, the Gospel of Christ’, hoping to make people believe that ‘whatsoever they write or teach’ was that very Word.37
Increasingly, religious controversies in England were an argument about the bible: who had the right to read or interpret it; which doctrines and practices did it mandate or condemn. Above all, this was a debate about authority. In the titanic literary contest between William Tyndale and Thomas More, it resolved itself into a deceptively straightforward question: which came first, the scripture or the Church?
More believed the answer to be obvious to any right-thinking person. The community established by Christ during his ministry on earth – the Catholic Church – produced a record of that ministry in the gospels, Acts of the Apostles and epistles. An authoritative understanding of those texts, guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, was preserved down the centuries in the body that created them.
Debates about meanings of scripture could safely be referred to a historic consensus of interpretation. If there were doctrines that did not seem to be scripturally grounded – for example, that Mary, the mother of Christ, remained perpetually a virgin – that was because scripture did not preserve the totality of Christ’s sayings or of apostolic teachings. The end of St John’s Gospel noted other things Jesus did, ‘the which, if they should be written every one … even the world itself could not contain the books’. ‘Unwritten verities’ endured in the collective memory of the Church. If it were really the case that reading scripture was essential to salvation, then most Christians who ever lived were doomed to perish eternally – so unpalatable a proposition as surely to be untrue.38
Tyndale could hardly deny the gospels were written by Christians years after the death of Christ. For him, questions of priority were not so much chronological as existential. The ‘Word’ was an eternal expression of God’s loving will, revealed in complete perfection in the written words of the Gospel. The Church – a congregation of believers scattered in time and space – was continually constituted by the Word, as it was received in the hearts of the faithful. More’s unwritten verities were ‘as true and authentic as his stories of Utopia’.39
It is far from certain that an episcopally approved, orthodox New Testament translation, with glosses and explanations demonstrating scripture’s agreement with the customs and rituals of Catholicism, would have defused dissent, or even prevented it arising. Other parts of Europe, where translations circulated relatively freely before the Reformation, were hardly sheltered from the storm.
But the association of vernacular scripture with opposition undoubtedly proved a tactical advantage to Tyndale and his allies. The bishops’ refusal to countenance an approved translation could be portrayed – with some justice – as a failure of nerve. It lent credence to claims that supporters of the status quo were opposed to lay bible-reading in principle. If corrupt translations were really the issue, then they ‘have had leisure enough to put forth another well translated’. The reality was they would have done it long since, ‘if ye could make your glosses agree with the text’.40
By defining – redefining – Christianity as a religion of the bible alone, and by refusing to concede, or even constructively discuss, the validity of practices without explicit biblical underpinning, the rebels inexorably drew their opponents onto ground of their own choosing. Another shrewd hit was William Roye’s publication, in Antwerp in 1529, of an English translation of Erasmus’s Paraclesis, with its visions of the ploughman singing ‘a text of scripture at his plough-beam’. By giving all scriptural citations in the edition from the 1526 New Testament, Roye co-opted the charisma of Erasmus for the promotion of Tyndale’s work.41 The cause of the early English reformers was, as they themselves saw it, the cause of ‘the gospel’. More than any other activity, production, distribution, reception and consumption of vernacular bibles provided dissidents with a missionary purpose, and a marker of measurable success.
Heresy was still – officially – a problem intruding from the outside, when, at the start of 1526, and with worrying reports of Tyndale’s activities arriving on his desk, Wolsey planned another public burning of Lutheran works. The King approved, showing himself – as Longland wrote effusively to Wolsey – ‘as fervent in this cause of Christ’s Church, and maintenance of the same, as ever a noble prince was’.42
It was another dazzling occasion: no fewer than thirty-six mitred abbots and bishops joined the cardinal in a packed St Paul’s Cathedral. At the King’s recommendation, John Fisher once again took to the pulpit. ‘Great basketfuls’ of confiscated books were on display, and were then carried outside for burning.
Also present, making a public abjuration of heresy, were four hapless German merchants, members of the Hanseatic community headquartered at the Steelyard on the north bank of the Thames near London Bridge. They were arrested following a raid on the premises led by Thomas More. The Germans had been reading scripture in Luther’s translation, and they confessed to owning works by him and other reformers, and to eating meat on fast days. Yet they do not seem to have been importing books for wider distribution, or to have been discussing ideas very much beyond their own circle.43 It was increasingly implausible for lapses in the nation’s orthodoxy to be entirely blamed on foreigners.
Kneeling alongside the Hanseatic merchants was an English friar, Robert Barnes, prior of the Augustinian house in Cambridge. His presence was a late addition to the proceedings, and a worrying indication of the current state of things in the universities. Barnes was present at discussions at the White Horse, but that did not make him a heretic. Others participants included Stephen Gardiner, soon to be considered the model of conservative orthodoxy. Barnes, like other morally serious and intellectually curious priests, was certainly reading Luther. But the White Horse group in the early 1520s was less a cell of committed Lutherans, more a book group of reform-minded enthusiasts.44
A brotherhood of dissent was, however, forming in Cambridge. Thomas Bilney, fellow of Trinity Hall, underwent a profound change of heart after poring over Erasmus’s Greek New Testament. His attention was caught – as Luther’s was – by St Paul’s passages about the justified living by faith. Bilney was in demand as a father confessor, and through this most clerical and orthodox of rites, trust in the old order was insidiously eroded. One of his penitents was Hugh Latimer, whose conventional pieties were eviscerated by Bilney’s words of private counsel. It was a similar story with Barnes. Bilney – as Foxe later put it – ‘converted him wholly unto Christ’.45 It is hard to be certain what, in the early 1520s, such a phrase precisely meant. But it undoubtedly involved impatience with the current ecclesiastical leadership, indifference – if not antagonism – to much traditional piety, and a zeal for the scriptures as the key to a more authentic relationship with God.
Barnes dramatically broke cover on Christmas Eve, 1525, in a sermon at St Edward’s Church, Cambridge. That Barnes did not preface his oration with the accustomed prayers for souls in purgatory was the least of it. In decidedly unfestive spirit, he argued that Christians were no more bound to serve God on holy days like Christmas than at any other times, and he queried the value of prayers made by priests who ‘mumble and roar out their diriges and masses’.
The core of the sermon was an indictment of the bishops, purported successors of Christ who actually ‘follow none but Judas’. Barnes excoriated their pomp, pride and ‘delicious’ life. There was also a digression against excommunications and ecclesiastical courts, prompted by a local churchwarden’s heartless pursuit of a poor executor for a small legacy, something Barnes heard about from the distressed widow. He struck a familiar note of anticlerical grievance: no man might dare preach truly without being accused of heresy. And he implied that two Flemish Augustinians, burned three years earlier at Brussels, were true martyrs of God.46
Hauled before the university authorities, Barnes dragged his feet over a public recantation. The vice-chancellor informed Wolsey, and Barnes was summoned to appear at Westminster. The cardinal ordered a search of college rooms for heretical books, but a Lutheran sympathizer, the president of Queens’ College, Robert Farman, put the word out, and suspect volumes were pre-emptively squirrelled away. Wolsey treated Barnes with surprising forbearance, and Gardiner, now in the cardinal’s employ, also interceded on his behalf. Still, in the end it was turn or burn, and Barnes decided to turn.47
Was he at this stage a heretic? Barnes said nothing directly about justification by faith, priesthood of all believers, sole sufficiency of scripture, or other avowedly Lutheran doctrines, though he did base his sermon on a postil (sermon outline) of Luther’s. Mendicant preaching was frequently hard-hitting, and famously undeferential to bishops. Gardiner believed such ‘railing in a friar had been easily pardoned’, had Barnes not espoused the ‘anabaptist’ opinion that lawsuits among Christians were forbidden. Even at a moment of growing doctrinal rebellion, jurisdictional matters remained the sorest point for some churchmen. Barnes’s strictures on pluralism and clerical avarice were not wildly different from what Colet, pillar of the establishment, said to Convocation in 1512. But Colet spoke in Latin to his ecclesiastical peers; Barnes preached in English to an urban lay congregation. John Fisher, one of the commissioners appointed by Wolsey, admitted to Barnes that his insistence on a Christian’s obligation to serve God with equal fervour every day of the year was something ‘he would not condemn for heresy for £100’. But, Fisher added, it was ‘foolish to preach this before the butchers of Cambridge’.48
The relative leniency with which Wolsey and Fisher treated Barnes shows they believed reconciliation to be possible. In his sermon preached at Barnes’s abjuration, Fisher made a remarkable pledge. If any disciple of Luther wanted to come to him in secret, ‘and break his mind at more length’, he promised confidentially to hear him out: ‘either he shall make me a Lutheran or else I shall induce him to be a Catholic’.49 It was an arresting offer; not one Bishop Longland was ever tempted to make to Lollard artisans in the Chiltern villages. The authorities now recognized that heretics might be ‘people like us’ – students and teachers, friars and doctors. There would have to be an effort to understand what drew them to the new doctrines in order to cure them from their effects.
Pathways to Conversion
I have thought in times past, that the Pope, Christ’s vicar, hath been Lord of all the world … that the Pope could have spoiled purgatory at his pleasure with a word of his mouth … that if I had been a friar, and in a cowl, I could not have been damned … that divers images of saints could have helped me, and done me much good … Now I abhor my superstitious foolishness.50
Hugh Latimer’s description of a religious transformation, written in December 1531, is both revealing and enigmatic. Contemporaries believed conversions of this sort were the work of God – or of the devil. Some historians have rightly warned us that there was more to the Reformation than a succession of individual religious conversions, noting that most people didn’t undergo one.51 But without such conversions there could have been no Reformation, and attempting to untangle them draws us to the mysterious seed-beds in which change first took root. For historians have to make sense of a paradox: that a convert’s radical rejection of the old and familiar could not come out of nowhere; that it must somehow be grounded in earlier attitudes and experiences.
For some, perhaps not much conversion was required. The concern of orthodox propagandists, that new Lutheranism was but old Wyclifism writ large, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lollards were keen to find out about the new ideas, to make contact with their proponents, and to get hold of new texts – especially the printed New Testament. A determination to prevent such contacts is the explanation for a late burst of anti-Lollard activity; in particular, Bishop Tunstall’s investigations in Essex and London in early 1528, triggered by the arrest of the Lollard evangelist, John Hacker.
Hacker’s testimony led to a conventicle of Lollards at Colchester, where the baker John Pykas confessed to having a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament, bought in 1526 from a Lombard of London. His friend Thomas Hilles, ‘a great reader amongst them’, likewise had ‘a book of the New Testament in English, printed’. Pykas went to Ipswich to hear Bilney preach, and considered his sermons ‘most ghostly made, and best for his purposes and opinions as any that ever he heard in his life’. Yet it was not so much the message of spiritual liberation through the gratuitous grace of Christ that struck a chord with Pykas as Bilney’s vigorous condemnation of pilgrimage and image worship. It was the familiar, not the strange and challenging, that Lollards first heard and responded to in ‘Lutheran’ teaching.52
Yet networks of old dissent and new reform were starting to mesh and merge in ways Tunstall and his commissaries found deeply unsettling. A regular participant in the Colchester conventicle was the London book-runner Robert Necton. Necton was a working man, not a university intellectual or affluent merchant. But neither was he some veteran Lollard artisan: he denied owning Wycliffite texts, yet he admitted keeping Tyndale’s New Testament in defiance of the prohibition, and having ‘read it thoroughly many times’. Necton was a Catholic who caught the bug of ‘the gospel’; books – the urge to buy, sell, read and discuss them – drew him to the Lollard circles on the fringes of the capital.53
The other nest of Lollards disturbed in the spring of 1528 was at Steeple Bumpstead, a group closely linked to Pykas’s Colchester circle. Here, the testimony is remarkable, not least for revealing convergences between old Lollardy and the people previously most immune to its blandishments: the friars. John Tyball confessed that about five years earlier he had made his confession to a Colchester Franciscan, Friar Meadow, who begged his help in escaping from ‘religion’. Tyball sheltered him, shaved the distinctive tonsure from his head, and sent him – where else? – to Amersham. Tyball’s curate, the irrepressible Richard Fox, meanwhile disturbed the faith of several inmates of Clare Priory, five miles east of Bumpstead across the Suffolk border. These were Augustinians – Luther’s order. Friars William Gardiner, Thomas Topley and John Wyggen were acknowledged by the Bumpstead Lollards to be members of their ‘sect’.54
It may have been through Clare that the Bumpstead Lollards secured an introduction to Robert Barnes. In the autumn of 1526, after temporary incarceration in the Fleet, Barnes was transferred to the London house of his order, so his confreres could keep an eye on him. They did not do a very good job. At Michaelmas 1526 Tyball and Thomas Hilles came to London to seek him out and ‘buy a New Testament in English’.
The story is justly famous, and supplies an arresting snapshot of the coalition forming around Tyndale’s vernacular bible. Tyball found the university-educated friar in his chamber, in the company of three or four others, one of them ‘a merchant man reading in a book’. The two Lollards explained themselves, and boasted how their curate, Richard Fox, ‘by their means was well entered into their learning’. Barnes promised to send Fox a letter of encouragement, and he sold the visitors a pair of printed New Testaments, while assuring them that in Latin the New Testament was no more than ‘a cymbal tinkling and brass sounding’ – itself a quotation from Tyndale’s translation of I Corinthians 13:1.
The mood, however, went flat when the Bumpstead Lollards proudly brought out ‘certain old books that they had’ – manuscripts of the four gospels, and various epistles of Peter and Paul. Barnes was underwhelmed by these hallowed testimonies of the Wycliffite witness. These books ‘the said friar did little regard, and made a twit of it … “A point for them! For they be not to be regarded toward the new printed Testament in English. For it is of more cleaner English.”’55
Friar Barnes D.Th. (Doctor Theologiae) did not think these rustic gospellers had much to teach him. Hilles remembered his reading to them ‘a chapter of Paul’ – perhaps an instruction in the theology of justification that Luther found in St Paul, but which was conspicuously absent from the mental inventory of late medieval heresy. Lollardy and Lutheranism was a marriage made in heaven, but it took time for the partners to get to know each other, and there was pragmatic calculation as well as romantic attraction in the burgeoning relationship. Lollards welcomed the printed New Testament and, through their established networks, helped in its distribution. For most of them, however, it seemed a confirmation and vindication of existing preoccupations, rather than any dramatic new departure.
For their part, reformers found in Lollardy a market for their books, a sympathetic convergence of attitudes, and a reservoir of old texts in which they could selectively fish. Only later would reformers fully elaborate the idea that Lollards represented a link in the historical chain of a persecuted ‘true Church’, connecting believers of current times with those of the apostolic age, and providing an answer to the recurrent Catholic jeer, ‘where was your Church before Luther?’ Yet, from a relatively early date, the exiles edited and published antique Lollard works: some half-dozen were printed at Antwerp in 1530–2, with occasional editorial apology for their old ‘barbarous’ style, but also to supply evidence that ‘it is no new thing, but an old practice of our prelates … to defame the doctrine of Christ with the name of new learning’.56
Some claims about Lollard contributions to the origins of the English Reformation have undoubtedly been exaggerated.57 Lollardy’s restricted geographical diffusion, its retreat from the universities, its lack of intellectual rigour, its traditions of concealment and compromise – all these amounted to a slender foundation on which to build a dynamic evangelizing movement. Heresy trials at this time suggest that many Lollards remained essentially unaffected by Luther’s doctrines of grace and theology of the cross.
Others did move towards a synthesis of new and old. Thomas Harding of Amersham came to the attention of the authorities in 1506, and again in 1522, when, failing to detect other Lollards, he was forced to wear the symbol of the faggot. In 1532, dwelling at Chesham, he was spotted reading a volume of English prayers and again reported. His books now included copies of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man and Practice of Prelates, as well as his New Testament. Harding confessed to holding familiar Lollard opinions about images, holy water and the eucharist, but defended his view that confession was unnecessary on the grounds that ‘the faith which you have in God is sufficient for your salvation’.58
Lollardy was one pathway to conversion, but it was not the route taken by the majority. None of the most prominent figures of the 1520s and early 1530s – Barlow, Barnes, Coverdale, Fish, Frith, Joye, Latimer, Roye, Tyndale – had a background in Lollardy. They were all, an opponent noted, ‘before fast in the Catholic faith’. The preaching of Bilney against pilgrimage and images, like aspects of Barnes’s Cambridge sermon, certainly sounded Lollard. But direct influences, rather than resort to a common repertoire of anticlerical and anti-ritualist themes, are impossible to trace. The early Reformation in England had a sympathetic Lollard godmother, but its parents were orthodox and Catholic.
Catholic orthodoxy in the early sixteenth century had a pronounced humanist flavour. It would be fatuous to claim humanism directly ‘caused’ the Reformation. Erasmus certainly thought it was. In 1524 he responded indignantly to the accusation of some friars that he ‘laid the egg and Luther hatched it’. Erasmus insisted that he had laid a hen’s egg, ‘and Luther has hatched a chick of a very different feather’.59
But Erasmian ideals undoubtedly helped foster a critical perspective on traditional piety, as well as a yearning for a simpler, more direct and authentic relationship with God. This was the starting point for Tyndale’s journey of discovery, and though he subsequently became disillusioned with Erasmus, Tyndale continued in his writings to acknowledge a debt to the Dutch humanist’s biblical scholarship. Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum had, after all, provided the base text and much of the philological groundwork for his own translation. And Tyndale carried the scars of some old scholarly battles, inviting readers of his Answer to More to remember how ‘within this thirty years and … unto this day, the old barking curs, Duns’s disciples and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin and Hebrew’.60
Many scholars espousing Lutheran ideas in the 1520s were on the side of Greek, Hebrew and Latin rhetoric in the university wars initiated by curricular reform and the appearance of Erasmus’s New Testament. Robert Barnes studied in Louvain during Erasmus’s residency, and on his return in the early 1520s began lecturing to the Cambridge Augustinians on Terence, Plautus and Cicero. Thomas Bilney confessed, when first seeking a copy of Erasmus’s New Testament, he was ‘allured rather by the Latin than by the Word of God’.61
Purveyors of the ‘new learning’ knew this was their natural constituency. The strategy of the book-runner Thomas Garrett in Oxford in 1527–8 was to seek out ‘all such which was given to Greek, Hebrew and the polite Latin tongue’. Pretending he was looking for instruction in the biblical languages, he brought along ‘books of new things to allure them’. Thomas More knew the type well. The Lutheran-sympathizing character known as ‘the Messenger’ in More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies gave ‘diligence to the Latin tongue’, but rejected traditional scholastic disciplines as contaminated with a ‘subtlety’ inimical to faith: ‘logic he reckoned but babbling … and as for philosophy, the most vanity of all’.62
Erasmus was painfully aware of the culpability foisted upon him, even in England, for luring people from the path of truth. In April 1526 he heard a (false) rumour that his Colloquies were banned in England, ‘something which no one has attempted in Louvain or Paris’ – places that were, to Erasmus, notorious centres of reactionary religion. The Colloquies, first published in 1518, and expanded in numerous subsequent editions, were short, witty dialogues, useful for teaching Latin and the art of speaking, but also allowing Erasmus to vent his views on various topical subjects. He protested blithely to Wolsey that there was nothing in them ‘offensive or irreligious or seditious’. Yet as threats to the Church’s authority grew, satirical swipes against pilgrimage, popular superstition or the religious life – Erasmus’s usual range of targets –no longer seemed like the poking of harmless fun at the establishment. John Longland wrote voicing his concerns.63
The concerns were not misplaced. In May 1528, Tunstall summoned before him Thomas Topley, one of the Clare Augustinians under the spell of the Lollard curate Richard Fox. The priest gave Topley a copy of the Colloquies, drawing his attention to the dialogue ‘Rash Vows’, which satirized pilgrimage to Compostela and its associated indulgences. After reading it, Topley found ‘my mind was almost withdrawn from devotion to saints’. His recantation warned Christians to beware of ‘Erasmus’s fables, for by consenting to them, they have caused me to shrink in my faith’. Tunstall too now wrote to Erasmus, expressing serious reservations about the Colloquies.64
Topley’s confession reveals the combination of possible influences at work in an ‘evangelical’ conversion. While serving Fox’s cure at Bumpstead in the latter part of 1527, Topley found in his chamber ‘a certain book called Wyclif’s Wicket’. This Lollard tract ‘wounded my conscience’, and caused ‘great wavering’ in Topley’s belief in the sacrament of the altar. Yet he only ‘consented’ to the doctrine when he heard Fox preach upon St Anthony’s Day – such public preaching was a remarkable sign of the confidence of these Essex Lollards. Still, Topley’s mind remained ‘much troubled’ until he heard, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, the sermon of a yet more authoritative and charismatic figure: Miles Coverdale, a fellow Augustinian and Cambridge scholar. Topley and Coverdale walked the fields around Bumpstead, ‘and did common together of Erasmus’s works, and of confession’ – a practice Coverdale condemned, since it was ‘sufficient for a man to be contrite for his sins betwixt God and his conscience’. As well as winning Topley to the view that the eucharist was ‘but for the remembrance of Christ’s body’, Coverdale’s preaching persuaded him to turn against imagery of saints, since, as he pathetically confessed, ‘he had no learning to defend it’.65
In Topley’s case, the corrosive drip of Erasmian satire reacted with the sceptical materialism of Lollardy to unsettle a mind perhaps never secure in conventional monastic profession. Topley confessed to being much given to ‘foolish pastimes’: dancing and, worse, tennis. The decisive element was the resolution of religious doubts by a powerful authority figure. New ideas are rarely encountered as abstract propositions; more commonly, they are introduced and advocated in circles of acquaintance. This was a trump card of the emerging movement: converts trusted the ideas because they trusted the people espousing them.
Champions of orthodoxy looked on in frustration as the purveyors of heresy were reputed good and holy men. As early as 1521, John Fisher feared Martin Luther’s ‘pretence of virtuous life’ was likely to ‘overthrow the weak’. The King likewise warned the friar was trying to pass himself off with a ‘visage of holiness … till he might enter in further credence and favour’. A work by a (temporarily) reformed heretic – William Barlow’s Dialogue describing the original ground of these Lutheran factions – supplied an extended commentary on the theme, starting with frank recognition that many people favoured Lutheran doctrine because of ‘good order … charitable liberality, and evangelic conversation’ among its adherents. Intriguingly, something modern historians generally regard as a black mark against the new ideas, and an obstacle to their acceptance in England – the association with abroad – Barlow considered part of their allure. Germans enjoyed a reputation for ‘plainness in word and deed, void of dissimulation, and for their homely familiarity without exception of persons’.66
Thomas More’s ‘Messenger’ wondered how the new preachers could be entirely wrong, since they ‘live so virtuously, fasting and giving their goods in alms’. From his own experience, More knew that Robert Farman, head of a Cambridge college and hawker of heretical books, grew ‘in good opinion and favour’ because he was a learned priest, skilled at hearing confessions, ‘and among many folk well allowed in preaching’. Bilney was similarly reckoned ‘a good man and a very devout’.67
These, of course, were false impressions. It was, defenders of the establishment insisted, simply not possible to be both a resolute heretic and a good person. Scarcely a priest coming out of Gonville College, Cambridge, so Bishop Nykke of Norwich noted sourly in May 1530, did not ‘savour of the frying-pan, though he speak never so holily’. Reformers misled people about the saintliness of their lives as they deceived them about the truth of their doctrines.
This explains a vein of personal invective. Knowledge of Luther’s ‘open vices and boldly boasted wretchedness’, the King observed, ‘must needs make his doctrine suspected’. Thomas More repeatedly emphasized Luther’s lewdness with a nun – that is, with his wife, the former Cistercian sister Katharina von Bora. Despite what modern commentators sometimes imply, this was a shrewd polemical thrust, not a glimpse into More’s own psycho-sexual pathology.68 There were also attempts to undermine some heretics as figures of authority by emphasizing their callow youth: More and others made sarcastic reference to ‘young father Frith’, while the poet John Skelton memorably characterized the troublemakers as a bunch of ‘friscajoly yonkerkyns’.69
Yet it was hard to paint all dissidents as hypocrites and secret sybarites. Bilney was almost universally recognized as a gentle, pastorally minded physician of souls, a habitual visitor – along with Hugh Latimer – of prisoners and the sick. He followed a deeply ascetic lifestyle, eating simply and sleeping little. His Cambridge confederate George Stafford died in 1529 after contracting ‘the sweat’ from an ailing scholar he was seeking to dissuade from practising magic. Other members of Bilney’s circle, including Thomas Arthur and Richard Smythe, were noted for charity towards the poor. One cause of Barnes’s 1525 troubles was his outrage at the financial persecution of a poor parishioner.
Acts of charity to the disadvantaged, and the imposition of ascetic discipline on the self – these were not strange ‘Lutheran’ innovations, but traditional marks of Catholic holiness. The earliest proponents of ‘the gospel’ were not outsiders but insiders, exhibiting some of the best qualities of late medieval piety. Small wonder that – until they were specifically earmarked as heretics, and sometimes even after that – people listened keenly to what they had to say. More so since many of the early reformers were authority figures, members of the clergy, and – disproportionately– of the orders of friars, with their strong traditions of pastoral outreach through preaching and hearing confessions.70
Even at a time of high ‘heresy alert’, pulpits remained open to radical itinerant preachers, either because of sympathy for their views or because locals had no reason to suspect them of being heretics. In this way, in the summer of 1527, Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur espoused an excoriating critique of images and pilgrimage in a succession of London and East Anglian parishes: St Helen’s Bishopgate, St Mary Woolchurch, St Magnus, Willesden, Newington, Kensington, Chelsea, Hadleigh, Christ Church, Ipswich.
Their qualifications were to outward appearance unimpeachable. Bilney was in 1525 granted a preaching licence (later withdrawn) by Bishop West of Ely. Arthur told the congregation at St Mary Woolchurch that he was licensed to preach by four authorities: Cardinal Wolsey, Cambridge University, the Pope and Jesus Christ, whose decree was to preach the Gospel to all. A similar concoction of delegated authority and charismatic mandate was dished up in 1527 by the book-runner priest, George Marshall. He told his congregation at Danbury in Essex that ‘I am a graduate, a master of art, and a master of grammar, and I will show you the Gospel’, adding that Christ and St Paul commanded no man be forbidden to preach.71
The orthodox feared heretics would not be recognized in their true colours; that, ‘agreeing with us in the most part’, they were – as Stephen Gardiner’s nephew Germaine put it – ‘like unto the rocks which, hid under the water, do hurt before they be spied’.72 They were right: heretics gained an audience, and then gained recruits, because what they were saying, and how they said it, resonated in challenging ways with what thinking Catholic Christians already understood to be true.
Justification
Yet they were also saying something radically new. ‘The righteous shall live by faith’; ‘A man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law’. Martin Luther found in these passages from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:17; 3:28) the key to unlocking the spiritual perplexity that had imprisoned him since entering the religious life. How might a sinful person become ‘righteous’, ‘justified’, acceptable in the eyes of God? His answer – after years of anguished effort to live the life of the perfect monk – was that the righteousness was not humanity’s but God’s; it was imputed to individuals, not achieved by them. Christ – wholly human and wholly divine – chose freely to die on the cross. And in consequence, God, of his free grace, chose to accept people as righteous, even while they remained irreparably sinful.
So confident was Luther that he had properly understood what God was saying about salvation, that in his German New Testament of 1522 he added the word ‘allein’ (alone) to St Paul’s comments about being justified by faith.73
Justification by faith alone was at once a catchy slogan and a bold reinterpretation of the doctrine of salvation. But for many encountering it, it was more than an abstract theological proposition; it was a life-changing insight, seizing the emotions and shaking the affections. Looking back from the last years of his life to the moment of his theological break-through, Luther remembered how ‘I felt myself straightway born afresh and to have entered through the open gates into paradise itself.’ In his Parable of the Wicked Mammon, the first complete presentation of justification by faith to an English audience, Tyndale explained how faith, the free gift of God poured into the heart, ‘renews a man and begets him afresh, alters him, changes him, and turns him altogether into a new nature’. In his Prologue to Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Tyndale added that that this was the only way to ‘quiet the conscience, and certify her that the sins are forgiven’. George Joye similarly promised that a believer would ‘feel his heart eased, comforted and loosed’.74
For all its novelty, justification by faith made sense to people – some people – because it spoke to their lived experience, suggesting a way to resolve tensions and difficulties encumbering their spiritual lives. This was the story of Luther himself, burdened with a sense of sin, and convinced of the inadequacy of works of satisfaction to put himself right with God.
Bilney told Tunstall in 1527 that before he could ‘come unto Christ’, he exhausted himself in ‘fastings, watching, buying of pardons, and masses’ – all undertaken at the behest of ‘unlearned hearers of confessions’. Reading Erasmus’s New Testament, he encountered a line in Paul’s First Letter to Timothy (1:15): ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.’ This sentence ‘through God’s instruction and inward working … did so exhilarate my heart, being before wounded with the guilt of my sins, and being almost in despair, that immediately I felt a marvellous comfort and quietness’. To Thomas More, who knew the ins and outs of Bilney’s case, all this was ‘superstitious fear and scrupulosity’ – piety of an excessive and literal-minded kind.75
But if so, these were traps into which serious-minded Catholics might readily fall, as More himself knew well. His own son-in-law, William Roper, husband of his beloved Meg, turned at some point in the mid-1520s into an ardent Lutheran. More ‘reasoned and argued with him’, gave him ‘my poor fatherly counsel’, but was unable ‘to call him home’. Roper’s descent into heresy grew from ‘a scruple of his own conscience’. Daily, he used ‘immoderate fasting and many prayers’, but ‘thinking God therewith never to be pleased did weary himself even usque ad taedium [unto exhaustion]’. Driven by curiosity, Roper got hold of Tyndale’s New Testament, and Luther’s Babylonian Captivity and Bondage of the Will. He became convinced ‘faith only did justify … and that, if man could once believe that our Saviour Christ shed his precious blood and died on the cross for our sins, the same only belief should be sufficient for our salvation’.76
It is impossible to say just how frequently such intensified engagements with orthodox Catholic devotion preceded sudden disaffection from it. We should be wary of inferring from a handful of documented cases that the religion of late medieval Europe was shot through with febrile ‘salvation anxiety’; that it was an over-ripe fruit on the point of falling from the tree. Yet it was a staple of the reformers’ propaganda that the Church’s requirements were intolerably ‘burdensome’ to the conscience. This was said frequently about the obligation to clerical celibacy, and the reformist critics – so often themselves celibate priests – were presumably in a position to know. Purgatory too was portrayed as a furnace of fear and dread, stoked by the clergy to make money out of masses and prayers. Yet turbulence of the spirit was easily assuaged when people recognized purgatory was simply ‘feigned’, an imaginary terror without warrant in scripture.77
Accusations of spiritual oppression often homed in on the requirement to confess sins to a priest. There was an irony here, for confession was the ideal opportunity for personalized spiritual direction, something to which the kind of people attracted to the new ideas were particularly drawn. Bilney and Farman used confession to spread their teachings, as did the Lollard priest Richard Fox. Bilney’s disciple, Hugh Latimer, was even prepared to concede that ‘if ever I had amendment of my sinful life, the occasion thereof came by auricular confession’.
Nonetheless, reformers frequently echoed the cynicism of the Lollards in seeing confession as a spiritually dubious exercise and an oppressive instrument of clerical surveillance. The sternest critic, Tyndale, thought ‘shrift in the ear’ was ‘verily a work of Satan’. People were taught that without it they could not be saved, yet shame might keep them from coming to confession, or from confessing everything when they did. Those who at the end of their lives could not get a priest oft times ‘die in desperation’.78
Liberty, mercy, freedom, release: these were the colours in which converts painted their portrait of religious enlightenment. Opponents took a predictably different view. Justification ‘by faith’ was licence to sin, a shameless evasion of moral responsibility. At his trial in 1528, Robert Farman was repeatedly asked how his Lutheran beliefs could be compatible with a life of virtue and restraint: surely it followed ‘that folk need no more but believe, and then howsoever they live shall make no matter’? Thomas More lampooned the moral complacency caused by Luther’s teaching:
[N]either purgatory need to be feared when we go hence, nor penance need to be done while we be here, but sin and be sorry and sit and make merry, and then sin again and then repent a little, and run to the ale and wash away the sin, think once on God’s promise, and then do what we list.79
This was more than a little unfair. But there was just enough truth in the charge to make reformers uneasy. It is not improbable that some were drawn towards heresy by its relaxation of requirements to fast, maintain vows, confess embarrassing sins, or contribute time and money to commemoration of the dead. The youthful spirit of protest and rebellion, a marked feature of the Reformation in its first phases, adds to the suspicion that not all support for change emerged from anguished crises of faith.
Nor, perhaps, did all converts get the point. John Hig, who abjured before Tunstall’s vicar-general in 1528, was a passionate partisan who believed ‘Martin Luther hath more learning than all the doctors in England’. He held court in alehouses, expounding the true meaning of last Sunday’s gospel to anyone prepared to listen. He also maintained there was no purgatory, and that prayers and alms would do no good when he was dead. But the lesson he drew from this – ‘that I would do for myself as much as I might while I was alive’ – hardly sounds like a rejection of the value of good works.80
The relationship of faith to works was a puzzle and a challenge. St Paul seemed to assert the exclusive role of faith. But another New Testament book, the Epistle of St James, asked what use it was ‘if someone says he has faith but does not have works’. It pronounced that ‘faith without works is dead’ (2:14, 26). Nifty footwork was required to traverse these positions, though Luther famously impugned James as an ‘epistle of straw’, and came close to banishing it from the canon of scripture. Among English reformers, Barnes was nearest to following this lead. But he decided that the works James referred to were those which followed rather than preceded justification – a solution that kept intact the primacy of faith, while parrying the Catholic thrust that Luther’s doctrine led – literally – to no good.
The issue dominated Farman’s trial in 1528. While the former president of Queens’ was argued into some tight corners, he stuck doggedly to his conviction that faith necessarily implied good works, bringing them forth ‘as the tree bringeth forth his leaves’. True faith ‘could never be idle, as the fire must needs burn and give heat’. We can compare this with the statement of Thomas More, writing a couple of years later, that the faith of a Christian must never be ‘an idle, dead, standing belief, but a belief lively, quick and stirring, and by charity and good works ever walking and going into Christ’. The sentiments here are a whisker apart, and a world away.81
Faith’s connection to works was the subject to which Tyndale endlessly returned. He saw works, not as a cause of justification, but as its outward sign, and as reassurance to the conscience of the believer. His thinking also came to exhibit a powerful concern, not merely with how believers were declared righteous, but with how they were actually made so, through inward working of the Holy Spirit. Increasingly, Tyndale began to think of the relationship between God and humanity in terms of the Old Testament concept of covenant – a kind of sacred contract, with obligations on both sides. God’s part – in Christ – was to rescue humanity from the fate to which sinful and fallen nature consigned it; humans in return undertook to strive to keep God’s Commandments. This marked a shift away, in emphasis at least, from the stark polarity of ‘Law’ and ‘Gospel’ found in Luther’s thought.
The concern of Tyndale and other English reformers with ethical conduct has been seen as a watering down of Luther’s counter-intuitive epiphany about salvation, readmitting by the back door a role for human effort. Moral legalism – a preoccupation with the keeping of God’s law – was certainly characteristic of Lollardy, and it is tempting to see the native heresy imparting some local theological flavour to the brew of English Protestantism.82
Yet, in taking this direction, English gospellers were not following any unique path of divergence from the main highway of the European Reformation. Among major continental reformers, Luther was unusual in his lack of concern with what followed after the Christian’s justification. For him, a believer simply remained forever simul iustus et peccator (‘at once justified, and a sinner’). Much greater interest in the moral regeneration of the justified sinner – sanctification – was to be found in the emerging ‘Reformed’ coalition of the Rhineland and Switzerland: in the writings of Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Bucer, all of whose works were being read by English people in the 1520s. Sanctification was also a preoccupation of Luther’s close ally, Melanchthon. Here again, a golden thread leads back to humanism, and the emphasis on right conduct in the Philosophia Christi of Erasmus.83
Much about conversion remains mysterious. Why some people were immediately attracted to the new ideas, and others, from similar social milieux and subject to the same cultural influences, fervently rejected them, is a question we cannot finally answer. The ‘typical’ convert of the 1520s would most likely have been an educated and literate layman, perhaps a common lawyer, someone strongly drawn to the ideals of Erasmian humanism, an advocate of vernacular scripture, seriously devout, yet sharply critical of abuses within the Church, partial to an anticlerical joke. But this is a pen portrait of Thomas More.
The most we can say is that the raw materials of conversion were all, by definition, present within late medieval culture. The very notion of conversion – the transformative personal event described by Luther, Latimer, Bilney and others – was itself a long-standing ideal of devotional life, recounted in saints’ Lives and idealized descriptions of entry into the cloister. Justification by faith alone was a novel idea. But the ideas that Christ died on the cross as a personal saviour, that salvation was dependent upon the grace of God, and that Christians should not complacently trust in their own works of righteousness: these were not inventions of the Reformation, but familiar themes from late medieval theology and sermons.
At the point of death, Ars moriendi texts advised that Catholics be asked, ‘belief ye that ye may not be saved but by His passion and death?’ ‘What preacher,’ Farman’s interrogators demanded in 1528, ‘has not told the people the parable of the poor publican ashamed of his sins, and the proud Pharisee boasting of his virtues?’ Surely Farman recognized ‘the Church has always taught against the putting of a proud trust in our own deeds’? His judges agreed that God freely redeemed the world without the world deserving it; that, by themselves, all the good works of mankind could not save a single soul. But they did not see how this meant there was no place for good works in human responses to God’s offer of salvation.84 It was precisely the shared premises that caused anger and mystification about the contradictory conclusions.
People like Farman were drawn to the new teaching, not despite but because of the religious concepts with which they were raised. The emotional yearnings of late medieval piety, its desire for an intensely personal relationship with Christ, for a purified heart burning with love – all this, so Farman and others came to feel, could be lived out more fully within a new framework of doctrine. But much of the language remained familiar: converts spoke in affective and sensual terms of smelling or savouring the Gospel, drawing on an existing repertoire of devotional terms and emphases. They discovered it to be ‘sweet’, a metaphor as ubiquitous in the texts of the heretics as in the prayer books and saints’ Lives of the preceding decades.85
The most striking convergences emerged out of the Christocentric character of late medieval piety. The existing devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus was a point of connection, some early reformers instinctively retaining the devotional habit of heading their letters with the graphic icon, ‘Ihus’. This point of common reference was seized upon by Thomas More to argue that if heretics were ‘content that the blessed name of Jesus be had in honour and reverence’, they should logically accept another form of representation – carved or painted images.86
References to ‘the precious blood of Christ’ saturate the writings of early reformers, just as they do the devotional and theological texts of the later Middle Ages. Almost identical phrases about Christians being ‘redeemed and bought by the precious blood and death of Our Lord’ can be found in Tyndale and in the Bridgettine John Fewterer. It was after meditating on how Christ ‘shed His precious blood and died on the cross for our sins’ that William Roper decided works and ceremonies were vain. His conclusion was radical, but the reflective exercise prompting it was conventionally devout and unimpeachably orthodox. It is revealing that when the London skinner John Perriman successfully persuaded an acquaintance to learn to read the New Testament, he did so by ‘calling it the blood of Christ’.87
Resentment at the Church’s jurisdictional powers, a dislike of overweening or immoral priests, exposure to the levelling wisdom of Lollardy – all these played their part in preparing people to welcome the winds of doctrinal change. But they were not the real wellsprings of the Reformation movement. It arose from deep within the devotional core of late medieval Christianity, a paradoxical tribute to the Church’s success in cultivating among priests and people alike a serious concern with salvation, and in fostering a personal relationship with Christ.
Contagion and Containment
By the later 1520s the Catholic authorities understood much about the dissent they were confronting; knowing how to contain and crush it was another matter. The contest was profoundly unequal: the forces of orthodoxy could deploy the disciplinary mechanisms of the Church and church courts, backed by the coercive power of the state. But the heretics were not without cards to play, or places to hide.
One important resource, a true birthplace of the English Reformation, was the Flemish port city of Antwerp, lying at the mouth of the River Scheldt, a hundred miles from the furthest tip of Kent. Antwerp was the ‘staple’, or designated port of business, of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, who enjoyed a monopoly of the export of cloth, mainstay of the late medieval English economy. Perhaps a hundred English merchants resided permanently in the city, but the transient population was much higher. Overwhelmingly, the Merchant Adventurers were Londoners, shuttling between the bustling bottlenecks of the Scheldt and Thames rivers.88
Antwerp was also a centre of book production, the international lustre and technical capacity of its printing houses outclassing anything to be found in London. Despite lying in imperial territory, it enjoyed proud traditions of independent-minded municipal self-governance. Religious rioting in 1525 persuaded the city authorities not to provoke trouble by harassment of the printing trade or heavy-handed policing of the foreign communities. Prohibitions on the printing of heretical works, initially at least, did not extend to vernacular bibles, and the printer Christoffel van Ruremund (who specialized in Catholic liturgical books for the English market) was able to produce in 1526, in parallel with the Worms publication, the first of several editions of Tyndale’s New Testament.89
Tyndale himself took up residence in or near Antwerp by the spring of 1528, when his Wicked Mammon was published by Martin de Keyser. It was followed in short order by The Obedience of a Christian Man, and in 1530 by The Practice of Prelates, an excoriating attack on the English Catholic hierarchy. At the same time, Tyndale moved forward with his project of translating all the scriptures into English. During his continental travels he managed to learn Hebrew, and in 1530 de Keyser issued Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Old Testament.
In the three years 1528–30, at least fifteen works by English exiles were published overseas, mainly in Antwerp. To throw the authorities off the scent, such books often claimed to have been printed ‘at Marburg in the land of Hesse’, by ‘Hans Luft’. Luft was a real printer, based in Wittenberg and handling much of Luther’s output. But the name – Luft is German for ‘air’– was an appropriately breezy pseudonym for an elusive, clandestine enterprise. Tyndale was responsible for many of these titles, but other hands were at work: the common lawyer Simon Fish, the Observant friars William Roye and Jerome Barlow, the secular priests George Joye and George Constantine, the brilliant young scholar John Frith.90 Around them gathered a coterie of sympathizers connected to the English merchant community, relatively immune from the efforts of English authorities to seize or silence them.
The English ambassador in the Netherlands, John Hackett, worked tirelessly to prevent the publication of books, and procure the arrest of heretics. But he found himself frustrated by the cautious attitude of the Antwerp authorities. After months of wasted effort to secure the Kentish merchant Richard Harman, Hackett reflected bitterly that ‘the burgomaster and the law of the town have done more diligence to save a cockatrice heretic than to please a noble prince’. Treaty arrangements between England and the Netherlands mandated the extradition of traitors. But there was no obligation – on the say-so of a bishop of London, or even a cardinal-archbishop – to return expatriates for supposed heterodoxy. As Hackett wrote plaintively to Wolsey in July 1528, ‘As soon as they be past the seas, they know no more God neither King.’91
Heretics went out; books came back. The volume of cross-Channel commerce was sufficient to make them needles in the hay of regular trade. Books could be smuggled unbound, the small octavo leaves of the New Testament concealed between the pages of larger and innocuous publications. They could be passed off as stocks of blank paper, or hidden with bales of linen. The intended recipients in London – as Thomas More discovered from a suspect in 1531 – knew in advance the names of the shipmen, and the identifying marks on the ‘fardels’ (bundles) containing the contraband.
There were successes, or apparent successes, in stemming the flow. Herman Rinck, the Cologne magistrate who interrupted the printing of Tyndale’s Testament in 1525, discovered at Frankfurt a cache of copies of Jerome Barlow’s scurrilous verse satire, The Burial of the Mass, and bought the entire stock. A similar strategy was employed by Tunstall when, on embassy in Antwerp in the summer of 1529, he was approached by an English merchant, Augustine Packington, with an offer to purchase all copies of Tyndale’s New Testament to be found in the city. As a sympathetic chronicler later told it, Packington was secretly in league with Tyndale, at that moment encumbered by piles of unexported New Testaments. Tunstall’s outlay served to finance a corrected new edition: ‘the bishop had the books, Packington had the thanks, and Tyndale had the money.’92 This account of a well-planned sting operation sounds too good to be entirely true. But, even as an embroidered version of events, it illustrates the difficulties the English authorities faced, operating in an alien environment, and unsure of whom to trust.
The percentage of banned bibles successfully purchased, confiscated or burned was in any case small. One estimate is that the six editions of Tyndale’s New Testament produced up to 1530 (excluding his definitive revision of 1534) may have amounted to 15,000 copies.93 Like modern customs officials battling the trade in illegal narcotics, the authorities occasionally got lucky, arresting a runner or seizing a consignment. But they could not stop the cross-border traffic, shut down the centres of production, or easily reduce the underlying demand.
Letters found during a search of Richard Harman’s Antwerp lodgings in 1528 revealed the extent of a cross-Channel fellowship. Richard Hall, a London ironmonger, requested two New Testaments from Harman, and John Sadler, draper, wrote to him in September 1526 with news from England – ‘none other but that the New Testament in English should be put down and burnt’. John Andrews and Thomas Davy, countrymen of Harman from Cranbrook in Kent, also wrote concerning the New Testament, Davy telling him ‘that no man may speak in England of the New Testament in English upon the pain of bearing a faggot’, and urging him to bear his troubles patiently ‘for the true faith of Christ’.94
Harman supplied bibles to Simon Fish at the Whitefriars, perhaps also to Geoffrey Lome, usher of St Anthony’s School. Both men sold wholesale to Robert Necton, referred on to Fish by George Constantine, another distributor, and a collaborator of Tyndale. Necton sold New Testaments and other prohibited works in London and in the market towns of his native East Anglia – Bury St Edmunds, Norwich, Stowmarket. Lome likewise ‘dispersed abroad’ a variety of heretical texts. Constantine, a Shropshire man, carried books back to his county of birth. In May 1528, the curate of Atcham near Shrewsbury confessed to reading Lutheran books and discussing them with him. All were part of a distribution network that connected Antwerp to the English universities, and the countryside beyond.
Its principal depot was the church of All Hallows, Honey Lane, just north of Cheapside, where Robert Farman was rector. Farman’s curate, the Oxford graduate Thomas Garrett, returned to his alma mater just before Christmas 1527, and Farman’s servant John Goodale supervised the conveyance there of two ‘very heavy’ fardels of books. He later claimed, implausibly, that ‘what was in them he knew not’.95
What was in them was revealed when Garrett was arrested in February 1528. His catalogue extended to over sixty titles, not just New Testaments in French and English, and numerous works by Luther, but an extensive list of past and current forbidden writers – John Wyclif and Jan Hus, as well as the German Lutherans Philip Melanchthon, Johannes Brenz, Theodore Fabricius, Urbanus Rhegius and Johannes Bugenhagen. The inventory also included authors diverging from Luther’s theology: the Strassburg reformer Martin Bucer; the Frenchman François Lambert; and the Swiss theologians Johannes Oecolampadius and Huldrich Zwingli, whose views on the eucharist Luther roundly condemned. Garrett also had for sale De Operibus Dei [Of the Works of God] by Martin Borrhaus, a decidedly heterodox German who flirted with the radical ideas known generically as anabaptism, and who entertained apocalyptic visions of the kind fuelling the violence of the recent Peasants’ War.96 The dissenting movement in England was not at any stage a tidily ‘Lutheran’ affair.
As evidence accumulated, it became clear the most active of Garrett’s supporters belonged to a group located in Cardinal College – Wolsey’s showcase humanist foundation – and were mainly scholars transplanted by the cardinal from Cambridge. ‘We were clear without blot or suspicion till they came’, the Warden of New College, John London, wrote bitterly to Longland. A dozen and more suspects were imprisoned in the Cardinal College cellar where the salt fish was stored – they included John Frith and the musician John Taverner, who had been hired to instruct the choristers. In these insalubrious surroundings, three of the prisoners died over the course of the summer – the first, largely forgotten, martyrs of the English Reformation.97
Only architecturally are universities cloistered communities. Longland thought that Garrett, Cardinal’s senior canon, John Clerke, and another of the college group, the physician John Fryer, were ‘three perilous men’. He feared ‘they have infected many other parts of England’. Garrett was found to have sent over sixty books (a set of his complete reading list?) to the Benedictine prior of Reading, and Longland feared he had ‘infected’ other monasteries too.
Even in the usually calm and shallow waters of the English Benedictine Order, the new ideas were causing waves. One of Garrett’s collaborators in the importation of books was Richard Bayfield, monk of Bury St Edmunds, who fell under the influence of Robert Barnes. Two Benedictines – one of Bury, one of Glastonbury – were in custody at Oxford, along with their books, before the end of February 1528. Another Bury monk, Edmund Rougham – who studied with Barnes at Louvain – preached at St Peter’s church, Oxford, on the middle Sunday of Lent, ‘the most seditious sermon that ye have [ever] heard of’. Rougham railed against Wolsey and the bishops, and with the words of Matthew’s Gospel urged imprisoned preachers to face martyrdom boldly: Nolite timere eos qui occidunt corpus – do not fear those who kill the body (but cannot kill the soul).98
Yet – other than the unfortunates rotting in the Cardinal College fish cellar – there were no martyrs in 1528. In part, this was because the key players, Garrett and Farman, were willing to abjure. But it was also because the problem still appeared containable, and because to the authorities some of those implicated seemed almost as much victims as perpetrators. Dr London professed pity for the young men Garrett and Clerke attempted to corrupt, and Archbishop Warham, chancellor of the university, was eager to assure Wolsey that those involved were ‘inexpert youth’, led astray by one or two ‘cankered’ elders, and now ‘marvellous sorry and repentant’. There were reputational concerns to think about. Warham worried that if the students were sent for public trial in London, it would bring ‘obloquy and slander’ to the university, and he recommended proceeding through a locally based commission. But his beliefs that there were varying degrees of guilt, and that the wayward should be guided back towards the true path, were undoubtedly genuine.99
Wolsey felt the same. He soon ordered the release of the Cardinal College detainees, and approved the lifting of excommunication for all penitent Oxford suspects. Garrett was even taken into the cardinal’s employ as a scribe. The impulse to rehabilitate, rather than condemn, can be seen also in the case of the two Cambridge troublemakers, Thomas Arthur and Thomas Bilney, brought to trial in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey in November 1527 after reports surfaced of the provocative sermons preached in London and East Anglia.
The cardinal presided, assisted by no fewer than seven bishops, including Tunstall, West of Ely and Fisher of Rochester. Even before the trial, there were attempts, by Thomas More and others, privately to talk sense into the accused. Bilney, conscience-bound and conscience-stricken, was intensely reluctant to abjure. But Tunstall, handed the lead in the matter by Wolsey, took immense pains with him, repeatedly postponing sentence and striving to hand-craft an abjuration Bilney might feel able to sign.100
The pair did recant, at St Paul’s, on 7 December 1527. And there were other, less publicly trumpeted, successes. Foxe annotated several of the names on his list of the 1528 Cardinal College detainees with such comments as ‘after that, a papist’, or ‘afterwards fell away, and forsook the truth’. Edmund Rougham, the firebrand Benedictine of Bury, also later returned to conservative orthodoxy.101 But the spirit of rebellion could not always be quenched by the equivalent of a serious chat in the headmaster’s study. And heretics did not always stay still long enough for the authorities to talk them round.
Exile and Return
Richard Bayfield was tried before Tunstall in 1528, but fled overseas before completing his prescribed penance. Two months later he had second thoughts, presented himself to Tunstall, and was ordered to return to his abbey. Shortly afterwards, he again took off for the continent. John Frith, released from confinement on Wolsey’s orders, fled to Antwerp in the latter part of 1528. So did Robert Barnes, after an elaborate ruse involving a suicide note, and a pile of clothes on the river-bank. By 1530 he was in Wittenberg, learning at the feet of Luther. George Joye, fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, was spared prosecution in 1526 through the intervention of Stephen Gardiner, but at the end of 1527, he too hotfooted it to Antwerp.102
There was never such a thing as a hermetically sealed ‘English Reformation’. The ability of suspects to flee abroad is an important reason why the nascent reform movement could not be crushed in its infancy. It was a pragmatic response to threats of persecution: Latimer remarked in a letter of 1531 that if God had not watched over him, ‘the ocean-sea, I think, should have divided my lord of London and me’.103 But the decision for exile was also a symbolic act of commitment and defiance, one underpinned by profound biblical resonances.
The English were an island people. But in an age when maritime transportation was the principal artery of commerce and trade, this facilitated rather than inhibited contact with a wider world of change. London was the main, but not the only, point of contact. A number of thriving ports – Bristol, Southampton and Exeter on the south and west coasts; Newcastle, Hull, Boston, Lynn, Yarmouth and Ipswich on the east – had their own important trade links to the continent. Journeys from the North Sea ports in particular brought merchants and mariners into contact with developments in the Hanseatic towns of northern Germany. Six sailors from Hull served on a Dutch ship loading wheat in Bremen, and remained there for five weeks. On their return in 1528, two of the party, Robert Robinson and Henry Burnett, were charged with heresy. Robinson condemned fasting, auricular confession and the Pope; Burnett was lax in observance of fast days and loose-mouthed about what he saw in Germany: ‘The people did follow Luther’s works, and no masses were said there … the priest and all that were in the church, old and young, would sing after their mother tongue, and there was no sacring [elevation of the host].’ A third member of the party, Roger Danyell, ‘had the gospels in English’.
It is probable these seamen were conventionally orthodox prior to their extended stay in Germany. Burnett denied that any of them purposefully travelled ‘to learn Luther’s works or opinions’, and they came from a part of the country without an attested Lollard tradition. They attended sermons at various places along the Friesian coast, though none of the party seems to have understood German. Perhaps an unpoliced break from fasting and confession led them to resent these tiresome obligations when they returned. Or perhaps they learned their heresy, and acquired a New Testament, from other English sailors.
An experience of witnessing the dismantling of Catholicism overseas must have been relatively common around the end of the 1520s. Lollards meeting in 1530 at the house of John Taylor in Hughenden, Buckinghamshire, were cheered by the testimony of Nicholas Field. He told them he had been ‘beyond the sea in Almany [Germany], and there they used not so to fast, nor to make such holy days’.104
Hughenden was an old haunt of heretics. But the trails of travel and exile led from new lairs of dissent. One was the Inns of Court, where common lawyers received their training, often along with a dose of anticlericalism (see p. 82). The Inns provided a layman’s equivalent to the experience of university – places where ideas were discussed, and bonds of male friendship formed.
Among the young law students succumbing to the lure of ‘the gospel’ was Francis Denham. In the early summer of 1528, Denham was in Paris, where he was apprehended by the English ambassadors, John Taylor and John Clerk, bishop of Bath and Wells. They were after George Constantine, at whose house Denham had been living. Denham was also acquainted with Bilney and Simon Fish, and at their suggestion translated a work by François Lambert, as well as Bugenhagen’s Epistola ad Anglos. Denham’s reading was every bit as eclectic as that of Garrett’s customers in Oxford: in addition to books by Luther and Melanchthon, he had works by Savonarola, and the mystical spiritualist author Caspar Schwenckfeld.
Denham’s travels took in Paris, Antwerp and the English garrison town of Calais – staple for the export of wool, as Antwerp was for cloth. There, a couple of years earlier, he ‘corrupted’ the Staplers’ chaplain, Philip Smith, supplying him with heretical books and advice on how to read scriptures without help of old interpreters. Smith admitted selling books in Calais, and was perhaps involved in exporting them to England. As with Antwerp, the volume and regularity of English trade made Calais an ideal conduit for the importation of prohibited books. The renegade Observant William Roye dedicated his Brefe Dialoge (Strassburg, 1527) to ‘the right noble estates and all other of the town of Calais’.105
Entering the Inns of Court with Denham in 1524 were others sharing his sense of disaffection from the Church. They included Simon Fish, and John Corbett, who, to the embarrassment of Bishop Clerk, formed part of his retinue on the Paris embassy. Another was an older figure, from a humble background, and already established in legal practice: Thomas Cromwell.
It was Fish who caused the biggest splash in the late 1520s. He had, as John Foxe put it, already ‘begun to espy Christ from Antichrist’ when, at Christmas 1526, he agreed to play the part of Cardinal Wolsey in a Gray’s Inn satirical revel. Wolsey took offence. The play’s producer was imprisoned, and Fish fled to Antwerp to commence his career as a book-runner. There, and most likely at Tyndale’s suggestion, he translated The Summe of the Holy Scripture, a 1526 Dutch work representing an uneasy composite of Luther’s ideas and the Swiss theology of Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Guillaume Farel.
Fish also composed a short, racy pamphlet, printed in late 1528 or early 1529. A Supplicacyon for the Beggers was ostensibly a petition to the King from the indigent poor against those false beggars, the mendicant orders. It was knock-about stuff. The tract highlighted the sexual voracity of the friars – ‘they have made a hundred thousand idle whores in your realm’ – and threw out equally implausible claims about huge sums the clergy had been siphoning off to Rome. But the Supplicacyon, which was rapidly translated into German and Latin, was more than a boisterous anticlerical lampoon. At its core was a revolutionary doctrinal claim: ‘that there is no purgatory, but that it is a thing invented by the covetousness of the spirituality’. For those not yet ready for the raw meat of justification by faith, this was a delicate proposition to chew on, and one with momentous political and economic implications.106
Fish’s appeal to the King signalled the growing confidence and boldness of the reformers. So did the manner of the tract’s distribution in 1529. Foxe tells us it was ‘strewed abroad in the streets of London’, and that copies were scattered at a Candlemas Day procession at Westminster in the presence of the King. This was a step beyond the discreet exchange of texts in merchant houses and college chambers – a booming salvo in a now highly public war of propaganda.107
One immediate consequence was the issuing in March 1529 of a royal proclamation reiterating the prohibitions on unlicensed preaching, and on the writing, importation or reading of heretical books.108 Another was that Thomas More again took up his pen, to counter the supplication of imaginary beggars with an equally fictive, and substantially longer, Supplication of Souls. The dead, suffering in purgatory, make a powerful social and theological case for the living to remember them in traditional and hallowed ways. But more earthbound matters were in contention too. Fish resurrected the case of Richard Hunne – a still recent and sore memory among Londoners – suggesting that if he had not commenced his action of praemunire, ‘he had been yet alive, and none heretic at all’. More denied this, as well as Fish’s claim that the bishops compensated a priest, Dr John Allen, for losing a praemunire suit a decade and more earlier. Fish’s strategy was ‘to inflame the King’s highness against the Church’. But Henry was ‘a prince of excellent erudition, virtue and devotion towards the Catholic faith of Christ’. In 1529, Sir Thomas still believed, or at least hoped, this to be true.109
More berated Luther and Bugenhagen in the elegant Ciceronian Latin he used to defend Erasmus from his detractors. But his Supplication of Souls was a treatise in plain English, and it followed hot on the heels of another vernacular work, his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, published in the summer of 1529. As the tide of heresy continued to rise, More was a man with a special commission. In March 1528, Tunstall granted him a licence to read heretical books, and to write against them in the vernacular. The authorities now accepted that simple and uneducated people (simplicibus et idiotis hominibus) needed help to recognize the malice of the heretics. Tunstall flattered his friend in typical humanist style as one who ‘can rival Demosthenes [the most renowned of Athenian orators] in our vernacular language as well as in Latin’. But he spoke no more than the truth in describing More as ‘a most eager champion of Catholic truth in all contests’.110
More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies, the first of half a dozen vernacular polemical works he produced between 1529 and 1533, stages a contest of a particular kind – a series of conversations between the author and a (fictional) character known as ‘the Messenger’, a bright but wilful young man fashionably drawn to the arguments of the reformers, for whom the model may have been More’s son-in-law, William Roper. The Messenger is – of course – confounded. But he is given some good lines, and allowed to speak his mind in the manner Fisher had earlier envisioned. Like Fisher, Longland, Tunstall and other bishops, More saw a distinction between hard-core malevolent heretics – principally Luther and Tyndale – and basically well-meaning people who had been seduced and misled, and could, like Roper, be redirected and redeemed.
Yet optimistic hopes that heretics could peacefully be argued out of their errors were fading by the end of the decade. At the time More wrote his Dialogue, no heretic of the Lutheran stamp had been put to death in England. More indeed scoffed that he had never encountered any ‘but he would foreswear your faith to save his life’. It was a telling contrast with the Catholic Church’s glorious catalogue of martyrs down the ages. But already More saw how this might change. The concluding chapters of the Dialogue carry grim titles: ‘concerning the burning of heretics, and that it is lawful, necessary and well done’; that ‘the clergy doth no wrong in leaving heretics to secular hands’; that ‘princes be bounden to punish heretics, and that fair handling helpeth little with many of them’.111 Blood would soon spill, and with it everything would change.
Factious Labels
Heretics and Catholics were the same sorts of people, and shared many underlying assumptions about truth and meaning. But by 1529 deep and bitter divisions over religion had emerged, and would never subsequently go away. The processes behind this were doctrinal and political, but they were also linguistic. Already in 1521 Erasmus recognized the potential of name-calling for fuelling angry theological sectarianism. In a letter to his English disciple Lord Mountjoy, he swore that neither threats nor promises would ever make him a member of any party but Christ’s. ‘A curse on all who rejoice in these factious labels!’112
The labels, at this stage, did not include the one later to define the era – ‘Protestant’. The word originated from developments in Germany in 1529, when, at the Diet of Speyer, Charles V’s representatives sought to rescind recent concessions to Luther’s followers. Six of the princes and a number of towns issued a defiant ‘protestatio’. As a result they became ‘Protestants’, though it was not a term they ever much used to describe themselves. In England, the word gradually entered parlance in Henry VIII’s reign, but only in reference to events in Germany.113
The first ‘Protestants’ were in fact early sixteenth-century Catholics. Yet this was something their opponents were precisely concerned to deny. Luther was once, so Fisher observed in 1521, a good member of the Catholic Church. But ‘he has cut himself from the Church. We came not out of them and out of his sect, but all they came out of us, and so have divided themselves from us.’114 Heresy, a crime of the will, was at the same time a social sin, an act of withdrawal and separation. It was also, in Fisher’s carefully chosen word, the delusion of a sect – a small band misguidedly following a charismatic but deceitful leader. More than anything else, the new heretics were called ‘Lutherans’ by their opponents. No one, complained Tyndale, might resist the fleshy Church of Antichrist, ‘but must be called a Lutheran’.115 It has come to sound like a neutrally descriptive label. But in the 1520s ‘Lutheran’, a term implying slavish adherence to a human teacher, was intended, and understood, as an insult.
Less clear is what reformers called themselves. Sarcastic references in Catholic sources suggest ‘gospeller’ was current among them.116 So too was ‘brethren’, a scripturally evocative word echoing usage among the Lollards. A clutch of heretics uncovered at Mendlesham in Suffolk in the early 1530s confessed to meeting ‘for a ghostly purpose to be done by us Christian brothers and sisters’. In London the same year the authorities received information from the mercer Thomas Keyle of arrangements ‘made for the augmentation of Christian brethren of his sort’, with each ‘Christian brother’ paying sums into a common fund. But ‘Christian brethren’ were a broad coalition of the like-minded, rather than a specific secret organization. Tyndale, Frith, Joye and others frequently addressed their ‘brethren in Christ’.117
‘Evangelical’ (Greek, evangelion: good news; gospel) was another term reformers used about themselves, and one that, in attempts to avoid anachronism, recent historians have tended to favour. Thomas More observed in 1533 that for some years past this was the name ‘by which they have been as commonly called in all the countries Catholic as by their very own name of heretic’. It was a name taken ‘arrogantly to themselves’. But More observed with satisfaction how Catholics turned this good name ‘to their rebuke’, just as St Augustine ironically christened the heretics of his own day Cathari, pure ones. It was, quite literally, a matter of name and shame. Every resource of language – including constant mocking emphasis on the ‘new learning’ espoused by heretics – was employed to differentiate them from the body of faithful Catholic Christians.118
The evangelicals had their own versions of the strategy. Fisher detected a potential for violence in Luther’s attitude to those ‘whom he calleth so often in derision papistas, papastros, and papanos and papenses’. In 1525, More wrote against Luther on behalf of ‘nos quos tu papistas vocas’ (‘we, whom you call papistas’). The derisory term was soon anglicized as ‘papist’ in the writings of the overseas exiles.119 The word was not – or not yet – used to designate a mass of ordinary, unenlightened, believers. Papists were the active agents of Antichrist: the bishops and their keenest supporters. Yet the emergent vocabulary of religious insult, against its intentions, supplied opportunities for rallying the orthodox. More wanted everyone to be aware that heretics ‘call the Catholic Christian people papists’, and he marvelled at the use of this ‘spiteful name’ against all who believed in the real presence.120
The language of division reflected the splintering of English Christendom, and contributed towards it. Orthodox and evangelical writers alike addressed the ‘Christian reader’ in what looks like a pitch for the broad middle ground. Yet in works like Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, ‘Christian’ itself was becoming a term of distinctiveness: what we are, and you are not. Evangelicals inveighed against ‘unchristian’ bishops, and against the Pope, whom Tyndale called a ‘great idol, the whore of Babylon, Antichrist of Rome’.
Unsurprisingly, much vitriol was directed against the worldly Cardinal Wolsey. But Tyndale was equally severe on the saintly Fisher of Rochester – ‘abominable and shameless, yea and stark mad of pure malice’.121 This was more than generic ‘anticlericalism’. The most vocal of evangelical activists were virtually all lower-ranking clergymen. Their hostility to the authority of the bishops – none of whom, unlike in other parts of Europe, displayed any sympathy for Luther’s agenda – was a personal emancipation as much as it was a theological critique.
Orthodox writers were no less fervent in castigation. The Church was one, Catholic, indivisible, united in faith and practice. By the mirror-logic of hostile stereotyping, heresy was querulous, fissiparous and fragmented. Yet stereotypes usually bear some resemblance to reality. The evangelical movement was never a tightly disciplined body with a uniform cast of mind. In particular, a decisive divide had opened between the central and north German and Scandinavian evangelicals looking to Wittenberg, and the reforming towns of the Rhineland and the Swiss Confederation.
The crux issue was the eucharist – in what sense, if any, Christ’s body was really present at celebrations of the Lord’s Supper. All agreed that Rome’s doctrine of transubstantiation was a tortuous nonsense. But Luther held robustly to the view that Christ meant what he said when he declared over bread and wine at the Last Supper, ‘This is my Body … This is my Blood’. His conviction jarred with the subtle textual readings of Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bucer and others. They discerned the manner of Christ’s presence to be spiritual or symbolic. In October 1529, at the Colloquy of Marburg organized by the Lutheran prince Philip of Hesse, an attempt was made to heal the rift between Luther and Zwingli. But Luther was immoveable, bluntly telling Martin Bucer, ‘You have a different spirit from us.’122
The factious divisions of evangelicals were a favourite theme of Catholic opponents. The opinions of the heretics, Fisher preached in 1526, were repugnant not only to the Church, ‘but with themselves, among themselves’. It was remarkable, observed William Barlow during his Catholic phase, that heretics ‘be divided into so many sundry sects, seeing they pretend to profess the only doctrine of Christ’.123
English evangelicals of the 1520s cannot be neatly parcelled into ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Zwinglian’ camps. But their internal divisions were real enough. Some were matters of personality and style. Tyndale fell out badly with his erstwhile collaborator, William Roye, ‘a man somewhat crafty when he cometh unto new acquaintance’. He dismissed the ‘railing rhymes’ Roye and Barlow produced in their satire against the mass as unworthy of a Christian.
Tyndale’s quarrel with George Joye was more substantial, and showed how much easier it was for evangelicals to tear down the structures of traditional belief than to agree about what to put in their place. Purgatory was a fiction, but what was the fate of souls prior to the Second Coming and Resurrection of the Body? Concerned lest the Last Judgement be seen as a mere rubber stamp, Luther believed souls did not immediately enter heaven, but ‘slept’ in anticipation of ultimate bliss. Tyndale and Frith both leaned to this view, but Joye considered it a dangerous error. To make the point, he produced an unauthorized version of Tyndale’s New Testament, which in some twenty places changed Tyndale’s word ‘resurrection’ to ‘the life to come’, or ‘the very life’. An unedifying consequence was a new preface in Tyndale’s edition of 1534, lambasting Joye for dishonesty, and accusing him of causing ‘no small number’ of people to deny the physical resurrection of the body.124
Only so much dirty linen could safely be washed in public. As John Frith lay in prison in London, Tyndale advised him: ‘of the presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament, meddle as little as you can, that there appear no division among us’. Barnes, he warned, ‘will be hot against you’. Robert Barnes was a faithful disciple of Luther on this issue. Tyndale himself was sceptical of a real physical presence; Thomas More considered, rightly, that in this he was ‘a much more heretic than Luther is himself’. But, with an eye to controversies in Germany, Tyndale’s instinct was for ‘the presence to be an indifferent thing till the matter might be reasoned in peace’.125
There is little to suggest that English evangelicals collectively adhered to a ‘Lutheran’ view of the sacrament, till, in some tectonic shifting of theological plates, a ‘Reformed’ understanding superseded it. Trial evidence reveals that from the outset a radical disbelief in real physical presence was common, even among people apparently unconnected to Lollardy. The strain of thinking that opponents derisively termed ‘sacramentarian’ ran through works like Roye’s Brief Dialogue and Joye’s Supper of the Lord.
In spite of Tyndale’s warning, Frith composed a tract in prison in 1532, committing himself to a spiritual and symbolic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper. Following Zwingli, he used the analogy of the eucharist as a wedding ring, given to a bride (the Church) as a token of remembrance by an absent bridegroom (Christ). It was a fundamental rejection of the incarnational instincts of medieval Catholic culture, its sense of physical substances imbued with the presence of the divine. As Germaine Gardiner riposted, ‘If this be idolatry, all Christian men these many hundred years have committed idolatry.’126
Celebration of the eucharist in fidelity to Jesus’ command was the ritual core of Christianity. For Catholics, it was a moment of transcendent communication with a really present Lord. And for Christians of all kinds it was increasingly to become a crucial symbol of individual faith, and of wider group identity. Frith could agree with Tyndale that belief or disbelief in bodily presence ‘is none article of our faith necessary to salvation’ – a reflection of the extent to which evangelicals, in England and elsewhere, were failing to reach consensus.127 Yet the correct interpretation of Christ’s life-giving words, ‘this is my body’, was – quite literally – a burning issue. The campaign against heresy was about to take a decidedly more violent direction. At the very moment it did so, it was knocked out of balance by an unexpected turn of events. Heresy had found its way into the court, and was flirting with the mind of the King.