1536 What is the most read work of English literature over the fifteen centuries we’ve had such a thing as English literature? The answer will be found in the drawer alongside every hotel and motel bed in the US – the authorised, or King James version of the Holy Bible, published in the seventh year of his reign (1611).
It may have been authorised by the monarch, via some five committees and 50 scholars (most Oxbridge-based), but the authorship of central sections, as any modern copyright court would adjudicate, belongs to William Tyndale, 80 years earlier. Eighty per cent of the ‘King James’ New Testament, it is estimated, is verbally unaltered from Tyndale’s earlier translation. To stretch a point, we could entitle him the most read author in English literary history.
Who was he? His dates, as best we can determine his birth, are 1494–1536. His death, which was very painful and very public, we know about. Little is known of Tyndale’s early life: even his surname is not certain. He sometimes appears in documents as ‘Hichens’. But it is known that Tyndale/Hichens was a student at Oxford. On graduation in 1512, he enrolled to do what we would call research, or advanced study, into theology. He was evidently a brilliant linguist.
He went on to become a tutor in a noble household, but young Tyndale was soon in trouble for heresy. He was the most pugnacious of clerics. Early on, he developed two very dangerous aspirations: (1) to defy Rome, and (2) to translate the scriptures into English. His aim, as he put it, was that ‘even the ploughmen of England’ should know the scriptures: and know them as well as they knew their plough handles.
It was a perilous doctrine, and he decided to leave England for Germany in the 1520s, where he may have met Martin Luther. Tyndale was on the Continent when Luther’s own vernacular Bible was published. Over the years, Tyndale himself worked on his great translation, abroad.
He fell out with Henry VIII on the issue of the king’s flagrantly multiple divorces. He was captured in Belgium, tried for heresy, strangled and burned at the stake in Brussels on the above date. His final words reportedly were: ‘O Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.’