Tyndale challenged him on detail, More’s method was to bluster. And he descended into a sort of madness. In his defence of Roman Catholicism, he claimed, for instance, that, as some miracles had it, the heads of saints could be buried in two places.
More was fighting for the rights of the Roman Catholic position to be infallible and to be whatever it decided it wanted to be. He saw it as sanctified by time and service. Any change, he thought, would inevitably destroy the sacrament of Holy Truth, the papacy and the monarchy. Everything must be accepted as it had been. To dislodge one pebble would be to set off the avalanche.
The vitriol against Tyndale’s translation and the burning and murdering of anyone offering the slightest disagreement to the Old Church’s view show what was at stake. Power was to be taken from those who had held it for so long that they believed that it belonged to them by right. Their authority had been exercised for so many centuries that the prospect of its being diminished in any way was felt to be fatal. They wanted the populace to be subservient, silent and grateful. Anything else was unacceptable. Tyndale’s print-popular New Testament had breached the fortifications of a privilege so deeply founded in the past that it seemed God-given and unchallengeable. It was not to be tolerated.
While this battle of the pamphlets was going on and Tyndale was being harried from town to town in Europe, evading both the King’s spies and the agents of the Holy Roman Emperor, he began to translate the Old Testament. To do this he found a way to learn Hebrew, a language in which he rejoiced. ‘Where did Tyndale learn Hebrew?’ asks David Daniell in his biography. ‘The straightforward answer is that we do not know. Because so little Hebrew was known in England in the 1520s, he must have learnt it somewhere on the Continent, where Hebrew studies were gathering pace.’
He would have had access to a Hebrew grammar and a dictionary and ‘a printed Hebrew text of scripture would not have been too hard to come by from a German bookseller.’ And we know he was ‘unusually skilled with languages’. Tyndale saw a close affinity between Hebrew and the English form. ‘The manner of speaking in both is one,’ he wrote, ‘so that in a thousand places there needs not but to translate it into the English, word for word.’ He found similarities with Anglo-Saxon and used Hebraic contractions and words so boldly they are now embedded in English.
To the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known as the Pentateuch or the Torah, he gave provocative marginal notes when he shipped them to England. Many of them directly criticised the Pope. Despite a shipwreck on the way from Antwerp to Hamburg in which he lost his whole manuscript and his reference books, he reconstructed the work in a few months, assisted by Miles Coverdale, a biblical scholar. His work rate was as prodigious as his erudition. References are made again and again to his working day and night. The project was always urgent, time always pressing him on.
In 1533, Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn, who was six months’ pregnant. Thomas Cranmer, who arranged the marriage, became Archbishop of Canterbury and soon afterwards Thomas Cromwell became Chancellor. Wolsey, having failed to secure the divorce, was discarded. The King, now Supreme Ruler, wanted an English Bible for his new non-papist Church. All finally ought to have been ripe for Tyndale. But Miles Coverdale’s version of 1539 was chosen. Tyndale was still the enemy.
We are told that Thomas Cromwell put out one or two feelers to Antwerp to help Tyndale. We know there were attempts to persuade him to return to England but, wisely, he suspected it to be an invitation to his trial and execution. He refused. But in these encounters we have a glimpse of the man, worn away, indigent, devoted to good works when not at his books. John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, wrote of him: ‘He was a man without any spot or blemish of rancour or violence, full of mercy and compassion, so that no man living was able to reprove him of any sin or crime.’
Tyndale found what he thought of as safe lodgings in Antwerp and it was there, in 1535, that the assassins finally caught him. One of them, the leader, Henry Phillips, was an Oxford man, which might have helped him into an acquaintanceship in which Tyndale trusted. Phillips led him to ambush, and fingered Tyndale, who was seized by the officers of the Holy Roman Emperor. There was no fight. They ‘pitied to see his simplicity’.
They took him to Vilvoorde Castle and he was put in a dungeon for seventeen months. English residents in the city tried but failed to secure his release.
In the first winter, he wrote a letter to the prison governor. He asked that some things could be fetched from his belongings in his lodgings.
A warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from the cold and have a cough . . . a warmer coat also for what I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too with which to patch my leggings and a woollen shirt . . . for my clothes are all worn out . . . And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening for it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew bible, grammar and dictionary, that I may continue with my work.
It seems the books at least were brought to Vilvoorde and he continued to work on the Old Testament. He was condemned officially for his belief in justification by faith. He had written that ‘the New Testament is an everlasting covenant made unto the children of God through faith in Christ and upon the deservings of Christ . . . there is an inward justification of a man before God which is by faith alone.’
He was found guilty of heresy and on 6 October 1536 tied to the stake and strangled by the hangman. His last words were: ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!’ and then he was ‘with fire consumed’.
There will be space further to discuss his language and its influence. Here enough to say that from his New Testament and his core work on the Old came the building blocks, the character and the beauty of the King James Bible. Out of his dedication and genius came words which still line our speech and writing and thoughts today. In the history of the King James Bible there were others before and after him. But many are like myself and view William Tyndale’s life and work as the founding and empowering sacrifice.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE KING JAMES VERSION IS COMMISSIONED
When Elizabeth I lay on her deathbed in March 1603, she was surrounded by some very apprehensive men. Who was to succeed her? She had been the Pope’s prime official target for assassination; there had been rebellions within her own country; a great fleet, the Spanish Armada, had set out from a Catholic country, Spain, immeasurably more powerful than her own. Its aim was to invade her England and destroy her rule. But it failed. Over the years she had managed to navigate her way through the poisonous domestic conspiracies of Catholics and the resentments of Presbyterians.
Elizabeth I was probably the best educated person to sit on the throne of England. She had seen the greatest flowering of artistic, entrepreneurial and intellectual genius in her country’s history. And her island realm had begun to call itself an empire.
She had been a monarch for more than forty years. Now, clearly at the end of her days, she had still not announced her successor. It was a time of murderous politics, when killing was often the preferred option for succession to a crown and paid assassins slunk around Europe like plague rats. These her last days, 22 March and 23 March in 1603, were a dangerous time for her courtiers as they watched the dying of a monarch, married to her country as she had said. But even now it seemed that she would not declare her successor.
We are told that ‘her face became haggard and her frame shrank almost to a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to change her dresses for a week. A strange melancholy settled down upon her. Gradually her mind gave way . . . food and rest became alike distasteful. She sat day and night propped up with pillows on a stool, her finger on her lips, her eyes
