On 30 June 1513, the young king, Henry VIII, arrived in Calais determined to reassert his title as "King of England and France."
His army, together with the flamboyant and hugely expensive royal paraphernalia that accompanied it, spent three months achieving little before returning home to a plague-ridden England, with measles for the King and a miscarriage for Queen Catherine.
In that year William Tyndale, born in Gloucestershire from a modest family, was working towards his Masters’ degree at Oxford which he was awarded two years later, the year of his ordination. Since he must be 24 years of age before ordination, this would bring his birth to 1491 - coincidentally, the same birth-year as the King himself.
A changing world
It was a good time to be at university, because the world was changing. Pioneer mariners like Columbus, Magellan and Vasgo da Gama were expanding the frontiers of navigation, but more significantly, the "Renaissance," a French word meaning rebirth, had arrived. Every area of life was changing: art, literature, invention and political science progressed with men like Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and Machiavelli - all contemporaries of Tyndale. Men believed that by knowledge we could vastly improve our lot. It was a kind of Christian humanism and had an immense effect on the minds of scholars. The university was alive with an air of excitement and discovery. The Church of Rome could not remain unchallenged.
In 1519 Tyndale switched to Cambridge University, possibly because the great Dutch theologian, Desiderius Erasmus, had been lecturing there and the text of his Greek New Testament was already circulating. Students were eager to learn the language and study the original text of the New Testament.
However, there was one significant barrier: the Roman Catholic Church in England was implacably opposed to any suggestion of a Bible in English.
An attack on the Bible
By the Constitutions of Oxford in 1409, and with the threat of excommunication and worse, no one was allowed to criticise the doctrine or practice of the church or its representatives and, above all, no one should translate, own or read any portion of the Bible in English without a licence from his bishop.
This aggressive attack on the Bible exceeded anything found on the continent of Europe. All things of importance were in Latin, which included church services, and all things in royal and noble society were in French; few of the commoners could even read English, and it was assumed that even if they could, they would never understand the Bible. Besides, the church told everyone what to believe.
However, in the two great universities, students were learning Greek and discussing the New Testament for the first time. The minds of many were changing, and the Reformation that began more than a century earlier - with the hand-copied Bibles of John Wycliffe and his team, translated from the fourth century Latin text of Jerome - was bursting into full flower. The decisive watchwords of the Reformation: "sola gracia, sola fide, sola scriptura" ("grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone") were taken up by scores of young scholars, not least at Cardinal College (now Christ Church) - Cardinal Thomas Wolsey's pride and joy. Wolsey was vehemently opposed to Reform.
Among young scholars, none was more fired with a decisive purpose than William Tyndale. During his subsequent two years at Little Sodbury manor in Gloucestershire tutoring the two young sons of Sir John and Lady Walsh, both favourable to Reform, Tyndale began his life’s work. He determined that if God spared him, he would ensure that even the ploughboy would have the Bible in his own language.
The Cologne Fragment 1525
However, Tyndale’s vain hope for a place on the staff of Tunstall, the bishop of London, meant that he could never complete his translation in England, least of all print it. Those Oxford Constitutions made that impossible. Therefore, in 1525 William Tyndale slipped across to the Continent, never to see his homeland again. From hereon neither the King’s agents nor Tyndale’s biographers could always be sure where he was: Hamburg, Wittenburg, Cologne, Worms, Antwerp? William Tyndale was God’s Outlaw.
By the spring of 1525 we know he was in Cologne, where his English New Testament was being printed by Peter Quentel. It had reached somewhere in Mark’s Gospel when the work was discovered, and Tyndale gathered what sheets he could and fled up the Rhine to Worms. Here, he was able to send out a few pages of the New Testament - what is now known as the Cologne Fragment. It contained only 31 pages from Tyndale’s Prologue to half way through Matthew 22. There are 90 marginal notes and almost all are explanations of the text. Did Tyndale have in mind a Bible and commentary all in one? This fragment was the first ever printed text from the Bible in English.
The following year in Worms, Tyndale had time to revise his text and decide on a much smaller volume, by leaving out those helpful marginal notes. The complete New Testament was smuggled into his home country by the German merchants, many of whom were supporters of Martin Luther’s evangelical theology. Their trading centre alongside the Thames is now the site of Canon Street Station.
The 1526 Worms edition was the first complete printed New Testament in English, translated from the Greek text and compiled by Erasmus. It is reliably reported that the first print run was around 6,000 copies. However, in an age before copyright laws, there were soon pirate editions, and some printers published the same edition simultaneously in more than one city. By the end of 1526, Christopher van Endhoven was turning out his own, even smaller, edition from his print shop in Antwerp, though for his pains he was arrested and his books and press destroyed.
A difficult reception
The church authorities were not pleased. Bishop Tunstall of London wrote to his archdeacons complaining of "the holy Gospel of God" in the common tongue, which was intermingled with "certain articles of heretical depravity and pernicious erroneous opinions, pestilent, scandalous, and seductive of simple minds." Together with Archbishop Wareham, he made a bonfire outside St Paul’s Cathedral of all copies they could find or buy. Even Cardinal Campeggio had heard in Rome of the "sacred codex of the Bible, perverted in the vernacular tongue."
Henry himself declared: "We... with the deliberate advice of Thomas Lord Cardinal and other reverend fathers of the spirituality, have determined the said and untrue translations to be burned, with further sharp correction and punishment against the keepers and readers of the same."
In short, both "God, and we" forbade it. Meanwhile Cardinal Wolsey ordered a search of his new Cardinal College and threw many young students into the fish cellars below the college, where three died in the foul conditions.
Tyndale also saw a number of 'tracts' (books) through the press, which were so helpful to encourage the young Reformers in England. The Parable of the Wicked Mammon is an exposition of the parable of the unjust steward in Luke 16 and a clear statement of justification by faith alone. The Obedience of a Christian Man arrived sometime in October 1528. It began with a statement of the value of Scripture and the plea that it should be available in the mother tongue. Scripture flows freely through his text and barely a page passes without a reference from the Bible. Tyndale marshalled strong reasons why the whole Bible should be available in English. It firmly made the point that Christians are peaceable and obedient to those in authority always providing they can be obedient to God’s word.
From the merchants by the Thames, the books and Bibles, both Tyndale’s and Luther’s were passed to the couriers across England. At All Hallows in London, Robert Forman was busy with the illicit trade and, together with his curate Thomas Garrett, by February 1526 they had moved 350 Bibles and books to Oxford before Garrett’s arrest.
The hunt was on for Tyndale. At various times there were five agents scouring the Low Countries for this elusive outlaw. Meanwhile Tyndale had begun translating the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) from the Hebrew, to which he added a Prologue showing the use of the Scripture; this was smuggled into England in 1530. In the same year The Practice of Prelates and A Pathway into the Holy Scripture arrived. The Prophet Jonah and The Exposition of the first Epistle of St John followed a year later. He was also revising his New Testament translation which arrived in 1534.
The bishops continued to burn Bibles and books - and some of the young Reformers - while the nation continued avidly to read the Bible and the new Christian literature. Wherever someone could read, a Bible would be found and a cluster of folks to hear it.
Betrayed in a safe house
When Tyndale finally stayed with Thomas and Anna Poyntz at the English House in Antwerp, he would appear to be safe. However, it was here that a despicable character, Henry Phillips, won the confidence of the English merchants and set a trap for the outlaw. Arrested in the narrow alleys of the city, Tyndale was taken to the dungeons of the Castle of Vilvoorde in Belgium where he remained for 500 days before trial. Inevitably, he was found guilty of the heresy of justification by faith alone and a denial of purgatory, praying to Mary and the saints, and the Roman doctrine of the mass. He was condemned to death. On 6 September 1536 in the market square at Vilvoorde, William Tyndale was first strangled before his body was burned to ashes.
His dying prayer at the stake: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes" was magnificently answered.
In 1537, an edition of Coverdale’s Bible reached England dedicated to Henry VIII. By now the King had resolved his marriage problem by declaring himself the supreme head of the church in England, divorcing Catherine of Aragon, marrying (and executing) Anne Boleyn, and had changed his mind about the Bible. In the same year, Matthew’s Bible arrived from Antwerp: "Set forth with the Kinges most gracyous lycense."
On 5 September 1538, Henry ordered a Bible to be placed in every parish church. All of them contained Tyndale’s New Testament and as much of the Old as he had completed from the Hebrew. This held true for the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the King James version of 1611.
The Bible in English set Britain free from the domination of the Church of Rome and made it "Protestant and Reformed." Without the Bible there would have been no Reformation in England, and without Tyndale there would have been no English Bible.
