It was brilliant and lively propaganda. The Church had betrayed its roots and ceased to be the true Church of Christ, he said, at the time of Pepin, the eighth-century king of the Franks and father of Charlemagne. The popes used the Carolingian emperors to lift themselves from being mere bishops of Rome; then they separated the clergy from the laity, until they finally used canon law and their monopoly of the scriptures to become universal tyrants.
He compared the way ‘oure holy father cam up’ with the ‘ensample of an ivytree: first it springeth out of the erth and then awhyle crepeth alonge by the grounde till it finds a great tree: then it joyneth itself beneth alow unto the bodye of the tre and crepeth upp a litle and litle fayre and softlyer. And at the beninninge while it is yet thyn and small that the burden is not perceaved, it seemeth gloriouse to garnysh the tre in the wyntre and to bere of the tempestes of the wether.’ But then the ‘foule stinckinge yvye waxeth mightye in the stompe of the tre and becomes a nest for al unclene birdes and for blinde oules which hauke in the darke and dare not come at the lyghte.’
This was how the pope crept up on kings and emperors, and fastened his roots in their hearts, and climbed above them; this was how the pope had ‘perverted the ordre of the worlde’ and ‘put downe ye kingdom of christ and set up ye kingdome of the devell
whose vicare he is’. This evil tradition was being continued in England by ‘Wolfsee’. All bishops were vain and treacherous to their princes, being ‘the pope’s creatures’. Henry had been young and inexperienced when he came to the throne, and Wolsey, ‘expert and exercised in the course of the world’, had surrounded himself with placemen whose role was not to serve the king but ‘to water whatsoever the cardinal had planted’.
When he moved on to day-to-day politics, however, Tyndale was as inept as ever. More referred to the ‘frantic drifts … devised of his own imagination’ that appeared in
Prelates
. This was not the result of distance, for a constant stream of people arrived in Antwerp from London, and kept the English expatriates up to date with events. Tyndale’s views were coloured by his own naivety. He did not believe that Wolsey had been dismissed, for example, nor that papal influence in England was being broken. He was convinced that Wolsey had retired to his diocese at York merely as a ploy, and that More was a stopgap chancellor who was filling the office until the cardinal made his return, more powerful than ever.
This might be nonsense – ‘Tyndale,’ More wrote mockingly of
Prelates
, ‘has weened to have made a special show of his high worldly wit, and that men should have seen therein that there was nothing done among princes, but that he was fully advertised of all the secrets …’ – but most of it was harmless. The book had a sub-heading, however:
Whether the King’s grace may be separated from his queen because she was his brother’s wife
. Tyndale would not leave this question be. The divorce was damaging his enemies in fine style without any need for him to keep poking his nose into the king’s great matter. It had ruined Wolsey, now a dying man, and it was poisoning relations between Clement VII and Henry. Campeggio had not returned to England – he was tactless enough to remind Henry of his existence by writing to him in June from Augsburg to congratulate him on the bonfire of Tyndale’s books at
St Paul’s Cross – and Rome was further than ever from settling the marriage in the king’s favour.
The great universities of the Continent as well as England were debating the validity of the marriage. More had been made High Steward of Oxford in 1524, and of Cambridge the following year, but he wisely avoided taking part in the debate. The regents of the English universities were browbeaten into agreeing that God’s law forbade a man to marry his brother’s widow. Francis I, looking for alliance with England, coaxed the Sorbonne into making the same finding. Charles V ensured that the Spanish divines favoured his aunt’s cause. The German Lutherans agreed that the marriage might be invalid, but said that it had been made, and so should stand. Sir Gregory de Casalis, Henry’s agent in northern Italy, attempted to bribe the universities of Florence and Milan to back the king, with some success. In July 1530 the bishops, abbots and peers of the House of Lords signed a petition to the pope, asking him to give judgement in the king’s favour. The chancellor did not sign the document.
Where More was too canny to venture, Tyndale felt compelled to plunge in. ‘I could not but declare my mind,’ he wrote, ‘to discharge my conscience withal.’ He said that ‘neither can the king’s grace or any other man of right be discontent with me’, for even ‘so vile a wretch’ as himself had the right to see how a fellow Christian’s conduct compared with God’s law. The king did not see it like that, of course, as a man less uncompromising than Tyndale, and blessed with greater insight into the deviousness of human nature, must have realised. Henry was a ruler, whose power over his fellow mortals was summed up in the adage
Indignatio principis mors est
, ‘the prince’s wrath means death’. Tyndale was a mere heretic in exile.
All was not lost, nevertheless, provided that Tyndale now came down on the side of the lovers. He had every reason to do so. Anne Boleyn continued to support reformers through Dr Butts, the
royal physician. She rewarded the Cambridge theologian Hugh Latimer for his support by making him one of her chaplains, and encouraging his elevation to the see of Worcester. She urged her household staff to read and discuss the scriptures, and asked her chaplains to teach her servants ‘above all things to embrace the wholesome doctrine and infallible knowledge of Christ’s gospel’. An admirer wrote to her at New Year 1530 that he had seen her at Lent ‘reading the salutary epistles of St Paul, in which are contained the whole manner and rule of a good life’. The epistles were the mark of the evangelical.
With staggering simple-mindedness, however, Tyndale judged the matter solely by the Bible. He said that he ‘did my diligence a long season’ to find the reasons that the English bishops and universities supported the divorce, but ‘I could not find them’. He had tried as best he could, he wrote in
Prelates
, but there was ‘no lawful excuse … by any scripture that I ever read’. He had even consulted ‘divers learned men of the matter’, presumably among the other exiled priests in Antwerp, and that proved equally fruitless. There was no scriptural necessity for the annulment and common morality was against it. Having laid down that Henry must stay with Catherine, Tyndale then castigated the king for his sharp criticisms of Luther’s marriage to the former nun. He advised Henry to fear lest God, angered by his wilful blindness, ‘tangle his grace with matrimony (beside the destruction of the realm that is to follow) much more dishonourable than his Grace thinketh Martin’s shameful’.
Tyndale expected Henry to return to Catherine, having seen the errors of his ways. But Henry was a boar in rut, lusting after Anne Boleyn more than ever – the Venetian ambassador was reporting that he was kissing her openly and ‘treating her in public as if she were his wife’, while the king himself wrote of ‘wishing myself (specially an evening) in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty ducks [breasts] I trust shortly to kiss’ – and his response was to want Tyndale dead. Tyndale was also at pains to insult his natural allies,
the reforming clergy who favoured the divorce. ‘Let them remembre the wronge they have done to the quene,’ he wrote furiously, ‘and what frute they have cost him that neuer coude come to the right birth for sorow which she sofred thorow their false meanes.’ It is touching that Tyndale should blame them for Catherine’s failure to achieve the ‘right birth’ of a son and heir. It says much for his common humanity, and nothing for his political common sense.
More was delighted. The first copies of
Prelates
were smuggled in the early autumn and they were snapped up eagerly. The Milanese ambassador, who gave the author’s name as ‘Tindaro’, a man ‘
magnae doctrinae
’, of great learning, reported that three thousand copies were in circulation in England. Posters were displayed across London denouncing the book. The bishop of London arrested Tyndale’s brother John, a merchant called Thomas Patmore, and a young man living near London Bridge, and handed them to More. The chancellor had them taken before him in the Star Chamber. They were charged with ‘receiving of Tyndale’s testaments and divers other books, and delivering and scattering the same’ throughout London; in addition, John Tyndale was accused of sending five marks to his brother beyond the sea, and for receiving and keeping his letters. They pleaded guilty, and were sent to the Counter, a prison in Cheapside, before being paraded through the city the following market day.
The Venetian ambassador watched as they were led on horses, facing the tail, with pasteboard mitres on their heads, bearing an inscription ‘
Peccasse Contra Mandata Regis
’, ‘We have sinned against the mandate of the King’, and copies of the offending books suspended from their necks; when they had completed their circuit of the thoroughfares, they cast the books into a great fire in Cheapside. This did William Tyndale’s reputation nothing but good, of course. ‘For one who spoke about these matters before,’ the imperial ambassador, Chapuys, told his master, ‘there are now a thousand who discourse of them freely and without fear.’
W
ithin a few weeks, Chapuys had startling news to report. The king, fearing that Tyndale would write ‘still more boldly against him’ and ‘hoping to make him retract what he has already said’ against the annulment, had ‘offered him several good appointments and a seat in his Council if he will come over’. Chapuys claimed that a letter had already been sent inviting Tyndale to return. The royal proclamation and the placards condemning
Prelates
were removed.
The imperial ambassador exaggerated when he spoke of a government post being on offer. In the essentials, however, he was right. Peace feelers were indeed being put out to Antwerp by the end of 1530.
No doubt Anne Boleyn played her part in the royal change of heart. Her reforming instincts remained sharp and her frustrations with the papacy over the annulment continued. She was angry that Henry had relented towards Wolsey early in the year, granting him a formal pardon and confirming him in his archbishopric of York, so that he remained the second most important churchman in the realm. Anne rightly suspected that Wolsey was intriguing against her over the summer and autumn of 1530.
Charles V was still active on his aunt’s behalf, and in July Wolsey had supported him when he had called on the pope to order Henry to estrange himself from Anne Boleyn. The following month, Wolsey wrote to Clement again to ask why the annulment decision was delayed, and the queen’s cause not pursued with more vigour.
Having wind of this, Anne conspired with the duke of Norfolk, her uncle, to kill off the cardinal. Wolsey’s physician was bribed to say that his patient was urging the pope to excommunicate Henry and to place the country under interdiction. These were extreme measures – the normal services and sacraments were forbidden in countries under interdict, though priests not personally responsible for the dispute could continue to perform rites in a low voice and in private behind closed doors – and the physician claimed that Wolsey was hoping to provoke an uprising in favour of the queen and himself.
Henry believed his lover, and on 1 November a warrant was made out for the cardinal’s arrest. Henry Percy, Anne’s old suitor who had now succeeded to the earldom of Northumberland, rode to the episcopal palace at Cawood in Yorkshire to charge Wolsey with high treason. The prisoner was already a sick man and he collapsed as he was being taken south to London. His escort, Sir William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, took him to Leicester Abbey. ‘Sir, I tarry but the will and pleasure of God, to render Him my simple soul into His divine hands,’ the cardinal said as he was helped to his deathbed. He made a final statement. ‘Well, well, Master Kingston,’ he said. ‘I see the matter against me, how it is framed. But if I had served God as diligently as I have the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs. Howbeit this is the just reward that I must receive for my worldly diligence and pains that I have had to do him service, only to satisfy his vain pleasures, not regarding my godly duty …’ He spoke of the divorce: ‘I assure you I have often kneeled before [the king] in his
privy chamber on my knees the space of an hour or two to persuade him from his will and appetite [for Anne Boleyn]; but I could never bring to pass to dissuade him thereto …’ He remembered Tyndale and the little band of heretics. He bade Kingston to ask the king ‘that he have a vigilant eye to depress this new perverse sect of the Lutherans, that it do not increase within his dominions through his negligence’.
At that, he died. Kingston sent an express messenger to inform the king. As a sign of the dangerous times, Kingston thought it best that the mayor of Leicester and other local worthies should be summoned ‘for to see him personally dead, in avoiding of false rumours that might hap to say that he was not dead but still living’. Wolsey, to general astonishment, was found to be wearing a hair shirt beneath his ordinary shirt of fine Holland linen. His corpse was laid out with all things ‘appurtenant to his profession’ – mitre, crosier, ring, pallium and vestments. He was kept all day in his coffin ‘open and barefaced that all men might see him lie there dead without feigning’. That night, the canons sang dirges and devout orisons, with torches in their hands and wax tapers burning around the bier. At 4.00 a.m., they sang mass and interred the body. By 6 a.m., all ‘ceremonies that to such a person was decent and convenient’ were completed.
Anne Boleyn was delighted at Wolsey’s death. She staged a masque for the court called ‘The Going to Hell of Cardinal Wolsey’. Her self-confidence grew; Chapuys noted that she ‘is becoming more arrogant every day, using words in authority towards the king of which he has several times complained … saying that she was not like the Queen who never in her life used ill words to him’. She told one of Catherine’s ladies that ‘she wished all Spaniards were in the sea’ and boasted that she cared not a fig for the queen and ‘would rather see her hang than acknowledge her as her mistress’.