Henry Phillips, last seen in Vienna in 1542, disappeared from history without revealing his employer’s identity. There is no hard evidence to prove the involvement of More – a ‘not proven’ verdict is inevitable – but the background points inexorably at More and at no other. He had an overwhelming motive: the destruction of heretics was the grand obsession of his life, and he placed Tyndale at the head of the dark galaxy of the Antichrist. He had the skills, in selecting and running double agents; he believed that the foulest methods were fair in heretic hunting, writing that safe conducts need not be honoured in such cases; he approved of the stake, the fate now awaiting Tyndale, fretting only that it was not used enough. His fall from office, and his imprisonment, encouraged rather than diminished his hatred of heresy.
And, even from the Tower, he had the opportunity. Phillips received his commission and his money during the autumn of 1534, probably in October or November. By 21 December, he had
already arrived in the Low Countries and was matriculating at Louvain. More was under very loose guard in the Tower at the time the commission was made. The Tower itself was part royal palace as well as prison; Anne Boleyn had spent the night before her coronation in one of its luxurious apartments, and among the ‘liberties’ of the Tower that More was able to enjoy was the royal menagerie, with its exotic birds and lions. He had his own man-servant and the use of a maid. His friend Antonio Bonvisi had contacts in Antwerp and the Low Countries. He was able to write freely and to smuggle lengthy manuscripts out of the Tower.
Such treatment was not exceptional. More had himself commented with dismay that John Frith was released from the Tower at Christmas 1532 as a favour by the bishop of Winchester; claims were also made, as we have seen, that the underkeeper at the Tower – Thomas Phelips or Philips – had ‘lett hym [Frith] go at liberty in the nyght’ to visit John Petite and other evangelicals. When Petite was himself in the Tower, the same underkeeper had allowed him to remove a board in his cell to enable him to join Bilney for supper in the cell above. Frith had received letters, from Tyndale among others, and he was able to write his treatise on the sacraments and other works. The conditions were not ideal, but his work,
The Bulwark against Rastel
, was lucid and compelling enough to convert his critic John Rastell, the brother-in-law of Thomas More.
The kindly man at the Tower seems to be the Thomas Philips whom More had interrogated at Chelsea and committed to the Tower while he was still chancellor. In his
Chronicle
of 1548, Edward Hall said that this Philips, also called Thomas, had himself been a prisoner in the Tower before – acting as some sort of guard – he had procured an English Bible for Sir Nicholas Carew to read for solace in the Tower in the days before Carew was beheaded for treason in 1539. Hall also mentioned that Philips had been ‘sore troubled’ by More. It would not have been unusual
for Philips being kept in the Tower for a lengthy period after More sent him there in 1529 before being formally convicted, and being given a privileged position as a staff helper, and retaining it after acquittal. The Tower was far from a paradigm of high security; it had its own working arrangements, perks and privileges.
More also had privileges. He was free to move in the Tower grounds and to receive letters and visitors. It was only at the end of 1534, after Harry Phillips had arrived in Louvain, that More wrote to his daughter that he was being held in ‘close keping’ because of ‘some newe causeless suspicion’ and ‘some secret sinister informacion’. He was allowed no visitors for some time, and barred from attending mass in the chapels of the Tower.
We do not know what this ‘causeless suspicion’ was. The strict regimen did not last very long, however, because More was soon enough writing to Fisher. It was a serious matter indeed for the authorities to have the two most high-profile prisoners in the kingdom writing to each other, with all the opportunity it gave them for collusion. They did so, however; and it is clear that More was not only in the frame of mind to commission Tyndale’s destruction, but also that the physical circumstances of his imprisonment in the Tower did not prevent him from doing so.
If God was More’s stated motive for wishing Tyndale harm, Phillips’s was money. More had that, too; stories that his family were reduced to burning bracken to stay warm after his fall are fable.
More had been one of the best paid men in the country for many years. In 1520, he was paid £173 6s 8d as under-treasurer, the second highest salary in the treasury. He more than doubled this with other grants and sinecures. He was granted a licence to export a thousand woollen cloths, which he was able to sell on to a merchant. He received a pension from the king of France, and he was paid a retainer by the earl of Northumberland. He was handsomely paid for commercial work. As a young lawyer, he had
worked for the city livery companies, and he continued to work for the Mercers. He was also paid for arranging the protection of merchant ships sailing from the Low Countries.
As Speaker of parliament, he had received a bonus doubling his £100 a year salary, and he picked up a lucrative sinecure as collector of the parliamentary subsidy in Middlesex. He speculated in property. In 1523 he paid £150 for Crosby Place in Bishopsgate Street in London, a ‘very large and beautiful’ building, selling it on eight months later for £200. In 1524, he bought seven acres of land in Chelsea for £30, and seven and a half acres in Kensington. He also bought the guardianships of two rich landowning lunatics.
The bishops wished to reward him for his work in parliament on behalf of the clergy in 1532. His son-in-law, William Roper, wrote that ‘they agreed together and concluded upon a sum of four or five thousand pounds at the least, to my remembrance, for his pains to recompense him’. He was able to refuse this, telling Tunstall that ‘I wolde rather have caste theyre money into the Temys thenne take yt’. More said later that ‘loke I for my thanke of god that is thyr better, and for whose sake I take the labour and not for theyres’. He knew that Tyndale had accused him of moneylust, and he wanted to deny it and show himself as a simple soul who ‘carried the Crosse in procession in his parish Churche at Chelsey’.
His circumstances were reduced after his resignation but he was still a rich man. He retained the income of a king’s counsellor until 1534, together with estates in Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire and Kent. His wife Alice complained that she would be ‘utterlye undone’ if his ‘landes and tenementis’ were confiscated. She remained a wealthy woman in her own right, however; on the death of her first husband, John Middleton, a wealthy silk merchant, she had inherited estates in Essex and Yorkshire. It seems that the family had spirited valuable ‘moveable goodes’ away from Chelsea before the arrest.
More thus had motive, money and – despite his imprisonment – opportunity. Phillips, feckless, wayward and shallow, was professional when it came to his craft; he was discreet, but when he did let a name drop from his past, when he was later poverty-stricken and in Rome, it was More’s.
‘Though I gave my body even that I burned …’
T
homas Poyntz, Tyndale’s host at the English House, and the man who knew Tyndale best, struggled the hardest to free him. In his writing, Tyndale was witty, bitter, wounding – he could strip the enamel from an opponent’s reputation with a phrase – and seldom kind. He was not a likeable man in print. Those who knew him in everyday life, however – the Walshes, Monmouth, now Poyntz and his wife – grew fond of him.
Tyndale was as harsh on himself as he was to others. ‘God made me ill-favoured in this world,’ he had written to Frith, ‘speechless and rude, dull and slow-witted.’ But this self-deprecation had its own charm. It was part of his raw honesty and his courage; together with the joy he had in his work, it stopped him from sliding into bigotry, and it touched those he met, and made them protective of him. He was not betrayed by an acquaintance, but by a stranger, Phillips, who used his professional guile to exploit his victim’s artlessness in the ways of the world.
In person, Tyndale inspired affection, not malice. Despite his own desperate circumstances in the Tower, John Frith took pains to defend his friend from the attacks on him made by Thomas
More in his
Letter
to Frith. He wrote of Tyndale’s ‘poor apostle’s life,’ adding that Tyndale ‘hath a faithful, clear, innocent heart’ that no man should reprove.
Poyntz was prepared to risk his life for him. Speed was essential. The longer Tyndale was held in Vilvoorde, without sanctions or ill effect on the English trade with Flanders, the less likely his release became. Tebold’s visit produced little. On 25 August 1535, Poyntz wrote to his brother John, the lord of the manor of North Ockenden in Essex, an evangelical sympathiser and a former courtier whom Poyntz hoped would be able to lobby the English authorities on Tyndale’s behalf.
He said that the king ‘has never a truer hearted subject this day living’ than Tyndale, who ‘hath lain in my house three quarters of a year’. He explained that Tyndale had been arrested ‘by procurement out of England’, and that ‘it is clear it must be the papists who are at the bottom of it’. These ‘privy lurkers’, he said, feared that the king might summon Tyndale to return to England and ‘hear him charitably’. They had betrayed him to prevent him harming the papal cause. Poyntz said that Tyndale was in grave danger of execution, and told his brother that his death ‘will be a great hindrance to the gospel, and to the enemies of it one of the highest pleasures’. He warned that there were two Englishmen at Louvain – he did not name them, but they were probably Phillips and Buckenham – who were ‘taking great pains to translate out of English into Latin those things that may make against him, so that the clergy here may understand it’. Poyntz had a good notion of the books and papers that had been confiscated from Tyndale’s rooms in the English House, and he knew that the prosecutors would find ‘opinions contrary to their business, the which they call the order of the holy church’. The letter ended with an appeal to his brother to solicit ‘the king’s grace’ to help Tyndale; ‘in my conscience there be not many perfecter men living, as knows God’.
His brother duly forwarded the letter to Thomas Cromwell. By then, Cromwell had already sounded out Henry VIII. A memorandum records that he had made a visit to the palace, probably in August, ‘to know the king’s pleasure for Tyndale, and whether I shall write or not’. The king agreed that efforts should be made to save Tyndale. This may have been at the prompting of Queen Anne; she was again pregnant, and she retained her husband’s favour for the moment. Cromwell wrote two letters to members of the privy council in Brabant in September 1535. One was addressed to the president, Carondolet, who was also the archbishop of Palermo; the other was to the marquis of Bergen-op-Zoom, the man whom Tyndale may have petitioned for books and warm clothes while in prison. The letters have not survived. They must, however, have appealed for clemency as a matter of grace rather than law. Heresy was an international crime, in the sense that the courts of any territory in which a suspect was seized were competent to try him or her, regardless of nationality. Tyndale was thus charged under the laws of the Low Countries.
The letters were handed to Stephen Vaughan to be sent on to Flanders. Vaughan acknowledged their receipt – he described them to Cromwell as ‘your two letters devised for Tyndale’ – but he feared they would achieve little. He said that ‘it were good the king had one living in Flanders, that were a man of reputation’, and, in the absence of such a heavyweight ambassador, he held out little hope of success. Vaughan sent the letters on to Robert Flegge, one of the English merchants at Antwerp. Flegge received them promptly, and replied to Cromwell on 22 September.
The marquis of Bergen-op-Zoom had left the court at Brussels two days earlier, to travel to Germany as escort to the eldest daughter of the king of Denmark. Flegge asked Poyntz to ride after him. Poyntz rode with all speed and overtook the party at Alken. After the marquis had read the letter, he told Poyntz irritably that some Flemings ‘were burned in England not long before’, and
that the English themselves burnt Anabaptists at Smithfield. As Poyntz protested, the marquis cut him short by saying that ‘the princess is ready to ride’. Poyntz followed the marquis’s party for fifteen miles until it stopped again at Maastricht. By now, the marquis was in better humour, and invited Poyntz to dine with him, complaining at the treachery of the times, and saying of his escort of men-at-arms that ‘we know not whether we ride among our friends or enemies’. After breakfast the next morning, he gave the Englishman a letter for the council in Brussels, and replies for Flegge and Cromwell.
Poyntz rode hard for Brussels and then went on to Flegge at Antwerp. The marquis’s letters were not encouraging. He told Flegge that he was sorry to be away from court, and so ‘unable to render the king’s highness … such service as he would wish’. He had written to Archbishop Carondolet, begging him to help, and could do no more. The archbishop in turn spoke with the queen-regent and the council, and wrote to Flegge to report that they had turned down the appeal. Flegge asked Poyntz to take the correspondence to Cromwell and the privy council in London. This Poyntz did, kicking his heels in England until the end of October, waiting for Cromwell to compose a new batch of letters.
Poyntz delivered these to the imperial council in Brussels. While he was waiting for a reply, he was told by a contact in the emperor’s chancery that ‘Master Tyndale should have been delivered to him according to the tenor of the letters’, but Phillips, who was in Brussels, had ‘followed the suit against Master Tyndale’.
Worse followed. Phillips now turned on Poyntz. He told Pierre Dufief, the procurer general who had arrested Tyndale, that Poyntz was ‘a dweller in the town of Antwerp, and there had been a succourer of Tyndale’. He added that Poyntz himself was a heretic – he was ‘one of the same opinion’ as Tyndale – and that the campaign to free Tyndale was Poyntz’s ‘own labour and suit and no man’s else’. Poyntz was arrested on or about Hallowtide,
1 November, on Phillips’s accusation. Dufief had him held in the house of one of his sergeants of arms.