Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Erasmus dedicated the Institutio to Catherine. In the “saintliness of your character,” he wrote, “one can find the perfect model of a most holy and blessed marriage.” After he sent the tract to the queen (in mid-1526), months went by without any word of thanks or acknowledgment, and Erasmus wondered if he had somehow offended her. Not until the following year would he learn of the troubled state of Catherine’s own marriage. Eventually, Mountjoy wrote to assure Erasmus that the queen was in fact pleased with the work. Whether in fact that was true—the Institutio was exasperatingly prolix and maddeningly digressive—the treatise would further Erasmus’s campaign to loosen the Church’s grip on matrimony (though not fast enough for Henry).

  In the end, Erasmus’s greatest impact on England would come through his work on the Bible. He had initially conceived his program to revive Greek and restore Scripture in England, and its fullest fruit would be realized there. The key figure would be neither More nor Colet nor any other member of the humanist fraternity, however, but an obscure linguist from the provinces named William Tyndale.

  Tyndale’s work as a Bible translator would have a decisive impact on the course of the English Reformation—indeed, on the formation of the English people. The fifty or so scholars whom King James I convened in 1604 to produce a new translation of the Bible relied heavily on Tyndale’s Old and New Testaments. An estimated 90 percent of the King James Version—the cornerstone of the Church of England—came from Tyndale. Other than Shakespeare, no individual would do more to shape the English language. Even today, the Bible read by most Englishmen is substantially the work of William Tyndale. And, though he would eventually become an ardent Lutheran, Tyndale got his initial inspiration from Erasmus.

  After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Oxford and (it’s believed) studying at Cambridge, Tyndale in around 1521 took a job as a tutor to the two young sons of Sir John Walsh in the village of Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire. In his spare time, he translated Erasmus’s Enchiridion into English. With its embrace of piety over pomp and its praise for Scripture as a guide to an ethical life, this moral manual would influence Tyndale more than any other book save the Bible.

  The Paraclesis also left a deep impression. Struck by Erasmus’s call for the production of vernacular Bibles so that ordinary Christians could read them, Tyndale decided to produce such a text in English. At the time, the English Church regarded all English-language editions as subversive, and it zealously sought to suppress them. Under Henry, translating the Bible into English remained a criminal offense, and England was the last major country in Europe without a vernacular Bible in print.

  None of this would deter Tyndale. He was austere, contentious, self-righteous, humorless, and uncompromising. He also had a great gift for languages—he would master Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German—as well as a knack for creating phrases that catch the ear and register on the mind. He was, in effect, a modern-day Jerome. Like that Church Doctor, Tyndale came to see translating the Bible as his life’s calling, for which he was willing to endure cold, hunger, loneliness, exile—even death.

  Seeking support for his project, he decided in 1523 to travel to London to see Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of London, whom Tyndale had learned of from a favorable mention in Erasmus’s New Testament annotations. Though not unfriendly, Tunstall informed Tyndale that he already had four chaplains and did not need another, and he advised him to instead seek work in London. Following his counsel, Tyndale found a room in west London and took up preaching.

  By then, Tyndale had discovered Luther. Like so many other reform-minded young men, he found Luther’s teachings about salvation by faith and grace more emotionally satisfying than Erasmus’s appeal to free will and moral rectitude. Tyndale’s Lutheran views gained him entrée to London’s cloth merchants. These men—objecting to the Church’s prohibition of usury and other restrictions—identified with Luther and his challenge to Rome. Tyndale’s idea of translating the Scriptures into English appealed to them, and one of them provided him with lodging. Eventually, several merchants—aware of the danger of embarking on such a project in England—offered to pay his way to the Continent. Tyndale accepted, and in the spring of 1524 he left England, never to set foot there again.

  He went to Hamburg. He may have also spent some months in Wittenberg (the record is inconclusive). Wherever he was, Tyndale devoted himself to translating, assisted by a former friar named William Roye. He worked from the Vulgate, Luther’s German New Testament, and Erasmus’s revised New Testament (including its Greek text and Latin translation). In addition to borrowing some phraseology from Luther, Tyndale added a number of marginal comments that mirrored Luther’s own notes, plus a prologue that relied heavily on Luther’s introduction to the New Testament. Overall, though, Tyndale went his own way. Drawing on his vast vocabulary, he was able to freshen familiar expressions. Taking everyday speech, he found ways to intensify and surpass it, creating a new type of prose that was at once simple and dignified. Among his coinages: “my brother’s keeper,” “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” “the signs of the times,” “our father which art in heaven,” “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,” “seek and you shall find,” “judge not that you not be judged,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” and “eat, drink, and be merry.”

  In addition to his linguistic innovations, Tyndale showed theological audacity. Like both Erasmus and Luther, he sought to strip away the Scholastic accretions that had obscured the true spirit of the text. Whereas the Greek agape was traditionally translated as “charity,” Tyndale gave “love.” He replaced “grace” with “favor” and “confession” with “knowledgement.” He translated presbyter not as “priest” but as “senior” and, following Erasmus, gave metanoia as “repent” rather than “do penance.” Most boldly, Tyndale, following Luther, gave ekklesia not as “church” but as “congregation.” The word “church,” signifying an organized body of clergy, barely appeared.

  Tyndale went with Roye to Cologne, where, despite its Catholic leanings, they quickly found a printer. While the printing was under way, though, word of the project leaked out, and the municipal authorities, wanting to avoid trouble, ordered it to stop. Worried that they might be arrested, Tyndale and Roye grabbed as many printed sheets as they could and found a boat to take them up the Rhine to Worms. In the four years since Luther’s appearance at the diet in that city, it had turned decisively in his favor, and they found another printer. To both hasten the process and keep down costs, the edition was to be a compact octavo offering only the bare text. Six thousand copies were run off; Tyndale’s name nowhere appeared.

  Word quickly spread. In December 1525 Wolsey was warned that a dangerous new translation of the Bible would soon be heading to England. The royal government immediately sprang into action. The bloody spectacle of the Peasants’ War in Germany showed the violence and anarchy that could result from making the Scriptures available to the common man. With Lutheranism spreading into Flanders, Holland, and Scandinavia, royal officials worried that England would be next. A watch was ordered on all ports, and customs officials boarded and searched merchant ships. Nonetheless, many volumes—concealed in bales of merchandise and cases of dry goods—got through. Arriving at landing stages in London and elsewhere, they were carried by colporteurs and sold in churchyards, inns, and taverns; copies were also read clandestinely by Lollard followers of Wyclif. For the first time, the English people could read the Bible in a printed edition in their own language.

  Church officials were dismayed. Through this translation, wrote Robert Ridley, a chaplain to Cuthbert Tunstall, “we shall lose all these Christian words, penance, charity, confession, grace, priest, church, which he always calleth a congregation.” In the note on Matthew 16:18, Tyndale (following Erasmus and Luther) maintained that the rock on which Christ’s congregation was to be built was not Peter but the confession he had made—a clear challenge to papal authority. The fact that t
he English New Testament came from a German press made it doubly suspect.

  On October 24, 1526, Tunstall issued a solemn admonition to all archdeacons in his diocese, ordering all copies to be handed over within thirty days. A bonfire was scheduled for December at St. Paul’s churchyard. In a sermon delivered on that occasion, Tunstall railed against the translation as being both seditious and full of errors, of which he claimed to have found two thousand. When he finished, all the volumes that had been collected were fed to the flames. In early 1527, Archbishop William Warham, in a more novel expedient, ordered the buying up of all copies of the translation. That served only to stimulate sales, however, and a new edition was soon being prepared in Antwerp.

  Clearly, sterner measures were needed, and to devise them, Tunstall turned to Thomas More. Now serving as both counselor to the king and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, More was growing increasingly impatient with any theological straying from official teachings. In 1524, Johannes Bugenhagen had come out with an Appeal to the English, in which he hailed the many Englishmen who were embracing the new gospel and called on others to do the same. With the Lutherans thus directly targeting England, More believed more than ever that the carriers of the new doctrines had to be destroyed. In this period he would emerge as England’s most determined hunter of heretics, putting in place a system of surveillance, intimidation, and entrapment aimed at stamping out all expressions of sedition and dissent.

  On a Friday evening in early 1526, More led a raid on Hanseatic merchants in the Steelyard, a district of docks and warehouses on the Thames near London Bridge that served as the base for the Hanseatic League in England and which was a stronghold of Lutheran thinking. Accompanied by several noblemen and their armed guards, he burst in on the men as they were about to sit down to dinner and announced that he had received reports that many of them had books by Luther. More had three of the merchants arrested and demanded that the names of the rest be submitted the following morning. Returning then, he ordered the handing over of all Lutheran books; the rooms of the merchants were then searched. Eight of them were taken to Westminster and brought before Wolsey, who forbade them and all other Steelyard residents to leave England over the next twenty days. In February, four German merchants and a doctor of divinity named Robert Barnes were brought to St. Paul’s on suspicion of heresy and forced to kneel in the aisle with faggots tied to their backs—a warning of what would happen to them if they persisted.

  Determined to move every lever against the new threat, More decided to approach Erasmus. He had been very pleased with the acerbity of the first part of the Hyperaspistes and was eager for the promised second part. In mid-December 1526, at the king’s palace in Greenwich, More drafted an urgent appeal to his old friend, its hectoring tone reflecting his growing ardor. “I pray God you will be able to bring” to “a happy conclusion” the “brilliant series of works by which you are nurturing the Christian faith,” More wrote. He noted “the eager anticipation” with which so many awaited the remaining volume of the Hyperaspistes; the wicked, by contrast, were “puffed up and exultant at the tardiness of your reply.” If Erasmus’s hesitation was due to a lack of courage brought on by fear of the consequences of proceeding, More continued, “I cannot tell you how surprised and disappointed I am. God forbid, my dearest Erasmus, that you, who have faced such hardships, run such risks, taken upon yourself such Herculean tasks, and spent the best years of your life in unremitting toil and sleepless vigils for the benefit of all mankind,” should now be ready “to desert the work of God rather than face the possibility of defeat.” It was not the time to be crushed by fear. By issuing a thousand copies of the first part “like so many affidavits, you have bound yourself before the world to do all in your power to finish the work.”

  Concluding on a friendlier note, More wrote that the “painter friend” whom Erasmus had sent his way had arrived in England. Though the man was a “wonderful artist,” he observed, he feared that he would “not find English soil as rich and fertile as he hoped.” More would be proved wrong. Before traveling to England, Hans Holbein the Younger had painted two portraits of Erasmus; Erasmus had been so impressed that he agreed to write letters of introduction for him to friends in Antwerp and London. Holbein would remain in England until the summer of 1528, then return to Basel. He would return to England a few years later and remain there until his death in 1543. During that time, he would become the leading painter of the English court, producing the most memorable images of Henry VIII and the Tudor world.

  Soon after writing to Erasmus, More sat for Holbein. The portrait (now hanging in the Frick Collection in New York) shows More as a self-assured man of state, the gold chain of Tudor service draped over a black velvet cloak, his short brown hair tucked firmly inside a black cap. Aside from the few days’ stubble on his chin, More seems all authority and self-control. Beneath the regalia, however, he was wearing his hair shirt, its painful chafing providing a test—and confirmation—of the constancy of his faith.

  When More’s letter arrived, in the first part of 1527, Erasmus was annoyed. A full year had passed since the publication of the first part of the Hyperaspistes, and he had begun to think that he could get away without producing the second. His scholarly projects were fully absorbing him. With the world seeming about to descend into barbarian darkness, he was intent on recovering as much ancient knowledge as possible. Thrilling as ever to the hunt for manuscripts, he dispatched messengers to scriptoria and libraries across Europe in search of them.

  The previous spring, for instance, he had sent Hieronymus Froben, the eldest son of Johann, to Italy with letters of introduction explaining that the young man was “prepared to purchase, beg, borrow, or steal” to get old manuscripts. Froben’s initial efforts bore no fruit; at Padua, the monks proved impregnable. But his persistence eventually paid off. Among his finds were several rare manuscripts by John Chrysostom, a prominent Eastern Father whose homilies and other writings offered revealing glimpses into the state of fourth-century Christianity. On receiving them, Erasmus felt he had acquired the riches of Croesus. He translated the homilies from Greek to Latin, weeding out the many corruptions that had crept into the text. They would become part of a five-volume edition of Chrysostom that, published in 1530, would help restore his place in Western Christendom.

  To Ferry de Carondelet, an aristocratic friend and a canon at the cathedral of Besançon in eastern France (and the brother of Jean), Erasmus wrote to see if its library had any old manuscripts of the Gospels and Epistles. While he was at it, he requested a cask of Burgundy wine, “a light ruby in color, not too fiery, but of good quality, though it should be well aged.” Ancient manuscripts and dry wine—two of the things Erasmus most prized in life.

  Erasmus needed those manuscripts for the fourth edition of his New Testament. In the decade since the appearance of the first edition, this work had ballooned into an immense exegetical apparatus, with multiple prefaces and methodological guides and a multitude of annotations, some so long that they were reprinted as mini treatises. As much as Erasmus longed to escape the tedium of collation, correction, and explanation, he again found himself on the treadmill. His New Testament had become a mainstay of biblical scholarship across Europe—by his own estimate, more than 100,000 copies of the various editions had been printed—and, despite the drudgery, he needed to make it as accurate as possible. Though one other edition would appear, in 1535, it would offer only minor changes from the fourth, so upon its publication, in March 1527, the fourth edition would stand in some ways as Erasmus’s own final testament.

  A week after it appeared, on March 30, Erasmus answered More’s letter. Explaining why he had not yet completed the Hyperaspistes, he exploded in exasperation: “What a fate is mine! I am feared by the highest prelates in the world, but am spat upon, shit upon, and pissed upon by the dregs of mankind!” He offered a roll call of all those who were hounding him: former friends like Oecolampadius, Pellicanus, and Capito; “Parisian Furies” li
ke Béda and Cousturier; a new group of critics in Spain and Poland; Dominicans and Benedictines; Latomus and his fellow hotheads in Louvain; libeling pamphleteers in Strasbourg; his many detractors in Rome; and, finally, Luther.

  Any further assault on the German reformer, Erasmus wrote, would be pointless. “With what weapons will you throw a person to the ground if he accepts nothing but the Sacred Scriptures and interprets them according to his own rules?” If Erasmus proceeded with the Hyperaspistes, he would “only stir up the hornet’s nest” (a phrase from the Adages). “In a short time this smoldering fire will break out into a worldwide conflagration. That is where the insolence of the monks and the intransigence of the theologians are leading us.” Despite his many misgivings, though, he wrote, he would comply with More’s request and complete the Hyperaspistes.

  And so with weary resignation the aging humanist prepared yet again to do battle with the raging prophet of Wittenberg.