Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  By July 1531, Henry had abandoned his effort to win Catherine’s approval for the divorce. She was banished to a castle in Hertfordshire and denied permission to see her daughter, Mary. Seeking support for his position, Henry solicited the opinions of major universities, both in England and on the Continent; with few exceptions, they endorsed it. He also sought the views of several leading theologians—Luther included. By now, Henry had become so embarrassed by the book he had written against Luther that he sought to disown it, claiming that it had been urged on him by Wolsey and others. Gaining Luther’s approval of his divorce would be a great coup. To solicit it, Robert Barnes, a friend of Bugenhagen’s who had left England to avoid persecution, went to Wittenberg and provided Luther with copies of the briefs issued by the universities. (It is unclear if Barnes was acting on royal authority.) Reading the argument in support of the king’s right to divorce the queen, Luther categorically rejected it. Since matrimony was a matter of divine law, he was unalterably opposed to divorce; if the king divorced the queen, he would “most gravely sin” against that law. As an alternative, Luther proposed that Henry take two wives. Henry, however, wanted only one, and relations between the English king and the German reformer took another step backward.

  With Catherine rudely pushed aside, More—one of her few overt supporters—felt increasingly isolated. The precariousness of his situation grew as the royal push against clerical privilege advanced. On May 15, a church assembly, through a measure known as the Submission of the Clergy, ceded the power of the clergy to make church laws without royal assent. With that, the anticlerical program had clearly triumphed, and the next day More (claiming ill health) resigned.

  Shortly afterward, he sent a letter to Erasmus that offered a revealing look into his state of mind. He described a visit he had received while chancellor from Simon Grynaeus, a professor of Greek at Basel. A prominent humanist, Grynaeus was known for his skill at locating rare manuscripts. Because the university in Basel was barely functioning, he decided to visit England to search the libraries of Oxford. Though he had Zwinglian leanings, Erasmus considered him a serious scholar and so agreed to provide him with letters of introduction to More and others. Arriving in England in the spring of 1531, Grynaeus was pleasantly surprised at the amount of time the chancellor was able to spare for him. When More himself was unavailable, he assigned others to guide him. Grynaeus later thanked More for his hospitality.

  More explained his reasons for it in his letter to Erasmus. His friends had warned him to be on guard against Grynaeus because of his suspect views. Thanks to the vigilance of bishops and the influence of the king, the new radical sects had until then been kept in check, but it was remarkable “what tricks” heretics used to sneak into a place and then with pertinacity to “crash their way through.” He referred to Englishmen who, through a steady stream of books written in the vernacular and containing mistranslations of Scripture, had been sending into the country “every brand of heresy” from the Low Countries. In short, More had been keeping Grynaeus under surveillance.

  Even now, as a private citizen, More remained vigilant. No longer able to enlist sheriffs and executioners, he turned to invective and polemic. In the months before his resignation, he had begun work on his rebuttal of Tyndale’s response to his Dialogue Concerning Heresies. Now, in the library of his Chelsea home, he finished it. The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer would weigh in at half a million words, making it the longest—and perhaps most vitriolic—religious tract in the English language. Celebrating the burning of the “Judases” who had been exposed by his surveillance methods, More wrote that if such men had been allowed to operate without restraint, England would suffer the same destruction that the Hussites had visited on Bohemia, the Lutherans on Germany, and the Zwinglians on Switzerland. Expressing regret that the campaign against them had been too soft, More stated that “there should have been more burned by a great many than there have been within this seven years past.” As for Tyndale, he was a “hellhound” fit for “the hogs of hell to feed upon,” a “shameful, shameless, unreasonable, railing ribald,” a “beast” who discharged a “filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth”—just a few of the insults More heaped on him.

  With More gone, Thomas Cromwell now became Henry’s top man. Theologically, Cromwell was an Erasmian. As a young man, he had reportedly memorized Erasmus’s Latin translation of the New Testament, and he subscribed to the broad outlines of Erasmus’s creed. The same was true of Thomas Cranmer, who in 1533 became archbishop of Canterbury (succeeding William Warham, who had died in August 1532). Under their joint leadership, England would gradually adopt many elements of the Erasmian reform program. In carrying them out, however, Cromwell would prove more of a Machiavellian, enlarging More’s spy network and creating an atmosphere of distrust and terror throughout the land.

  First, though, there remained the king’s great matter. Sometime in December 1532, Anne Boleyn became pregnant, and on January 25, 1533, she married Henry in a secret ceremony. On June 1, Cranmer crowned her queen, and on September 7 she gave birth—to a daughter. Deeply disappointed, Henry did not even attend her christening. (She was named Elizabeth, after both of her grandmothers.)

  Acting on the king’s wishes, Cromwell in 1534 helped push Parliament to adopt a series of historic acts that further curbed the power of the Church; they included the end of all payments to Rome for benefices. The Act of Succession declared Catherine’s daughter illegitimate, thus making Elizabeth heir to the throne; it further required all subjects of the king to take an oath to uphold the contents of the act. Later in the year, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, unconditionally declaring Henry the head of the English Church. Cromwell also began preparing a series of visitations to the country’s monasteries and abbeys intended to produce a record of their wealth—a prelude to the abrupt and dramatic dissolution of those institutions that would unfold between 1536 and 1541.

  Given More’s still considerable prestige, Henry was eager for his approval of the succession; any sign of opposition from him could encourage popular resistance. On April 13, 1534, More was called before a panel of royal commissioners to take the oath. He said that he was willing to swear to the succession but not to the supremacy of the Crown over the Church; in his mind, papal authority remained the foundation of Christianity and hence of the social order. Four days later, More was arrested and sent by river to the Tower. Also imprisoned was John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, who likewise supported Catherine (and who was a close friend of Erasmus).

  While in the Tower, More was forced to undergo a series of interrogations and examinations—many led by Cromwell—designed to break him. Throughout, More maintained that he was a faithful subject of the king, but he nonetheless refused to take the oath. Though he would not say why, the reason was clear: if he so swore, he would be sanctioning the demise of the Church’s authority in England—the very aim of the heretics he had so tirelessly battled. He would also be endorsing what he saw as Henry’s growing absolutism.

  On June 22, 1535, Fisher was beheaded. On July 1, More received a final trial, held in Westminster Hall before a panel of judges, including Cromwell and Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father. More was so weak that he had to sit, and he was no doubt dirty and pale from having been imprisoned for so long. The proceedings were a show trial with but one acceptable outcome. More was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. In recognition of his long years of service, Henry commuted his sentence to beheading. On July 6, 1535, More mounted the scaffold. It was old and unsteady, and he needed help climbing up. After asking the people to pray for him, More declared that he died the king’s good servant but God’s first. He was killed with a single stroke of the ax. The executioner picked up his head from the straw and, showing it to the crowd, shouted, “Behold the head of a traitor.” The head was boiled, placed on a pike, and raised above London Bridge.

  More’s defiance of Henry recalls Luther’s performance at Worms. Both men ref
used to yield before the highest authority in the land on a matter of personal conscience. Both showed supreme courage and conviction. There were, however, important differences. Standing before the emperor, Luther had pleaded without success for an opportunity to explain why he refused to recant his views. More was urged to explain his position but refused to do so until after judgment was handed down. By remaining silent, he no doubt hoped to be spared. He wasn’t, of course. Unlike Luther, More had no prince to protect him, no castle in which to hide. More suffered the end Luther had expected.

  Remarkably, in December 1534, while More was still in the Tower, the English bishops, in a dramatic about-face, asked the king to authorize a new English translation of the Bible. Thomas Cromwell, who subscribed to the Erasmian principle of making Scripture available to all, took charge of the matter. Seeking the right man for the task, he enlisted Miles Coverdale, who (it’s believed) had worked with Tyndale on his Pentateuch. Coverdale drew heavily on Tyndale’s translations (as well as the Vulgate and two German translations, one of them by Luther). In 1537, two revised editions of Coverdale’s Bible appeared with the king’s full blessing. At long last, England had a Bible in English—one deeply indebted to Tyndale.

  Tyndale himself, though, would not be around to see it. After More’s death and Henry’s change of heart, the English pursuit of him was called off, but he remained wanted by Charles V for his support of justification by faith and other Lutheran doctrines. After years of furtive living, diligent translating, and working with the poor, Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips, an Englishman working for the emperor. Seized by imperial agents in Antwerp, he was confined in the castle of Vilvorde outside Brussels. During his five hundred days of imprisonment, Tyndale was interrogated by a panel led by Jacobus Latomus—the same Louvain theologian who had hounded both Erasmus and Luther. He was found guilty of heresy and condemned to the stake. On October 6, 1536, he was led to the place of execution in Vilvorde. In an act of mercy, he was strangled before being burned. Tyndale thus fell victim to the same surge of fanaticism and intolerance that had consumed his own persecutor, More.

  When Erasmus heard of More’s execution, he—like most of Europe—was aghast. “In the death of More, I feel as if I had died myself, but such are the tides of human things,” he wrote. “We had but one soul between us.” Beyond that clipped statement, however, Erasmus would not go. He offered no eulogy, issued no protest. Damião de Goes, a Portuguese humanist and friend of Erasmus, wrote to him from Padua about the surprise that he and others felt at his failure to comment more fully on the death of such close friends as More and Fisher. Any such expressions, however, would have displeased Henry. Since their first meeting, in 1499, when Erasmus had hurriedly drafted a poem at the request of the then-eight-year-old prince, he had worked hard to stay in Henry’s good graces, and even now, after the king had ordered the deaths of two of his oldest friends, he shrank from offending him. Erasmus’s reaction was further blunted by his disappointment at More’s campaign against heretics. “Would that he had never mixed in this perilous business, but had left theology to the theologians!” he tersely observed.

  Erasmus had spent much of his life opposing such zeal. With Europe dividing into rival confessional camps and his dream of a united Christendom fading, Erasmus decided to make one last bid to salvage it. In 1533, he was at work on a commentary on Psalm 83 (Psalm 84 in modern editions). The psalm describes how, in the altars of the Lord, “The sparrow has found a home for herself, and the turtle dove a nest where she may lay her young: your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.” Moved, Erasmus turned his essay into a call for Christian unity. Where doctrine is concerned, he wrote, there are many who, putting the worst possible cast on statements of religious belief, furiously shout, “Heresy, heresy! To the fire, to the fire!” In so doing, they actually stir sympathy for the accused. Christians should put aside their private hatreds and insane quarrels and instead nurture a spirit of accommodation in which each side makes concessions to the other so that peace can reign.

  Erasmus went on to offer a series of propositions on which he felt all Christians could agree: Believers are justified by faith, but works of charity are necessary as well. Confession can be beneficial, as long as one does not dwell excessively on one’s sins and resolves to do better. On fast days, those who eat should not insult those who abstain, and those who abstain should not condemn those who eat. More generally, Erasmus urged Christians to “do nothing by violent or disorderly means, nor inflict on anyone anything for which, if done to us, we should call on heaven and earth and sea; nor force on anyone a new form of religion which he finds abhorrent.” Surely it was right for those who do not wish to suffer violence for religious reasons to refrain from inflicting it on others.

  If then we temper our counsels and calm our emotions, and devote ourselves to mending the concord of the church, the prophecy of Isaiah will be fulfilled: “And my people shall dwell in the beauty of peace, and in the tabernacles of faith, and in abundant resting places.” And with one voice, rejoicing with each other, we shall all together say, “How lovely are your tabernacles, O Lord of hosts.”

  On Mending the Peace of the Church (as Erasmus titled his essay) was a resonant call for religious tolerance (at least among Christians)—a formative document, in fact, in the development of that tradition. Within a year, nine editions appeared. Both Catholics and Protestants, however, would rush to condemn it.

  Luther would be among them. After reading On Mending the Peace, his friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf urged him to write against it. Luther needed little coaxing. In a long letter to Amsdorf that would quickly appear in print, he scornfully rejected Erasmus’s call for concord. Where matters of doctrine are concerned, there could be no compromise. Referring to Erasmus’s fear of being labeled a Lutheran, Luther sardonically observed that he could reliably attest he was not one. Rather, he was an evil enemy sowing tares among the wheat.

  On April 1, 1533, Luther, forced by a bout of illness to remain idle, decided to read Erasmus’s prefaces to the New Testament. He was reminded of everything he detested about the Dutch humanist. Erasmus saw Christ as little more than a Solon, a lawgiver. He belittled the authority of Paul and treated his Epistle to the Romans as if it “had no relevance for our time.” Erasmus’s famous edition of the Greek New Testament with its annotations had become outdated and should be suppressed, especially in light of how Zwingli and others had been led astray by it.

  Luther’s main activity in this period was completing his own translation of the Old Testament. His work on it had been repeatedly interrupted—by the peasant uprising, his recurring ailments, and his theological disputes. The text itself posed profound difficulties. The account of the building of Solomon’s temple was so full of obscure terms that Luther visited craftsmen in their workshops to inquire about their tools. The prophets were especially elusive. “How hard it is to make these Hebrew writers talk German!” he complained to his friend Wenceslas Link. “They resist us, and do not want to leave their Hebrew and imitate our German barbarisms. It is like making a nightingale leave her own sweet song and imitate the monotonous voice of the cuckoo, which she detests.” No less than with the New Testament, Luther wanted to Germanize the Old.

  To help him, he convened in his home a collegium biblicum—a linguistic think tank that included Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, and the Hebrew scholar Aurogallus. Over sixteen sessions they worked hard to eliminate Hebraisms so as to produce a seamless German text. In taking such liberties, Luther knew that some would object, but, he wrote, the translator, in seeking the sense of a passage, should ask himself, “‘Pray tell, what do the Germans say in such a situation?’ Once he has the German words to serve the purpose, let him drop the Hebrew words and express the meaning freely in the best German he knows.” In contrast to Tyndale, who coined “Jehovah” for the unpronounceable name of God, Luther used HERR (in caps)—German for “master,” “lord,” or “sovereign.” This reinforced the idea that German ru
lers were instruments of God and so deserving of unqualified obedience.

  Luther wanted the Hebrew patriarchs not only to speak German but also to sound Christian. “The Jews think we should learn the Bible from them,” he observed. “Indeed! Should we learn the Bible from those who are the greatest enemies of the Bible? . . . When Moses speaks to me of Christ I will accept him, otherwise he shall be nothing to me.” As he bluntly put it, he tried to get rid of the Hebraisms in the text “so that no one can say that Moses was a Hebrew.” From start to finish, Luther read the Old Testament as a record of Christ and salvation and saw its people and places as prefigurements of the New, and his translation reflected this.

  In September 1534—more than twelve years after he had begun translating the Scriptures—the complete Bible was done. The printing, carried out by Hans Lufft, was a mammoth undertaking, including not only the text but also multiple prefaces and many marginal comments, plus 117 color woodcuts prepared by the Cranach workshop. These illustrations—showing biblical figures dressed like Saxon lords and buildings resembling ducal palaces—further cast the Bible as a story about Germany. By now, it was safe to place Luther’s name on the title page. Finding its way into pulpits, schoolrooms, and households, the Luther Bible would become the cornerstone of Lutheran culture in Germany.