Thomas More didn’t burn everyone he detained. As a heretic, you had one mulligan: recant. But if you cashed in your single recantation and were caught a second time—off to the flames with you, friend. Not that your heresy mulligan was a walk in the park. Well, in some cases it was a walk in the park, but that park was located at Thomas More’s house.
More’s home stood in Chelsea, located in central London. It was an impressive estate, containing a library, private chapel, ample guest accommodations, a menagerie, even a dock for More’s personal barge. It had lavish gardens, with “apple trees, roses, and a collection of herbs.” Yet within this garden also stood the “Tree of Truth.” Despite its name, this tree wasn’t in the habit of dropping apples of wisdom. It was more into the extraction side of the business.
Rumors began circulating that More was illegally detaining suspected heretics and torturing them on his property, presumably in an attempt to make them confess. He wholeheartedly denied the allegations. Sure, the gatehouse on his estate was equipped with stocks and chains and fetters, but c’mon, those were collectors’ items. Everyone knows an Iron Maiden is great Feng Shui, and a person’s choice of décor isn’t a crime, is it?
More did admit to arresting and detaining a merchant named Segar Nicholson, for selling contraband books. Nicholson was among the first to accuse More of torturing him at his home in Chelsea. He claimed that the lord chancellor caused him to be bound to the Tree of Truth, whipped, and then subjected to ever-tightening ropes around his skull until he lost consciousness. More dismissed the accusation, saying of Nicholson, “never had either bodily harm done him or foul word spoken him while he was in mine house.” A known seller of antichrist books was in your custody for a week and you didn’t torture him even a tiny bit? Not a single screw to a thumb, or a morning’s stretch on the rack? Sounds like someone else could use a visit to the Tree of Truth.
After he resigned his post as lord chancellor, Thomas More’s days were numbered. He still sought out heretics wherever he could find them, but his political support was withering fast. Henry was angry with him, Anne Boleyn held nothing but contempt for him, and his allegiance to the pope in Rome was becoming more and more problematic. It was only a matter of time before charges of treason found him. This happened in April 1534, when he was brought before a commission to take the “Oath of Supremacy,” which recognized Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church. To refuse was treason, and on that day, Sir Thomas More became a traitor to England.
More was charged with depriving the king of one of his titles. He was sentenced “to be hanged, cut down while still alive, castrated, his entrails cut out and burnt before his eyes, and then beheaded.” Henry, the ultimate frenemy, commuted the sentence to just decapitation. In July of the following year, More was executed. His head was boiled and stuck atop a pole on London Bridge. Had his daughter not bribed the constable of the watch, this last vestige of More would have been unceremoniously dumped into the river below.
AS THOMAS More’s falling out with the English monarchy became increasingly lethal, Tyndale was heavily engaged in his most important contribution: the second edition of his English New Testament. Published seven months after More was declared a traitor, Tyndale’s 1534 New Testament would become the gold standard of biblical translations. This more refined and accurate version spread like wildfire, revolutionizing not only religious study, but the English language itself.
The Bible is the most popular book printed in English. Tyndale’s New Testament was the great trailblazer, cutting paths through the unruly wilderness of the English language. His authoritative biographer, David Daniell, goes as far as to say that Tyndale’s work was a “liberation of language itself,” and without him, there could have been no Shakespeare: “I cannot express too strongly the revolutionary effect of this release of rhetoric into English . . . Something happened, before Shakespeare, to switch the power into English. What happened, I am sure, was the constant household reading of the Bible in English.” The translations that those households were reading owed the majority of their text to Tyndale. The Geneva Bible, the translation Shakespeare used (as did Milton, as did the Pilgrims), relied on the path blazed by Tyndale. So many of the phrases we know by heart (“let there be light,” “the spirit is willing,” “there were shepherds abiding in the field”) came from his mind. He was an extraordinary translator above all else, weaving a text of such beauty that, hundreds of years later, we still frequently stop to admire it.
Unfortunately for Tyndale, revolutionizing the English language is not a guarantor of personal safety. A couple of months before his nemesis was beheaded in London, Tyndale received a visitor to his home in Antwerp. The young man was in his twenties, came from an affluent family in Dorset, England, and had graduated from Oxford with a bachelor’s degree in civil law. He was also a gambler, a notorious thief, and a conman. And like most conmen, Henry Phillips did not break into Tyndale’s home but, rather, was invited in by the victim himself.
Tyndale had been on the run for roughly a decade by now, but the great wheels of change were turning all over Europe. Through the influence of Anne Boleyn and the new lord chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, England was becoming friendlier to Protestants every day. But the Low Countries, where Tyndale was hiding, were marching toward an ever-more-frightening state of conservative Catholicism. In 1533, for example, an anonymous letter circulated among government authorities that complained about the lack of an organized Inquisition “in the Spanish manner” to hunt heretics. Raids to arrest heretics followed soon after in the very city where Tyndale resided. His own name ended up on the list, and he had to work harder than ever to stay one step ahead of the flames.
Into these changing tides stepped Henry Phillips, who met Tyndale at a dinner for Antwerp merchants in 1535. Tyndale instantly took a liking to the well-spoken young man and invited him back to his lodgings to continue their conversation. As the two men talked into the night, Tyndale did not realize that his new BFF harbored some seriously dark secrets. Among them was the fact that he had been hired to abduct Tyndale and turn him over to Catholic authorities.
In Antwerp stood the English House, a kind of embassy for English merchants. It was here that Tyndale had sought refuge. In line with its sovereign status, the city of Antwerp couldn’t just break into the English House and start dragging out international suspects. Tyndale had to be lured outside, and it was Phillips who became the bait.
We wonder if one of the most important translators of the life of Jesus looked back and caught the similarities: a cadre of officers waiting in concealment, a dinner appointment, a nod of the head in place of a kiss, a substantial monetary reward. When Tyndale realized what was happening, he simply gave himself up without a word or a struggle. After a decade on the run, it was over.
Ever since Tyndale’s betrayal, there has been considerable debate over who orchestrated his arrest. As far as we know, Phillips never revealed the name of the person or persons who sent him to hunt down the rogue translator. Investigations at the time placed blame on various bishops in England, but the accusations are full of dead ends and contradictions. History may never know the identity of the man who doomed Tyndale, but it does know certain things about the man. For one, to cover his expenses and necessary bribes, Henry Phillips would have needed access to a considerable amount of money. His shadowy benefactor would also have been familiar with the Low Countries and their laws and procedures. In order to dig up the information about Tyndale’s whereabouts that led to Phillips’s “friendly” approach, a robust system of informants would have been necessary. Above all, despite the tides that had turned so dramatically in England, this person must have felt nothing but a continuing and burning hatred for Tyndale and his work.
Not many people in England fit the bill. Some might note that, up until the very last stages of his imprisonment, Thomas More was free to write and coordinate with friends on the outside. If Tyndale’s greatest nemesis wasn’t behind his final abduction, it was
another person, his name lost to history, who closely matches Thomas More’s profile.
The betrayer Henry Phillips pops up a few times around Europe before dropping off the historical record entirely. He surfaces in Rome a year after his betrayal of Tyndale, asking for money and claiming to be kin of the now-executed Thomas More. His later years were reportedly steeped in paranoia and poverty, and he bounced around such promising careers as mercenary, highwayman, and beggar in the streets of Vienna. The martyrologist John Foxe recorded that Phillips was “consumed at last with lice.”
During the year and a half that Tyndale was imprisoned at Castle Vilvoorde (in modern-day Belgium), numerous attempts were made by friends and government officials to secure his release. Even Henry VIII asked for leniency, and the powerful Thomas Cromwell pressed tirelessly. While those petitions caused delays, in the end they fell on deaf ears. Heresy was an international offense, and Henry’s power was limited outside England. Also, Emperor Charles V, who ruled over the Low Countries, was Catherine of Aragon’s nephew. Catherine had died just three years before, dishonored and forsaken by the King of England. Charles wasn’t exactly in the mood to extend Henry any personal favors.
While Tyndale was languishing in prison, another English translation of the Bible was being prepared, by Tyndale’s friend and colleague Miles Coverdale. In his edition, Coverdale made sure to play nice with Henry VIII, noting in the dedication that “power given of God unto kings is in earth above all other powers.” In 1537, less than twelve months after Tyndale died, a new edition of Coverdale’s translation became the first English Bible officially licensed by the king. The translation was, of course, mostly Tyndale’s. However, the name of a heretic couldn’t be ascribed to a royal work such as this, so it was called the “Thomas Matthew Bible,” after two New Testament apostles. To pass the king’s inspection, Tyndale’s contribution had to be buried.
Like his greatest enemy, Thomas More, William Tyndale was condemned to die for his religious convictions. This reportedly happened near Vilvoorde, on October 6, 1536. Unlike More, whose sentence was reduced to beheading, Tyndale did not die easily. Because it couldn’t be proven that he’d been given his one heretic mulligan, the Belgian courts decided to extend to Tyndale the mercy of strangulation. While choking someone with the intent to kill normally isn’t considered a mercy, when the alternative is live immolation, it’s a godsend. Unfortunately for Tyndale, God failed to deliver on that one. If contemporary accounts are accurate, the strangulation was botched, and Tyndale was burned while yet alive and speaking. That would mean the author of one of the most important works ever printed in the English language was forced to endure a horrific death not once, but twice.
On the back of the printing press, Tyndale fundamentally altered the religiopolitical landscape of England. Small-scale English translations of the Bible had come and gone for more than a millennium, but Tyndale produced his greatest creation by virtue of Gutenberg producing his. Seventy-five years later, when the monumental King James Version of the Bible was published, Tyndale’s translation would account for 83 percent of its New Testament and 76 percent of its Old.
It is a cruel irony that the crime for which Tyndale was hunted, abducted, and brutally executed became one of the greatest English accomplishments within a few decades after his death. Perhaps, when you get yourself mixed up in one of the largest power struggles in English history, things like that are bound to happen. Today, when people blame a “scapegoat,” or encourage friends to “fight the good fight,” or compliment “the salt of the earth,” we can thank William Tyndale. Ultimately, though, when you’re hunted by religious fanatics, bloodthirsty emperors and kings, and an eloquent nemesis with a scatological fetish, even the printing press can’t prevent you from becoming the “forgotten ghost of the English language.”
4
MAKING THE ROUND WORLD FLAT
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, EUROPE found itself in the midst of a trade route arms race. Everyone was assembling maps and expeditions to stake their claim on the economic arteries of the world. The voyages of Christopher Columbus helped Spain call dibs on the Americas. Sailing around Africa to reach India was Portugal’s gambit. Italian city-states such as the Republic of Venice dominated many other routes to the East. England, however, had nothing. It was the scrawny kid picked last for imperialist dodgeball.
For decades, British explorers made several attempts to own the Arctic. More than anything else, they wanted to break through the frigid lands and waters of northern Russia to establish profitable trade routes with the Far East. Anyone who is slightly familiar with the Land of Rus or its ability to churn out an ungodly amount of snow and ice would peg this for the fool’s errand that it was, but English politicians and explorers had an ace up their sleeve: a map printed in 1569 by the most famous cartographer alive, Gerard Mercator.
MERCATOR’S MAP OF THE NORTH POLE, SEPTENTRIONALIUM TERRARUM DESCRIPTIO, FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1569. THIS IS A 1611 IMPRESSION OF A 1595 UPDATE, courtesy of Leen Helmink Antique Maps.
This is a top-down view of the Arctic Circle as it was understood by Mercator and spread by printing presses in the late sixteenth century. The first thing that should strike a modern observer is its sheer beauty. If not, please get your AI software updated, because you are not human. The second observation is the presence of four giant islands, each roughly the size of three Texases, sitting in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Unlike its southern cousin, the Arctic is essentially void of land mass. Did people in the sixteenth century know that? No. How could they? Humanity didn’t fully grasp the emptiness of the Arctic until we could take pictures of it from orbit.
The great mapmaker Mercator didn’t have access to low-earth-orbit satellites, but he did have access to something nearly as effective: hearsay. In the library of one of Mercator’s friends sat the manuscript of Jacobus Cnoyen, a world traveler who’d lived two centuries before. In 1364, Cnoyen visited the court of the king of Norway and met with a very interesting priest. The priest claimed to be descended from a group of four thousand settlers sent to the Arctic by none other than King Arthur. The account of this settlement was contained in a document known to Cnoyen as the Gestae Arthuri, which is now lost.
The priest also informed Cnoyen that a monk from Oxford had recently visited the islands and met with the Norwegian king personally. What did they discuss? That the monk, armed with an astrolabe, had wandered around the Arctic mapping everything in front him. He’d “put into writing all the wonders of those islands” and now gave King Edward III the book, called Inventio Fortunata (“Blessed Discovery”). This book is also, you guessed it, lost.
It was from this wandering monk that a priest learned about the topography of the Arctic Circle. The priest then passed that information to globetrotter Jacobus Cnoyen in 1364, who wrote it in his travelogue, which landed in the library of Mercator’s friend in Antwerp (and was lost sometime in the 1580s). In 1577, Mercator sent a transcription of that travelogue along with a summary of its importance to his friend John Dee, who was a personal adviser to Queen Elizabeth I.
This was all fantastic news for Britain for two very important reasons:
1. Finders keepers. Whoever gets to a new place automatically owns that place by virtue of planting his flag first. This is why America, um, legally owns the moon. If Arthur settled the Arctic Circle in the sixth century, then the Arctic Circle naturally belongs to England. Including . . .
2. The Northwest and Northeast Passages. Look at that map again. Even with the naked eye, you can see that it’s entirely possible to sail a ship from England to China just by skirting those four big islands. You might even slow down when passing one of them to wave at its “pygmies whose length in all is 4 feet.” Or at the imaginary inhabitants of another island, described as “the best and most salubrious of the whole of Septentrion”—which sounds like made-up Harry Potter words but actually meant “the healthiest folks of the northern regions.”
Mercator’s famous name was
wielded by those who supported an English claim to imaginary trade routes in the New World. Carrying his 1569 world map, English explorers of the late sixteenth century, such as Martin Frobisher, smashed themselves against the ice-locked lands of northern Canada for years (not without casualties) before finally giving up and returning home. (At least they didn’t return empty-handed. Frobisher hauled literally tons of Canadian gold back to England. Canadian gold in this case being iron pyrite—ye olde fool’s gold.)
LIKE AN Englishman into a shelf of Arctic ice, Europe crashed into its first information age in the 1500s. This deluge of raw data was made possible by three main factors: the Age of Discovery, humanism, and the rise of printing. A flood of information like this comes with unique challenges. A flood is not picky. It pulls in trash and mixes it with treasure. Sometimes, in that massive vortex, it’s hard to distinguish between the two. Gerard Mercator made a valiant effort, but even the great cartographer wasn’t immune to misinformation. We shouldn’t judge him too harshly, though. He lived in a time when the face of the planet was changing every day.
The Age of Discovery was the time of famous explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Hernán Cortés, and Sir Francis Drake. George Beste, an associate of Frobisher’s, said that within “fourscore years, there hath been more new countries and regions discovered than in five thousand years before.” As these adventurers returned home (often having raped and pillaged their way through entire continents), their accounts were recorded in vibrant detail (sans the rape and pillage) and fed, with varying degrees of accuracy and subterfuge, into the ravenous printing presses of Europe.
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