Free Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan

joy …’ To translate it was an act of affection and rapture.

3
    London
    T yndale needed a patron to support him while he worked on the translation. ‘As this I thought,’ he wrote, ‘the bishoppe of London came to my remembrance, whom Erasmus praiseth exceedingly … for his great learning. Then thought I, if I might come into this mannes service, I were happye. And so I gate me to London.’
    He arrived in the city to see Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop, in or around July 1523. He was armed with a letter of introduction that Walsh had given him to a courtier he knew well, Sir Henry Guildford, the king’s Controller of the Household, and until recently the Master of Horse.
    Tyndale duly called on Guildford. The courtier was an amateur scholar, and Tyndale presented him with a translation from the Greek of an oration by Isocrates that he had recently finished at Little Sodbury. Guildford received him warmly and said that he would mention him to Tunstall. He evidently did so, because he then advised that Tyndale should write to Tunstall to beg for an appointment to see him. Tyndale delivered the letter to one of the bishop’s servants and waited for a reply.
    On the face of it, Tunstall was an admirable choice as a potentialpatron. He seemed to be the very model of a liberal scholar. After studying at Oxford, Tunstall had gone on to read law at Padua, where he was friendly with Aldus Manutius, founder of the famous Aldus publishing house in Venice. He knew Erasmus – who of importance did not? – and had helped the great man with the second edition of his Greek New Testament while he was on his diplomatic mission to the Low Countries. Tunstall had some Hebrew, as well as Greek, and a book he had written on arithmetic remained a standard work for students for many years.
    His time in Italy had shown him that the pope as well as the Church would benefit from reform. ‘I saw myself,’ he recollected with some disgust, ‘when Julius, then being bishop of Rome, stood on his feet and one of his chamberlains held up his skirt, because it stood not as he thought with his dignity that he should do it himself, that his shoe might appear, while a nobleman of great age prostrated himself upon the ground and kissed his shoe.’ His friends found him generous and tolerant. More, to whom he gave a much-treasured piece of heart-shaped amber with a fly suspended in it as a keepsake, described him in Utopia as a man ‘out of comparison’. Erasmus went further. ‘Our age does not possess a man more learned, a better or a kinder man,’ he wrote. ‘I seem not to be alive now that he is taken from me.’
    Above all, Tunstall met Tyndale’s key criterion. As bishop of London, he had the power to lift the Constitutions of Oxford and authorise the translation of the scripture. Tyndale had high hopes. ‘I was beguiled,’ he said, that his approach to the bishop was ‘the next way upon my purpose’. In fact, he had hopelessly misjudged both the man and the circumstances.
    Tunstall was not solely a cleric. He was part lawyer, part diplomat and part politician, like his soul mate, Thomas More. The two men were bound together by friendship, political experience and a deep loathing for heresy. They displayed the latter in the Hunneaffair, and their views on this great cause célèbre should have warned Tyndale of the futility of approaching Tunstall.

    Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London and later Durham, whom Tyndale sought out when he arrived in London in 1523. The young tutor was foolish to think that Tunstall would aid him to translate the Bible. The bishop was a traditionalist, and a close friend of Thomas More, who found him a man ‘out of comparison’. Thwarted, Tyndale left England for the Continent, cursing Tunstall as a ‘still Saturn … a ducking hypocrite’.
    (Bridgeman Art Library)
    Early in December 1514, the body of a rich London tailor named Richard Hunne had been found hanging by the neck in a cell of the