Free Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan Page B

calling the pope ‘Satan’ and ‘Antichrist’, and with condemning papal indulgences and the veneration of images. The trial was held in the Chapel of Our Lady at St Paul’s on 16 December, in the presence of More and Tunstall. Hunne was duly condemned and his property was declared forfeit to the crown, thus depriving his family and surviving children of a fortune More estimated at 100,000 marks. Four days after the trial, the body was burnt at Smithfield.
    The coroner’s jury was not easily cowed, however. The jailer of the Lollards’ tower, one Charles Joseph, had fled from London to the countryside on the day Hunne’s body was found. A warrant was issued for Joseph, and he was arrested two months later and brought to the Tower of London. Under interrogation, he admitted to the jury that at midnight on 3 December, on the direct orders of Dr William Horsey, chancellor to Bishop Fitzjames, he and the cathedral bell-ringer John Spalding had entered Hunne’s cell. They found him lying in his bed and strangled him. The jury indicted Horsey, Spalding and Joseph for murder.
    A few months before Hunne’s death, Leo X had repeated the canon law principle that no layman had rightful jurisdiction over a clerk or cleric in any case of any nature. ‘Clerk’ was a broad term, covering any individual whom the Church deemed to be fulfilling a vocation. This included men with menial jobs on Church property, including bell-ringers and jailers. If a man had a tonsured head and read a little Latin, he was adjudged a clerk – and was safely beyond the reach of a coroner’s jury and the gallows if he could mumble a few words from the Latin Bible.
    Parliament, however, in anti-clerical mood in 1512, had passed a law against ‘criminous clerks’ that made unordained clerks subject to the common law courts in cases of murder committed inchurches, in the home of the victim, or on the king’s highway. Londoners, in increasingly angry mood, demanded that the accused men appear in a common law court. The bishop wrote desperately to Wolsey, asking him to intercede with the king on Horsey’s behalf. ‘For assured am I that if my chancellor be tried by any 12 men in London,’ he wrote, ‘they be so maliciously set in favour of heretical depravity that they will cast and condemn my clerk though he be as innocent as Abel.’ The appeal worked. Horsey was kept in prison until London’s anger died down; he then pleaded not guilty to the King’s Bench, and was released.
    In the face of the evidence, Tunstall and More continued to insist that Hunne was a suicide. More said flatly that Hunne ‘hanged himself for despair, despite, and for a lack of grace’; he claimed that Hunne was frantic to find that ‘in the temporal law he should not win his spurs’ so that ‘he began to fall in fear of worldly shame’. For good measure, More later cited an Essex carpenter who said that he had met Hunne at a conventicle of heretics in London. That the Essex man was a convicted felon and perjurer did not concern More in the least; all, to him, was fair in the war against heretics.
    More may have discussed the morality of this with Tunstall while they were together in the Low Countries. More’s humanism in Utopia has a strangely submissive streak when it comes to the Utopian priesthood. The secular authorities in his imagined island commonwealth let priests go free no matter what they might have done. ‘Neither,’ he wrote of the treatment of priests, ‘do they think it right to touch with mortal hand anyone – guilty of whatever horrible deed – who has been set aside as a gift to God in such a singular manner.’
    More’s respect for the clergy was high, close to grovelling; Tyndale had none. Neither was More’s friend Tunstall a better prospect. He, too, was deeply hostile to Lutheranism. While on a diplomatic mission to Worms in 1521, he had urged the king toban the import of Luther’s treatise De Babylonica Captivitate , which attacked