We next hear of Tyndale in Antwerp, that tight, thriving city of trade and commercial enterprise. We do not know when he left Worms or where he was in the two years between the issuing of the Worms New Testament and the Compendious Introduction in 1526 and 8 May 1528 when his next book, The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, was printed in Antwerp. One thread of evidence has him in Hamburg with Miles Coverdale at some point, but that is associated with the translation of the Pentateuch, and probably belongs later in the story. Whether he can be thought realistically to have spent time with Luther at Wittenberg is discussed later.

Antwerp had good printers and an export trade of books to England. Though knowledge of English in Antwerp was poor, and there was poor regard for the language, the printers worked through Dutch and German stationers in London.¹ Antwerp had a powerful English community of merchants, and it is not surprising to find Tyndale at the time of his arrest nine years later, in 1535, living in the English House in Antwerp: that may have been his address from as early as 1526. He was certainly in Antwerp at those key moments in 1531 when Stephen Vaughan met him on Cromwell's behalf, though Vaughan had been told that he was in Frankfurt, Hamburg or Marburg; such information was perhaps cover. He must have travelled; but Antwerp would be a good place in which to settle and be inconspicuous. All his books from now on were printed in Antwerp, and it was a printer in that city who pirated his New Testament. Antwerp was one of Europe's centres of Christian humanism as well as ‘heretical’ printing. It was the place where not only Tyndale's Pentateuch and revised New Testament appeared, but George Joye's translations of the Psalms and some Prophets (from Latin). It was where the first complete Bible in English was printed, Coverdale's translation of 1535, and the first Bible in English to be licensed, ‘Matthew's Bible’ of 1537.

The Parable of the Wicked Mammon was the first of Tyndale's extended treatises; it is an exposition of the New Testament teaching that faith is more important than works. It is loosely based on a sermon by Luther, about the puzzling ‘wicked mammon’ parable in Luke 16, better known today as ‘the unjust steward’, in which a servant accused of embezzlement is unscrupulous in getting back into his master's favour and is commended. Tyndale makes it a means of approaching a theological problem. We are supposed to do good works—look no further than Matthew 25, ‘I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink …’, and so on; yet works, though important, do not bring eternal life. Luther and Tyndale emphasise that the teaching in the New Testament is that true works only come naturally from true faith, as fruit comes from the tree. Moreover, the mistaken reliance on works leads to the superstitious dependence on ritual, something fostered by the Church simply for its own profit: at the hour of death, we are saved by faith in the promises of God, as Tyndale puts it, and not by a holy candle.

The book is a clearly-printed black-letter octavo of seventy-two leaves, and thus, in form, pocket-size and roughly like a slim version of the 1526 Worms New Testament. The colophon states that it was ‘printed the viij. day of May. Anno M.D. xxviij’, and gives a false name for the printer. It is the first of ten quite well-printed English Lutheran books appearing between 1527 and 1535 from ‘Hans Luft of Marburg’, who was in reality Martin de Keyser of Antwerp.² Hans Luft was certainly a printer of the time, but he was in Wittenberg and particularly successful with Luther's own works. Such concealing devices were increasingly common. De Keyser called himself various names, including ‘Peter Congeth at Parishe’, ‘Joannes Philoponos at Malborow’, and ‘Adam Anomymous, Basel’.³ Several printers suggestively located themselves in ‘Utopia’, or, for fully Lutheran pieces, even ‘Rome, at St Peter's court’.⁴ The pages of Mammon have few ornaments and no marginal notes; ‘The Principal notes of the book’ are printed on two leaves at the end. There is no title-page as such. Instead, on the first side of the first leaf, is the following:

That faith the mother of all good works justifieth us, before we can bring forth any good work: as the husband marrieth his wife before he can have any lawful children by her. Furthermore as the husband marrieth not his wife, that she should continue unfruitful as before, and as she was in the state of virginity (wherein it was impossible for her to bear fruit) but contrariwise to make her fruitful: even so faith justifieth us not, that is to say, marrieth us not to God, that we should continue unfruitful as before, but that he should put the seed of his holy spirit in us (as saint John in his first epistle calleth it) and to make us fruitful. For saith Paul Ephes.2 By grace are ye made safe through faith, and that not of your selves: for it is the gift of God and cometh not of the works, lest any man should boast himself. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesu unto good works, which God hath ordained that we should walk in them.

This is the ‘title’ of what was now the sixth Lutheran work in English, little books smuggled into England, after the sheets of the 1525 Cologne New Testament. The second was Tyndale's own 1526 complete Testament from Worms, the third Tyndale's Compendious Introduction to Romans, the fourth Roye's Brief Dialogue and the fifth Read me and be not wroth, by Jerome Barlow but apparently encouraged by Roye. This new long ‘title’ is a trumpet-call. It is Lutheran, declaratory, and made of the New Testament—the last third of it is Paul in Tyndale's own 1526 translation. The ‘title’ is in its way sensational. We could expect a book so announced to have had a powerful impact in England, and that is what we shall find.

PROLOGUE TO THE PARABLE OF THE WICKED MAMMON

It is the first book of the six with an attribution. The first four leaves are a prologue headed ‘William Tyndale otherwise called hychins to the reader’. He must have thought he had a pressing reason to declare himself. In a revealing narrative in the first two pages of the preface, half of the whole, he tells us first his previous position.

The cause why I set my name before this little treatise and have not rather done it in the new testament is that then I followed the counsel of Christ which exhorteth men Matt. vi. to do their good deeds secretly and to be content with the conscience of well doing, and that God seeth us, and patiently to abide the reward of the last day, which Christ hath purchased for us and now would I fain have done like wise but am compelled otherwise to do.

The compelling reason, however, comes out of unhappiness. When the work at Worms on the 1526 New Testament was finished, his slippery assistant William Roye went on to Strasburg and apparently made a fool of himself in print. Tyndale had to dissociate himself publicly. He did it by telling the story, and then by setting those events against the New Testament, and particularly the teaching of Paul. So far, so clear. William Roye, having been an incompatible but adequate assistant to take the place of the unknown helper who did not arrive, left him when the work was done, early in 1526, and, having dubiously made new friends and some money, went off to Strasburg ‘where he professeth wonderful faculties and maketh boast of no small things …’ The real trouble began in May of the following year, 1527.

A year after that, and now twelve months before the printing of this work, came one Jerome a brother of Greenwich also through Worms to Argentine [Strasburg], saying that he intended to be Christ's disciple another while, and to keep (as nigh as God would give him grace) the profession of his baptism, and to get his living with his hands, and to live no longer idly and of the sweat and labour of those captives which they had taught not to believe in Christ: but in cut shoes and russet coats.

Like Roye, Barlow had been a Franciscan friar in the reformed order of Observants in their monastery at Greenwich. Jerome was apparently saying that his Christian conscience could no longer allow him to live idly on the backs of monastery servants taught to believe not in Christ but in the sign of having been on a pilgrimage (‘cut shoes’) and in the monastic institution (‘russet coats’). Though warned, Jerome set to work with Roye, to make the anti-Wolsey rhymes: the first printing of Rede me and be not wroth opens with an emblem of Wolsey, in which his cardinal's hat is coloured red, and the six axes in the design have drops of red blood falling from them. Tyndale's attack on Roye did not come from peevish bad temper, as has been asserted.⁵ It is not for nothing that the passage against Roye prefaces his exposition of the parable wherein he tackles systematically the issue of works as subsidiary to faith: Roye's bad works show him lacking in faith, and untrustworthy.

THE PARABLE

The book proper, opens with Jesus's parable from Luke 16, set in larger, bolder type. Tyndale follows his own 1526 translation (apart from two or three minor changes in punctuation).

There was a certain rich man which had a steward that was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him and said unto him. How is it that I hear this of thee? Give accounts of thy stewardship. For thou mayest be no longer my steward. The steward said within himself: what shall I do? for my master will take away from me my stewardship. I cannot dig, and to beg, I am ashamed. I woot [know] what to do, that when I am put out of my stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.

Then called he all his master's debtors, and said unto the first, how much owest thou unto my master? And he said, an hundred tons of oil, and he said to him. Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to another, what owest thou? And he said, an hundred quarters of wheat. He said to him. Take thy bill, and write fourscore. And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely. For the children of this world, are in their kind, wiser than the children of light. And I say also unto you, make friends of the wicked mammon, that when ye shall have need, they may receive you into everlasting habitation.

What follows in the book divides into three large sections, with systematic sub-sections. One of the important apsects of this treatise, as of others of Tyndale, neglected until now, is the logical step-by-step way the argument is developed.⁶ The first main section is about faith and works—how faith has to come first, and alone justifies. The second, arising from a brief discussion of the meaning of ‘mammon’ (an Aramaic word meaning ‘riches’) and particularly ‘unrighteous mammon’, so-called ‘principally because it is not bestowed and ministered unto our neighbours' need’, plunges into the problem of why we should follow an unjust steward, who waits wisely on his own unrighteousness: if only the righteous were so wise to work, pray or study. There follow twenty-nine pages of lavish quotation from Matthew 5, 6 and 7 (the Sermon on the Mount) and elsewhere in the Gospels, with digressions into Paul and John's Epistles, making the New Testament speak for itself on the point that true wisdom should follow true faith in Christ, with a page on the power of Scripture. The final section starts with the New Testament understanding that we are naturally damned but God sends his spirit to open our eyes to his mercy. In that case, Tyndale asks, what are good works, what is their intent, and how do they serve? He lists the principal ones as commended by Scripture—fasting, watching, prayer and almsgiving—concluding with thirty-eight pages of Scripture doctrine and illustration.

The method, as it would have been in the preaching of the time, is of a rather simple systematic argument under headings, filled out with repetition and illustration of the basic truths of the New Testament—our sinfulness, Christ's promises, our faith in him alone saving us—making a kind of layering. Tyndale is following Luther, but as usual making the matter very much his own, particularly in the reiteration of the central fact. This, says Tyndale, is the gospel, and he lays over that statement another of what the gospel is, and another and another and another. This is not a twentieth-century method; but such accumulation immerses the reader in the New Testament. It is impossible to come away from this book not knowing a good deal of the Gospels, and of what Christ and Paul taught, side-lit from John and Peter. It is likely that in writing it Tyndale had in mind that for some readers these pages could have been a first encounter with New Testament words in English, and a first exposition of the New Testament doctrine of faith before works. Accumulation of New Testament reference and quotation has a confirming effect. Tyndale, as a reformer, understood that Scripture, separately in both Testaments and then taken together whole, comments on and proves Scripture. Later, the force of Scripture leads Tyndale to attack what is unscriptural in current Church practice, but not here as often as in later books such as the Obedience.

His one-and-a-half-page introduction to the whole argument announces that as people have been falsely led to trust in works, he will set out the true New Testament teaching. To show a little of the ordering of his ideas, here is the first main section of the three main parts, on faith and works, set out to show how it also divides into three, and into three again, like this:

• I. Faith comes first and alone justifies.
  • A. Faith alone brings life: the law, death.
    1. God cannot but fulfil his promises.
    2. Paul and Christ declare goodness necessary before good works result.
    3. The law cannot justify, only the promises.
  • B. Scripture enjoins good works.
    1. Matthew 25, ‘I was an hungred …’
    2. These only come from faith.
    3. Scripture ascribes both faith and works to God only.
  • C. The outward works show the inward goodness.
    1. Righteousness is by faith, shown by works: profit is not to result.
    2. Eternal life follows faith and good living, and cannot be earned.
    3. God (not saints) receives us in heaven: works should be aimed at the poor, not saints.

(The complete systematic scheme will be found at the end of this book in Appendix A.)

Tyndale's source is Luther, specifically a sermon printed twice, in identical texts, at Wittenberg in 1522, Ein Sermon von dem unrechten Mammon Lu. XVI.⁷ Luther gives partly an exposition of the parable,

it is, more essentially, a discussion of the relationship between faith and works, in the light not only of Luke XVI but also of many other New Testament passages which seem to imply that works will win salvation and heaven for man. Luther maintains, first, that faith alone justifies, second, that true faith will always reveal itself in good works done freely and without thought of reward, and, third, that it is not the saints, but God, who receives men into heaven.⁸

We see at once that this is only the first of Tyndale's three main sections. Tyndale has greatly expanded Luther, as he had done before with the Prologue to the Cologne New Testament and the Compendious Introduction to Romans, but here the enlargement is much greater. Luther's printed sermon occupies only six leaves in quarto; Tyndale has six times as much. As before, the expansion is in two ways: the filling-out of Luther's rather stark sentences, often with human experience; and the addition of much new material. Here, in the Wicked Mammon, both ways are themselves much extended: Tyndale, as he learns his craft of scriptural translation and exposition, develops his own strengths, and leaves Luther increasingly behind. Here he grounds Luther's theology in everyday experience, opening up the German statements of doctrine to describe over and over again what it is like to be human and experience the unmerited gift of faith. Moreover, Tyndale alone sets out the whole parable—Luther's text is only the final verse, ‘make friends of the wicked mammon, that when ye shall have need, they may receive you into everlasting habitations’. Luther preached often, and many sermons have survived: the Weimar edition prints sixty-four for the year 1522, a not uncommon number. Many were printed at the time. This one, however, had at least five editions in 1522 and one in 1523, printed in Wittenberg, and probably as well in Augsburg, Basle and Erfurt. It was a well-known statement of the primacy of faith, and in translating it Tyndale was showing himself to be firmly in the Lutheran mainstream. At the same time, he was not just translating it: his Wicked Mammon is an English Lutheran work, existentially illuminated—and five times the length.

Tyndale's increasing freedom can be felt everywhere. For Luther's three introductory paragraphs, he prints one of his own, beginning ‘Forasmuch as … many have …’, a direct echo of his translation of the opening of Luke's Gospel. Because many have ‘enforced to draw people from the true faith’, he begins (a statement then expanded with biblical quotation, continuing ‘and brought them in belief that they shall be justified in the sight of God by the goodness of their own works, and have corrupted the pure word of God, to confirm their Aristotle withal …’, a point again developed), ‘wherefore I have taken in hand …’; a phrase that again imitates Luke's opening sentence,

to expound this gospel, and certain other places of the new Testament; and (as far forth as God shall lend me grace) to bring the scripture unto the right sense, and to dig again the wells of Abraham, and to purge and cleanse them of the earth of worldly wisdom, wherewith these Philistines have stopped them. Which grace grant me God, for the love that he hath unto his son, Jesus our Lord, unto the glory of his name. Amen.

After this information, Tyndale greatly expands Luther's brief introductory quotations of four texts from Romans to prove that faith alone justifies, and amplifies the German to expound at length over six sides a number of other texts on faith, the law and the gospel. Tyndale is going out of his way at the very beginning to explain law and gospel, expecting to reach readers who would find it all very new. Luther had already by August 1522, the month of the sermon, been copious on the subject. By 1528 there had been nothing at all printed in English with such radical theology, apart from Tyndale's 1525 Cologne prologue, and his Worms Compendious Introduction. Tyndale, we must also notice, is behaving like a good Erasmian rhetorician, using the figure amplificatio. His own thirty-eight-line introductory paragraph, plus thirty-line parable (replacing Luther's thirty-three lines) is all one sentence, amplifying in balanced sections the contrast between the teachings of the schoolmen and of Scripture. Now, as the treatise begins, his first point reproduces Luther's proof from Paul that faith alone justifies, and then amplifies it extensively, layer by scriptural layer. Tyndale uses amplificatio in two particular directions, scriptural and existential. In both those he is being properly Erasmian. An appeal to ancient texts linked with illustration from everyday life in the same remark or in adjacent sentences in good clear Latin is how Erasmus advised a student to write, as in De copia, and how he himself worked, as in the Enchiridion. Yet Tyndale is his own man: he is writing good clear English, which Erasmus would not appreciate, and his texts are all from Scripture, a source which Erasmus noticeably avoided (we nowhere have Erasmus on Romans). Tyndale both takes Luther's Scripture references further and makes his everyday illustrations move Luther's bald statements into fuller humanity. Thus, to show the latter work in action, where Luther, on his first page, remarks ‘Gleich wie er leyplich muss zuuor gesundt seyn ehe ehr arbeytt und gesund werck thutt’ (‘Just as a sick man must previously be made bodily whole before he can do the work of a whole man’), Tyndale takes that idea and elaborates it:

even as a sick man must first be healed or made whole, ere he can do the deeds of an whole man, and as the blind man must first have sight given him ere he can see: and he that hath his feet in fetters, gyves or stocks must first be loosed or he can go, walk or run, and even as they which thou readest of in the Gospel that they were possessed of the devils, could not laud God till the devils were cast out …⁹

Unlike Erasmus, however, all Tyndale's amplificatory pictures of human life have one common theme—the healing release that comes from the work of Christ in a body. Where Luther explains that the effect of faith on the human heart is to make a man renewed and reborn and live in a new way, Tyndale amplifies as follows:

Therefore it [faith] is mighty in operation, full of virtue and ever working, which also reneweth a man, and begetteth him afresh, altereth him, changeth him, and turneth him altogether into a new nature and conversation, so that a man feeleth his heart altogether altered and changed, and far otherwise disposed than before, and hath power to love that which before he could not but hate, and delighteth in that which before he abhorred, and hateth that which before he could not but love. And it setteth the soul at liberty and maketh her free to follow the will of God, and doth to the soul even as health doth unto the body, after that a man is pined and wasted away with a long soking [consuming] disease. The legs cannot bear him, he cannot lift up his hands to help himself, his taste is corrupt, sugar is bitter in his mouth, his stomach abhorreth longing after sibbersause and swash [bland food and pig-swill], at which his whole stomach is ready to cast his gorge. When health cometh, she changeth and altereth him clean, giveth him strength in all his members and lust to do of his own accord that which before he could not do neither could suffer that any man exhorted him to do, and hath now lust in wholesome things, and his members are free and at liberty and have power to do of their own accord all things which belong to an whole man to do, which afore they had no power to do, but were in captivity and bondage. So likewise in all things doth right faith to the soul.¹⁰

Here, after the opening line freely rendering Luther, Tyndale has made a soaring set of variations on the theme of joyful release from illness. Later in the treatise, little pictures from home life begin to be seen: in the course of three of his own paragraphs on, as so often, the nature of the law and the promises, Tyndale notes the way the law reveals, and even causes, wrath: ‘when the mother commandeth her child, but even to rock the cradle, it grudgeth [complains], the commandment doth but utter the poison that lay hid, and setteth him at bate with his mother and maketh him believe she loveth him not.’¹¹

Soon after, the reception of the idea of faith to those who have not heard of it before is ‘as when a man telleth a story or a thing done in a strange land, that pertaineth not to them at all. Which yet they believe and tell as a true thing.’¹² A full parallel text, Luther alongside Tyndale, would show that Tyndale adds to Luther's words, over and over again, description of the effect of the gift of faith on personality, a genuine alteration, something visible. He is recording a conversion experience, a transformation. His method is to craft as carefully as ever, with short parallel units in a swift rhythm, patterns of sound through alliteration and assonance, and so on: but there can be felt through it all strong feeling ‘in our hearts’ about what it is to receive Christ and be converted. The nature of the experience and its intensity are both clear.

And when the gospel is preached unto us we believe the mercy of God, and in believing we receive the spirit of God, which is the earnest of eternal life, and we are in eternal life already, and feel already in our hearts the sweetness thereof, and are overcome with the kindness of God and Christ and therefore love the will of God, and of love are ready to work freely, and not to obtain that which is given us freely and whereof we are heirs already.¹³

That is Tyndale not Luther. The most remarkable of all Tyndale's additions to Luther is what develops from the example he chooses in order to show that outward deeds are signs of inward faith. This is the story in Luke 7 about Simon the Pharisee who invited Jesus to his house, and the woman ‘who was a sinner’ who there anointed Jesus's feet and was told her sins were forgiven and that her faith had saved her (as we saw above,¹⁴ named in late Church tradition as Mary Magdalen, though the Gospels do not say so). This simple example becomes what has been rightly described as a ‘cascading passage’, where ‘its irrepressible torrent of clauses accurately reflects the subject matter’—‘like Mary's love, the clauses themselves “could not abide nor hold, but must break out”’.¹⁵ The subject is the reality of works produced by the intensity of feeling at the presence of Christ and faith. The illustration fills three pages of Wicked Mammon. Tyndale writes:

Take for an ensample Mary, that anointed Christ's feet … [Tyndale then reproduces Luke's story in full from his own 1526 translation, beginning with Simon ‘which bade Christ to his house’, ending with Jesus's words ‘To whom less is forgiven …’ Tyndale sums up ‘Deeds are the fruits of love; and love is the fruit of faith.’ He goes on:] But Mary had a strong faith, and therefore burning love, and notable deeds done with exceeding profound and deep meekness. On the one hand she saw herself clearly in the law, both in what danger she was in, and her cruel bondage under sin, her horrible damnation and also the fearful sentence and judgement of God upon sinners. On the other side she saw the gospel of Christ preached, and in the promises she saw with eagles eyes the exceeding abundant mercy of God, that passeth all utterance of speech, which is set forth in Christ for all meek sinners. Which knowledge their sins. And she believed the word of God mightily and glorified God over his mercy and truth, and being overcome and overwhelmed with the unspeakable yea and incomprehensible abundant riches of the kindness of God, did inflame and burn in love, yea was so swollen in love, that she could not abide nor hold, but must break out, and was so drunk in love that she regarded no thing, but even to utter the fervent and burning love of her heart only. She had no respect to herself, though she was never so great and notable a sinner, neither to the curious hypocrisy of the Pharisees which ever disdain weak sinners, neither the costliness of her ointment, but with all humbleness did run unto his feet. Washed them with tears of her eyes, and wiped them with the hairs of her head, and anointed them with her precious ointment, yea and would no doubt have run into the ground under his feet to have uttered her love toward him, yea would have descended down into hell, if it had been possible.¹⁶

The passage responds to rhetorical analysis, revealing as well as alliteration, three-fold parison, repetitio. Yet it is also personal and more immediate than anything in Luther's sermon. It bears comparison, also, with the passage quoted above from Nicholas Love's Mirror: there Mary expressed her own feelings in direct speech; we are meant to believe that such words were part of Luke's Gospel story, from which of course they are many miles distant. Here Tyndale, by contrast, is amplifying the text to demonstrate the power of love to produce deeds. Nicholas Love and Tyndale share the using of the Gospel to write for the heart. In every other way they are polar opposites, in that Nicholas Love creates his own words for Mary as if they were in the Gospel, full of feeling for devotion and humbled imitation, and all enclosed within the Church. Tyndale, having given Luke's text in full, comments on it, drawing attention to the direct and amazing force of faith upon a sinner at a moment of conversion—an experience enabled by the text alone.

This passage, quoting in full and developing the story in Luke 7, how the inward goodness prompted by love and inspired by faith produces genuine and not feigned good works, is not in Luther. It is typical of the double amplificatio that Tyndale uses: on the one hand greatly enlarging Luther's scripture reference, even to longer quotation, and on the other, grounding the meaning of the doctrine in human behaviour. The sub-sections are of different lengths: that which we have labelled II.A, for example, is of only a few lines, as (directly translating Luther) Tyndale explains the word ‘mammon’. The last sub-sections of the second and third parts are many pages long (twenty-six in the first, and thirty in the second) and are made up entirely of detailed quotation from, and comment on, the New Testament, from Matthew, Luke and John, with Romans, I and 2 Corinthians, Hebrews, John and Peter's first Epistles, and James's, as well. The Old Testament, the few times that it is mentioned, is seen only through the New, as the classic examples of faith from Abraham and Rahab are reached through James 2 and Hebrews 11, as is a mention of Pharaoh, implicitly. It is, as noted, impossible to come away from this volume not knowing many of the key texts of the New Testament, in English. One of the ways in which Tyndale differs from Luther is in his desire always to instruct, to make things as clear as they can be made. In the Scripture passages that make the last section of all, Tyndale moves right away from the parable of the unjust steward and quotes and expounds many texts that at first sight suggest that good works should be done in order to gain heaven, such as ‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments Matt. xix’. These twenty-six original pages deserve much more attention than there is space for here as, rooted in the words of Christ, they make clear how wrong it is to make works the passport to heaven. Good works do not deserve heaven, or justify the doer, since justification and heaven are given for the sake of Christ's blood. Good works are urged because they are the will of God.¹⁷ Matthew's Gospel alone makes this irrefutable. In this submersion in the New Testament Tyndale differs from Luther, who more frequently elsewhere takes his Scripture from the Old, though not here. This, of course, was one reason for ascribing the last section of the 1525 Cologne prologue to Luther translated by someone other than Tyndale: when Tyndale is flying solo, as it were, and writing to instruct, his mind rightly reaches for the New Testament alone. One of the purposes of this book must have been to penetrate English minds with the essence of the New Testament. In its first following of Luther it is Lutheran: yet most of it is original and Tyndalian, if that word means an entire book immersed in the New Testament.

His other use of amplificatio is in the much stronger sense of human life. When he begins his third main part with a steady look at good works, they are not simply the standard late medieval trio of fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage. He begins ‘Good works are all things that are done within the laws of God, in which God is honoured and for which thanks are given to God’¹⁸ A few lines later he expresses vividly how fasting, like modern slimming regimes, can so easily distort.

Some fast from meat and drink, and yet so tangle themselves in worldly business that they cannot once think on God. Some abstain from butter, some from eggs, some from all manner of white meats, some this day, some that day, some in the honour of this saint, some of that, and every man for a sundry purpose. Some for the tooth ache, some for the head ache, for fevers, pestilence, for sudden death, for hanging, drowning, and to be delivered from the pains of hell.

The running, jolting rhythm of that last sentence is excellent, like an ambling horse: the awkwardness of the breaks matches the folly of the treatments, until the last nine words run away into extreme absurdity. But he goes on, ‘some are so mad that they fast one of the Thursdays between the two saint Mary days in the worship of that saint whose day is hallowed between christmas and candlemas, and that to be delivered of the pestilence.’¹⁹ Some pages later, explaining that ‘all works are good which are done within the law of God’, he is blunt: ‘and understand that thou in doing them pleasest God, whatseover thou doest within the law of God, as when thou makest water. And trust me if either wind or water were stopped thou shouldest feel what a precious thing it were to do either of both, and what thanks ought to be given God therefore.’²⁰ Such basic reality extends in the next sentence to the essential point that ‘as touching to please God, there is no work better than another … whether thou be an apostle or a shoe maker … Thou art a kitchen page and washest thy masters dishes, another is an Apostle and preacheth the word of God … Now if thou compare deed to deed there is difference betwixt washing of dishes and preaching of the word of God. But as touching to please God none at all.’²¹ In other words, ‘there is nothing to exclude the simplest layman from the upper reaches of the spiritual life’;²² no wonder the English prelates had to destroy this book and those who loved it.

There are over two dozen places in the book where images of daily life as it is lived come as sudden shafts of sunlight: the child complaining when asked to rock the baby's cradle, an actor coming back as someone else, a sick person loathing slops, someone finding the cause of a lunar eclipse, a father speaking to his child, ‘he that loveth not my dog, loveth not me’, a child warned from the attraction of fire and water, taverners altering their wines, a servant washing dishes. This is a piece of literature quite without pretence to be elevated. Caxton would not have considered it for printing for his wealthy, upper-echelon customers. Indeed, Tyndale, explaining the commonality of works in Christ (‘Let every man of whatsoever craft or occupation he be of … refer his craft and occupation unto the common wealth, and serve his brethren as he would do Christ himself’²³) gives a list of crafts or occupations which accurately describes his readers: ‘whether brewer baker tailor victualler merchant or husbandman’. Again, it is no wonder that the super-elevated Sir Thomas More sneered, and worse. These are people for whom the Gospel was too good: the good news must be kept from them.²⁴

Tyndale can be polemic. Explaining that the world does not understand God and that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle do not reveal him, he presents the common Church view, asking ‘How can he be a divine, and wotteth not what is subjectum in theologia?’ Early in the book he explains that God's ‘son's blood is stronger than all the sins and wickedness of the whole world’,

… and thereunto commit thyself … (namely at the hour of death) … Or else perisheth thou though thou hast a thousand holy candles about thee, a hundred tons of holy water, a ship-ful of pardons, a cloth sack full of friars' coats and all the ceremonies in the world and all the good works, deservings and merits of all the men in the world, be they or were they never so holy.²⁵

Tyndale's Prologue to Wicked Mammon ends with powerful attack on Antichrist—it is he that can come on again in different name and clothes, like an actor—in a long paragraph identified, by means of Christ's attack on Pharisees as hypocrites, with ‘our prelates’. ‘There is difference in the names between a pope, a cardinal, a bishop, and so forth, and to say a scribe, a Pharisee, a senior and so forth, but the thing is all one.’

The old Antichrists brought Christ unto Pilate saying, by our law he ought to die … They do all things of a good zeal, they say, they love you so well, that they had rather burn you than that you should have fellowship with Christ … Some man will ask peradventure why I take the labour to make this work inasmuch as they will burn it, seeing they burnt the gospel? I answer, in burning the New Testament they did none other thing than that I looked for: not more shall they do, if they burn me also, if it be God's will it shall so be.

Nevertheless in translating the New Testament I did my duty, and so do I now, and will do as much more as God hath ordained me to do … If God's word bear record unto it and thou feelest in thine heart that it be so, be of good comfort and give God thanks.²⁶

PRINTING IN ANTWERP

Printing was of far greater importance in the Low Countries than in England. Up to December 1500, just under 2,000 books were issued there, compared with about 360 in England.²⁷ In the first decades of the sixteenth century there were some sixty printers in Antwerp, capable of producing work of high quality for a growing English market, and printing in Latin, German, French, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Hebrew.²⁸ The large printing-houses, which had rich resources, skilled technical staffs, and learned translators and editors, could produce books cheaply, efficiently and quickly.²⁹ Much of the output was good, trade, run-of-the-mill stuff and sometimes slightly below, like the first piracy of Tyndale's New Testament in 1526 from Christoffel van Ruremund, also called von Endhoven, in squint-producing sextodecimo. Though the English authorities issued proclamations against books by Luther, Tyndale and Roye (and presently others) not all copies were destroyed, though there was early in 1527 a burning of Tyndale's New Testaments even in Antwerp itself³⁰—it is intriguing to think that Tyndale might even have watched. De Keyser, who began printing in Antwerp in 1525, at first specialised in Latin theology, but seems to have had some connections with Lutheran circles, especially in Scandinavia. He showed courage. He printed two forbidden Dutch books in 1526 and 1528 under the name of ‘Adam Anonymous, Basel’.³¹ He printed the ten ‘Hans Luft of Marburg’ books in semi-black-letter type, workmanlike rather than beautiful. All ten have woodcut initials in common and often share one or two title-page compartments. Printing ‘religious’ books in English for smuggling was dangerous, as the word easily meant ‘seditious’, but it was obviously lucrative.

Since historians regularly announce that Tyndale's work was attacked because of its inflammatory marginal notes, it should stated here that in Tyndale's lifetime editions of The Parable of the Wicked Mammon had no marginal notes at all, after the prologue. A few pages at the back of the book give short notes keyed to pages, notes like ‘The law death, and the promises life’ or ‘The promises justify’ or ‘The talent, Matt.xxv’, which act as a kind of index. When there are notes in the margin, they work in a way typical of all Tyndale's treatises. Thus, there are eight marginal notes to the preface, and they make a sort of rough summary: ‘2 Tim. ii. With God's word ought a man to rebuke wickedness and not with railing rhymes’; ‘Antichrist is as much as to say, as against Christ and is nothing but a preacher of false doctrine’; ‘Antichrist was ever’; ‘Antichrist when he is spied goeth out of the play and disguises himself and then cometh in again’; ‘Antichrist is a spiritual thing and cannot be seen but in the light of God's word’; ‘The prelates have a burning zeal to their ghostly children’; ‘Try all doctrine by God's word’ and ‘Believe nothing except God's word bear record, that it is true’. These are points which summarise the text. Before we have read the prologue, skimming the margins gives the argument, useful in finding one's way around. As usual, it is instructive to watch the accumulation of notes, now placed in the margin, in editions after Tyndale's death, until by the time of John Daye's edition in 1573 they are averaging five or six on each page. It is these which Walter printed in the Parker Society text. Even so, the zealous searcher after offence in the margins will be disappointed.

MAMMON'S RECEPTION

The Parable of the Wicked Mammon was published on the 8 May 1528, and it probably began to circulate in England not long after. When the Lutheran-hunting authorities—Tunstall, Warham, Wolsey himself—intercepted copies, they were violent. Archbishop Warham's council of divines found over two dozen heresies in it. A little later, Sir Thomas More called it a ‘very mammona iniquitatis, a very treasury and well-spring of wickedness … the wicked book of Mammon’³² On 18 June 1528, Wolsey instructed the English ambassador to the Low Countries, John Hackett, to demand from the Regent the handing-over of three heretics, believed to have been Tyndale, Roye and an English merchant called Richard Herman, who was a citizen of Antwerp, who had heretical books for sale. The Regent replied that not even the Emperor had powers of extradition, but a search would be made for the three and their books, and they would, if found, be tried. Only if they were found guilty would they be sent to England, or punished on the spot. The investigators only succeeded in finding one, the merchant Herman, whom they imprisoned, in June. Early in the autumn they were still looking, for Tyndale and Roye, and for evidence against Herman. Mozley prints letters from Herman Rinck which give a picture of the confusion the authorities were in, using information that was too meagre, wrong, out of date or all three. After repeated demands for more evidence from England, the Regent's court, receiving little or nothing from Wolsey, gave up on the whole of Hackett's case, and released Herman on 5 February 1529.

Tyndale's Wicked Mammon, coming on top of his Worms 1526 New Testament and its Endhoven Antwerp pirating the same year, his Compendious Introduction, and (Roye and) Barlowe's Rede Me …, had stirred up much persecution in England. Many of those mentioned by Foxe were examined or punished, or usually both, for possessing, usually with Tyndale's Testament, ‘a book called the Wicked Mammon’. Foxe does not always follow a strict chronological order, to put it mildly, and tends to print documents as they come to hand, making it difficult to get an immediate picture of the rolling, rising tide of persecution in England month by month, from May 1528. Nevertheless, it is clear enough, first, that Tyndale's Wicked Mammon had an immediate impact in England, and was read and owned fairly widely among what we can call evangelicals, often tradesmen and merchants:³³ and second, that it continued to be influential and was still prohibited, and hunted out, years later. Foxe gives fuller details of the examination of some of those who owned a copy, particularly if they became martyrs. Thus ‘John Tewkesbury, Leatherseller, of London, Martyr’³⁴ (Strype, using Foxe's papers, calls him a haberdasher³⁵) who was converted by the reading of Tyndale's Testament and the Wicked Mammon, was twice examined in April 1529, by Tunstall and other bishops and later by More at his house in Chelsea, where he was elaborately tortured.³⁶ From there he was sent to the Tower and was racked ‘till he was almost lame’. (He had abjured, but later recanted and was burned alive by Stokesley.) In his first examination, he was so expert in ‘the doctrine of justification and all other articles of his faith … that Tunstall, and all his learned men, were ashamed that a leather-seller should so dispute with them, and with such power of the Scriptures and heavenly wisdom, that they were not able to resist him’. Foxe gives several pages to the interrogations and what followed. Tewkesbury was first examined by Tunstall, with the Bishop of St Asaph and the Abbot of Westminster, entirely on detailed articles of heresy ‘extracted out of the Book of “The Wicked Mammon”’. He was first asked if ‘he would stand to the contents of the book named The Wicked Mammon’ to which he replied that he would. Tewkesbury, throughout the documentation, which Foxe prints from Tunstall's register, comes across as an honest, faithful, Christian man—a mixture of Bunyan's Faithful and Mr Standfast—holding firmly to what he has experienced. When a passage of the book, from the section on alms, was put to him,

Now seest thou what alms-deeds meaneth, and wherefore it serveth. He that seeketh with his alms more than to be merciful, to be a neighbour to succour his brother's need, to do his duty to his brother, to give his brother what he owed him, the same is blind, and seeth not what it is to be a Christian man³⁷

(which is an edited version of the passage in Tyndale), Tewkesbury replied ‘that he findeth no fault throughout all the book, but that all the book is good, and it hath given him great comfort and light to his conscience.’³⁸ The first examination was on nineteen articles, of which these are typical: ‘First, that Antichrist is not an outward thing, that is to say, a man that should suddenly appear with wonders, as your forefathers talked of him, but Antichrist is a spiritual thing—Whereunto he answered and said, that he findeth no fault in it.’ ‘Again, it was demanded of him touching the article, whether faith only justifieth a man? To this he said, that if he should look to deserve heaven by works, he should do wickedly; for works follow faith, and Christ redeemed us all, with the merits of his passion.’ Or, ‘“We are damned by nature, as a toad is a toad by nature, and a serpent is a serpent by nature.” To that he answered, that it is true, as it is in the book.’ The next examination, before Tunstall and the Bishops of Ely, Lincoln, Bath and Wells, and others, produced another five articles of heresy, as ‘Item, “We desire one another to pray for us. That done, we must put our neighbour in remembrance of his duty, and that he trust not on his holiness. “—To this he answered, ‘Take it as ye will; I will take it well enough”’. Again and again, Tewkesbury answers that he finds no fault, or no ill, in it, a sentiment surely hard not to agree with.

Later detailed attacks on the Wicked Mammon allow us to watch the process of destruction, invariably by the manipulation of evidence to reveal heresy. Quoted phrases are left incomplete, summaries are subtly false, and ideas are imported. Archbishop Warham, on 24 May 1530, with his bishops, issued ‘A Public Instrument … for the abolishing of the Scripture and other Books to be read in English’, which opens with ‘Heresies and Errors collected by the Bishops out of the Book of Tyndale, named “The Wicked Mammon”’. Foxe prints the twenty-nine articles of heresy, and adds his own comments.³⁹ The very first article is ‘Faith only justifieth’, on which Foxe comments, ‘This article being a principle of the Scripture, and the ground of our salvation, is plain enough by St Paul and the whole body of the Scripture; neither can any man make this a heresy, but they must make St Paul a heretic, and show themselves enemies unto the promises of grace, and to the cross of Christ.’

Against almost every Article, Foxe simply writes ‘Read the place’, or ‘The words of Tyndale be these’, indicating distortion. For example, Article VII, ‘Christ with all his works did not deserve heaven’: Foxe prints Tyndale's passage,⁴⁰ which not only gives impeccable Christology, ignored by the Article, but shows that the damage is done simply by cutting Tyndale's phrase short: what Tyndale wrote was ‘… Christ did not deserve heaven (for that was his already) …’ By supplying contexts, correcting wording, completing statements and, above all, appealing directly to Scripture, Foxe shows the extent of the manipulation needed to make charges of heresy. Before printing the full passage after Articles II and III (‘The law maketh us to hate God, because we be born under the power of the devil’, and ‘It is impossible for us to consent to the will of God’), Foxe writes, ‘The place of Tyndale from which these articles be wrested, is in the “Wicked Mammon” as followeth: which place I beseech thee indifferently to read, and then to judge.’⁴¹

A modern biographer of More calls The Parable of the Wicked Mammon ‘fierce’, adding that ‘it exalted justification by faith and held the standard Lutheran position that good works were sinful if they were done with a view to reward’, saying no more about it.⁴² Even apart from that travesty of the content of Tyndale's book, we may wonder what is the more ‘fierce’: printing the New Testament accurately in English, protesting when the word of God is burned, and setting out the New Testament doctrine of faith with much quotation—or imprisoning, humiliating, repeatedly torturing and finally burning alive men and women.

Notes

1. Kronenberg, pp. 139-63.

2. Latré, p. 92. The other nine are: Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man, 2 October 1528; Erasmus's Exhortation and Luther on 1 Corinthians 7, 20 June 1529 (probably translated by Roye); John Frith's Revelation of Antichrist, 12 July 1529; Tyndale's Pentateuch, 17 January 1530; Barlowe's Proper Dialogue, 1530; A compendious old treatise 1530; reprinted, 1530; the Examinations of Thorpe and Oldcastle, 1530; Tyndale's Practice of Prelates, 1530. See CWM, VIII, pp. 1065-91.

3. Kronenberg, pp. 156-9.

4. Kronenberg (1967), pp. 81-94.

5. Clebsch, pp. 230-31.

6. Clebsch, p. 307, in an astonishing phrase, calls Tyndale's Bible translations ‘prized verbiage’. How he could bring himself to read the rest one cannot imagine. And see Mozley (1937), p. 128, ‘the book shows little order or arrangement’.

7. Weimar, X, pp. 283-92. For this section of this chapter I am much indebted to Hume (1961), pp. 59-78.

8. Ibid., p. 60.

9. Sig. B.2. PS, p. 50.

10. Sig. B.4v. PS, pp. 53-4.

11. Sig. B.2v-B.3. PS, pp. 51-2.

12. Sig. B.3v. PS, p. 53.

13. Sig. C.6. PS, p. 65.

14. See above, p. 98.

15. Hume (1961), pp. 68-9.

16. Sig. B.7v-B.8. PS, pp. 56-8.

17. Hume (1961), p. 71.

18. Sig. F.1. PS, p. 90.

19. Sig. F.1v. PS, pp. 90-91.

20. Sig. F.7v. PS, p. 100.

21. Sig. F.7v-G.1. PS, pp. 100-2.

22. Hume, p. 73.

23. PS, p. 102.

24. Foxe gives a ‘brief table or catalogue of all such as were forced to abjure in king Henry's days, after the first beginning of Luther’. The list of just over 100 names, which sometimes also gives trades, includes a shipwright, eight tailors, a butcher, a pointer, a bricklayer, a draper, a glazier, a scrivener's servant, a servant, and a shoemaker (IV, pp. 585-6). Strype refers to a tallow-chandler, a pointmaker, a weaver, and three husbandmen (Strype, I, ii, pp. 116-17). Foxe's bricklayer had been imprisoned ‘for charging a priest with a lie, that preached at Paul's cross that the blood of Christ was not sufficient for man's redemption without works’.

25. PS, p. 48.

26. Sig. A.5. PS, pp. 43-4.

27. Kronenberg, p. 140.

28. Avis (1973), p. 234.

29. Avis (1972), pp. 180-7.

30. Kronenberg, p. 149.

31. Kronenberg, pp. 153-8.

32. CWM, VI, i, pp. 291, 424.

33. Foxe, V, pp. 32-41, noting in particular Patwell and Medwell, pp. 570-7.

34. Foxe, IV, p. 688.

35. Strype, I, i, p. 116.

36. ’In the porter's lodge, hand, foot and head in the stocks, six days without release; then he was carried to Jesu's tree, in his privy garden, where he was whipped, and also twisted in his brows with small ropes, that the blood started out of his eyes; and yet would not accuse no man. Then he was let loose in the house for a day, and his friends thought to have him at liberty the next day. After this, he was sent to be racked in the Tower …’ Foxe, IV, p. 689.

37. PS, p. 100.

38. Foxe, IV, p. 692.

39. Foxe, V, pp. 570-7.

40. PS, p. 62.

41. Foxe, V, p. 570.

42. Marius, p. 339.

Abbreviations

CWM The Complete Works of St Thomas More, New Haven and London, 1969

PS [Tyndale] Doctrinal Treatises … (1848); Expositions … and The Practice of Prelates (1849); Answer to More … (1850), edited for the Parker Society by Henry Walter

Bibliography

Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is London.

Avis, F.C. ‘Book Smuggling into England during the Sixteenth Century’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 1972, pp. 180-87

—‘England's Use of Antwerp Printers, 1500-1540’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 1973, pp. 234-40

Clebsch, W.A. England's Earliest Protestants 1520-1535, New Haven and London, 1964

Foxe, John The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 8 vols, 4th edn, ed. rev. and corrected by J. Pratt; intro. by J. Stoughton, 1877

Hume, A. ‘A Study of the Writings of the English Protestant Exiles, 1525-35’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of London, 1961

Kronenberg, M.E. ‘Forged Addresses in Low Country Books in the Period of the Reformation’, The Library, 5th ser., II, 1967, pp. 81-96

—‘Notes on English Printing in the Low Countries (Early Sixteenth Century)’, The Library, 4th ser., 1, 1929, pp. 139-63

Latré, G. ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible and its Antwerp Origins’, The Bible as Book: the Reformation, British Library, 2000, pp. 89-102

[Luther, M.] D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtaufgabe, Weimar, 58 vols, 1883

Marius, R. Thomas More: A Biography, 1985

Mozley, J.F. William Tyndale, 1937

Strype, J. Memorials of Archbishop Cranmer, 2 vols, 1812

—Ecclesiastical Memorials …, 3 vols, 1821