William Tyndale Translates Bible into English

The press shuddered once and the sheet slid free, still warm. I caught the edge before it could crease and held it up to the lamp. Black letters marched across the page in straight ranks. “The Gospel according to Matthew,” they read, and below that the first verses in plain English. Tyndale stood at the compositor’s bench with his sleeves rolled, ink on his knuckles, watching the same way a man watches a child take its first steps.

We had come to Worms because Cologne had grown too dangerous. The sheets we ran there had been seized before the quires were even folded. Here the printer asked fewer questions and the river barges moved downstream without inspection. Tyndale corrected proof by candlelight until the words blurred. He kept a Hebrew lexicon open on one side and a Greek text on the other, moving between them without looking up. When he found a phrase that would not sit right in English he would walk the length of the room and come back with a different word.

By spring the New Testament was bound in small octavo volumes, light enough to hide inside a bolt of cloth. I carried the first parcel to the boat myself. The master of the vessel asked no names. He took the coins and stowed the package beneath a false floorboard. Three weeks later word reached us that the books had reached London and were already being read in cellars and upper rooms.

Tyndale never stayed long in one place after that. He moved from town to town with a single trunk and a changing set of aliases. I met him again two years later in Antwerp, where the English merchants kept a house on the quay. He lodged in the upper rooms and worked at a plain table that faced the river. Merchants brought him food and paper and asked nothing in return except that he keep translating. He finished the Pentateuch there, the pages stacked in careful piles weighted with smooth stones.

Henry Phillips arrived in the spring of 1535. He was young, well spoken, and carried letters that seemed to come from friends in England. Tyndale took him in because the man claimed to need shelter and because he spoke of shared purpose. They walked together along the wharves in the evenings. Phillips borrowed money for new clothes and said he would repay it when his own funds arrived. Tyndale lent him the sum without writing it down.

One afternoon Phillips asked Tyndale to walk with him to a house outside the city walls. I watched them leave from an upper window. Tyndale wore his usual dark gown and carried no papers. They turned the corner and did not come back. By nightfall we learned the house belonged to an imperial officer. The arrest had been quiet. No one raised an alarm on the street.

The prison at Vilvoorde was a stone keep set in marsh ground. Visitors were allowed only after the payment of heavy fees. I went twice with letters from the merchants, but the guards turned me away at the gate. Inside, Tyndale was permitted to keep his Hebrew Bible and his lexicons. He wrote letters asking for warmer clothing and a lamp. The court examined him on points of doctrine for months. He answered in Latin and in English, always the same answers.

On the sixth of October they led him from the cell at dawn. The sky was low and the air damp. A crowd had gathered outside the walls, mostly soldiers and a few curious townspeople. The executioner used a cord first. When the body went slack they piled brushwood around the stake and lit it. The smoke rose straight because there was no wind. I stood at the edge of the field with two other Englishmen who had come to see the end. None of us spoke until the fire had burned low.

Three years later Coverdale’s complete Bible appeared in London with the king’s license. Copies reached Antwerp in the usual way, sewn into bales of cloth. I opened one on the same table where Tyndale had once worked. The words were close to the ones I remembered from the Worms sheets, only smoother in places. The merchants who had once hidden the illegal volumes now sold them openly from their warehouses.