One day in 1529, or so the story goes, Anne Boleyn gave Henry VIII a copy of The obedience of a Christian man.Footnote 1 The Obedience was a dangerous book. Its author, William Tyndale, was living in exile on the continent, his works having been condemned as heretical by the religious authorities in England. Although his latest book advocated non-resistance to monarchs, a sentiment that might please the king, it also contained Lutheran heresy, which Henry abhorred. Far from being angry, however, Henry is said to have been delighted with Tyndale's tract, saying ‘this book is for me and all kings to read’.Footnote 2
Historians have tended to accept that Henry read and approved of the Obedience. The story of the king's acquisition of the text has been repeated by Tyndale's modern editors and biographers, as well as by the biographers of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell.Footnote 3 The authors of various works on the Henrician Reformation and Tudor political thought have also given credence to some version of the story (although often with qualifications), and it has been described by Diarmaid MacCulloch as ‘well-attested’.Footnote 4
Henry's alleged approval of the Obedience has been linked to another important episode. Geoffrey Elton and others claimed that Henry – or perhaps Thomas Cromwell – tried to recruit Tyndale as a royal propagandist or diplomat in 1531.Footnote 5 Stephen Vaughan, one of Cromwell's clients, sought Tyndale out in Antwerp and negotiated with him on the king's behalf, promising Tyndale safe conduct if he would return to England.Footnote 6 Henry, it is claimed, hoped that Tyndale's pen could be enlisted in support of his campaign for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Although these negotiations broke down, they seem to indicate that an alliance between Tyndale and Henry was both possible and desirable. Tyndale, it is alleged, believed that a ‘godly King’ such as Henry was the only force capable of reforming the church. Henry was supposedly attracted by Tyndale's support for royal authority.Footnote 7
The question of whether Henry read and approved of the Obedience or tried to recruit its author is important because the text has been credited with influencing the regime's thinking and propaganda on the issue of obedience.Footnote 8 Tyndale's support for royal authority has been characterized as absolute and unequivocal. The tract was described by A. G. Dickens as ‘an unflinching exposition of the divine right of kings’, while J. J. Scarisbrick characterized it as ‘the first thorough-going apologia of Caesaropapism’.Footnote 9 Brad Pardue has suggested that the Obedience offered Henry almost unlimited authority, while for Quentin Skinner, Tyndale and his fellow evangelicals arrived with ‘complete decisiveness’ at the conclusion that the monarch must be ‘obeyed in all things’.Footnote 10 David Daniell claimed that the Obedience offered Henry ‘absolute, unlimited power’ and was thus ‘exactly what [Henry] wanted to hear’.Footnote 11 More guardedly, Peter Marshall has said that some refrains in the Obedience were ‘music for royal ears’.Footnote 12 The Obedience, it seems, was consistent with the regime's own ideas and provided more or less unambiguous backing for royal authority, laying the foundation for a staunchly conservative tradition of evangelical thought that continued until the emergence of the ‘monarchomachs’ during the reign of Mary I.
Doubts have nevertheless been raised about whether Henry did in fact read and approve of Tyndale's Obedience, or try to recruit its author. Even those who endorse the general outline of the story have described Henry's approval as ‘unlikely’.Footnote 13 G. W. Bernard has pointed out that the main source for the story was written many decades later.Footnote 14 Richard Rex has raised further doubts, arguing that even if the king approved of the book's support for royal authority, he would certainly not have liked its Lutheran theology.Footnote 15 According to Rex, the evidence that Henry tried to recruit Tyndale in 1531 is ‘flimsy’.Footnote 16 Karl Gunther and Ethan Shagan have questioned whether evangelical political thought was as conservative as it seems, arguing persuasively that support for royal authority was compatible with remarkably radical political ideas, although their focus was on evangelical authors other than Tyndale.Footnote 17 Daniel Eppley has also argued that Tyndale's support for royal authority in the Obedience was more limited and conditional than it might seem, although he left open the question of whether Henry read and approved of the text.Footnote 18
As we shall see, scepticism about these issues is well founded. The story of Henry's acquisition of Tyndale's Obedience was first recorded by John Louthe, archdeacon of Nottingham, and an examination of Louthe's aims and sources raises fresh doubts about its reliability.Footnote 19 Rather than delighting in his works, Henry appears to have been hostile to Tyndale and his writings both before and after this episode is supposed to have occurred. He was probably involved in an attempt to extradite Tyndale from the continent and suppress his works in 1528–9, and later evidence suggests that he viewed Tyndale's books as heretical and seditious. While Louthe's story might lead us to believe that the king made an exception for the Obedience, Henry was personally involved in banning the tract in 1530. Moreover, there is little to suggest that the negotiations carried out by Stephen Vaughan in 1531 were intended to recruit Tyndale as a royal diplomat or propagandist. These negotiations were instead part of a long-running effort to secure Tyndale's return to England, willingly or otherwise, so that he might abjure his heresies and be prevented from writing more seditious books. While it is possible that Henry ultimately hoped to recruit Tyndale once these objectives were achieved, this remains a matter of speculation. Vaughan's negotiations provide no evidence for this and it is unlikely given Henry's record of hostility.
Moreover, Henry's allegedly delighted response to the Obedience is difficult to reconcile with the radical and subversive content of the book. Despite its title, the Obedience did not advocate anything like the sort of obedience that would have satisfied Henry, and certainly not the absolute, unqualified obedience imagined by some historians. There has been a tendency to conflate Tyndale's narrow, minimal position – non-resistance to tyranny – with the much broader phenomenon of obedience. But for Henry, merely refraining from armed rebellion against a tyrant did not count as obedience, nor was the possibility that he was a tyrant something that he wished to dwell on. Tyndale's Obedience was highly critical of Henry, who was presented as being worse than a tyrant, and the book endorsed disobedience of various kinds.
I
The first person to record the story that Anne Boleyn gave Henry a copy of Tyndale's Obedience was John Louthe, archdeacon of Nottingham. Writing in 1579, Louthe presented the episode as the culmination of a tense court drama. Around 1529, he claimed, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey had tried to engineer Boleyn's downfall by exposing her ownership of Tyndale's tract to the king, thus implicating her in heresy. Boleyn's mistake had been to lend the forbidden book to one of her ladies in waiting, Anne Gainsford. George Zouche, a young gentleman who was courting Gainsford, playfully plucked the book from her hands and refused to return it, becoming so obsessed with it that he read it in the royal chapel. Zouche was spotted by Richard Sampson, the dean of the chapel, who seized the book and interrogated him about its owner, before telling the whole story to Wolsey. Far from being frightened by the confiscation of her book, Boleyn predicted that it would be ‘the deerest booke that ever the deane or Cardynall tooke away’.Footnote 20 Before Wolsey could denounce Boleyn to the king, she got there first, presenting the Obedience to Henry and persuading him to read it. The king's unexpected delight at the tract meant that Wolsey's attempt to ruin Boleyn backfired spectacularly, and shortly afterwards, the cardinal was himself driven from office. The story was picked up by the historian John Strype in the eighteenth century, from where it found its way into the historiography of the Reformation.Footnote 21
There are several reasons to doubt the authenticity of Louthe's story. Most obviously, it was written fifty years after the events were supposed to have taken place. It was hardly a ‘document of the time’, as David Daniell described it.Footnote 22 Louthe's account was apparently based on the testimony of George Zouche, who had died at least twenty years earlier.Footnote 23 This left plenty of time for errors and misunderstandings to accumulate in the retelling.
Louthe's account also had a clear polemical purpose. It appeared in a letter that was intended to furnish John Foxe with material for the next edition of his Protestant martyrology, the Acts and monuments. In earlier editions, Louthe said, Foxe had omitted material ‘that wolde dawnte your adversares, honor god, comforte his churche, & sett owt the myghty power of god’.Footnote 24 He hoped to bolster the authority of the next edition by fleshing out some of Foxe's stories and offering new ones.
According to Louthe, Henry's acquisition of Tyndale's Obedience had momentous consequences. It explained not just the fall of Wolsey, but the entire Henrician Reformation. After Henry read the Obedience, Louthe wrote, the king's eyes were opened to the truth. He rejected the lies of the papists, and courageously led his subjects out of Babylonian captivity, scorning the threat of foreign invasion and rebellion.Footnote 25 This version of events was doubtless intended to rebut Catholic histories of the Reformation that attributed Henry's break with Rome to his lust for Anne Boleyn rather than any principled sympathy with reforming ideas. Louthe evidently hoped to rehabilitate both Boleyn and the king, who he presented as the victim rather than the initiator of censorship, the unwitting dupe of clerical evil councillors who kept the truth from reaching him. The complicated and tortuous story of Henry's break with Rome and the religious turmoil that followed was reduced to a satisfying, dramatic moment of conversion. The ambiguities of Henry's religious beliefs, his persecution of heretics, his conservative positions on justification and the mass – and indeed the awkward fact that Tyndale opposed the divorce – were all quietly forgotten.
The story of Henry acquiring the Obedience also neatly conformed – or was made to conform – to Louthe's providential interpretation of history. Louthe included it among a series of anecdotes designed to show the unfolding of God's plan. In these stories, prophetic words came true, brave evangelicals miraculously avoided persecution, and the machinations of papists backfired.Footnote 26 Boleyn's defiant warning that Wolsey and Sampson would rue the day they seized her book, and the spectacular way in which the cardinal's attempt to undermine her precipitated both his own downfall and that of the entire popish edifice in England fit this pattern exactly. Anne's prophetic words are not the only unlikely detail in Louthe's account. There is something suspiciously theatrical about the king's thigh-slapping declaration that the Obedience was a book ‘for me and all kings to read’.
The fact that Foxe declined to incorporate Louthe's story about the Obedience in the Acts and monuments raises further doubts about its credibility. Although Foxe used some of Louthe's material in the 1583 edition, he did not include the anecdote about Anne showing Henry Tyndale's Obedience. Footnote 27 The story did not make its way into print until 1721, when John Strype, working from Foxe's papers, included it in his Ecclesiastical memorials. Footnote 28 Given Foxe's eagerness to praise Anne Boleyn and to present Tyndale as a Protestant martyr, as well as his weakness for tales of hair's-breadth escapes and providential punishments, this omission is puzzling.Footnote 29 One possibility is that he did not believe Louthe's story and thought that including it would give further ammunition to his Catholic critics, who accused him of lying.Footnote 30 As the editor of Tyndale's works, Foxe must have known that his life and writings provided little evidence of royal approval. On Foxe's account, Tyndale had cried ‘Lord, open the eyes of the King of Englande’ shortly before his execution for heresy in 1536, which made little sense if Tyndale had already opened the king's eyes in 1529.Footnote 31 The notion that Henry was decisively converted by the Obedience also contradicted Foxe's view that he vacillated between evangelical and conservative policies depending on which faction held his ear.Footnote 32
Foxe may also have omitted the story because he thought Louthe had confused it with a similar anecdote, already included in the Acts, about Anne introducing Henry to another evangelical text, Simon Fish's A supplication for the beggars.Footnote 33 The Obedience and the Supplication were similar enough that they could easily be confused, and contemporaries frequently misattributed Fish's works to Tyndale.Footnote 34 If some version of this story is true, and the king approved of one of the texts, Fish's Supplication is a more likely candidate than Tyndale's Obedience, as it contained relatively little Lutheran doctrine and did not criticize the king.Footnote 35 It is also possible that Louthe confused the Obedience with various other books written to discredit Wolsey that may indeed have played some part in his downfall.Footnote 36
Louthe's account is not supported by contemporary sources. While Cardinal Campeggio complained about Lutheran books circulating at court in April 1529, the king only seemed to have heard of their contents at second hand.Footnote 37 In December, Henry criticized the pope's magnificence, which he said had been a cause of war and discord. While this was certainly an important theme of the Obedience, such criticisms were hardly unique to Tyndale.Footnote 38 In May 1530, Richard Nix, bishop of Norwich, reported that the readers of heretical books in his bishopric were spreading rumours that Henry approved of them, but Henry was already in the process of rebutting this report.Footnote 39 No contemporary seems to have attributed Wolsey's fall to Henry's acquisition of the Obedience, and the episode was not mentioned by Wolsey's servant and biographer, George Cavendish.Footnote 40 The attempt to smear Boleyn for possessing the tract, if it occurred, also seems to have done little harm to the career of Richard Sampson, Wolsey's co-conspirator: in October 1529, he was sent on an embassy to the pope, which among other things was intended to secure the divorce.
It has been suggested that Louthe's story is corroborated by another text, George Wyatt's manuscript biography of Boleyn, which was probably written in the 1590s or early 1600s.Footnote 41 The stories are certainly similar. Both involve a young suitor being caught with a heretical book that he had borrowed from a lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn. Boleyn is said to have gone to the king before Wolsey could accuse her, thus hastening the cardinal's fall. In Wyatt's version, Henry only read selected passages that Anne had marked with her fingernail, rather than those points he might disapprove of.Footnote 42 Wyatt's source seems to have been one of Boleyn's ladies-in-waiting, presumably Gainsford.Footnote 43
While this story corroborates elements of Louthe's version, Wyatt never named Tyndale's Obedience as the text Henry read. The book in question is simply referred to as one of several works touching religious controversies and papal power. Moreover, Wyatt's chronology is muddled. He said that the book was published after Boleyn's marriage to Henry in late 1532, but the Obedience was printed at least four years earlier.Footnote 44 The book was supposed to have precipitated Wolsey's fall, but by 1532 the cardinal was already dead. It was identified as Tyndale's Obedience not by Wyatt, but by the nineteenth-century editor of his biography, Samuel Singer. Singer had read Louthe's account of the episode in Strype's Ecclesiastical memorials and sought to make Wyatt's story fit this pre-existing narrative, guessing that the Obedience must have been the book Wyatt meant.Footnote 45
II
Henry's alleged endorsement of the Obedience sits uneasily with evidence that he strongly disapproved of Tyndale and his writings. The religious authorities in England had been prohibiting and burning copies of Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, as well as arresting and interrogating those who smuggled or possessed copies, since 1526.Footnote 46 Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Warham, and others clearly led this effort, but there is some evidence to suggest that Henry was involved in an attempt to extradite Tyndale in 1528–9. Between June 1528 and April 1529, Sir John Hacket, the English ambassador in the Low Countries, and John West, a Franciscan friar, sought to apprehend Tyndale, as well as his colleague William Roy and Richard Harman, a merchant involved in the sale of Tyndale's works, for heresy and treason.Footnote 47 They also bought up and destroyed copies of a recently published book attributed to Tyndale and Roy.Footnote 48 The book in question was almost certainly Read me and be not wroth, which was later revealed to be the work of Roy and Jerome Barlow.Footnote 49
Although Wolsey clearly co-ordinated these efforts, Henry also appears to have been involved. The king wrote to Margaret of Austria, the governess of the Habsburg Netherlands, in the summer of 1528 and again in April 1529, requesting the extradition of Harman.Footnote 50 It seems unlikely that Henry would pursue Harman, who smuggled Tyndale's books, without having any involvement in the parallel effort to extradite Tyndale himself. Recent scholarship has suggested that Henry took a close interest in business carried out in his name.Footnote 51 Indeed, when Herman Rinck, a resident of Cologne, responded to Wolsey's request for help in apprehending Tyndale, he sent a near-identical letter to the king, evidently believing that Henry was involved.Footnote 52 There was also reason for the king to take a personal interest, since Tyndale was (wrongly, as it turned out) believed to have slandered Henry in Read me and be not wroth.Footnote 53 As we shall see, Henry also tried to have Tyndale abducted in 1532, indicating that he was quite capable of pursuing him in Wolsey's absence.
Stephen Vaughan's attempt to persuade Tyndale to return from exile in 1531 provides more direct evidence that Henry disapproved of his writings. Everyone involved in these negotiations, including Tyndale himself, seems to have assumed that Henry thoroughly disliked his works. Almost the first thing that Tyndale said to Vaughan was ‘I am enformed that the kinges grace taketh…displeasure to me for putting forth of certeyne boks.’Footnote 54 The king, he acknowledged, had clearly been angry with the publication of his works in the past.Footnote 55 Of course, by 1531, Tyndale had published the The practice of prelates, which criticized the king's divorce. Nevertheless, it is significant that both Tyndale and Vaughan spoke of books in the plural. In other words, Henry was thought to be displeased, not just with recently published tracts like the Practice, but with Tyndale's output in general. There is nothing to suggest that the king only disliked some of his works, but delighted in the Obedience and considered it a book for all kings to read.
Henry's angry reaction to reading Tyndale's Answer to Thomas More's Dialogue concerning heresies in 1531 also suggests that he rejected Tyndale's entire oeuvre. The Answer, he said was ‘fylled with Sedycyous Slaunderous lyes’, but Tyndale's other works were also ‘replet with so abhomynable Sclaunders & lyes…to infecte and intoxicate the peopull’.Footnote 56 Tyndale, he said, habitually spread errors and seditious opinions through his ‘most vncharytable venemous and pestilent boks’.Footnote 57 While Henry probably objected to the Practice most of all, there is no reason to assume that he made an exception for the Obedience.
Henry not only seems to have disapproved of Tyndale's works in general, he also orchestrated efforts to ban the Obedience in 1530, shortly after Boleyn is supposed to have given him a copy. In May, he set up a commission of theologians to consider the contents of various books that were suspected of containing ‘detestable errours, and dampnable opynyons’.Footnote 58 The commission's report on the Obedience identified thirty errors, including the claim that purgatory and miracles did not exist, and that justification could be achieved by faith alone – a doctrine Henry consistently opposed.Footnote 59 The king was involved at every stage of the commission, inviting scholars to take part, consulting with them regularly, and summoning justices of the peace to enlist their help in rounding up heretical books.Footnote 60 A resulting set of injunctions was corrected in Henry's own handwriting.Footnote 61 The king was also present on 24 May to endorse the commission's condemnation.Footnote 62 A proclamation followed on 22 June that banned the Obedience and several other works.Footnote 63 These ‘blasphemous and pestiferous’ books, the proclamation said, were intended not only to lead subjects to heresy, but to ‘stir and incense them to sedition and disobedience against their princes, sovereigns, and heads’.Footnote 64 It is often claimed that Henry would have welcomed Tyndale's support for royal authority, even if he disliked his Lutheran beliefs, yet the commission's judgement – endorsed by the king – was that the Obedience was neither orthodox nor obedient.
III
It has been claimed that Henry, or perhaps Thomas Cromwell, sought to recruit Tyndale to royal service in 1531.Footnote 65 Tyndale has been described as a ‘potential royal asset’ and a target for ‘seduction’ by Henry, who allegedly hoped to use him as a diplomat or propagandist.Footnote 66 Louthe's account of Henry's delighted response to the Obedience, and this attempt to recruit Tyndale, seem to be mutually supporting pieces of evidence.
The immediate context for the supposed attempt to enlist Tyndale was not altogether promising. In December 1530, his Practice of prelates was banned by yet another royal proclamation.Footnote 67 Tyndale's brother and a number of merchants who had circulated copies of the text were forced to march through London wearing pasteboard mitres bearing the words ‘I have sinned against the commandments of the King.’ They carried copies of the Practice around their necks, which they flung into the fire at the end of the procession.Footnote 68
It is certainly true that Henry's representatives tried to persuade Tyndale to return to England and offered him safe conduct. Stephen Vaughan, a friend and agent of Cromwell who had already been involved in searching for heretics on the continent, was tasked with securing Tyndale's return while in the Low Countries in 1530–1.Footnote 69 After arriving in Flanders, Vaughan corresponded with Tyndale, securing a copy of his most recent work, the Answer to Thomas More's Dialogue concerning heresies, which Tyndale was preparing for publication, and sent it to the king.Footnote 70 In April 1531, he met with Tyndale outside Antwerp.Footnote 71
Vaughan was keen to effect a reconciliation, and hoped that Henry would welcome Tyndale's latest polemic. As we have seen, however, when the king read the Answer he was disgusted by its tone and content. Cromwell drafted a letter to Vaughan that communicated the king's furious response and ordered him to cease all negotiations.Footnote 72 Tyndale, Henry said, had done enough damage by publishing heretical and seditious works abroad; he would do much worse if he returned to England.Footnote 73 Rather than hoping for his return, the king was ‘veray joyous to haue his Realme destytute of Such A person’.Footnote 74 Nevertheless, Vaughan met with Tyndale again in May, repeating the offer of safe conduct, but Tyndale clearly distrusted the offer and would only return if the scriptures were published in English.Footnote 75 Vaughan made a final, unsuccessful effort in June, but negotiations petered out thereafter.Footnote 76
What was Henry trying to achieve in these negotiations? While it is possible that he ultimately hoped to enlist Tyndale as a diplomat or royal propagandist, the available evidence suggests a more modest aim: silencing Tyndale and persuading him to recant his heretical opinions. According to Eustace Chapuys, the furore sparked by the publication of Tyndale's Practice of prelates in 1530 had given Henry a bad fright. The proclamation banning the book inadvertently encouraged subjects to discuss the divorce, stimulating demand for Tyndale's work. The king had been forced to burn not just the Practice, but the proclamation as well. Henry, Chapuys said, was now worried that Tyndale would write even more boldly against him, and hoped to make him retract what he had already said, so he sought to persuade him to return home.Footnote 77 Rather than enlisting his pen, the king appears to have wanted Tyndale to stop writing altogether.
Preventing the publication of further seditious material certainly seems to have been one of the main aims of Vaughan's diplomacy. One of his priorities was to delay the publication of Tyndale's Answer to More until the king had a chance to read and approve it.Footnote 78 Tyndale was persuaded to postpone publication, but he eventually claimed that printing had already begun and would be impossible to stop.Footnote 79 Vaughan also promised that the Answer would be Tyndale's last work, evidently believing that this would improve the chances of a reconciliation.Footnote 80
As well as silencing Tyndale, Henry's other aim was to make him recant his heretical opinions. From the beginning of Vaughan's negotiations, it was clear that Tyndale was expected to acknowledge his offences and humbly beg the king's pardon.Footnote 81 As Cromwell wrote, Tyndale's return depended on his ‘conuersion and amendement’.Footnote 82 If Vaughan could ‘excerpte and take awaye the opynyons and fantasies sorely rooted’ in him, and if Tyndale would ‘submyt [him]self to…obedyence and good order’, the king would be inclined to mercy.Footnote 83 The same deal was to be offered to John Frith, another exiled writer.Footnote 84
It is possible, of course, that Henry ultimately wanted Tyndale to write propaganda for him or conduct diplomacy, but the correspondence between Vaughan and Cromwell does not provide evidence for this. The only indication that Henry wished to employ Tyndale came from Chapuys, who claimed that the priest would be offered ‘several appointments and a seat in his Council’ if he returned to England.Footnote 85 A seat on Henry's council was an unlikely promotion for a renegade priest, and it is likely that Chapuys was passing on exaggerated rumours.
The fact that Vaughan approached two other evangelical authors, John Frith and Robert Barnes, would seem to support the idea that Henry sought to recruit Tyndale. The evidence here is mixed. Henry's plans for Frith seem to have extended no further than having him return to England to abjure his heresies. When Frith did go home in 1531, it was without a safe conduct. He was arrested and (after Henry intervened personally) examined about his heretical opinions.Footnote 86 He refused to recant and was executed. The approach to Barnes was much more successful. He was asked by a representative of Henry (presumably Vaughan) to ascertain Luther's opinion on the divorce in 1531, returning to England under safe conduct later that year.Footnote 87 After returning to the continent, he was part of a Lutheran embassy to England in 1534–5 and took part in subsequent negotiations on Henry's behalf.Footnote 88 While Barnes conducted negotiations for Henry, however, this does not by itself mean that similar things were expected from Tyndale or Frith. Unlike Tyndale, Barnes had direct links to Luther that could be exploited. His Supplication, unlike Tyndale's works, was not directly critical of Henry or the divorce. Moreover, while Barnes conducted diplomacy for Henry, he does not appear to have written propaganda for him.
Tyndale himself did not have any faith in the limited offer of safe conduct, let alone any deeper alliance with the king. As Vaughan wrote, it was difficult to persuade him to return to England ‘when he dayly hereth so many thynges from thence whiche feareth hym’.Footnote 89 The news that troubled Tyndale no doubt included the public humiliation of his brother, the burning of his work, and the trial of another evangelical convert, Thomas Bilney, who was executed in August 1531. After their first meeting, Tyndale clearly feared that Vaughan would follow him to find out where he lived, and took steps to throw him off the trail.Footnote 90 Despite Vaughan's promises, Tyndale finally announced that he ‘ne wold ne durste come Into Ingland’.Footnote 91 Even if Henry offered him safe conduct, he said, his promise would ‘shortly be brokyn by the perswasyon of the clargye’.Footnote 92
Tyndale had good reason to mistrust the king. As we have seen, Henry may already have been involved in attempts to extradite him in 1528–9. When Vaughan's approach failed in 1531, Henry asked Charles V, in whose territories Tyndale was hiding, to arrest the priest for spreading sedition. The emperor's response amounted to a refusal.Footnote 93 The king did not give up. In March 1532, he ordered Sir Thomas Elyot, who was in the Low Countries on diplomatic business, to apprehend Tyndale. Unfortunately, this was not easy. ‘Hering of the kinges diligence in thapprehention of him’, Elyot wrote, Tyndale had hidden himself away.Footnote 94
According to the traditional reading of this story, Henry behaved in a volatile manner, shifting unpredictably from delight to persecution to reconciliation to attempted abduction. He read and approved of Tyndale's Obedience in 1529, only to ban it in 1530. His anger subsided by the time he sought to recruit the priest in 1531, but after reading Tyndale's Answer, Henry embarked on another dramatic change of policy, seeking to kidnap the man he had hoped to employ. If we assume that Henry was consistently hostile to Tyndale however, although still inclined to mercy, this puzzle resolves itself. If, as the evidence suggests, Henry aimed at nothing more than silencing Tyndale and securing the renunciation of his heresies, there was no contradiction between burning his works and offering him a safe conduct to return home. On this reading, Henry's attempt to abduct Tyndale when Vaughan's diplomatic efforts failed was a change of means, not ends. Of course, consistency was no great shibboleth for a monarch given to violent swings of temper, and it remains possible that Henry ultimately aimed to recruit Tyndale as a propagandist or diplomat, but to assume that this was indeed the purpose of Vaughan's negotiations is to push the evidence further than it will go.
IV
The idea that Henry was delighted by the Obedience and sought to recruit its author hinges on the notion that even if he disapproved of Tyndale's theology, the king was pleased by his advocacy of obedience to royal authority. According to this interpretation, it was only Tyndale's opposition to Henry's divorce in the Practice of prelates, or perhaps his distrust of Henry's promises, that prevented a rapprochement. Aside from its theology, there was nothing in the Obedience for Henry to object to.
At first glance, the Obedience does seem to offer absolute and unqualified support for obedience. To resist divinely ordained monarchs, Tyndale said, was to resist the almighty Himself.Footnote 95 Even tyrants should be meekly obeyed, since God sent evil rulers to chastise his sinful people. This punishment should be patiently accepted – indeed welcomed.Footnote 96 Those who tried to correct their superiors with violence were taking upon themselves an office that properly belonged to God alone.Footnote 97 Such arguments were intended to refute accusations that evangelicals used scripture to encourage rebellion.Footnote 98
Yet in one important sense, all of this was beside the point. According to the Obedience, kings were largely irrelevant to the actual practice of politics, since they exercised no real power or agency. The authority that they were supposed to wield had been wrested out of their hands long ago by clerical evil councillors. ‘The greate thinges of the worlde’, Tyndale said, were all administered by the clergy, and lay rulers did nothing without their say-so.Footnote 99 The pope and his bishops manipulated monarchs almost from birth, corrupting them with earthly pleasures and persuading them to tyrannize and exploit their subjects.Footnote 100 In case there was any doubt that these criticisms applied to Henry, Tyndale wrote that one of the methods by which the clergy duped monarchs was by conferring pompous and bitterly ironic titles on them like ‘defender of the faith’.Footnote 101
The result of all of this was that kings were mere ‘shadowes / vayn names & thinges ydle / havynge no thinge to doo in the worlde / but when our holy father neadeth their helpe’.Footnote 102 Indeed, ‘shadows’ like Henry were worse than tyrants, because they allowed others to persecute subjects in their name, substituting the tyranny of one for the tyranny of many. ‘It is better to haue a tyraunte vnto thy kinge’, Tyndale wrote ‘then a shadowe, a passiue kinge that doeth nought himselfe / but sofre other to doo with hi[m] what they will’.Footnote 103 Support for an idealized form of royal authority was thus entirely compatible with a condemnation of kingship as it was currently practised.
The notion that the clergy had taken complete possession of temporal power allowed Tyndale to criticize recent English domestic and foreign policy with impunity, since it had allegedly been orchestrated by the prelates rather than the king. The bishops, according to the Obedience, used Henry's temporal power to persecute the godly, turning England into a virtual police state.Footnote 104 At the same time, the pope persuaded the king to beggar and murder his own subjects in pursuit of ruinously expensive foreign wars that only benefited the papacy.Footnote 105 While Henry and his propagandists insisted that ordinary subjects had no business meddling with state matters, Tyndale believed that even the ‘worste in the realme’ could tell the king when he broke God's commands.Footnote 106 Tyndale's presumptuous discussion of high politics, his opposition to the king's wars and the taxes raised to pay for them, and his insulting dismissal of monarchs as mere ‘hangmen vnto the Pope and Bisshopes’ would all have been deeply unacceptable to the king.Footnote 107
It is sometimes claimed that Tyndale viewed Henry as a potential ‘godly prince’, and sought an alliance with him as the only man strong enough to reform the church.Footnote 108 In fact, Tyndale's view of politics and religion was deeply pessimistic. While he believed that Henry should put down papal tyranny, he saw little sign that he would, because any loyal adviser who spoke out would be cast out of court.Footnote 109 Nor was Tyndale necessarily a supporter of royal supremacy.Footnote 110 He denied that the spiritual estate was separate from and superior to the laity, and demanded that they be removed from positions of temporal power. But just because the clergy should stay out of politics, it did not follow that the king should control religious affairs. In particular, Tyndale showed no sign of believing that Henry should decide doctrinal matters – indeed, the king himself did not claim this authority until later.Footnote 111 In this respect, as in many others, Tyndale's Obedience owed a considerable debt to Martin Luther's Temporal authority: to what extent it should be obeyed of 1523.Footnote 112 While Luther rejected rebellion, like Tyndale he argued that secular rulers – who were for the most part ‘the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth’ – had no authority to ban books or regulate belief, and should be disobeyed if they tried to do so.Footnote 113 Tyndale did not anticipate the Henrician Reformation or seem to think that it was likely to occur, and to see him as a potential enthusiastic supporter of Henry, let alone of the royal supremacy, is to read subsequent developments back onto 1528.
While the Obedience freely criticized the king, its rejection of rebellion was not as absolute and unqualified as it might seem. For one thing, the biblical justifications for obedience that it cited were not without their ambiguities and contradictions. Romans 13:3 suggested that rulers should be obeyed in part because they punished evil works, not good ones, yet the rest of Tyndale's polemic made it clear that rulers were not living up to this obligation.Footnote 114 Similarly, the injunction in Romans to give obedience, honour, tax, and rent to whom they were ‘due’ arguably gave the reader some leeway to decide what might be due to whom.Footnote 115 At times, Tyndale implied that tithes and rents were payments for services rendered, suggesting that they should not be paid if priests and landlords failed to fulfil their side of the bargain.Footnote 116 Monarchs, he said, should only raise enough to maintain peace and defend the realm.Footnote 117 There was no legitimate place here for Henry's cherished foreign military expeditions.
While the Obedience rejected rebellion, Tyndale expressed a certain sympathy with those who resorted to it. He could understand why ordinary subjects who were kept ignorant of the gospels and thus of biblical injunctions to obedience might be tempted to rebel, even if he did not condone it.Footnote 118 Not everyone was able to turn the other cheek and meekly accept tyranny, particularly when the pope had habituated subjects to unchristian violence.Footnote 119 Even Jesus’ disciples, he said, had been ready to fight to defend Christ when he was arrested, despite having heard his teachings on obedience and non-violence at first hand.Footnote 120
Once again, Tyndale's views seem to have owed something to Martin Luther, whose Sincere admonition of 1522 had argued that bloody insurrection against the clergy, while forbidden, would be richly deserved.Footnote 121 While Luther castigated rebels who participated in the German Peasants’ War (as well as the princes who provoked it), he sometimes gave the impression of being less concerned with principled opposition to rebellion than with avoiding the blame if it broke out.Footnote 122 In 1531, when it seemed as if Charles V might invade Germany to crush Lutheranism, he protested that although he had taught the people to suffer even the persecution of tyrants patiently, he could not ‘create the doers of this teaching’. If the people rejected his prohibitions and resisted the emperor, he said, ‘so be it’.Footnote 123
Even if subjects rightly rejected rebellion against the king, Tyndale said, they might also think that it was lawful to rebel with the king against the evil councillors who had usurped his power.Footnote 124 Of course, temporal government was ordained by God, but temporal government was currently wholly in the power of the clergy, who were supposed to preach, not rule. While tyrants were sent by God and should therefore be obeyed, the clerical tyrants of the present were the servants of antichrist, and their power was not supported by scripture.Footnote 125 Luther's Warning, although written after the Obedience, demonstrated how similar loopholes and exceptions could be found in even the most principled and absolute defence of obedience. The Warning argued that while insurrection (defined narrowly as a rejection of all law) was forbidden by scripture, self-defence against papist ‘murderers and bloodhounds’ was permissible.Footnote 126
Tyndale ultimately rejected any form of popular rebellion, arguing that subjects should suffer patiently and remit the punishment of even clerical evil councillors to God.Footnote 127 Nevertheless, his depiction of a realm persecuted, beggared, and nearly destroyed by the clergy, with temporal power completely subordinated to an evil, anti-Christian papacy, clearly undermined royal authority. As Daniel Eppley has argued, this had the potential to encourage rebellion among those who were less scrupulous about biblical injunctions on obedience than Tyndale.Footnote 128
As absolute as Tyndale's support for obedience might seem, it also came with an important caveat. Subjects should obey the commandments of their rulers, even if they were tyrants, except if they were ordered to do evil, or to disobey God's law. In that case, they should follow God's commandments before those of man, although they should also accept whatever punishment an evil ruler inflicted on them for disobeying.Footnote 129 As critics like Thomas More pointed out, this exception left a great deal of room for disobedience, if not rebellion. Tyndale, More said, believed that various orthodox beliefs and practices, including clerical celibacy, holy days, the cult of saints and the doctrine of the real presence were all against scripture. It followed that any law made to enforce these practices should be disobeyed.Footnote 130 As such, More said, Tyndale's condition for obedience was in effect ‘a playne exhortacyon to dysobedyence and rebellion’.Footnote 131 More might have added that for Tyndale, the persecution of evangelical reformers, the banning of English translations of scripture, Henry's divorce, foreign wars, and the taxation needed to pay for them were all without scriptural warrant.Footnote 132 Even if no rebellion occurred, it was difficult to see how Henrician government was supposed to function if every subject took it upon themselves to scrutinize royal commands and compare them with scripture before deciding whether to co-operate.Footnote 133 Of course, Henry would never claim that his subjects should obey ungodly commands either, but the apparent consensus on this principle hides an important practical disagreement: Tyndale thought Henry was issuing ungodly commands, and Henry did not.
The commission of 1530 had claimed that Tyndale's Obedience was not just heretical but also seditious and disobedient. It is tempting to dismiss the commission's judgement as mere mudslinging from conservative theologians who aimed to undermine Tyndale and believed that heresy was seditious by definition. Thomas More argued that heresy was inherently disruptive of public peace, but he also criticized Tyndale's ‘raylynge’ against monarchs and the potentially radical implications of his call to disobey ungodly commands.Footnote 134 If Cromwell is to be believed, Henry seemed to think that Tyndale's works in general were slanderous and seditious.Footnote 135 We should not assume that the king found Tyndale's political thought acceptable, even if he rejected his theology, to the extent that it is even possible to distinguish between the two.
Tyndale's conception of obedience contrasted with that of the king and his propagandists. As Thomas Swinnerton insisted, subjects were obliged, not just passively to obey Henry, but ‘to loue…to honoure, and ayde oure moste gratious prince, with all oure very hartis’.Footnote 136 The regime wanted active support based on inward conviction, not grudging outward obedience that went no further than withstanding persecution and abstaining from rebellion. Moreover, as Henry himself insisted in A glasse of the truthe, obedience was due to him, not simply because it was mandated by scripture, but because he deserved it. The king took infinite pains for the commonwealth, and obedience was the least he should expect in return.Footnote 137 Sticking with Henry against the pope and his interdictions and excommunications was patriotic, virtuous, and manly.Footnote 138 Henry's characteristic response to rebellion was shock at his subjects’ ingratitude, a sentiment that was expressed in royal correspondence and propaganda during the Pilgrimage of Grace and beyond.Footnote 139 For Tyndale, subjects should refrain from rebellion even though the king was in the wrong. For Henry, they should obey wholeheartedly because he was in the right.
Tyndale's Practice of prelates of 1530 expanded on many of the themes of the Obedience. Tyndale clung to his bleak, conspiratorial view of politics in the Practice even when there appeared to be some signs of reform. He dismissed the fall of Wolsey as a temporary feint, intended to mollify the cardinal's critics while secretly preserving his power, and claimed that the reforms introduced by the parliament of 1529 were mere ‘faces of reformacyons’ designed to secure taxation.Footnote 140 Henry's divorce, rather than undermining papal authority, was just another of Wolsey's schemes.Footnote 141 The Practice made tactless insinuations about how monarchs were ‘entangled with hores’ by the clergy and speculated that Henry might be motivated by ‘a sette malice agenst the truth and…a grounded hate agenst the lawe of god’.Footnote 142 It further muddied the issue of resistance by claiming that although rebellion was utterly forbidden, it could also be the instrument of God's righteous punishment. After all, God stirred the Jews to rebel against the Roman authorities after the death of Jesus, and had also inspired the German Peasants’ War of 1524–5 in order to punish the popish clergy.Footnote 143
Historians have tended to argue that Tyndale rejected ‘active resistance’ and favoured ‘obedience’.Footnote 144 While technically true, these claims are misleading. A distinction must be drawn between violent rebellion, which Tyndale rejected, and disobeying royal commands or criticizing the monarch (neither of which were particularly ‘passive’ actions), which Tyndale not only advocated in his writings but practised himself. When under threat of persecution in England, he did not patiently withstand the worst that the authorities could do. Instead, he fled into exile, and published a series of tracts that were, as far as Henry was concerned, heretical and seditious. Tyndale was asked to delay the publication of a tract until Henry had approved it; Henry hated it but Tyndale published it anyway. When invited to return home by a messenger from the king, he refused. The attention that has been paid to non-resistance to tyranny in the Obedience has tended to obscure the radicalism and subversiveness of both Tyndale and his writings. Far from setting the tone for an essentially conservative tradition of political thought, Tyndale's Obedience suggests that from the very beginning, English evangelicals were adept at smuggling dangerous ideas and criticism of authority under a cloak of obedience to royal authority.
