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simple stories had to serve for them. The language of God was sacred and the sacred became secret and the secrecy spawned ignorance, spun fear. The traditional mechanisms of tyrannical suppression evolved over the centuries.
    To throw off the language – to let in fresh air, and new words – was unthinkable. Save for a few brave and evangelical scholars. But when they tried, in all good faith and with no intention but to improve and to purify a Church to which they were devoted, they were set upon. When it feared its supremacy challenged, as it did at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Church reacted swiftly.
    William Tyndale walked into the perfect storm.

CHAPTER THREE
    THE FOUNDATION IS LAID
    A t the centre of the storm was Martin Luther. The scriptural work and political actions of this German priest had an eruptive effect. The fallout is still with us. For not only in 1517 did he attack with learning and virulence the many failings and corruptions of the Church, in 1522 he translated the New Testament into German. The Church was destabilised. The violence of his preaching was believed to have stirred up a peasants’ revolt against the princes and the states in 1524 – 5 in which more than 50,000 people were slaughtered. Out of this turbulence came the Protestant Reformation which ripped apart the Catholic monolith for ever and set a new course in European and American history and beyond which was to reconfigure the world.
    He put the fear of revolution into the kings and prelates. They looked at what we might for convenience call ‘Germany’ and cowered. They feared for their titles, their booty and their lives. Few more than Henry VIII, who, in his full pomp as king, said that he hated Luther more than any man on earth. Henry’s defence of the Pope and the Catholic Church against Luther’s 1517 eruption had earned him a most coveted title, a gift from Rome, ‘Defender of the Faith’.
    Henry became a militant and a fanatical Roman Catholic. With
the help of Wolsey, a cardinal and Lord Chancellor of England, his spies raked the land for dissidents. Wolsey, dressed in gowns suppurating in silk and satin, his fingers glittering with precious stones, his entourage pharaonic in its splendour, relished the hunting down of those godly men. He loved to toy with them in mock and mocking trials, to have them tortured but he did not condemn people to burning at the stake. Others, including Sir Thomas More, applauded and supported Henry’s anti-Protestant zeal.
    Into this London stepped William Tyndale, unblemished in his Catholic devotion and a monarchist who had argued that the King was outside the law and subject only to God’s law. Outwardly he was a gentle scholar but one who proved to have within him a will which would not be broken. He never once gave in or gave up his vow to make the Bible accessible even to ‘a plough-boy’.
    At Oxford in the early sixteenth century he had been drawn to the ideas of the Lollards, who were still at large. The hand-copied manuscript translations of the Bible were still passed on, more than a century after the death of John Wycliffe, despite persecution, torture and executions. The English hunger for a Bible of their own was not to be thwarted. Tyndale was ordained priest in 1521. Despite his academic distinction, which had been developed at Oxford and was then burnished at Cambridge where he inherited the example of the recently resident Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus, he turned away from further formal study.
    It is a speculation but I think that he was already preparing himself for what he knew would be an unorthodox vocation. He became a chaplain and tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh in the village of Little Sodbury in the Cotswolds, a lush and hilly area of the rich wool trade in the west of England.
    He was twenty-six, a wonderfully accomplished linguist, with a gift for poetry. He was in a sympathetic community which