The Most Dangerous Man in Tudor England

500 years ago,

this was the scene of a primitive

and horrifying execution.

In 1536, an English priest and one of its very greatest scholars,

was led from his cell to a nearby bridge,

tied to a stake, wood piled around him and burnt to death.

His crime was translating the Bible into English.

His name was William Tyndale.

Today, many have never even heard of him,

yet this man's legacy lives on in every English-speaking country.

Tyndale's influence is immeasurable.

His translation of the Bible

fuelled a Protestant ascendancy

that went throughout the world.

The biblical ideas that he released into the common tongue

fired the English Reformation.

And his genius, now acknowledged,

makes him, alongside Shakespeare,

one of the co-creators of the modern English language.

Tyndale's words and phrases have shaped the way

we express ourselves and what we believe.

Yet he's been written out of history,

perhaps because of the savage truths his story reveals

about the men and women who dominated Tudor England.

William Tyndale was a matchless scholar

whose heroic life of principle

took on the great forces of Henry VIII with only an army of words

and proved him to be a hypocrite, a bully and a tyrant.

Henry VIII retaliated by trying to hunt him down and have him killed.

I think that William Tyndale

is one of the greatest men in English history.

And in this film, I'm going to uncover his remarkable story.

It's a quest that reveals a courageous pioneer

who wanted to see the word of God accessible to everyone,

from plough boy to monarch.

But his work was thought to be an act of revolution,

feared by kings and statesmen and bishops alike,

who believed it would cause the status quo to be ripped apart.

In the longer term, they were right.

This is a story of 16th-century espionage.

The burning of heretics and sympathisers

who risked their lives to get the word of God into English homes.

It's a story of a man who was hounded out of his own country

and spent most of his adult life on the run, in exile.

Yet no-one in history has changed our language as he did.

No-one has had the impact on it, which released imagination,

shaped thought and reconsidered belief.

So, who was William Tyndale

and why did his work strike fear

into the hearts of England's most powerful men?

William Tyndale was a man from the heart of England.

It was in these tranquil Cotswold hills on the Welsh border

that his turbulent life began.

He was born here in 1494, in an area dominated by the wool trade.

His parents were cloth traders, so he grew up among farmers,

merchants and the people round here,

the commons of England, from whom he was to draw so much.

This farm in the village of Slimbridge

once belonged to Tyndale's brother, Edward,

and it's still a working farm today.

-Hello, Ken.

-Hello, Melvyn.

-How are you? Good to see you.

-Fine, thank you.

It's amazing, isn't it, William Tyndale, born here?

-Yes, it is.

-Changed a bit since then.

Everyday life then was a hard grind.

But there was also great hope of something more.

The world of Tyndale's childhood was dominated by religion.

England was an obedient Roman Catholic country.

He would go to mass every Sunday,

he would be taught that his purpose in this world

was to seek salvation in the next.

And to that end, he'd go to confession and do penance.

His daily life would beat to the drumroll of the calendar

and the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church.

And the language of the Church and its Bible was Latin.

Beyond most people's comprehension.

They spoke English,

a language not seen as fit for the word of God,

which meant they couldn't understand the Bible for themselves.

And for the monarchy and the ruling class,

it was very useful that the people, the commons,

didn't know this language, this Latin.

It gave them control in thought and word and deed,

as elite language always does.

At that time, religion and politics

were different sides of the same coin.

This was the currency

and Henry VIII was determined to keep his grip on it.

BELLS PEAL

And for the Catholic Church, control of the Bible through Latin

was crucial to maintaining its structure and power.

Many of the key concepts of the Roman Catholic Church at that time,

purgatory, penance, confession,

even the hierarchy itself, weren't in the Bible.

They were the rulings of popes through the centuries.

Canon law, it was called.

And unless people could read the Bible, get past the Latin,

they couldn't gather the evidence to challenge these concepts.

In the 16th century, even to attempt a translation of the Bible

into English was illegal,

an act of heresy, punishable by death.

Yet even as a boy around here,

Tyndale dreamed of translating the Bible into English.

And one day, he would risk his life

to become the liberator of this sacred text.

It was in Oxford, where Tyndale began his education,

that he first realised both the power and the dangers

of attempting an English translation of the Bible.

He arrived here in the spring of 1506 to attend Magdalen School,

and then Magdalen Hall, where he did his BA.

The school is no longer here, but one of its original buildings

is still part of what's now Magdalen College.

William Tyndale came here when he was 12 years old.

He would stay for eight years.

He got what was probably the finest education available

at that time in the whole of the medieval world.

During Tyndale's time here, England gained a new king.

In 1509, Henry VIII came to the throne.

And he was gathering around him the men who would become

his most influential advisers.

They would come to dominate

the course of Tyndale's life and mission.

The first of these was Wolsey.

He'd been at this college a generation before Tyndale

and he was a stunningly-brilliant scholar.

He became the Lord Chancellor and then a cardinal,

a mighty force in the land.

Alongside Wolsey was Thomas More, a devoted Catholic

and soon to become one of Henry's most trusted advisers,

as well as the most feared heretic hunter in the land...

and Tyndale's arch-enemy.

It was here at Oxford

that Tyndale's passion for languages and rhetoric flourished,

skills which were essential for his later work, translating the Bible.

But the approach to studying the Bible here

had been undisturbed for centuries.

The Bible was studied in Latin.

And the emphasis was on scrutinising particular verses and passages,

with little sense of the whole.

Oxford was a fortress

of Roman Catholic domination and authority.

It stood for stability and continuity.

And any intrusions from heretics

were to be guarded against and repelled.

Tyndale was not impressed.

It was during his education here that Tyndale began to reject

the ancient and unchallenged approach to the Bible

and expose himself to new, and more radical, ideas

coming from the Continent.

Tyndale's imagination was fired

by the great Dutch classical scholar and humanist, Erasmus.

Erasmus believed that, to get to the truth of a text,

you had to study it in the language in which it was originally written.

In the case of the New Testament, that was Greek.

So Erasmus began to prepare a new Greek edition of the New Testament.

This opened Tyndale's eyes.

Greek was the key.

But it was an endeavour the Catholic hierarchy viewed with suspicion.

This, after all, to very many people, was a sacred book,

like the Koran is today.

You touched it at your peril.

You left it alone. It was the word of God.

The fear was that, if you began to go back to the original text

and find discrepancies,

you would undermine this word of God.

It would be dangerous.

Tyndale didn't share their fears.

For him, Erasmus was an inspiration.

And it wasn't just Erasmus.

He also began to hear talk of Luther,

an obscure radical German monk, who, in 1517,

launched an attack on the power of the Pope.

He translated the Bible into German,

the language of the common people.

Luther's study of the Bible led him to radical new beliefs

which struck at the heart of the Catholic Church.

Which was how you achieved eternal life.

He said that nothing in the Bible

talked about the Church being the intermediary,

holding the key to the gates.

What it said in the Bible was that you were justified by faith.

This was the doctrine of grace.

There couldn't have been a bigger battle.

The Church saying, "We are the gates to heaven."

And Luther saying, "No!

"It's the individual and justification by faith."

It was war.

This wasn't just a war of words.

Souls were at stake.

If Luther was right, there was no need

for the complex Church structure put in place for securing salvation.

Confession, penances, pilgrimages. They were all redundant.

Luther's ideas triggered revolution in Europe.

Riots and wars.

30,000 deaths.

And they ushered in the Reformation,

which struck fear in the hearts of the Catholic Tudors.

Martin Luther made Henry VIII famous.

With some help from his friends,

Henry VIII wrote a rebuttal of Luther, savaging him.

This gained the sympathy and admiration of the Pope,

who dubbed him Defender of the Faith.

With this great swagger title,

Henry saw himself as the Pope's avenging sword

against these new ideas.

For Tyndale, it was his attraction to Luther's dangerous arguments

that put him on a collision course with the Tudors...

..and marked his first steps towards martyrdom.

After Oxford, Tyndale was ordained as a priest.

And it was in his very first post back in Gloucestershire,

as tutor and chaplain to the Walsh family,

that his subversive beliefs began to cause a stir.

A contemporary record reports he attended dinners with local clergy,

in which discussions were heated.

According to the account,

a churchman Tyndale was arguing with said,

"It would be better to be without God's laws than the Pope's."

This totally appalled and infuriated Tyndale,

as it had done Luther.

The whole point was that the Bible contained the word of God,

not laws and rules

made by successive popes over centuries

and turned into a system

which he objected to in almost every particular.

For Tyndale, the only way to save your soul,

which was the only meaning of being on Earth,

was to listen to the word of God.

And to find the word of God, you were to understand it,

preferably in your own language.

It was an argument that provoked Tyndale to lay bare,

probably for the first time,

the ambition that would drive the rest of his life.

His determination to translate the Bible into English.

At that same meeting, Tyndale's reported as saying

that he defied the Pope and all his laws.

And he added, "If God spares me,

"I will cause the boy that driveth the plough

"to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost."

Tyndale's passion to make God's word

accessible to the ordinary men and women of England

was made explicit.

Tyndale's choice of the image of the plough boy was brilliant...

..because the plough boy was illiterate.

And what Tyndale intended to do

was to write a book, a bible,

that would be available to everybody,

that could be read aloud and understood by everybody.

And the effect of this was to be immeasurable.

In Tyndale's eyes,

the Catholic clergy seemed unfit to transmit the word of God.

So the commons of England had to be able to read it for themselves,

in plain English, to ensure their souls were saved.

But Tyndale's criticism of papal law and his radical ambition

turned the local clergy against him.

Rumour spread that he was a heretic

and his days in Gloucestershire were numbered.

To achieve his dream, Tyndale needed a patron.

He made for London.

In the 16th century, this was a city of spies and heretic hunters.

And it was well known that sympathisers of an English Bible

faced severe punishment.

London under Henry VIII could be a savage city.

There were as many prisons, stocks and whipping posts

as there were gleaming spires.

Whispers of Lutheranism reported to bishops

led to people being tried and tortured.

It wasn't the best place to come to seek the privacy and the finance

to translate the Bible into English.

But Tyndale, nonetheless, sought out the man he believed

would help him realise his ambition.

Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London.

Tunstall was a traditionalist.

He hated Luther just as much as his master, Henry VIII, hated Luther.

He was also a friend of Thomas More,

by then, Speaker of the House of Commons.

The two of them were united in loathing any sort of heresy.

When Tyndale went to see Tunstall, he was polite to him, we're told,

but he showed him the door

and he made sure that no other door in London

was open to him to translate this sacred text into English.

If Tyndale had shown an innocence

in thinking the bishop would back his cause,

it seemed he knew immediately what this rebuff meant.

In 1524, he boarded a boat out of London.

At a time when no new work could be published

without permission of the Church,

he knew that he would never achieve his mission in England.

This was the most decisive moment of his life,

a solitary scholar leaving the country

he would crucially help revolutionise.

Tyndale didn't know this at the time,

but he'd embarked on a self-imposed exile

which would last until his death, a decade later.

He was in his twenties and he would never see England again.

He would be fighting not only the people in this city -

Bishop Tunstall and Sir Thomas More and King Henry VIII -

but, eventually, the spies

from the Holy Roman Emperor and from the Pope himself.

For the rest of his life, William Tyndale was a hunted man.

Tyndale's destination was Germany,

Luther's home and a place where he believed

he would find financial support for his venture.

It was a journey that would set in motion a train of events,

ultimately leading to chaos and revolution in England

and trigger a battle

in which religion almost destroyed the Tudors.

When he reached the Continent, Tyndale disappeared

and it was during his first two years undercover

that he started work on a book

that would make him the most dangerous man in England...

..his translation of the New Testament.

It's difficult to keep track of Tyndale once he's in Germany.

He did some translating in Hamburg, some in Wittenberg,

where he might have met Luther.

Certainly, he learned vernacular German,

in order to translate Luther's Bible into English,

just as he was working on Erasmus's Greek version of the New Testament.

He would work 12-15 hours a day, we're told.

And when he'd finished it, the next thing was to find somebody

who would be bold enough to take the risk of printing it.

Cologne was a city known for its printing presses.

It was also staunchly Catholic.

The archbishop controlled all new publications

and kept an eye on printers who might be publishing heretical works,

an offence punishable by death.

Although it was both a dangerous and expensive endeavour,

Tyndale managed to find funding from sympathetic English merchants

and a printer, Peter Quentell,

who was willing to take a chance on his New Testament.

But as the work began, Tyndale's plan was interrupted.

One of Bishop Tunstall's friends and a notorious Bible hunter,

Cochlaeus, was in Cologne.

And by an unfortunate coincidence,

he'd also commissioned Peter Quentell

to publish a work for him.

He got friendly with Quentell's men and, drunk one night,

they revealed that 3,000 copies of an English New Testament

were to be secretly shipped to England.

The printer's workshop was raided.

When the authorities arrived, Tyndale had already fled.

But the damage was done.

Word of his dangerous work was already on its way to England.

Cochlaeus wrote to Wolsey and Henry VIII

to keep a strict watch for the "pernicious merchandise."

Tyndale might have escaped,

but the printing of his New Testament was far from complete.

So he took the pages he'd salvaged

and made his way to the town of Worms, to finish what he'd begun.

This must have been a tremendous moment for Tyndale.

The book was being printed.

He was on his way to achieving his great ambition

and he was derisory about those who tried to stop him.

"Who would be so bedlam mad,"

he said, "as to keep people in dark ignorance,

"when they could have access to true light, by reading the word of God?"

The first step of Tyndale's ambition had been realised.

Thousands of copies of the New Testament were printed,

but there's only one complete copy still in existence

and I've travelled to Stuttgart to see it.

So here it is. The only remaining complete first edition

of Tyndale's 1526 translation

of the New Testament from Greek into English.

The only one.

Thousands were printed.

This is the only complete one.

And the first thing you think

is how small it is.

That's partly because it was forbidden

in the country for which it was destined,

and this could be hidden away in clothes.

It could be carried around surreptitiously,

and it had to be, because if you were caught with this Bible,

you were liable to be tortured

and sometimes executed.

It had that powerful effect on the Tudors.

And the greater effect was that, once its power

spilled into the population,

it changed Tudor history,

English history and, eventually,

world history, for ever.

Tyndale's name is not on the title page.

He didn't want himself, as it were, to get between the word of God

and those it was destined for.

But when you read the prose within it,

you hear his unmistakeable voice in the phrases he chooses to use.

"In the beginning was the word."

"Eat, drink and be merry."

"Our Father, which art in heaven."

His language is simple and resonant, sentences short.

And the phrases are ones that are still on our common tongue.

For the ordinary men and women of England,

to read this wasn't just an education, it was a revelation.

It's almost impossible to imagine

the effect that this translation in English

had on the minds of the people who read it or who heard it in England.

It was as if the dark cave of their minds had suddenly been illuminated

and they had all the story of the New Testament - the characters,

the conflicts, the arguments, the difficulties, the nuances.

They were all theirs. They could talk about it.

They could discuss God among themselves.

Towards the end of his reign,

Henry VIII was dismayed that he'd allowed this to happen.

"Even a pot boy," he said, "will have an opinion!"

And he was right.

And he was fearful of it,

because language produced by Tyndale became one of the great instruments

which attacked the Tudor and forthcoming dynasties.

And it was Tyndale's political, radical choice

of very particular words that proved so subversive.

This wasn't just a literary work,

it was an attack on Catholic Tudor England.

When he translated, he didn't just put one word there for another,

he made a difference.

Now, these, to non-scholars, like myself, might seem small,

but at the time, they were dynamic.

For instance, when he translated the Greek word, "ecclesia,"

instead of using "church," which was expected,

he used "congregation."

"Church" meant a hierarchy, authorities, bishops,

all the things he detested.

A "congregation" meant a collection of people, a democracy, equal souls.

Then there was the Greek word, "presbuteros."

People expected it to be translated as "priest."

Tyndale emphatically translated it as "elder."

To him, priests were a special caste of people, self-appointed,

unnecessarily intervening between ordinary people and God.

The elders were merely the wisest members of the congregation.

By taking away "priest,"

he was stripping away the hierarchy of the Church.

It was a democratisation and it was thrown in the faces

of the authorities - and Tyndale knew that.

Tyndale was completely undermining the biblical basis

for the Catholic hierarchy and its practices.

The messages of the New Testament could no longer be controlled.

And its translator, a man of principle,

would show Henry VIII to be a tyrant and a hypocrite.

This small volume was about to destabilise an entire nation.

In 1526, copies of Tyndale's translation

began to arrive on English shores.

They were smuggled in here along the Thames,

first in their scores, then in their thousands.

Some in casks, falsely claimed to hold oil or wine,

some in woollen bails,

some as separate leaves of paper put in other books.

Somehow or other, they got through.

From St Catherine's to Westminster,

creeks and quiet anchorages

saw smugglers offloading their illegal cargo.

And even though it cost

two-and-a-half weeks' of a servant's wages,

the New Testament was an immediate, clandestine bestseller.

But while it was popular with merchants and tailors,

for the Tudor hierarchy, it was incendiary.

And it was here at St Paul's,

100 yards from where the book smuggling was going on

right under their noses,

that the war against Tyndale and his translation

was most fiercely waged.

The men in the front line of opposition

were the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall,

Thomas More and Archbishop Wolsey.

They soon showed the uncompromising reception

that Tyndale and his supporters could expect,

when they turned on those involved

in spreading the revolutionary ideas of Luther,

that were already flooding into England.

At the beginning of 1526,

Thomas More made an armed raid on the Steelyard,

the headquarters of the German merchants in London,

alleging that they were importing Lutheran texts,

which were causing grievous harm.

On the 11th February, four of them faced a humiliating punishment.

The men were forced to process through the city.

They were led into St Paul's

and forced to stand in the aisle with firewood lashed to their backs.

It must have been a terrifying warning.

The Bishop of Rochester gave a furious sermon against Luther,

scarcely heard because of the shouts of the crowd.

And at the end, the penitents were brought forward

and made to kneel and beg for forgiveness.

As a final warning, Luther's texts were ceremonially burnt.

And as Tyndale's New Testament began to flood into England,

it faced the same treatment.

In 1526, Cardinal Wolsey

and the bishops decided the "untrue translations" should be destroyed.

On the 26th October, Bishop Tunstall preached his most famous sermon.

He attacked Tyndale's New Testament viciously.

He said it was full of strange doctrines

and contained more than 2,000 errors in translation.

After he had finished,

he ordered all copies of Tyndale's New Testament to be taken outside.

In the 16th century, people used to gather outside St Paul's

to hear the teachings of the Bible.

Bishop Tunstall came out here, not to proclaim the words of God,

but to burn them.

In Tunstall's mind, burning these books

was a purification of the Church from works that were of the Devil.

But for the common people of England,

it was an act of violence that went too far.

It was one thing to burn the work of a radical priest, like Luther.

It was quite another to burn the Bible, the word of God.

That had a profound impact.

For many, the destruction of the New Testament,

even if it was said to contain errors, was a deeply unsettling act.

A line had been crossed.

And when the news reached Tyndale, his work took on a new edge.

He became more than just a translator of the Bible.

He became a man convinced that the Catholic hierarchy

was perverting the will of God.

His writing began to focus on the clergy,

with attacks that were both brilliant and targeted.

It was war. This troublesome priest had to be silenced.

And it was the renowned heretic hunter, Thomas More,

who stepped up to seek him out.

More lived here, in a mansion

in Chelsea, and he had a fearsome reputation

as a man devoted to stamping out heresy.

There was no-one better to take Tyndale on.

It was the start of a feud between the two men

that would generate three-quarters of a million words.

More's great work against his enemy

was The Dialogue Concerning Heresies,

in which he revealed just why

he considered Tyndale the most dangerous man in Tudor England.

And I've come to the chapel in which More once worshipped

to talk about it with the historian, John Guy.

Can you tell us what The Dialogue Against Heresies consists of?

The book is a conversation

with the character that he calls "the messenger",

"the messenger", the emissary of a friend,

who's confused about

what to believe in these troubled times.

The messenger is clearly somebody who sympathises with Tyndale

and More tries to convert him.

So, we are talking about More and Tyndale

looking at religion in completely different ways?

Yeah.

More saw Tyndale as a serious threat in the same way that

the Soviet Union and America, you know,

stared at each other across the world during the Cold War.

Because if Tyndale was right about authority,

then half the institutions of the Catholic Church collapsed

and we were into a completely brave new world,

in which authority was dedicated by scripture.

But More's problem with that is that how do you interpret scripture?

Every man or woman will interpret it differently and you'll have chaos.

But there's a great passage from More saying,

"This is what will happen, if this man gets his way."

Well, More got carried away sometimes,

and he went right over the top.

And he writes, "If Tyndale's Testament be taken up,

"then shall false heresies be preached,

"then shall the sacraments be set at nought,

"then shall Almighty God be displeased,

"then shall He withdraw His grace

"and let all run to ruin.

"Then will rise up rifling and robbery, murder and mischief

"and plain insurrection.

"Then shall all laws be laughed to scorn."

In other words, it's the collapse the Church, as he knows it,

and also the collapse of the state.

So he sees these two conjoined, should Tyndale get his way.

So he's fighting an enemy of the state,

as well as an enemy of the Church.

He's fighting an enemy of the Church and, in More's Catholic world,

the Church and state have to work together.

The Dialogue gives a lurid insight into More's fevered state of mind.

For him,

Tyndale's Testament was nothing less than an invitation for anarchy.

More believed that Tyndale had threatened the peace of the realm.

"I will follow him," said More, "to the world's end."

But events in England took an unexpected turn.

One which would, in the end, decide the fate of both More and Tyndale.

King Henry VIII had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn.

It was here, at the Boleyn family home, that Henry first met Anne.

He was already married to Catherine of Aragon,

but she'd failed to produce a male heir.

Anne was sexually shrewd and intelligent,

and Henry was fascinated by her.

She was also a Protestant.

It seemed that Tyndale might well have a new and unexpected ally.

In 1528, Henry VIII appealed to the Pope

for the annulment of his marriage.

He based his case on the Bible, the Book of Leviticus,

in which it said that a man may not marry the widow of his brother.

Henry had married the widow of his brother, Arthur,

and these were the grounds that he put to the Pope

for annulling his marriage.

His plea was sent to Rome, but the Pope refused him.

The King appeared to have nowhere to turn.

But help came from the least expected source - William Tyndale.

Still on the run, Tyndale had fled to Antwerp.

And it was here that, in 1528, he published a new work -

The Obedience Of A Christian Man.

Very soon, a copy of it found its way into Henry's hands.

Even though Henry saw himself as a traditional Catholic,

Tyndale's message was one that the King would have found reassuring.

The British Library has an early copy of it.

Well, here we have The Obedience Of A Christian Man, published in 1528.

What did he set out to write this book for?

Well, Tyndale wished to enforce, I think, really two key points.

The first was the supremacy of scripture, of God's word,

over any other authority, including the false authority of the Pope.

And that's something he emphasises time and time again.

The second main point of the text is the supremacy of kings.

For Tyndale, God is the highest authority and God appoints

kings, therefore kings are the highest authority in the land.

And actually here he says,

"God hath made the king in every realm judge over all.

"And over him is there no judge."

So the supremacy of kings and therefore...not the Pope.

So did The Obedience Of A Christian Man -

well, it must have done! -

find favour with Henry VIII?

-Yes...

-How did he get hold of it?

Well, there is a much later story -

so we don't know if it's true or not -

that it was actually handed to Henry VIII by his sweetheart Anne Boleyn.

And he's said to have read it

and declared that this was a book for him and all kings to read.

And you can see why.

The king is said to wield the spiritual sword.

The bishops, the popes, the temporal sword.

So they lack this authority from God himself.

At a time when Henry's annulment was dividing the country,

a confirmation of his divine authority over the Pope

by a man of Tyndale's intellectual standing

was something Henry would have welcomed.

But if the King had further hopes

of Tyndale's support for his annulment,

within two years, they were shattered...

..with the publication of another of Tyndale's works.

In 1530, Tyndale publishes The Practice Of Prelates,

in which he discusses the King's campaign for an annulment.

And, unfortunately, it does not come to a conclusion

which Henry VIII would have appreciated.

Now, Henry VIII is forming his annulment campaign

on this passage in the Bible.

He says, "I'm not lawfully married to my first wife,

"Catherine of Aragon.

"There is more than one passage in Leviticus that says a man

"shall not take his brother's wife. It is an unclean thing."

And yet, in The Practice Of Prelates,

Tyndale says, "Well, yes, that's true,

"but there are also other arguments in the Bible that contradict that,

"saying that a man SHOULD marry his brother's widow."

And at one point, Tyndale actually says it is a flat commandment

in Deuteronomy that stipulates a man shall marry his brother's wife.

This is not good news for Henry VIII.

The Practice Of Prelates reveals Tyndale

doing exactly what Henry feared an English translation would do...

..allow the Bible to be used against him and his wishes.

It was a work which enraged the King.

Yet within weeks, Henry made Tyndale a startling offer.

An appointment within his court

and a return to England, all things forgiven.

In 1530, the King's new secretary, Thomas Cromwell, a man sympathetic

to reformers, sent an agent to meet Tyndale to try and lure him back.

For the first time in six years, Tyndale broke his cover.

He made his way to a field outside Antwerp city gates,

where he was to meet Cromwell's man, Stephen Vaughan.

This was an extraordinary encounter.

After all, Tyndale was the most wanted man in the realm

meeting a royal agent.

The men met a number of times over the next six months.

Tyndale repeatedly refused any suggestion of a return.

Perhaps he didn't trust Henry and feared, with reason,

sooner or later he would have been called a heretic and burnt.

Then things came to a climax

when Tyndale, eventually, proposed a deal.

Vaughan reported that Tyndale said, yes, he would come back,

provided that the King brought out a Bible in English.

He would return within two days, he would never write again,

he would endure pain and torture and, even, death.

But, said Tyndale, there had to be a Bible in English.

That was his condition.

Tyndale's desire for a Bible in the common tongue far outweighed

any concerns he might have for his own safety,

but Henry wouldn't have it.

In London, Henry's impatience with the Pope over his annulment

had come to a head.

In 1531, he addressed Parliament.

Henry demanded that he become sole protector

and supreme head of the English Church and clergy,

and, from then on,

became head, in effect Pope, of the Catholic Church in this country.

For Tyndale, it should have been a great moment of triumph.

Henry had rejected the authority of the Pope.

But any hopes that the King would also reject his Catholic beliefs

were disappointed.

Henry VIII remained theologically conservative.

Except for papal supremacy, he held on to Catholic sacraments -

the penance, the mass, confession -

and he was still just as committed to the Bible in Latin.

Tyndale's position hadn't improved.

And, as 1531 wore on,

Tyndale's war of words with More reached a crescendo.

In their works, the ideas

that epitomised either side of the Reformation

clashed repeatedly, often in vitriolic language.

More believed that the only way the Scriptures could be

understood was through the filter of Church teaching and its priests.

Tyndale thought it was wrong to say that uneducated men

and women couldn't arrive at their faith without

the intervention of the Church.

Mankind, he thought, was born with a spiritual sense.

Reflecting the increasing fury of these two men,

the language got very rough indeed.

Sorry about this!

More wrote, "You kissed the arse of Luther, the shit devil.

"Look, my fingers are smeared with shit

"when I try to clean your filthy mouth."

Tyndale was against anything that was not in the Bible.

He condemned penances, pardons, pilgrimages, purgatory.

He taunted More and said he was a lying papist.

And of his Church, he said he was of the Devil, of Satan, of wretches.

For More, the spiritual immensity of the Church was reflected in

its construction, in its great hierarchy of priests.

And compared with the Church, the Bible was merely parchment.

For Tyndale, the Bible was the route to salvation

and the words in the Bible were the words of God himself.

Both men were full of fury and obsessed with refuting each other.

More personally interrogated the supporters of Tyndale

and executed them ruthlessly.

It was about to become a struggle to the death.

For Tyndale, hearing the news of his friends' deaths

must have been deeply disturbing.

Yet, still he remained committed to the work that he believed in.

"In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth."

The first line of Genesis.

In 1530, Tyndale published the first five books

of the Old Testament, The Books Of Moses.

He then went on into the Old Testament

translating directly from the Hebrew.

Nothing was going to check his resolve.

And in England, the tide was turning in his favour.

In 1533, Henry's marriage to Catherine

was declared null and void.

In the same year, he married Anne Boleyn.

And as Protestant sympathisers in Henry's court gained ground,

so More, the ultimate defender of the Catholic faith,

dramatically fell from grace.

He was arrested for treason, for failing to swear an oath

affirming the legality of Anne and Henry's marriage.

Because he refused to deny the supremacy of the Pope,

Thomas More was sentenced to a hanging.

After that, while still alive, he would be taken down and castrated.

Then his bowels would be taken out

and he would have to watch them being burnt.

Then he would be beheaded.

Because of their long friendship,

Henry VIII decided that he merely needed to be beheaded.

On 6th July 1535, More was led from here to his execution.

His severed head was boiled until it was black

and displayed on London Bridge.

He died fearing for the future of the Catholic Church in England.

And he was right to do so. Henry continued to dismantle it.

But the weeks leading up to his death might have been eased

had he known about the impending death of Tyndale.

His greatest enemy was also about to meet his end.

Unbeknown to Tyndale, there was a new threat closing in.

And with More's death,

this time the threat wasn't from the English Tudors, but from the Pope.

Antwerp was under the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V,

and local Catholics had petitioned for it to be purged of heretics.

The hunting began again.

Once more, Tyndale was in danger.

In 1535, he befriended a new arrival,

a man named Harry Phillips,

with whom he seemed to share many interests.

Phillips was an Oxford graduate and, seemingly, well off.

But there was a mystery as to why this charming, educated man

was in Antwerp at all.

Tyndale saw Phillips several times

and when he was questioned about him closely, Tyndale said,

"He's an honest man, handsomely learned and very conformable,"

by which he meant conformable to his, Tyndale's, beliefs.

He was taken in by him. Sympathetic, this man from England.

But Phillips wasn't what he seemed.

Tyndale didn't know

that Phillips had studied at a strict Catholic university

and was colluding with the imperial court in Brussels

to have him arrested.

He was no sympathiser to Tyndale's cause.

He was his betrayer.

On 21st May, Phillips called on Tyndale in the English House

and said he had no money.

As anticipated, Tyndale took him out to dinner.

They went down a particularly narrow street

and Phillips insisted that Tyndale walked in front of him.

At the bottom of this street, waiting for him,

were two arms bearers of Charles V.

They said, "We pitied his simplicity when we took him."

It had taken a Judas to capture Tyndale.

He was taken to the Castle of Vilvoorde,

the state prison outside Antwerp.

He had 16 months left to live.

William Tyndale's cell no longer exists,

but this 18th-century prison

was built on the very site where it had once stood.

He was here for more than 14 months.

It was a miserable, bitter, cramped experience.

At one stage, he wrote to the master of the prison.

I have a copy of his letter.

"I beseech Your Lordship to send me from my goods in his keeping

"a warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from cold in the head,

"being troubled with a continual catarrh,

"which is aggravated in this prison vault.

"A warmer coat also, for that which I have is very thin."

He goes on, "I ask for leave to use a lamp in the evening,

"for it is tiresome to sit alone in the dark.

"But, above all, I beg and entreat your clemency to allow me

"the use of my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar

"and Hebrew lexicon, that I might employ my time with that study."

We don't know whether he got them or not.

Right to the end,

Tyndale's commitment to bringing the word of God

to the plough boy back in England never left him,

even in the face of death.

On 6th October, 1536,

William Tyndale was led from his cell, for execution.

Despite attempts by Thomas Cromwell to secure his release,

he'd been found guilty of heresy,

and any hopes of a final reprieve

disappeared with Anne Boleyn's fall from favour.

After her beheading, Henry once more cooled towards Protestant reformers.

As an act of mercy,

they decided to strangle Tyndale before they lit the fire.

His last words were, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!"

But the strangling was inept and, as the flames rose,

he regained consciousness

and witnesses recall the stoic, silent acceptance of suffering,

as his body burned.

Tyndale died still believing that the only way to God's salvation

was through his word.

And whilst others bent their principles to survive

the winds of political change,

Tyndale was a man whose refusal to give up on his beliefs

led to his own destruction.

He died before he'd completed his entire translation of the Bible,

but he'd done enough. The New Testament,

the first five books and a little more of the Old Testament.

He liberated the language. He liberated the word of God.

He took it away from the elite and it went out into the streets,

into the field, into the workplace, into the shipyards, everywhere.

And in the end, even Tyndale's dying wish for King Henry's eyes

to be opened was granted.

In 1535, a year before Tyndale's execution,

a Bible in English did appear in England -

commissioned by Thomas Cromwell,

attributed to Myles Coverdale.

Its patron was King Henry VIII himself.

And there's an irony on its frontispiece.

The man who hounded the translator of the Bible into English

across Europe

is portrayed as a generous distributor of the word of God

to all his subjects.

Three years after its publication,

a ruling was passed that an English Bible should be placed

in every church.

8,500 copies of this Great Bible were printed

and supplied to every parish in England.

The word of God was now readily accessible to every man,

from monarch to plough boy.

And yet, the name of the man who pioneered

the first translation of the Bible into English

has largely disappeared.

From being the most notorious name in England,

Tyndale's life and work

have remained one of England's best-kept secrets.

But even though Tyndale himself is not a household name,

his words and phrases have endured, not in his own work,

but hidden in that of later translators.

This is a copy of the King James Bible,

which was originally published in 1611.

Alongside Shakespeare,

it's considered one of our greatest works of literature.

For many years, the King James Bible was considered to be

the work of a committee - 52 scholars.

Recently, however, with close research,

the startling result is

that 84% of the New Testament in the King James Bible

was written by Tyndale,

and 75% of those books he translated in the Old Testament -

the first five books, for instance were Tyndale.

It's mostly Tyndale's Bible.

Many of the well-loved phrases we readily associate

with the King James are those of Tyndale.

It's his words that still echo down the centuries.

And I believe the way he wrote can be seen

as the beginning of English, as we know it today.

The English language is lucky.

When it came into its full formation, it had two geniuses.

The first was a genius of the imagination, Shakespeare,

who contributed more words to our language than any other individual.

The second was the genius of translation, Tyndale.

He contributed more idioms than anyone else,

words that are still on our tongue today.

And I bet you've said some of these.

"To lick the dust", "fall flat on his face",

"from time to time", "rise and shine", "sign of the times".

On they go, hundreds of these idioms

that he placed into the Bible deliberately.

And what they have in common is that every one of those sayings

is a monosyllable -

the simplest possible way to speak.

He drew on Anglo-Saxon and Hebrew but, most of all,

he drew on his heart.

He wanted to tell that plough boy, plainly, what was going on.

He chose the most basic language, and that was why it was

so eruptively effective right across the world.

And, as for literature, where do you start?

Well, let's start with Shakespeare.

One way and another, Tyndale fed into Shakespeare

and then he went on through the centuries.

Anybody you can think of really - Tennyson, the Bronte sisters,

John Bunyan.

Over in America, Melville down to Steinbeck and Bob Dylan.

On it goes, the people that this book influenced.

Enormous, majestic, unparalleled.

And yet, despite Tyndale's contribution

to the King James Bible,

there's no trace of his name

and that's because the translators used Henry's Great Bible

and Myles Coverdale, who wrote it,

had worked with Tyndale and drew massively on his version.

But he completely ripped off Tyndale's translation

without crediting him.

And Henry VIII did not want him credited.

He wanted Tyndale rubbed out of history.

And so edition after edition after edition of the Bible,

up to and including the King James Bible, left Tyndale's name out.

Henry wanted him dead twice.

But despite the best efforts of the Tudor hierarchy

to wipe Tyndale out, they ultimately failed.

And here in St Paul's itself,

one of the few physical copies of Tyndale's original New Testament,

albeit incomplete,

has now become one of the cathedral's greatest treasures.

It's a minor miracle that it's here, in St Paul's,

when thousands of copies of this book were burnt here.

It's a survivor.

Tyndale's words, his mastery,

indeed his reforming of the English language,

his economic, poetic prose, are still remarkably powerful.

But I suspect for Tyndale, this legacy wouldn't have impressed him

because, for him, it wasn't the turn of phrase that mattered,

it was the purpose of those phrases, to bring alive the word of God

for every man and woman in England, and through that, save their souls.

"In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

"The earth was void and empty and darkness was upon the deep...

"And God saw that light was good,

"and divided the light from the darkness,

"and called the light Day..."

"In it was life and life was the light of men.

"And the light shineth in the darkness

"and darkness comprehended it not."

His work not only unlocked the English language,

it gave to English people the liberty to think

rather than the duty to believe.

And it changed England itself, profoundly.

Within a few years, his work had fuelled the Reformation,

monasteries were vandalised, confessionals were empty,

the clergy did not have to mediate between the people and their God.

They could read the word of God for themselves...

in English,

and that's what he'd given his life for.

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