During this time Poyntz was working with all his might in England to ward off the blow by which his friend was about to be struck. John assisted Thomas, but all was useless. Henry just at that time was making great efforts to arrest some of his subjects, whom their devotion to the pope had driven out of England. 'Cover all the roads with spies, in order to catch them,' he wrote to the German magistrates;[455] but there was not a word about Tyndale. The king cared very little for these evangelicals. His religion consisted in rejecting the Roman pontiff and making himself pope; as for those reformers, let them be burnt in Brabant, it will save him the trouble.
All hope was not, however, lost. They had confidence in the vicegerent, the hammer of the monks. On the 13th of April Vaughan wrote to Cromwell from Antwerp: 'If you will send me a letter for the privy-council, I can still save Tyndale from the stake; only make haste, for if you are slack about it, it will be too late.'[456] But there were cases in which Cromwell could do nothing without the king, and Henry was deaf. He had special motives at that time for sacrificing Tyndale: the discontent which broke out in the North of England made him desirous of conciliating the Low Countries. Charles V. also, who was vigorously attacked by Francis I., prayed his very good brother (Henry VIII.) to unite with him for the public good of Christendom.[457] Queen Mary, regent of the Netherlands, wrote from Brussels to her uncle, entreating him to yield to this prayer, and the king was quite ready to abandon Tyndale to such powerful allies. Mary, a woman of upright heart but feeble character, easily yielded to outward impressions, and had at that time bad counsellors about her. 'Those animals (the monks) are all powerful at the Court of Brussels,' said Erasmus. 'Mary is only a puppet placed there by our nation; Montigny is the plaything of the Franciscans; the cardinal-archbishop of Liège is a domineering person, and full of violence; and as for the archbishop of Palermo, he is a mere giver of words and nothing else.'[458]
Among such personages, and under their influence, the court was formed, and the trial of the reformer of England began. Tyndale refused to be represented by counsel. 'I will answer my accusers myself,' he said. The doctrine for which he was tried was this: 'The man who throws off the worldly existence which he has lived far from God, and receives by a living faith the complete remission of his sins, which the death of Christ has purchased for him, is introduced by a glorious adoption into the very family of God.' This was certainly a crime for which a reformer could joyfully suffer. In August 1536, Tyndale appeared before the ecclesiastical court. 'You are charged,' said his judges, 'with having infringed the imperial decree which forbids any one to teach that faith alone justifies.'[459] The accusation was not without truth. Tyndale's Unjust Mammon had just appeared in London under the title: Treatise of Justification by Faith only. Every man could read in it the crime with which he was charged.
Tyndale had his reasons when he declared he would defend himself. It was not his own cause that he undertook to defend, but the cause of the Bible; a Brabant lawyer would have supported it very poorly. It was in his heart to proclaim solemnly, before he died, that while all human religions make salvation proceed from the works of man, the divine religion makes it proceed from a work of God. 'A man, whom the sense of his sins has confounded,' said Tyndale, 'loses all confidence and joy. The first thing to be done to save him is, therefore, to lighten him of the heavy burden under which his conscience is bowed down. He must believe in the perfect work of Christ which reconciles him completely with God; then he has peace, and Christ imparts to him, by his Spirit, a holy regeneration.—Yes,' he exclaimed, 'we believe and are at peace in our consciences, because that God who cannot lie, hath promised to forgive us for Christ's sake. As a child, when his father threateneth him for his fault, hath never rest till he hear the word of mercy and forgiveness of his father's mouth again; but as soon as he heareth his father say, "Go thy way, do me no more so; I forgive thee this fault!" then is his heart at rest; then runneth he to no man to make intercession for him; neither, though there come any false merchant, saying: "What wilt thou give me and I will obtain pardon of thy father for thee," will he suffer himself to be beguiled. No, he will not buy of a wily fox what his father hath given him freely.'[460]
=TYNDALE DEGRADED.=
Tyndale had spoken to the consciences of his hearers, and some of them were beginning to believe that his cause was the cause of the Gospel. 'Truly,' exclaimed the procurator-general, as did formerly the centurion near the cross; 'truly this was a good, learned, and pious man.'[461] But the priests would not allow so costly a prey to be snatched from them. Tyndale was declared guilty of erroneous, captious, rash, ill-sounding, dangerous, scandalous, and heretical propositions, and was condemned to be solemnly degraded and then handed over to the secular power.[462] They were eager to make him go through the ceremonial, even all the mummeries, used on such occasions: it was too good a case to allow of any curtailment. The reformer was dressed in his sacerdotal robes, the sacred vessels and the Bible were placed in his hands, and he was taken before the bishop. The latter, having been informed of the crime of the accused man, stripped him of the ornaments of his order, took away the Bible from the translator of the Bible; and after a barber had shaved the whole of his head, the bishop declared him deprived of the crown of the priesthood, and expelled, like an undutiful child, from the inheritance of the Lord.
One day would have been sufficient to cut off from this world the man who was its ornament, and those who walked in the darkness of fanaticism waited impatiently for the fatal hour; but the secular power hesitated for awhile, and the reformer stayed nearly two months longer in prison, always full of faith, peace, and joy. 'Well,' said those who came near him in the castle of Vilvorde, 'if that man is not a good Christian, we do not know of one upon earth.' Religious courage was personified in Tyndale. He had never suffered himself to be stopped by any difficulty, privation, or suffering; he had resolutely followed the call he had received, which was to give England the Word of God. Nothing had terrified him, nothing had dispirited him; with admirable perseverance he had continued his work, and now he was going to give his life for it. Firm in his convictions, he had never sacrificed the least truth to prudence or to fear; firm in his hope, he had never doubted that the labor of his life would bear fruit, for that labor had the promises of God. That pious and intrepid man is one of the noblest examples of Christian heroism.
=TYNDALE'S DYING PRAYER.=
The faint hope which some of Tyndale's friends had entertained, on seeing the delay of justice, was soon destroyed. The imperial government prepared at last to complete the wishes of the priests. Friday, the 6th of October, 1536, was the day that terminated the miserable but glorious life of the reformer. The gates of the prison rolled back, a procession crossed the foss and the bridge, under which slept the waters of the Senne,[463] passed the outward walls, and halted without the fortifications. Before leaving the castle, Tyndale, a grateful friend, had intrusted the jailer with a letter intended for Poyntz; the jailer took it himself to Antwerp not long after, but it has not come down to us. On arriving at the scene of punishment, the reformer found a numerous crowd assembled. The government had wished to show the people the punishment of a heretic, but they only witnessed the triumph of a martyr. Tyndale was calm. 'I call God to record,' he could say, 'that I have never altered, against the voice of my conscience, one syllable of his Word. Nor would do this day, if all the pleasures, honors, and riches of the earth might be given me.'[464] The joy of hope filled his heart: yet one painful idea took possession of him. Dying far from his country, abandoned by his king, he felt saddened at the thought of that prince, who had already persecuted so many of God's servants, and who remained obstinately rebellious against that divine light which everywhere shone around him. Tyndale would not have that soul perish through carelessness. His charity buried all the faults of the monarch: he prayed that those sins might be blotted out from before the face of God; he would have saved Henry VIII. at any cost. While the executioner was fastening him to the post, the reformer exclaimed in a loud and suppliant voice: 'Lord, open the king of England's eyes!'[465] They were his last words. Instantly afterwards he was strangled, and flames consumed the martyr's body. His last cry was wafted to the British isles, and repeated in every assembly of Christians. A great death had crowned a great life. 'Such,' says the old chronicler, John Foxe, 'such is the story of that true servant and martyr of God, William Tyndale, who, for his notable pains and travail, may well be called the Apostle of England in this our later age.'[466]