“It happened that one Packington, a merchant and mercer of London, was in Antwerp, and this Packington was a man that highly favoured Tyndale, but to the Bishop utterly showed himself to the contrary. The Bishop commenced of the New Testaments, and how he would gladly buy them. Packington said to the Bishop, ‘My lord, I know the Dutchmen and strangers that have bought them of Tyndale and have them here to sell; so that if it be your lordship’s pleasure to pay for them I will then assure you to have every book of them that is printed and here unsold.’ The Bishop said, ‘Do your diligence and get them; and with all my heart I will pay for them whatsoever they cost you.’ Packington came to Tyndale and said, ‘William, I know thou art a poor man, and hast a heap of New Testaments by thee for the which thou hast both endangered thy friends and beggared thyself, and I have now gotten thee a merchant, which with ready money shall despatch thee of all that thou hast.’ ‘Who is the merchant?’ said Tyndale. ‘The Bishop of London.’ ‘Oh, that is because he will burn them,’ said Tyndale. ‘Yea, marry,’ quoth Packington. ‘I am the gladder,’ said Tyndale, ‘for these two benefits shall come thereof; I shall get the money to bring myself out of debt, and the whole world will cry out against the burning of God’s Word; and the overplus of the money that shall remain to me shall make me more studious to correct the said New Testament, and so newly print the same once again, and I trust the second will much better like you than ever the first.’ And so, forward went the bargain: the Bishop had the books, Packington had the thanks, and Tyndale had the money.”
On 4th May 1530, therefore, at St. Paul’s Cross, in the Churchyard, these Testaments were publicly burned. Burnet says: “This burning had such a baleful appearance in it, being generally called a burning of the Word of God, that people from thence concluded there must be a visible contrariety between that book and the doctrines of those who kindled it, by which both their prejudice against the clergy and their desire of reading the New Testament were increased.” Men said to one another that the book “was not only faultless, but very well translated, and was devised to be burnt because men should not be able to prove such faults as were at Paul’s Cross declared to have been found in it were never found there indeed, but untruly surmised.”
Commenting in after-years upon the carping criticisms that were passed on his work, Tyndale said: “There is not so much as one i therein if it lack a tittle over his head, but they have noted it, and number it unto the ignorant people for an heresy.”
CHAPTER V.
A MAN WITHOUT A PATTERN, BUT WITH
MANY IMITATORS.
“This Book, this Holy Book, in every line
Marked with the seal of high Divinity,
On every leaf bedewed with drops of love
Divine and with the eternal heraldry
And signature of God Almighty stamped
From first to last; this ray of sacred light,