Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/433

 the Tyndale family), More again reverted to the subject. This contest of Tyndale and More was the classic controversy of the English reformation. No other discussion was carried on between men of such pre-eminent ability and with such clear apprehension of the points at issue. To More's assertion of the paramount authority of the church Tyndale replied by appealing to scripture, with an ultimate resort to individual judgment. From such divergent premises no agreement was possible.

In the meantime the face of affairs had considerably changed in England, where the contest on the divorce question had driven Henry into opposition to the pope. Cromwell was made a privy councillor in 1531, and in the same year Stephen Vaughan [q. v.], English envoy in the Netherlands, was instructed to communicate with Tyndale, whose views in his ‘Obedience’ were in accordance with Cromwell's policy. On 17 April 1531 Vaughan had a personal interview with Tyndale, near Antwerp, in which he suggested his return to England under a safe-conduct, but Tyndale expressed himself unwilling for fear of ecclesiastical resentment (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, v. No. 201). Henry, however, considered Vaughan had made too many advances, and sent him a peremptory letter rebuking him for overmuch complaisance, and ordering him to make no further attempt to bring Tyndale to England (ib. v. No. 248). Two further interviews between Vaughan and Tyndale in May and June produced no result (ib. v. No. 246). The failure of the negotiations was a disappointment to Tyndale, and caused him to take a gloomy view of Henry's policy. In the prologue to his translation of Jonah, issued in the same year, he likened England to Nineveh, and called on her people to repent.

Towards the close of the year Henry VIII, assuming a more hostile attitude, demanded Tyndale's surrender from the emperor on the charge of spreading sedition in England. Meeting with a refusal, and deeming Vaughan too sympathetic, he instructed Sir Thomas Elyot [q. v.] to kidnap him if possible (ib. v. pp. 121, 142, 165, 244–5, 265–7, 409, 653). Tyndale in consequence left Antwerp, but returned in 1533, when the danger seemed past, and remained in the town for the rest of his life, occupied chiefly with the revision of his translations of the Pentateuch and the New Testament. In the middle of 1534 he took up his abode in the dwelling of Thomas Poyntz (probably a relative of Lady Walsh), an English merchant-adventurer. The house had been set apart since 1474 by the municipality for the use of English merchants, was known as the ‘English House,’ and was situated in a block of buildings between the present Rue de la Vieille Bourse and Rue Zirck. Towards the close of the year John Rogers (1500?–1555) [q. v.], the first martyr in the Marian persecution, came to Antwerp as English chaplain. He was a Roman catholic on his arrival, but afterwards joined the reformers, probably through the influence of Tyndale, with whom he became intimate.

In 1535 Tyndale made the acquaintance of a young Englishman, Henry Phillips, said to be a Roman catholic student at Louvain, who had fled to Flanders after robbing his father. This man, by falsely professing great zeal for religious reform, insinuated himself into Tyndale's confidence and, after receiving much kindness from him, decoyed him from the English House, and betrayed him to the imperial officers. He was arrested on 23 or 24 May 1535, and conveyed a prisoner to the castle of Vilvorde, the state prison of the Low Countries.

Phillips, who was an extreme catholic, was certainly not a royal agent, and strenuous efforts were afterwards made by Henry to get him into his power. Whether Tyndale was the victim of an English ecclesiastical plot is doubtful. Phillips was at various times in communication with leading English catholics, and he was assisted in his betrayal of Tyndale by an English priest named Gabriel Donne [q. v.], who soon afterwards was appointed abbot of Buckfastleigh in Devon. No direct evidence, however, that he was employed by the English catholics has ever been discovered, and it was very possibly on his own initiative that he sacrificed Tyndale, from whom he had borrowed money. Great efforts were made to procure Tyndale's liberation, and Poyntz was himself imprisoned for his zeal. The English merchants, after remonstrating with the queen regent, Mary of Hungary, and representing the arrest as a breach of their privileges, attempted to obtain the intervention of Henry VIII and Cromwell. So late as 13 April 1536, Vaughan wrote from Antwerp to Cromwell: ‘If now you sent but your letter to the privy council [of Flanders], I could deliver Tyndale from the fire’ (ib. x. No. 663). Even if willing, Henry was not in a position to do much. International usages gave him no ground for intervention, and he could hardly expect a personal favour from the Emperor Charles, with whom he was almost at open rupture. In September 1535 Cromwell wrote without effect to Carandolet, the archbishop of Palermo, president of