CHAPTER XIV.

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UTHER and Zuingli met at Marburg on the 30th September, 1529, in melancholy and fruitless conflict, but Tyndale does not seem to have been on the scene. He took up his final

abode in Antwerp some time in 1531, probably at the beginning of the year, or perhaps towards the end of the previous year. The horizon was now beginning to darken around him, the clouds were thickening, and star after star was disappearing in the gloom. Fryth, called indifferently by Cranmer "one Fryth," and contemptuously styled by More "young father Fryth," had won the crown of martyrdom. He had slipped over from the Continent on a previous occasion, and returned again; but on his coming to England in the summer of 1532, he was seized, condemned, degraded, and sent to the stake. More had resigned the Great Seal on the 16th of May, and Cranmer had held the primacy for a few months. But Longland, Stokesley, and Gardyner his old college tutor, examined him, the first of the three pronounced sentence, and he "went to the fire" on the 4th of July, 1533, being at the time under thirty years of age. While he was in prison, he bravely defended his opinions, and his writings are said to have enlightened Cranmer, and to have converted Rastall the printer, brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More. The last sentence of the "Order" of the communion service in the Book of Common Prayer is from Fryth. Tyndale's exile by the death of Fryth became drearier, but his spirit wavered not in toil. He had, as he foreboded, the sentence of death in himself, but he improved the brief respite still to work. "As poor," he was "making many rich," even those in his fatherland, of whom he

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might truthfully say, "Ye are in our hearts, to die and live with you." He had long felt the defects of his first edition of the New Testament; and had said in the preface, “In time to come (if God hath appointed us thereunto) we will give it his full shape, and put out, if ought be added superfluously, and add to, if ought be overseen through negligence, and will endeavour ourselves, as it were, to seethe it better, and to make it more apt for the weake stomakes." Several years had passed away and the promised work had not been done. In the meantime, however, several thousands of copies from foreign presses had been put into immediate circulation in England.

1

There occurred now a peculiar episode in Tyndale's history. George Joye, a scholar and fellow of Peter-House, Cambridge, was now a refugee and "companion in tribulation," for he had fled to the Continent to save his life. He had already been attempting a translation from the Latin text, and had published a Psalter at Strasburg in 1530, the Prophet Isaiah 2 in 1531, and Jeremiah in 1534. At Antwerp he brought out in an evil hour an edition of Tyndale's New Testament, correcting it from the Vulgate. The title is"The New Testament as it was written and caused to be written by them which herde yt, whom also our Saueowre Christ Jesus commaunded that they shulde preache it unto al creatures." The colophon, which Tyndale in his Vindication singles out, and gives at length, is, "Here endeth the New Testament diligently oversene, and corrected, and prynted now agayn at Antwerpe, by me wydowe of Christoffel of Endhoven. In the year of our Lorde M.CCCCC & XXXIIII in August." The matter was kept very secret, and Tyndale, though he was living in Antwerp, does not seem to have been aware of the manœuvre.

1 More in the preface to his Confutation calls him Joy "the priest, that is wedded now."

Joye describes his version of Isaiah as "Isaye speakinge playne Englissche."

3 A copy is in the Grenville Library, British Museum. It has no notes, heads of chapters, or prologues; the printing is fair, but the spelling is bad.

Tyndale was now left alone, and in his sad solitude had been busy revising his translation, which was published in November, and imprinted at Antwerp by Martin Emperowr.1 The title indicates its nature and suggests its necessity,-"The New Testament dylygently corrected and compared with the Greek." Tyndale in his "address yet once more to the Christian Reader," warns with solemn severity against Joye's production. "Thou shalt understand, most dear reader, when I had taken in hand to look over the New Testament again, and to compare it with the Greek, and to mend whatsoever I could find amiss, and had almost finished the labour, George Joye secretly took in hand to correct it also, by what occasion his conscience knoweth, and prevented me, in so much that his correction was printed in great number, ere mine began. When it was spied and word brought me, though it seemed to divers others that George Joye had not used the office of an honest man, seeing he knew that I was correcting it myself, neither did walk after the rules of the love and softness which Christ and His disciples teach us, how that we should do nothing of strife to move debate, or of vainglory, or of covetousness; yet I took the thing in worth, as I have done divers other in time past, as one that have more experience of the nature and disposition of that man's complexion, and supposed that a little spice of covetousness and vainglory (two blind guides) had been the only cause that moved him so to do; about which things I strive with no man, and so followed after and corrected forth, and caused this to be printed without surmise or looking on his correction." That his work should be tampered with in any way by a careless or unscholarly editor, and the trick studiously concealed from him all the while, must have deeply wounded him. To have wantonly touched and retouched a common treatise without authority was wrong; but it was an act of no common daring so to handle the translation which Tyndale regarded as the labour and crown of his life, on which also rested his critical repute and his means of blessing the English people. Joye's knowledge that Tyndale was diligently working at a revision, was 1 Sometimes spelled Lempereur.

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an aggravation of the offence, for in such a case "he used not the office of an honest man." "When the printing of mine was almost finished, one brought me a copy and showed me so many places in such wise altered that I was astonied, and wondered not a little what fury had driven him to make such change, and to call it a diligent correction." Joye did not affix Tyndale's name to the reprint, though the book was really his with some changes, none of any value or suggested by the original, but only inserted to eke out the sense by unneeded and clumsy supplements. Many of these alterations are, as he confesses, from the Vulgate, and he aimed at "giving many words the pure and native signification." The result of his effort is a poor, marred, and diluted version. Tyndale argues that Joye should have put his own name to the book, as it was not expedient for the edifying of the unity of the faith of Christ that whosoever will, shall, by his own authority, take another man's translation and put out and in and change at pleasure, and call it a correction." Joye, in his own account, distinguishes between the greater and the minor corrections; in his own phrase, he had "mended a few certain doubtful and dark places," though, at the same time, he avows, "I have made many changes." Nay, he had the hardihood to aver that he met in Tyndale's version with "hard sentences that no reason could be gathered of them, whether it was by the ignorance of the first translator or of the printers," and that he had made such places “plain from the Latin text." Yet Joye's version was done so carelessly, that the error in Tyndale's first edition in Mark xiv, 5, "two hundred pence" for "three hundred pence" is unnoticed and unchanged, and he had not even looked into the Vulgate.

Joye calls his book in reply "An Apology made by George Joye to satisfye if it may be William Tyndale, to pourge and defend himself against so many slanderause lies feigned upon him in Tyndale's uncharitable and unsober pistle, &c.-Lord deliver us from lying lips and from a deceitful tongue. I know and believe that the bodies of every dead man shall rise at doomsday." He specially prided himself on his change of a verse "darkly translated," and he had shown his amendment to

Tyndale's scribe, but Tyndale refused it "though it stand clearer and truer in my correction than in his," and he boldly adds, “let the learned judge." The passage is Acts vi, 1, Tyndale having, "In those dayes, as the nombre of the disciples grewe, there arose a grodge amonge the grekes agaynst the ebrues, because theyr widdowes were despysed in the dayly ministration." Joye's version is, "In these dayes, the nombre of the disciples grewe, there arose a grudge amonge the grekes agaynst the ebrues, because theyr pore nedy were neglege in the dayly almose dealinge." The "Apology," for he was not afraid to answer Tyndale for "all his high learning," is dated 28th February, 1535. The story contained in it has some interest, for it gives a good account of the spurious issues.2 "Thou shalt know that Tyndale, about eight or nine years ago, translated and printed the New Testament in a mean great volume, but yet without kalendar, concordances in the margin, and table in the end. And anon the Dutchmen got a copy, and printed it again in a small volume, adding the calendar in the beginning, concordances in the margin, and the table in the end. But yet for that they had no Englishman to correct the setting, they themselves having not the knowledge of our tongue, were compelled to make many more faults than were in the copy, and so corrupted the book that the simple reader might oft times be tarried, and stick. After this they printed it again, also without a corrector, in a greater letter and volume, with the figures in the Apocalypse, which was therefore much falser than their first. When these two prints (there were of them both about five thousand books printed) were all sold, more than a twelvemonth ago, Tyndale was pricked forth to take the Testament in hand, to print it and

1 Anderson's Annals, vol. I, p. 396. In 1541, he published a small book against adultery, "printed at London, by George Joye." The motto on the last leaf is 1 Cor. vi, 910; and in its translation, for the single epithet "covetous," he has

"greedy, covetouse, insaciabl, deceytfull, gatherers ;" and for the epithet "extortioners," he has "nor pyllers and pollars."

2 See Waterland's Letters to Mr. Lewis, Works, vol. VI, p. 305, &c. ed. Van Mildert, Oxford, 1856.