Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan Read Free Book Online Page B

is that all of them, except Coverdale alone, were burnt for their beliefs; and that, at some time while he was at Cambridge, Tyndale was exposed to Luther’s ideas and took his own first steps to the stake.

2
    Decision
    A fter he left Cambridge, Tyndale became tutor to the children of a Gloucestershire landowner. He arrived with the Walsh family in the midsummer of 1522. He was now aged about twenty-seven, and the months he spent in this rolling wool country set up the rest of his life. He discovered his vocation and he had the first warnings of the perils that went hand in hand with it.
    His employer, Sir John Walsh, the future high sheriff of the county, was a good-natured ex-courtier who had served as ceremonial champion to the young Henry VIII at the coronation in 1509. The king remained fond of him, spending a night at his house with Anne Boleyn when a royal progress brought him nearby. Sir John was married to Anne Poyntz, an heiress from a leading county family, whom Tyndale affectionately recalled as ‘a stout and a wise woman’.
    The Walshes lived at Little Sodbury Manor, a rambling and friendly house of soft grey stone and mullioned windows that still stands in quiet splendour amid its lawns and ancient yews on a steep west-facing slope of the Cotswolds. Its buildings were grouped round a courtyard, now the west lawn, with one of thefinest great halls in England set beneath a steep-pitched roof. ‘Walche,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘is Lord of Little Sodbyri, and hath fayr place there in the syde of Sodbyri high hill and a park.’ The manor was only a dozen or so miles along the lanes from Slimbridge and North Nibley, and the landscape of pasture and copses was familiar to Tyndale from his childhood. He worked and slept in a heavily beamed room under the eaves at the back of the house, so tradition has it, whose window looks out on to a steep hill. At the summit, where stumps of earth walls trace the remains of a Roman camp, the eye is drawn to Stinchcombe Hill and Nibley Knoll, and across the watery green of the Severn vale to the purple and black loom of the Welsh mountains.
    The site was inhabited in the Bronze Age; it was mentioned as a border post against Welsh marauders by the Roman historian Tacitus at the end of the first century. Its name – Sod, or South, and Bury, or Camp – is derived from Saxon words. The manor house itself, one of only two definite homes that we know of in Tyndale’s fugitive life, reflected some of the vicissitudes of English history. Its Saxon owner was expelled after 1066 by a conquering Norman, Hugo Maminot. It passed in time to Hugh le Despenser, an avaricious courtier created earl of Winchester by Edward II, and hanged at Bristol when his royal patron was deposed and murdered in 1327.
    Unstable times had returned more recently. When the manor’s great hall was built in the mid-fifteenth century, a spyhole, or ‘squint’, was set into a gargoyle on the wall to the left of the fireplace so that the room could be observed through it from an upper chamber. In the space of a fortnight in 1471, it witnessed the visits of the Lancastrian Margaret of Anjou, and her enemies Edward IV and Richard of Gloucester, as they billeted themselves in the house before riding on to clash at the battle of Tewkesbury. The house had passed to Sir John Walsh’s father through marriage a few years later.

    Sir John knew Tyndale’s brother Edward well. The two men later served together on various commissions in the county. The young tutor was treated as a member of the family and his duties were light. The eldest Walsh boy, Maurice, was no more than seven (he was fated, as it transpired, to die of burns as an adult after a ‘fiery sulphurous globe’ rolled in through the parlour door and struck him as he sat dining during a thunderstorm) and he was only in the first stages of reading and writing and Latin grammar.
    The tutor thus had time in plenty to indulge his passion for debate and