The pulpit of the man who brought the Bible to the people — only to be strangled and burnt for his efforts
William Tyndale was a titanic figure in the Reformation in England. The pulpit he once preached from survives to this day at Bucklebury House in Berkshire; John Goodall takes a look.
Standing up for what you believe in can come at a high price — the highest price. It's a lesson that William Tyndale learned in October 1536, when he was strangled to death, and his body then burnt at the stake. Even that was supposedly a mercy for a man found guilty of heresy: the fact that he was strangled before being burnt was a concession to his stature as a scholar.
Tyndale's crime was becoming a major figure at the vanguard of the Reformation in England. His New Testament, the first complete translation in English, proved hugely influential in both religious and literary terms. Much of it can still be seen today: scholars have estimated that 84% of the King James Bible was taken from Tyndale's work.
Translating the bible had long been a risky pastime in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, but Tyndale might have survived if he'd left it at that. Instead, his scholarship picked at the open sores of the Reformation, enraging first the Catholic Church — by supporting Henry VIII's right to be head of the church in England — and then, two year later, infuriating Henry VIII himself by arguing against the King's proposed divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
Tyndale judged Henry to be the more dangerous, and fled to the Continent — only to be arrested in 1535 by imperial officers of the Holy Roman Empire. He was imprisoned for over a year in Vilvoorde Castle, near Antwerp in modern-day Belgium, convicted of publishing a translation of the Bible without church approval, and executed as a heretic on October 6, 1536.
Four centuries later, Willie Hartley Russell stands in the pulpit that originally came from St Adeline’s Church in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where Tyndale began his ecclesiastical career after leaving Cambridge. Open in front of Hartley Russell is a copy of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, first published in Worms, Germany in 1525.
Tyndale was briefly a tutor to the children of Sir John and Lady Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor and, by tradition, preached from this pulpit. It was transferred to the manor house — a former home of the Hartley Russell family — when St Adeline’s was rebuilt in 1849 and then to Bucklebury House in about 1906.
On the table is a bust of Benjamin Franklin, who collaborated on his own abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer in 1773, aiming — in the spirit of Tyndale — to make its text more usable for ordinary people.
Hartley Russell as another connection to one of the men who shaped the modern world: he is a descendant of David Hartley, who corresponded with Franklin, and was a rare voice during the American Revolutionary War as a British MP sitting in Westminster who called for an end to hostilities, and supported the rights of the colonists.
As well as pushing for conciliation, Hartley also proposed the abolition of the slave trade in 1776. As a representative of the British government, he was a signatory of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, which recognised the independence of the United States.
Find out more about Bucklebury House and estate at their website.
