Thomas Bilney: ‘simple good soul’?
Korey Maas
It is one of the curiosities of English Reformation scholarship that so little
has been written about Thomas Bilney. It is a curiosity because, as Marcus
Loane long ago noted, ‘to Bilney must be ascribed the first human impulse
in the Reformation movement in the schools of Cambridge’. And even in
recent years this assertion has been repeated by John Davis, who writes quite
simply that ‘he took the lead in starting the English Reformation’. Davis
also goes on to emphasise that he was the ‘leading preacher of the English
Reformation’, and that his two trials for heresy can without exaggeration be
called ‘the most important of the Reformation’. And the fact that I have
very kindly been invited to speak here today suggests that some of you, at
least, would agree that Thomas Bilney is indeed a very important figure of
the Reformation in England.
But for all of the agreement about his significance, a very simple question
remains unanswered. Or, rather, answered in too many incompatible
ways. Again, it is John Davis who highlights this fact by stating that ‘Few
figures are more variously described in English historiography than Thomas
Bylney’. So the question to be asked is simply: Who was Thomas Bilney?
One of the most enduring – and certainly most endearing – answers to that
question was put forward by Bilney’s convert and companion Hugh Latimer,
who referred to him as ‘little Bilney’ and ‘Saint Bilney’, and whose frequent
eulogies were summarised with his description of that friend as ‘a very simple
good soul’.
Latimer’s sketches of Bilney’s life, which make their way into Foxe’s book
of martyrs, and thus become a virtually unquestionable orthodoxy among
later English Protestants, provide ample testimony in support of Bilney as
‘a very good soul’. We read that he was ‘of a strait and temperate diet’ and
‘could abide no swearing’, that he was ‘laborious and painful to the desperates’
and ‘ever visiting prisoners and sick folk’. We also hear of his intercession
on behalf of a woman falsely accused of murder; and Latimer will
fairly gush with praise when he describes Bilney as so prompt and ready to
do every man good after his power, both friend and foe; noisome wittingly to
no man, and towards his enemy so charitable, so seeking to reconcile them
as he did.
Now, of course, a sceptic would be quick to point out that this is precisely
the kind of testimony one might expect from friendly witnesses like Hugh
Latimer and John Foxe. Which is why it is all the more significant that even
Bilney’s arch-enemy – the man who also did so much to make William Tyndale’s
life miserable, Sir Thomas More – could find little room to disagree
with this characterisation of Bilney’s life. Even he had to admit that Bilney
was ‘onys good, faythfull, & vertuouse’. Even he had to admit that Bilney
‘had lernynge, and had ben accustumed in morall vertues’.
There is little question, then, that Bilney was indeed ‘a very good soul’.
But, at the same time, there can be little question that he himself would not
have been entirely happy with an inordinate amount of attention being paid
to his good deeds. After all, those deeds were not unique to Bilney; they are
precisely the sort for which so many mediaeval saints were honoured by the
Roman church: the very deeds which Bilney denied had any merit, and the
very saints which Bilney insisted should not be honoured. So if we want to
answer the question of who Thomas Bilney was, we also have to ask what he
believed. What was it that motivated him to the kind of piety to which his
friends as well as his enemies testified?
The answer to this question is far from simple, for the reason that Bilney
himself, despite Latimer’s description, was not ‘a very simple soul’. To the
contrary, Bilney and his beliefs are a complex and complicated issue. It is for
this reason that Davis has already told us that ‘Few figures are more variously
described’. The late Richard Marius put this down to Bilney himself, calling
him ‘a martyr of somewhat confused beliefs’. But confusing is perhaps a
better adjective, because Bilney himself seems to have been quite consistent;
it is only in the later literature that the inconsistencies and contradictions
especially become developed.
A few examples: William Clebsch, in his much used survey of England’s
earliest Protestants, describes Bilney as the ‘moving spirit of the Cambridge
circle of Lutherans’. And more recently Louis Schuster has concurred, calling
him the ‘leader of the Lutheran enthusiasts’. But Davis, whom I have
already mentioned several times, insists that ‘Bylney was closer to the Lollards
than he was to Luther’. And there are those who also agree with him.
Anne Hudson has said ‘it seems certain that Bilney’s views were genuinely
only Lollard’. In addition to these positive assertions, we can also find an
equal number stated in the negative. Gordon Rupp was quite blunt when
he insisted that ‘Bilney was no Lollard’. And Greg Walker is equally blunt
in his contradiction: ‘Bilney was . . . no Lutheran’. More confusingly, there
appears to be no clear consensus even on the question of whether Bilney
was a heretic of any stripe, whether he had indeed passed beyond the fluid
boundaries of orthodox mediaeval Catholicism and into either Lollardy or
Lutheranism. While there are those who claim he was a ‘Protestant reformer’
who held a ‘Protestant world picture’, others argue that ‘he cannot be called
a Protestant although he is often portrayed as one’.
So much for Bilney being a ‘simple soul’.
But what accounts for such confusion? Partly, it is due to the fact that,
unlike William Tyndale, Bilney left to posterity no substantial body of written
material. In fact, what we do have amounts to not much more than a
few letters, the transcripts of his trials, and a too infrequently referenced,
but very revealingly annotated Latin Bible, which he had in his possession
probably until his first trial in 1527. So the evidence with which to sketch an
outline of Bilney’s theology is not overabundant. With that in mind, what I
would nevertheless like to do is to look once again at some of this evidence
in an attempt to pin down more precisely what he did believe.
The best place to begin then, is right here, in Norfolk, because it was here
that Bilney was born and began his education. And if we want to suppose
Bilney had particularly Lollard leanings, then his Norfolk background is
quite a convenient fact. Norfolk had a long tradition of Lollardy, with suspects
being either abjured or burned throughout the whole of the fifteenth
century. And when the Norwich bishop Richard Nix complained about
the Cambridge college of Gonville Hall, saying that there was ‘no clerk who
had lately come out of it but savoureth of the frying pan’, he undoubtedly
did so knowing that Gonville Hall – like Bilney’s college, Trinity Hall – was
largely populated by Norfolk men.
Of course, setting aside what some psychologists might say, one’s early
environment is not an infallible determiner of one’s later views. So we are
forced to examine the evidence of Bilney’s own words or, at least what are
recorded as Bilney’s own words. If we turn to the evidence of his preaching
we can find there some strong indications of Lollard influence. Many of the
witnesses against him at his first trial in 1527 were quick to accuse him of
standard Lollard fare. Those who had heard his sermons at Willesden, Newington,
and Ipswich especially recalled his condemnation of images. And
the testimony of those who heard him preach at St Magnus, London, deals
almost exclusively with his criticism of the cult of saints. And it is difficult
to dismiss his accusers as hostile witnesses, because even those sympathetic
to Bilney tell the same story. Thomas Fen and Guy (or Guido) Glazen, both
Suffolk shoe-makers, as well as John Pykas, an Essex baker, would later recall
that their own opinions concerning saints and images were either prompted
by or confirmed by Thomas Bilney. William Tyndale would also say that
Bilney did speak against the cult of saints, their images, and pilgrimages to
their shrines. John Foxe goes so far as to say this was the ‘whole sum of his
preaching and doctrine’.
But even if we accept all of this as incontrovertible, we must also admit
that, despite the strong Lollard flavour of such ideas, they were by no means
exclusive to Lollardy. We can find the same sentiments not only in the works
of such orthodox humanists as Desiderius Erasmus and John Colet, but they
are just as strongly expressed in the writings of Luther and his Wittenberg
circle. We do have to admit that Bilney’s preaching sounded sufficiently
Lollard to attract a strong Lollard following. Thomas More complained that
he knew of at least two who would not hesitate to travel twenty miles to hear
Bilney deliver a sermon. And his preaching at Ipswich in 1527 did draw a
crowd of Lollards all the way from Colchester. But, once again, Bilney is
not unique in attracting such an audience. And once again Colet’s name is
worth mentioning, since a group of Lollards is also known to have travelled
for some miles in order to hear him preach at Paul’s Cross. And, of course,
from the earliest date Luther’s books were being received in Lollard circles
just as warmly as they were in the universities.
You can see why Bilney’s position has become such a topic of contention.
On the basis of his preaching – and it was his preaching for which he was
best known – one is led to believe that his constant and consistent theme
was the denunciation of such common beliefs and practices as pilgrimages,
the veneration of images, and the intercession of saints. But this was a theme
shared by orthodox humanists, Lollards, and Lutherans alike. So where did
his contemporaries place him in this spectrum of beliefs? The simple fact
that he was twice brought to trial and twice convicted is enough to indicate
that the authorities, at least, could not consider him orthodox. And the
evidence of these two trials, especially the first, sheds interesting light on the
position they did believe him to hold.
One of the curiosities of this 1527 trial is that in the register of Bishop
Tunstall, who presided over the hearing, there exist two separate sets of
interrogatories. The first is a list of thirty-four questions recorded in Latin;
the second is a much shorter list, recorded in English. The different languages
are themselves telling, but even more so are the contents of each list.
The shorter list, which focuses on images, saints, and ceremonies, has not
unjustly been called ‘wholly Lollard in character’. The longer list, by contrast,
has been defined by the same author as ‘a Lutheran list’. And this is
also a fair assessment. The very first question found on this list is whether
‘the assertions of Luther . . . were justly and godly condemned’ and whether
‘Luther, with his adherents, was a wicked and detestable heretic’. What
is particularly noteworthy here is the fact that, despite having both sets of
interrogatories at hand, that judged to be essentially Lollard in character
was simply ignored, and Bilney’s trial proceeded solely on the basis of those
articles considered ‘Lutheran’. This needs explaining.
One author has attempted to explain this by suggesting that, in assuming
him Lutheran, Bilney’s judges had ‘partially prejudged the issue’. If they did
so, this is at least understandable. If Bilney’s Norfolk context might suggest
Lollardy, then his Cambridge context could certainly suggest Lutheranism.
It is well known that Luther’s books were widely circulating in Cambridge
during Bilney’s day. It was only one year after he had become a fellow of Trinity
Hall that they fuelled a bonfire in that city. Those who frequented the
White Horse Inn, including Bilney, are most often assumed to have done so
to discuss the reforming ideas of Luther. And it was Bilney’s convert Robert
Barnes who created the first public controversy in Cambridge by preaching a
1525 sermon in which he followed Luther’s postil on the text for the day. It
is this kind of evidence that has led Richard Rex to say of Cambridge in the
early 1520s that ‘all we see of the Reformation in Cambridge is Luther’.
So, again, it would certainly be understandable if Bilney’s position had
been prejudged. But was it in fact? As significant as the articles brought
against him are for what they say, they are equally significant for what they
do not say. In particular, he was never accused of what had long been a
central tenet of Lollard thought: the rejection of Christ’s bodily presence
in the sacrament. Rather than prejudging the case, it is quite probable that
Bilney’s judges simply found it easier to reconcile his moderate iconophobia
with Lutheran ideas than to reconcile his view of the sacrament with those
of Lollardy.
What is there, then, to prevent one from saying that Thomas Bilney was
indeed a Lutheran, at least insofar as that term can be defined before 1530
and the presentation of the Augsburg Confession? Well, one small matter,
it would seem, is decisive. Bilney, standing before his judges, confessed with
his own mouth that Luther was indeed ‘a wicked and detestable heretic’ and
that he was ‘justly and godly condemned’. Such an unambiguous admission
certainly is problematic. Until we read Bilney’s response to the rest of
the charges brought against him. He confessed that everything on which he
stood accused was indeed heresy. He defended none of the doctrines attributed
to him. He simply said he had preached no such thing.[43]_He denied
everything.
In the face of the overwhelming evidence concerning Bilney’s preaching
– presented by friend and foe alike – this is really quite remarkable. Unbelievable
even. And Thomas More, for one, refused to believe it. And he
states his reason for distrusting Bilney’s denial. He claims that he had heard
on good authority that Bilney told his followers: ‘Let us preche and set
forthe our way. And yf we be accused / lett us saye we sayd not so’. More’s
conclusion, then, is that Bilney ‘in very dede persevered in perjury’. This
is a serious charge, and one which Gordon Rupp, at least, was unwilling to
consider. He argued that it was inconceivable that Bilney, otherwise known
to be scrupulously honest, would stoop so low as to lie, even in such dire
circumstances. But, in fact, we have good reason to believe that he would,
and that More’s accusation carries some serious weight.
I mentioned earlier that one of the few illuminating documents still available
to us is Bilney’s own annotated Vulgate. Since the thoughts recorded
there were private thoughts, not intended for the eyes of the authorities, we
can safely assume that they accurately reflect Bilney’s true views. Two of his
annotations especially speak to the issue at hand. At one point he speaks of
the prophet Jeremiah telling a ‘pious lie’. And in the margin at 1 Samuel
19, where David’s wife Michal lies in order to save his life, he notes, ‘Michal,
David’s wife, practises deceit blamelessly.’ In Scripture itself, Bilney was
able to find justification for sometimes speaking untruthfully. Which forces
us to ask: if he would lie about his rejection of saints, images, and pilgrimages
– which he almost certainly did – is it not likely that he was also being
less than honest when he claimed that Luther was a heretic who had been
justly condemned?
If we look once again at Bilney’s preaching, this time not only asking what
he preached, but why, we can begin to formulate an answer to that question.
Bilney was certainly no rationalist; he was not attacking popular piety
because he thought it superstitious nonsense. And it would seem that he
was not simply a proponent of crude anti-clericalism, despising the authority
such piety granted the clergy, as so many Lollards did. So why did he
preach against the intercession of saints? In debate with the conservative
friar John Brusierd, who criticised him for a sermon preached at Ipswich,
Bilney argued that Christ’s all-sufficient atonement made the role of saints
superfluous. Christ alone effects salvation. So why were pilgrimages condemned?
Because, Bilney insisted, man ‘can in no wise merit by his own
good deeds’. Instead, he explained to Bishop Tunstall, men should only
‘put their confidence in Christ, who was for them crucified’. God’s grace
alone, received by faith alone, is sufficient for salvation. And on what basis
did Bilney proclaim such radical ideas? He told his hearers at Ipswich: ‘here
is the New Testament, and here is the Old. These be the two swords of our
saviour Christ which I will preach and show to you, and nothing else.’
In other words, Scripture alone carries doctrinal authority. Scripture alone;
Christ alone; grace alone; faith alone. Those famous watchwords of the
Lutheran reformers were no less the presuppositions of Bilney himself. It
will not do to say that only Bilney’s doctrine of faith is Lutheran, while his
other opinions are merely Lollard. Even when he is preaching what might
sound like simple Lollard tenets, his underlying motivation for doing so
goes quite beyond the bare biblical legalism of Lollardy.
But, finally, we have to ask, how far does it go? How far beyond Lollardy,
and even mediaeval orthodoxy, does Bilney’s theology extend? The last
defence of those who would like to save Bilney from the heresy of Lutheranism
can be summarised in the words of A.G. Dickens: ‘To his dying day he
remained orthodox on the Papal Supremacy, the authority of the Church,
[and] the doctrines of transubstantiation’. Harold Darby wrote nearly the
same, saying he was ‘orthodox in acknowledging the sacrifice of the mass,
the doctrine of transubstantiation and the authority of the church’. If this
truly is the case, then Bilney would be a strange Lutheran indeed, since
Luther himself was orthodox on none of the above. It is for this reason that
John Davis concludes that Bilney was no proponent of Lutheranism, but of
something called Evangelism, which he defines as ‘the espousal of doctrines
of faith while remaining in communion with Rome’.
But even on the points raised by Dickens and Darby – and these are points
Rome would have considered decisive: sacraments and ecclesiastical authority,
especially the authority of the papacy — Bilney’s communion with Rome
is difficult to maintain. Bilney did tell his judges in 1527 that he believed
the church could not err. But once again he seems to have been less than
completely honest, because the annotations in his Bible tell a different story.
‘The church can err’, he wrote. And again, ‘surely one can deduce how vain
is that saying which is advanced: that the Catholic Church cannot err’. In
Thomas More’s opinion, Bilney’s regard for the visible Roman church was so
fundamentally errant that ‘the contempnyng of Crystes catholyke knowen
chyrche, and the framynge of a secrete unknowen chyrche . . . was the very
poynt that broughte hym unto all hys myschyefe’.
It would seem, then, that Bilney was not orthodox on the authority of the
church. Nor does it appear that he was any more orthodox on the subject
of papal supremacy. It may be unwise to read too much into Latimer’s statement
that Bilney ‘died well against the tyrannical see of Rome’; but Foxe
is a bit more specific when he writes that Bilney began in his preaching tour
of 1527 ‘to pluck at the authority of the bishop of Rome’. In May of that
year he claimed that there had been no good pope in the previous five hundred
years, and that they must be preached against because ‘they have foreslaundered
the bodie of oure Savyoure Cryste’. When John Brusierd, the
conservative friar who heard this sermon, criticised him for such unguarded
words, Bilney justified himself by claiming that papal authority was no
divine right. When Brusierd pressed the matter, Bilney even went so far as to
confirm that the papacy looked uncannily like the description of Antichrist
found in St Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. In the light of such
comments, perhaps a bit more weight can be given to some rarely mentioned
Norwich memoranda which assert that it was for ‘speaking against the Pope’s
supremacy’ that Bilney was eventually burned. Taken together, such comments
speak quite strongly against any claims that Bilney remained orthodox
in the matter of papal primacy.
Claims for his orthodox stance on the sacrament, however, do rest on
firmer ground. It has already been noted that, despite the dozens of articles
brought against him, Bilney was never questioned on the sacrament. And
even with the great mass of information available to him, John Foxe several
times regrets to inform his readers that Bilney ‘never differed therein from
the most gross catholics’. It is very curious, then, that when Miles Huggarde
wrote The assault of the sacrament in 1554, he included ‘olde Bylney’ among
those who did indeed assault the sacrament. It is certainly possible that
Huggarde, simply for the sake of polemics, found it convenient to tar Bilney
with a sacramentarian brush, especially since so many of his contemporaries
did break with Rome on the Eucharist. But it is also possible that Foxe was
being less than precise when he dismissed Bilney as orthodox. While generically
stating that his opinion did not differ from that of the old faith, he
nowhere goes so far as Darby and Dickens in stating that he held specifically
to transubstantiation or the sacrifice of the Mass.
Without further evidence this point cannot be pressed too far, but it is at
least possible that Bilney’s true opinion represented a subtle ‘middle way’,
which allowed Protestants to accuse him of Romanism while also allowing
Catholics to accuse him of Protestantism. What would such a ‘middle way’
look like? It would look very much like the eucharistic theology of Luther, a
theology which insisted on Christ’s bodily presence in the sacrament, yet at
the same rejected the process of transubstantiation as a dogmatically binding
explanation for that presence. Again, this point cannot be pressed too far, but
this sort of confusion is not entirely unheard of. It is found, for instance, in
the theology of Thomas Cranmer; and the confused party is Cranmer himself.
When he looked back on the sacramental view he had held in the 1530s,
Cranmer disparagingly referred to it as nothing other than ‘the papist’s doctrine’.
Yet Peter Newman Brooks has convincingly proved that Cranmer’s
views at that time were in fact distinctively Lutheran. The confusion arises
only because Cranmer, who eventually rejected any notion of corporal presence
in the sacrament, came to view the subtle distinction between the positions
of Rome and Wittenberg as inconsequential.
At this point, a brief apology is probably in order. I have carried on for so
long about Luther that some of you may be thinking you have stumbled into
a meeting of the Luther Society rather than the Tyndale Society. But by way
of conclusion I would like to suggest that Bilney’s connection with Luther
cannot be completely separated from his connection with Tyndale.
In the few statements we have from Bilney himself, Tyndale is never mentioned
as someone he had known. Nor do Tyndale’s few references to Bilney
indicate any more than a familiarity based on second-hand knowledge. And
despite continuing speculation that Tyndale might have been resident in
Cambridge during Bilney’s time, there is still no firm evidence to substantiate
this. What Bilney certainly did know, however, were Tyndale’s publications.
It is with reference to Tyndale that Thomas More states: ‘Another is there
also, whom hys unhappy bokes have broght unto the fyre, Tho. Bylney’. It
was ‘Tyndals heresye’ of which he accused Bilney; and therefore, he would
say, ‘god caused hym to be taken, & Tindals bokes with hym to, & both two
burned togyder’. But More is equally insistent in apportioning some of
the blame to Luther; ‘the very fundacyon wheruppon all other heresyes are
byelded’, More said Bilney had ‘lerned of Luther and Tyndale’. It was, he
argued, the result of ‘the false delyght of Luthers and Tyndales bokes’.
Given their early and well-distributed presence in Cambridge, it is very
likely that Bilney would have read some of Luther’s works. But the only
questionable literature he is ever known to have had in his possession is not
Luther’s, but only Tyndale’s. In particular, Tyndale’s translation of the New
Testament, and his Obedience of the Christian Man, both of which he was
found to be delivering at the time of his final arrest. Even these two works,
however, bear the unmistakable imprint of Luther. Richard Rex has outlined
Tyndale’s debt to Luther in producing the Obedience of the Christian
Man. But even more well known is the Lutheran influence on Tyndale’s
translation of the New Testament. His translation borrows heavily from the
vernacular Bible produced by Luther only a few years previously. Equally
telling is the fact that the prefaces found in Tyndale’s Testament are little
more than reproductions of those found in Luther’s edition.
And what is true of the New Testament and the Obedience is true of much
of Tyndale’s work: ‘No other theologian of the English Reformation translated
as much Luther as did William Tyndale’. The result is that, on a great
many topics, to read Tyndale is to hear Luther. It is partly for this reason that
James McGoldrick felt justified in speaking of Tyndale as ‘Luther’s English
Connection’. McGoldrick only describes one other person in this way,
the Cambridge reformer Robert Barnes. But on the basis of the evidence
presented above, he might have been equally justified in describing Thomas
Bilney – Barnes’s associate and Tyndale’s admirer – as another significant link
in the ‘English connection’ of Martin Luther.
As noted earlier, there is by no means a unanimous consensus on this.
Among recent authors it is not even a majority opinion. But if the interpretation
presented here is even partially convincing, it will at least confirm the
suspicion that Bilney, though perhaps a ‘good soul’, was by no means a ‘very
simple soul’.
Endnotes
