The only extant title page of a printed version of William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (1526). Württembergische Landesblibliothek, Stuttgart.
A small group of English Bible translators gathered around Tyndale in Antwerp, among whom were George Joye, Miles Coverdale and John Rogers. Tyndale worked on his polemical writings, corrected his translation of the New Testament and translated parts of the Old Testament. In all this, the proximity of Leuven was important. Not only was it the only university town in the Low Countries and a bulwark of Roman Catholic belief, but from 1517 to 1521 it had also been the home base of Erasmus who with likeminded colleagues had driven the university in a more progressive direction. Indeed, there are echoes of Erasmus in Tyndale's famous statement ‘... I wille cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost’.
But Leuven played yet another part in Tyndale's life. It was a student of this university, the Englishman Henry Phillips, who in May 1535 tricked Tyndale into leaving his safe haven in Antwerp and betrayed him to the soldiers of Emperor Charles v. He was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde, near Brussels. From his cell Tyndale wrote a letter asking for some warm clothes and also for a Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary. This letter is the only surviving manuscript that is quite certainly written in Tyndale's own hand. In September 1536, Tyndale was strangled and burned.
A year earlier, in 1535, Miles Coverdale, a collaborator and assistant of Tyndale's, produced the first complete English Bible (which is usually thought to have been published in Cologne, but it is argued in Tyndale's Testament that it was actually printed in Antwerp, possibly by Merten de Keyser, where Coverdale also worked as a corrector). Since Coverdale could not understand Greek or Hebrew, he drew heavily on Tyndale's work and translated the rest from existing German and Latin versions. But about half of the Old Testament and the whole of the New were essentially the work of Tyndale. Nevertheless, by omitting Tyndale's more controversial passages and annotations the Coverdale Bible met with some degree of official acceptance in England and paved the way for John Rogers' Matthew Bible which was published a few months after Tyndale's death. The Matthew Bible was the first complete English version of the Bible to receive Henry viii's official approval, but again, apart from a few small changes, it was based solidly on Tyndale's published and unpublished work. According to the Fleming Guido Latré its printer was probably Matthias Crom of Antwerp. Then in 1539 Thomas Cromwell issued an injunction that every parish church should acquire a copy of the ‘Great Bible’, Miles Coverdale's revised version of the Matthew Bible. This in turn heavily influenced the King James version of 1611. It has been calculated that about eighty per cent of Tyndale's Old Testament and ninety per cent of his New Testament appears in the Authorised Version.
The biblical and polemical work of Tyndale not only furthered the growth of standard English, both written and spoken, it also influenced political thinking. The ordinary man and woman in England now had direct access to the Bible, the book that in Tyndale's age was seen as the ultimate justification of all earthly power.
In 1913, the Trinitarian Bible Society financed the erection of a monument to William Tyndale in Vilvoorde. (The liberal, free-thinking mayor of Vilvoorde seized on the event as an opportunity to show the Catholic Church in a bad light rather than to honour Protestantism.) In 1986, a small Tyndale Museum was opened. In 2002, from 3 September until 1 December, the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp devoted an exhibition to Tyndale. The museum is an ideal venue for such an exhibition since it also houses the oldest printing presses in the world and provides a picture of the role played by Antwerp in the sixteenth-century world of typography and printing. To accompany the exhibition it published a book, the above-mentioned Tyndale's Testament, which includes not only the exhibition catalogue but also a range of contributions on Tyndale and the Antwerp printers, Tyndale's importance for language and culture, the Bible and the early Reformation, the smuggling of forbidden books from Antwerp to England and finally the Antwerp roots of the Coverdale Bible, still a controversial subject. There