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eyes ‘small and blue, his teeth few, poor and blackish, and his hair thin and white’. Two of his four immediate predecessors had been murdered, one had been killed in battle, and the fourth had been driven in humiliation from his realm in mid-reign; Richard III had murdered, or was suspected of involvement in the murder of his brother, his wife, the king, Henry VI, and two nephews, the little princes who disappeared in the Tower of London in 1483. The dead princes were brothers of Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, and Henry’s natural and overriding ambition was to make his new Tudor dynasty stable and long lasting.
    Two pretenders challenged him. Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford tradesman but put forward as a surviving nephew from the Tower, was proclaimed king in Dublin in 1487, but his forces were defeated in battle at Stoke later in the year. Shortly after William Tyndale was born, another pretender, Perkin Warbeck, claimed to be the Tower’s second surviving prince; he was hailed by the Irish earls, and the king of Scotland gave him his cousin in marriage, before he landed in the West Country, failed to make progress, surrendered and was hanged in 1499.

    Even after that, the dynasty hung by a single life. Henry VII’s sons Arthur and Edmund died young, though only after Arthur had married Catherine of Aragon. The future Henry VIII was left as the only male heir, a fact that, together with his later marriage to Catherine, his brother’s widow, was greatly to influence the adult life of William Tyndale and the future of English religion.
    As a boy, Tyndale may have attended the grammar school at Wotton-under-Edge, the nearest large town. The school claims to be the eleventh oldest in England, and survives as Katharine Lady Berkeley’s School, though it moved from its old site in the town in the 1950s, and its buildings have been converted into apartments. The town’s motto is ‘Strong by Stream and Staple’, and its water-powered cloth mills flourished from the sixteenth century until they were put out of business in the nineteenth by the more efficient mills in the valleys around Stroud and by the giant works in Yorkshire. Its weekly cloth market flourished in Tyndale’s day, attracting many ‘tolseys’, or ‘foreigners’, from other parts, who paid a toll to attend it.
    Tyndale was an eager and talented child, and he was sent to Magdalen School in Oxford at the age of about twelve, in 1506. A turreted fragment of the school’s Grammar Hall still remains; besides this school-room, the original building had little more than the chambers of the master and the usher, and a kitchen. Shortly after, he entered Magdalen Hall – then adjacent to Magdalen College but later moved and established as Hertford College – where he began the seven-year course that led to a BA degree.
    Most undergraduates were from middling families – the great Thomas Wolsey was the son of an East Anglian butcher – and the nobility had yet to send their sons to Oxford in any numbers. The Tudor beau, with his florid languor, was still a generation distant. In Tyndale’s day, students were forbidden to keep sporting dogs, ferrets or hawks for hunting, though some went poaching in theroyal forests at Shotover and Woodstock; they were not allowed to gamble or to own dice or playing cards, or to carry arms unless travelling. Taverns and brothels were off limits. For legal amusement, students staged morality plays and pageants, and comedies by Plautus and Aristophanes, and sang and played the lyre and lute.

    Tyndale went to Oxford in 1506, when he was about twelve. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1512, and Master of Arts three years later. He scorned the academic sophistry of the day, but he improved himself ‘in knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts’. His study of rhetoric helped to lay the rhythm and cadence that underpinned his translating genius. A later spell at Cambridge probably cemented his radical