Cuthbert Tunstall was a Yorkshireman, educated at Oxford, Cambridge, and Padua, and praised by Erasmus as among the first of Englishmen in Greek and Latin learning. A diplomat as much as a churchman, he became Bishop of London in 1522.

The next year a young scholar named William Tyndale came to London hoping that so learned a bishop would sponsor his translation of the New Testament. Tunstall received him coldly:

If you will look well about London, … you will not fail to meet with some suitable employment.¹ Cuthbert Tunstallto William Tyndale, 1523, as reported by Merle d’Aubigné

Tyndale left England and printed the New Testament abroad. When copies reached London in 1526, Tunstall forbade them in October, preached against them at Paul’s Cross, and had them burned. In 1529, at Antwerp, he arranged through the merchant Augustine Packington to buy up all the copies he could find. Tyndale saw the opportunity at once: “If he buys my books, it can only be to burn them,” he said, but the money would pay for a better edition, and the burning would show the world what the bishops thought of God’s Word.²

Tunstall was translated to Durham in 1530. Under Edward VI he was deprived and imprisoned; under Mary he was restored and sat in judgment on Protestants, though no one was burned in his own diocese. In 1559 he refused the oath of supremacy to Elizabeth, was deprived again, and died in custody at Lambeth on November 18, 1559.

Catholic Opponents