Working from exile in the Low Countries, William Tyndale pressed forward with English translations of Scripture that English authorities considered dangerous heresy. His insistence that ordinary people should read the Bible in their own tongue, rather than through clerical intermediaries, put him on a collision course with both church and crown that would end in his execution in 1536.
Tyndale believed passionately that scripture belonged to plowboys as much as to bishops, and he possessed the linguistic genius to make that belief real: his English New Testament, first printed in 1526, gave the language phrases still spoken today, from "let there be light" to "the powers that be."
Henry VIII's government considered unauthorized vernacular Bibles a threat to religious and political order, and Tyndale's outspoken criticism of the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon made him doubly dangerous. He worked from safe houses in Antwerp, smuggling printed sheets back across the Channel inside bales of cloth and barrels of flour.
His translation work in this period fed directly into the later King James Bible, which retained an estimated eighty percent of Tyndale's wording. Betrayed by an acquaintance in 1535, he was strangled and burned at the stake near Brussels the following year, reportedly crying out, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Within three years, an officially sanctioned English Bible sat in every parish church.