Why was William Tyndale executed but Miles Coverdale was not?
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Betty Knowlton is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
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12Please edit your question to include informations who these persons were, when they lived, in which country they were persecuted (or not).– ccprogCommented 2 days ago
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3Documenting preliminary research will improve both the probability of an answer and the quality of the answer(s)– MCW ♦Commented 2 days ago
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4Related question that might also answer this question: Why was William Tyndale burnt at the stake? - IMHO the accepted answer answers the first half of this question, and the second half of this question can be answered by the fact that Coverdale didn't do that (as @MCW mentioned).– T.E.D. ♦Commented 2 days ago
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3According to the Wikipedia article that you linked, Miles Coverdale was forced into exile three times, and was deprived of his office of Bishop. "Nothing happened" is something of an understatement.– Simon CraseCommented 2 days ago
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1 Answer
We've established in a previous question that one of the conditions that made the execution of Tynedale more feasible was his public arguments with King Henry VIII. From the accepted answer there:
King Henry himself is also a possibility. At first the King was a fan, after reading The Obedience of a Christian Man, which was pro-secular authority. However, Tyndale argued against Henry's divorce, which served to put him in the same political hitlist as Thomas More. There are accounts of the King sending agents to attempt to capture Tyndale, and appealing to the Emperor. So it certainly would be within character for it to have been a Crown agent organizing the job. At the absolute least, whoever did it knew they wouldn't get any pushback from the Crown over it. At most, its possible what actually got him killed was arguing against King Henry VIII.
Reading through Coverdale's bio, I'm seeing no hint of similar criticism of secular authority. In fact, he actually dedicated his first Bible translation to King Henry VIII.
Even so, I'm seeing that he was in fact in exile for his own safety at the same dangerous time Tynedale was. Tynedale was only captured via trickery: He was lured out of his safehouse by an Englishman with gambling addiction who had been bribed by the arresting authorities.
Of course Coverdale, unlike Tynedale, was not stuck hiding in a single safehouse, because the Holy Roman Empire was not after him. So why were they after Tynedale? Because King Henry called in a favor:
Henry asked Emperor Charles V to have the writer apprehended and returned to England under the terms of the Treaty of Cambrai;
So what got him on the wrong side of the King, bad enough for him to personally call in a favor with a fellow monarch? As today's Wikipedia put it:
In 1530, from exile, he wrote The Practice of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's desire to secure the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn, on the grounds that it was unscriptural and that it was a plot by Cardinal Wolsey to get Henry entangled in the papal courts of Pope Clement VII.
It looks like Charles was reluctant to take this step, which afforded Tynedale a chance to back down, but instead the man doubled down by releasing an attack on the legitimacy of the Papal State.
So the general answer here is that Tynedale actually put a lot of effort into ticking off multiple secular authorities, and let himself get tricked into leaving his safe space. Coverdale, for whatever reason, didn't feel like doing all that.
