William Tyndale - Whitehall Gardens, London, UK
N 51° 30.304 W 000° 07.417
30U E 699616 N 5709915
This statue, of William Tyndale, is one of three statues given a place in Whitehall Gardens that are along the Victoria Embankment in Central London. Tyndale's statue is the southernmost of the three.
Waymark Code: WMEF4V
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 05/20/2012
Views: 5
The bronze statue, that is about 125%
life-size, shows Tyndale standing wearing robes and a soft cap. His right arm is
hanging straight down and his hand is resting on an open book that itself is
laying on a very early press. He is holding and unidentifiable object in his
left hand and his left arm is across his chest. The statue is sat atop a stone
plinth that has carved decoration. There is a bronze plaque on both the front an
rear sides of the plinth (see photos). The plaque at the front tells of Tyndale
and the one at the rear lists the contributors, who each contributed £100, for
the statue.
The Tyndale Society website (visit
link) tells us:
"London has hosts of statues which generally
become duller and more obscure to both the eye and the mind as the events and
figures they commemorate become increasingly distant; unless, that is, they have
the anarchic drama of Boadicea or the formal familiarity of Nelson's Column or
Eros. The rest are the retired po-faced worthies of the past suffering the
unwanted affection of pigeons.
Tyndale has a statue too. It might seem rather tucked-away in the Victoria
Embankment Gardens now, but in the 1880s the Embankment was a plush site
following Bazalgette's massive reclamation works along the Thames finished in
1870. The sculptor was Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm who was considered "virtually the
keystone of establishment sculpture during Victoria's reign."
This bronze statue was unveiled on May 7th 1884 in token of the 80th anniversary
of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and also being the 400th anniversary
of 1484, the date that the bronze plaque beneath claims for Tyndale's birth.
The statue is a fine one. Boehm's background in Vienna and the Continent brought
to his work rather more vivid articulation "than the standard broad anodyne
treatment that was the general rule in England, undercutting marble and
modelling deeper for bronze thus producing a more varied effect of light and
shadow..."' The stance is quite lively with some movement in Tyndale's frozen
gesture towards his books that manages to be dignified without being pompous.
There is a kind of how implied in the graceful turn and sweep of the body which
in no way compromises the vertical accent necessary to this kind of monument.
The portrait is not entirely fanciful; it is based on the painting at Hertford
College Oxford, but whereas that shows the writer interrupted from his work,
this is in academic garb and with his attributes of books and printing press. I
rather think that a seated, writing Tyndale might have made a good composition
but it wouldn't have complemented its standing companion pieces, Outram and
Bartle-Frere, in the garden layout. Certainly Boehm's most successful figure' is
a seated one, the wonderfully restless Carlyle on Chelsea Embankment.
Blackwood comments that Boehm has "augmented the beard and softened the line of
strain about the eyes"' that is apparent in the painting. Qualities of any face
are hard to read, much less with such a healthy heard, but Boehm's attempt to
convey Tyndale is very credible. He has maintained some of the evidence of the
ravages of heavy study together with a convincing strength and mildness. Others
might read it differently but I think they would agree that this lacks the
complacency of the faces of so many Victorian statues.
Even the printing press beside him is a careful portrait of a sixteenth century
one in the Antwerp Museum. Within the haphazard arrangement of leaning books, it
might suggest the sort of picturesque scenery that a gun carriage might lend to
a posing general, but Tyndale's right hand binds it all into the composition and
therefore into himself. You could easily imagine a child there or a beloved dog
in its place. Simultaneously his left hand catches up the folds of robe to stop
them brushing the delicately balanced book. Boehm's Tyndale with his books and
press is in the tradition of church iconography; that of showing a saint in his
or her full dress uniform, be it camels-hair apron or cope and mitre, with their
appropriate accessories of sword, spiked wheel, grid-iron, or else a weighty
tome, a hand-held cathedral or candle. Tyndale is shown in this tradition unlike
his neighbours, the politician or soldier. John Blackwood is right when he says
that the "statue is exceptionally skilful and impressive" but speaks little
"about the pioneering courage of William Tyndale"; however, if I'm right about
the tradition evoked, personified heroism and fortitude (adored by the
Victorians) is always silenced in the representation of saints who in
altarpieces "cast their crowns" at the feet of the Saviour. Tyndale like the
altar saints stands proudly by his books and press that were both his charge and
the death of him. Even his gesture to the open hook cannot be read as the
self-congratulation of a heroic thinker or writer but as a tender devotion to a
text one could die for.
This statue is a successful work of art and faithfully does honour to Tyndale. I
feel it ought to be better known and appreciated, especially as it also acts as
a memorial, with the implication of remembering both the man and his work as a
National treasure. This must have been the intention of The British and Foreign
Bible Society who have shared the same zeal and energy, and I hope that they
were pleased with it. I also hope that with a 200th anniversary approaching in
2004, they will find as good a way of celebrating. There is probably still some
mileage in memorials to Tyndale."
The Spartacus website (visit
link) gives a brief biography of Tyndale:
"William Tyndale was born in Slymbridge in
about 1496. After being educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, he became a chaplain.
While studying at Oxford he became very interested in the ideas of John Wycliffe
and the Lollards. Tyndale became convinced that the church had become corrupt
and selfish.
Like Wycliffe, Tyndale thought it was important that people had the opportunity
to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Tyndale wanted to translate the
Bible into English but at that time Henry VIII and the English church were very
much against the idea.
In 1524 Tyndale went to Hamburg where he met Martin Luther and the following
year moved to Cologne where he managed to arrange for his translation of the
Bible to be printed in English. He argued: "All the prophets wrote in the mother
tongue... Why then might they (the scriptures) not be written in the mother
tongue... They say, the scripture is so hard, that thou could never understand
it... They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue... they are false
liars." The translation owed much to the work of Desiderius Erasmus. During the
next few years 18,000 copies of this bible were printed and smuggled into
England.
In 1530 Henry VIII gave orders that all English Bibles were to be destroyed.
People caught distributing the Tyndale Bible in England were burnt at the stake.
This attempt to destroy Tyndale's Bible was very successful as only two copies
have survived.
In 1535 William Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips and arrested in Antwerp
and imprisoned in a castle near Brussels. He was found guilty of heresy and on
6th October, 1536, he was strangled and burnt at the stake.
Tyndale did not die in vain. Two years later Henry VIII gave permission for the
publication of the English Bible. However, people were not allowed to read it
aloud to another person; nor were people below the rank of gentleman allowed to
own a copy of the English Bible."