Tyndale was certainly regarded as a heretic, but that’s not what got him killed.
But as to your larger point: There certainly was not the modern conception of the agnostic state. But I was taking you to mean that the 16th century saw some great quantum leap of innovation, when the truth was that the separation of church and state actually backslid considerably from what had existed before. And it’s an important point to me, because the Catholic church gets saddled with all of the sins of the state, prior to the reformation: how often the Papal Inquisition is thought to be the doer of the foul deeds it was founded to oppose!
What had been lacking before the Reformation wasn’t so much a separation between Church and State, but an assumption that the Christianity meant Catholicism/Orthodoxy. If you were a non-Christian, the societies were typically fairly libertarian compared to 3 centuries later. But once you claimed to be a Christian, you fell under the authority of the Catholic church; heretics were seen as misleading people into damnation, tricking people who were trying to follow Christ into instead following evil. But even as such, ecclesiastical “crimes” were met with ecclesiastical “punishments” which often didn’t mean much unless you actually did believe in certain Christian doctrines: The Church condemned anyone who published or read Galileo’s writings. But what of it?
“Tyndale was certainly regarded as a heretic, but that’s not what got him killed.”
He was sentenced to death for heresy. There is a long discussion of the arguments about his beliefs here:
http://www.tyndale.org/reformj01/wilkinson.html