The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  The Bible, and increasingly the King James Version, had shown its power. It had been used with deadly effect. It was to go on to assume many shapes, one of which was to become the language of the politics and the lawmaking of the day. Though it was in all the churches, in another sense it had left the Church. It was no longer chained to the lectern, it was out in the streets. It was a torch.

  What has been quoted from the sermons and homilies is just a sliver of what was said and printed at the time. Not only were these messages hammered home in public oratory, they were alehouse talk, campfire talk, domestic conversation. Although the meat of it was scriptural, the disputatious and judgemental nature of it provided opportunities for wider and bolder discussion which succeeding generations were to build on. Those who learned to read through the Bible – about a million copies were sold in this period – would move on to other literature, wide reading, a shifted horizon of thought.

  But the Bible drove the debates and provided the words for thought and the telling images. ‘Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low’ – Isaiah. The idea of levelling and raising bit deeply into the arguments. Certain places carried great meaning: Babylon above all which evoked all wickedness and temptation. Egypt a close second, from whose bondage the Chosen had to make their escape. These two place names, like the notion of the levelling of mountains or the image of the wilderness, occur again and again in the literature of militant Presbyterianism. ‘We are all wilderness brats by nature,’ wrote John Collinges in 1646.

  And the wilderness was contrasted with the garden. ‘God Almighty first planted a garden,’ wrote Bacon. ‘It is the greatest refreshment of the spirits of man.’ And the notion of a garden recurs, fenced off from the wilderness, cultivated, protected by God, and on into reams of metaphor. ‘True religion and undefiled is to let everyone quietly have earth to manure, that they may live in freedom by their labours,’ wrote Gerrard Winstanley, one of the leading thinkers and activists, on what we might call ‘the left’. Winstanley, like others, also used the word ‘hedge’; in his case he saw hedges as enclosures, against the common good, oppressive to the peasantry, like the Norman yoke. And ‘yoke’ itself was sought out to be a key word.

  These words, like certain names – Moses, Cain, Abel, Abraham, Isaac – drove into the vocabulary of the faith debate and some remain there today. Most have seen their resonance abate in the UK through the secularising of our history, but elsewhere still they carry the meanings drawn from the Bible. America and Nigeria are prime examples. But they were branded into this nation’s discussion with itself which began in earnest in the seventeenth century.

  A version of the Bible that had only crept into the public light and stumbled its way to popularity and needed laws to help it gain acceptance, emerged out of the Civil Wars as the dictionary and encyclopaedia of a nation arguing with itself. Its words had aided and abetted massive slaughter. It had nurtured ideas of equality and justice for all. The fact that it was now widely accepted in English made it the nation’s book. It assumed a place as the mouth of England’s many tongues. It expressed its passion for coherence. It spoke of the country’s ancient and cruel divisions, its hopes for a better future, an earthly heaven.

  Those Civil Wars and that act of regicide astonished the world. A divinely appointed king had been executed and it had been done through law and the words of the Bible had not only condoned it but urged it on. There was no knowing what might happen next.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE NEW MAP

  Hell had been unleashed on the battlefield and in the pulpit. Carnage had been sanctified by the vengeful God who through Moses had urged on his first Chosen People, the Israelites, to murder all the women and children of the Midianites but to spare the virgins for the troops. Brother set against brother and father against son were not unfamiliar in the Old Testament. In that book of history, poetry, hope and death, life was harsh, God was cruel, punishment was crushing, mercy was rare; loving kindness was saved for and by the New Testament.

  Inside the constitutional tension which a king stretched to breaking point was an educated parliamentary class who claimed their rights from the early Middle Ages and, in trace memory and law, from pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon England. They could and would defend them. Inside an economic and cultured insurrection against the traditionally privileged by the aspiring gentry class, there had grown a religious whirlpool whose force had sucked everything into its violent spiral. For most of the seventeenth century, the temper of the times was deep-dyed in religion. It ate up everything it encountered. And the gravitational force of it was focused on the King James Bible.

  Intense, often frenzied, interpretations of its words and the actions of its varied cast of biblical characters real, legendary and mythical licensed new liberties and new excuses. Men called themselves ‘Saints’. Communism was advocated and practised, as was free love, the preaching by women and the virtue of nakedness. Innocents were murdered, property was razed, all institutions were interrogated.

  The Bible was the oracle; the Scriptures were the law. But whose? Who owned the Bible? The British Isles were racked with the effort of attempting to measure every seventeenth-century action against ancient and often corrupted texts written more than 2,000 years before their time. Texts which could be scoured for calming wisdom and moral truths but also texts crammed with extremes of behaviour became increasingly attractive the more bitter the battle became between the King and his enemies. The Bible lit the fire and roared on to feed the flames.

  It was a time when religion, through the Scriptures translated in the King James Version, drove kings to believe that ‘Kings are called Gods by God Himself because they sit upon God’s earthly throne.’ James I wrote that sentence. Charles I died for it. It was a time when some Puritans believed that the spirit that spoke within them made them Saints to be counted alongside the Apostles, predestined to rule on earth. It was a time when intellectual rigour went toe to toe with intellectual fanaticism and for many years moderation was the loser. And the soul was on the battlefield more vividly for some than the sword.

  After the execution of the King ended the Civil Wars save for a series of vengeful reprisals, the ascent of Oliver Cromwell replaced one make of tyrant with another. But the fight had gone out of the majority. The exiled son of the executed King, a man who claimed no Divine Right, a dandy, a compliant and bankrupt monarch seeking a safe berth, returned to England and landed at Dover. There he was given a copy of the King James Version, to which instantly he declared allegiance. In London, King Charles II was greeted by cheering multitudes. It appeared that the waters had closed over a riven nation.

  By 1660 you could say that the Bible had fought itself to a standstill. Inside that Civil War tangle of arguments and the agitated currents and cross-currents of motivation the plot lay in the Bible. But which version was it to be?

  The Geneva Bible was considered subversive by James I and by Charles I and his favoured ministers. Its lower cost and its radical notes made it popular, among the Presbyterians, the Parliamentary Party and the Parliamentary Army. In 1644, however, the Royalists managed to cut off the importation of Geneva Bibles and in that year the final edition of the Geneva Bible was published. It withered away.

  Archbishop Laud’s argument for this repressive action was that the continual mass buying of imported Geneva Bibles would kill the English printing industry. The crown’s lucrative stake in Robert Barker’s printing monopoly of the Bible was not mentioned. The Geneva Bible was to be banned and it was banned and the sales of the King James Version, already strong, grew rapidly and would soon monopolise the territory. It would go through several revisions but hold fast to the 1611 version until the misguided decision was taken to recast it in ‘modern’ English.

  Yet the Presbyterians and the Puritans, fed by the conviction that they were the Elect, the Chosen People, would not let go easily. Their Bible emanated from Geneva where Calvin, the source of their rule and di
scipline, had exercised his form of religious despotism. So versions of the King James Bible began to appear with the Geneva Bible’s radical notes. There were at least nine editions produced between 1642 and 1715, most smuggled in from the Netherlands as Tyndale’s New Testament had been many years earlier. But it had been convincingly superseded. Yet Geneva went down fighting.

  Archbishop Laud was executed in 1645 and the Puritans went into battle to dislodge the King James Version. As A. McGrath describes in In The Beginning, they persuaded the Parliamentary Grand Committee to set up a subcommittee. Their attack on the King James Version was cunningly aimed at the veracity of the translations. To secure their preferred version they knew that, even in the middle of a battle, they needed to present a scholarly case.

  But surprisingly their cause did not prosper. There was the difficulty, even the impossibility, in proving that the language and translation in the King James Bible was inferior. There was also the difficult fact that John Field, printer, was handed the monopoly on the King James Version in 1656 by the Presbyterian hero, Oliver Cromwell. Field was a ferocious monopolist. This move was to give the King James Version not only Cromwell’s authority but a licence which would be best fattened by the crushing of the opposition from Geneva.

  By the time Charles II came to the throne in 1660, the rule of the Saints and the Puritans in the Parliamentary cause was exhausted. The Established Church had found some teeth again. The Geneva Bible was effectively outlawed and with sad rapidity rendered ineffective. The Geneva Bible had had its moment and lost it. The Protestants in New England had thought that Cromwell and the Saints would see them marching hand in hand with Old England. That potentially epoch-changing alliance was thwarted for ever. The Atlantic was no longer a connection but a chasm.

  And the King James Bible had come through. It would move away from being primarily the source for arguments and pamphleteering to become the buttress of the constitution. It would be thoroughly revised and tenderly corrected up until 1769, when the Oxford Edition became the standard which we still use (or some do) today. This managed the masterful feat of keeping the greatness of the original sound and sense while clearing away extraneous clutter. Out of that Civil War and the rule of Cromwell, the King James Version emerged victorious and, astonishingly, unimpaired. It had achieved and would retain dominance in the English-speaking Protestant world for centuries.

  The spirit of enquiry was let loose by the Bible more than by any other book of the age. That spirit of enquiry would turn against the Bible itself. It was grounded in the new arguments which arose out of this civilisation-changing development. It was a new dawn in English-speaking life; this ability for Everyman openly to discuss what to them at that time were the most profound of all matters: the Holy Scriptures. They were at home and secure in their own language. Henry VIII was right to fear the consequences and so were Thomas More and Charles I and many a thousand bishops, aristocrats and autocrats. The walls were down, the Word was out, opinion and interpretation were not solely for priests; each person could now be a judge.

  What a difference it made to ‘ordinary’ people, to be able, as they did, to dispute with Oxford-educated priests and, it is reported, often better them! What an illumination it must have given to minds blanketed for centuries, deliberately excluded from the knowledge said to govern their lives and promise their eternal salvation, minds deliberately stunted! There was, we read, ‘a hunger’ for the English Bible, for the words of Christ and Moses, of Paul and David, of the Apostles and the prophets. God had come down to earth in English and they were now earthed in Him. It was the discovery of a new world.

  It was a treasure chest of sayings, of instances, of teachings. It could be closely read by scholars. It could be memorised and used in daily discourse. Above all, above anything, it could not only be argued about, this Book of Books, it could and did embolden argument against itself. The habit of argument was democratised with a speed and spontaneity which indicated how frustratingly imprisoned that capacity had been. The majority had been below the salt of debate for millennia. It was a luxury above and beyond them. It was a mystery they were not allowed to penetrate.

  They were literally screened off in the great cathedrals. They had to sit mute for hundreds of years and worship in the Latin they did not understand and believe and act on the diktat of interpreters, priests, bishops, whose agenda was based on the subservience of the congregation. Now they were free. Thanks to martyrs, courageous believers and brave scholars, their minds were liberated in an act even greater than the Pentecostal miracle when the Apostles were said to have been given the gift of many tongues. The English speakers were given the gift of this charismatic, self-contradictory, resonant, historical work. It was drenched in blood. It was enriched by a sacred constellation. The trickle they had only been allowed to sip from became the spring from which they could drink as long and as deeply as they wanted.

  There were many forces which began the long haul to democracy in the English-speaking world. But one, perhaps the vital one, was the gift which widespread Bible reading and individual interpretation gave to a literate group of the independent-minded. They knew that if they could challenge what was in the Bible, then they could challenge what was in the constitution. Therefore they could challenge the world they had inherited and make it the world they wanted.

  This new power, this build-up of the muscles and sinews of individual questioning, took time partly because they had scarcely been exercised before and certainly not on this scale. Before this tectonic shift, who was to dispute their place in society when God had ordained that place? Who dared speak out when the ruling monarch and aristocracies and the princes of churchly power and wealth were on constant guard to make sure that tongues were stopped? When things remaining as they were consolidated the rich and the powerful?

  But the greatest weapon of all had been the ability to preserve ignorance among the mass of people. Illiteracy was authority’s best ally. Again and again over the centuries which succeeded the publication of the King James Bible, those in authority would retreat only inch by inch and their argument would be that these uneducated, these peasantry and populace were obedient only as long as they did not know the secrets of the trade of rule. These people did not understand how the mighty forces of the state worked. They did not understand the arts of civilisation and their crude and vulgar intervention would surely wreck the destined and stable order of things.

  It was a recurring theme: keep out the majority by characterising them as ignorant and disruptive. Educate them and they would become dangerous. They were to be kept down and, whenever necessary, suppressed. Build an insurmountable wall and call it God’s ordering. Democracy eventually clawed its way up and over that high wall as a result of the determination of thousands of individual men and women, who in many instances drew inspiration from the New Testament.

  Thanks to the Bible in English, the people, after millennia of repression, could speak for themselves. They had lifted up their eyes. They had found help. And even those who were to abandon the Bible owe their liberation to a book commonly available, in alehouses, in taverns and in homes and in English.

  The political routing in Britain of the Presbyterians and other nonconformist groups like the Quakers, who had fought to the last to preserve New Model Army rule, was complete. As Dissenters they sought and found other ways to influence the realm with the most positive results. But within months of King Charles II’s coronation, all that bloody biblical warfare seemed to belong to a different world.

  By imploding, the Presbyterians judged themselves to have been cast into the wilderness by the Lord and punished for failing to create His Kingdom on earth. They condemned themselves to a pacific regrouping which might take many years. And by accepting the King so warmly, the people expressed above all relief that a familiar order had returned and the Presbyterians were both rejected and snubbed: and disenfranchised.

  But though it looked the same, the monarchy was not the same. In
the 1680s, James II would attempt to emulate the highhandedness of his father, Charles I. After a brief bloody skirmish he was shunted out of the country never to return. His daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William assumed the throne after a Bill of Rights in what became known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. This confirmed the strength of Parliament’s position in the constitution and was regarded as the model of the way in which a nation could bring about fundamental change without much bloodshed. The Bible had declared that the killing of a king could be acceptable: and a king had indeed been executed. His son was exiled. The message was clear. In that regard, the Bible’s work was done.

  Like a high flow of water which, baulked in one direction, will find another, the King James Version, though it was never to leave the battlefield, moved on. For example, ‘All serious English political theory dates from this period,’ writes Christopher Hill. ‘Hobbes and Harrington, Levellers, Milton and Winstanley . . . the concept of progressive revelation allowed the possibility of new insights, new interpretations.’

  It is remarkable how quickly a country which had fought to the death inspired by the Bible so abruptly and decisively switched its mood. Common sense emerged from the debris. In 1662, John Gardner, a bishop, said: ‘Nothing is by Scripture imposed upon us to be believed which is flatly contradictory to right reason and the suffrage of our senses.’ A dozen years earlier, if he had dared say that in public, he would have been imprisoned and probably hanged. Now he walked the streets freely to give his views. This liberty raced throughout the culture although censorship was not entirely lifted. Yet the Bible could be mocked by Thomas Hobbes and his ears would not be cropped, his life not threatened.