The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  The early democratic dialogue was fed by the pull between two ideologies. One was that of the Divine Right of Kings, vigorously claimed by James I and fatally held on to by his son Charles I. Opposed to that was the ideology of John Calvin and other nonconformists where anyone with the blessing of God and under proper authority can oppose tyranny and therefore any government perceived to be unjust can be brought down. The people could be God-supported in challenging an ungodly government and with God on their side and not on the side of the King or tyrant, where was the firm ground of government? It spread into calls for freedom of speech and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attempts to give a place in the political world to the common man (and much later woman) on a par with their equal place in the intersecting sphere of religion. For religion in those centuries was the language and the arena of politics.

  The strongest flavour of the roots of the democratic flowering comes from a debate in a church, St Mary the Virgin, in Putney, now a rich suburb of London. In 1647 it was a country village just two or three miles up the Thames from Parliament. What were known as the Putney Debates began on 28 October 1647 and lasted until the 11 November.

  They were initiated by the Puritans’ New Model Army in its cavalry regiments. It was here that the fervent Puritans were at their most radical and determined. They demanded ‘one man, one vote’; that Authority be invested in the House of Commons and not with the King. Certain rights they called ‘native’ and these were to be inalienable: freedom of conscience and equality before the law. Thomas Rainsborough spoke for all of them, ‘for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he . . . and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.’ The Bible in English had given these men equality before God; now they wanted equality before government. The democratic game was afoot.

  The Chairman of these Debates was Oliver Cromwell, who would not at that stage agree that the King should be removed. His son-in-law, Henry Ireton, spoke for Cromwell and others on his side and argued that only landholders should have the vote. He said ‘no man hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of this kingdom . . . that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.’

  In 1647 Cromwell and Ireton’s view prevailed.

  But the fuse had been lit and that simple phrase ‘the poorest hee . . . hath a life to live as the greatest hee’ became the spark that was to light the fire which eventually razed centuries of tyranny, monarchy, feudalism and oligarchy. From now on the search and the fight for a new space for democracy was on. And behind it was the authority and confidence given by having the Bible in their native tongue.

  In America, the first colonists held their first assembly also in a church. As time went on, the colonists claimed more and more religious freedom. The church assembly was the model which guided them towards greater political freedom. Nowadays, in a secular society, it seems easy to diminish the part played by religion in the reorientation of the modern world. But in the journey towards a full democracy there can be little doubt that the experience of a religion which grew out of the wide reading of the King James Version was the defining condition, the initiative for most people and certainly for most activists.

  Having discussed and even disputed the Sacred Scriptures, the state held no ideological fears for these activists. In the Declaration of Independence, 1776, seen to mark the formal arrival of democracy in America, the words ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’ took the roots back to God and the Bible of the founding Puritans.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, the French essayist, Alexis de Tocqueville, was to write: ‘the Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this connection does not spring from that barren traditional faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.’

  It had been a determined journey to arrive at the condition described by de Tocqueville. Noah Webster, whose Bible-based educational books had such a widespread influence, wrote that ‘our citizens should early understand that a genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament, and the Christian religion.’ That early understanding was clear to the first colonists. Their numbers swelled greatly, with the Great Awakening, which has already been referred to.

  In the middle of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards was dismissed from his church in Northampton, Massachusetts, for ending his grandfather’s policy of open (i.e. general) communion. Edwards instead favoured and emphasised personal (individual) communion, personal salvation, an individual and not a community decision. Furthermore, individuals could choose between different Churches. The idea of the individual as the hub of society was beginning to replace the still prevailing notion of the Church as the community. Once the individual was given authority, herding and mass control were not so easy to take for granted and the voice of a single person had to be heard.

  Edwards was a key player in the Great Awakening of the mideighteenth century. Its transforming effect on the religious lives of the hundreds of thousands who came to hear the charismatic preachers was a prologue to its eventual effect on their sense of themselves in the politics of the day. Though the message of the Great Awakening was biblical, it was also egalitarian and emphasised that the grace of God could fall on anyone who sought salvation. Salvation became independence, and independence sought the entitlement to a vote. Now you had a place on earth equal to the place provided by the grace of God in heaven.

  Edwards clarified and changed the emphasis of the Christian message. He moved it back to the ways of the original Apostles as many progressives failed to do. It was its own version of the Renaissance, the rediscovery of the past in order to energise and re-order the present. As has been mentioned, Edwards was foreshadowed by the Wesley brothers and by George Whitefield, who were also key influences in the devolution of the Church.

  Now it took only the conversion of the ‘heart’ to take the soul into the Kingdom of Heaven. This reinforced almightily the shift to the individual being the determinant of his or her own fate. It reached to the poor and marginalised as never before. Following the literate preachers, hitherto the theological masters of the universe, there grew the army of the poor and the marginalised who now had a status. Democracy was creeping in, a part of salvation.

  Thomas Paine was an Englishman, a radical, a democrat but not a Christian. Yet, in the crucial year 1776 he published, in America, a pamphlet, Common Sense, which quoted extensively from the Bible. For example, he writes:Near three thousand years passed away from the Mosaic account of the creation, till the Jews, under a national delusion, requested a king. Till then their form of government (except in extraordinary circumstances when the Almighty interposed) was a kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes . . . and when a man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the person of kings, he need not wonder that the Almighty, ever jealous of his honour, should disapprove of a form of government which so impiously invaded the prerogative of heaven.

  In the Bible the non-religious Tom Paine found a template for revolution. He picked out the positive points of the embryonic nation of America like an archer arrowing into the dead centre circle again and again. If the Jews were under a ‘delusion’, then the Americans were not alone; indeed they had venerable forebears and examples to follow. The Bible fed his hunger for democracy.

  The Almighty was given due omnipotence. Christians were secure with that. The phrase ‘a kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes’ was a canny perception of the state of a country with its eyes beginning to open to the possibility of a republic. This was in step with its ‘judges
’ and its nonconformist assemblies run by ‘elders’. ‘Idolatrous’ was good, the king to be associated with the graven image, would bring onside those who believed ‘thou shalt not worship any graven image.’

  The phrase about the Almighty ‘ever jealous of his honour’ spoke both to an often expressed characteristic of the Old Testament Jehovah, god of vengeance and to the ideal of ‘honour’ which took the curse off any possible offence.

  Paine’s adoption of passages in the King James Version as a means of communication was successful beyond any expectation: 150,000 pamphlets sold within a few weeks, and Common Sense was exported to London and Paris where it caused an equal sensation and set Paine on the road to be the world revolutionary-threat-in-chief.

  Abraham Lincoln though possibly a Christian was never a Church member. But he, too, like Paine, used the language and drew on its reserve of history, suffering, struggle and its triumphs. Perhaps he was essentially closer to it than Tom Paine, as when, in his Second Inaugural Address in the middle of the carnage of the Civil War, he refers to both sides in that war as appealing to the same Bible and praying to the same God. He might have added that they were instructed by an almost wholly identical cohort of nonconformist divines. And he appealed to prayer, a central Christian instrument. ‘Finally do we hope – fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war might pass away.’ That their President was praying alongside them would have mattered greatly to the many Christians embroiled in that conflict. Lincoln’s speech was approved in Europe as well as in America. The theologian Philip Schaff wrote at the time: ‘I do not believe that any royal, princely or republican state dreamt of recent times can be compared to this inaugural address for genuine Christian wisdom and gentleness.’

  George Washington took up the song. ‘Of all dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports . . . ’tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government’ (my italics).

  In Britain the road to democracy was not marked out by quite such vivid and enthusiastic figures. But movements for social reform were far more often than not lit into life by those whose theory came out of the New Testament. Political developments – notably the trades unions and the birth and growth of the Labour Party – owed more to Methodism than to Marxism.

  And underneath it all were the two pillars of wisdom: the first was the Reformation which demanded freedom of thought on what were then the most pressing and awesome issues of the day – the teachings of the Bible. The second was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, which happened in many countries but in Britain resulted in a book which became the university for those who were barred from them, the education for those who had hitherto been denied it, and the national book giving access for all to the high table of debates on life and death and eternity. The King James Bible is a book which has informed and enriched two English-speaking empires over 400 years and carried many of its messages around the globe. It set off consequences no one could have imagined in 1611, nor, in many cases, would they have approved. It has been well used and abused. It has been a transforming force, often making our world a better place.

  In its beginnings was the call to faith. In those beginnings were other hidden calls to people who would listen to them. Its impact has been immeasurable and it is not over yet.

  AFTERWORD

  I encountered the King James Bible in 1945 when I was six. My uncles had hauled me into the choir of St Mary’s, the Anglican church in the north Cumbrian town of Wigton. A town at that time of twelve churches. Wigton’s population was about 5,000.

  In the service of the Nine Lessons and Carols, the tradition is that the youngest choirboy reads the first lesson. It was a tough call. The words I had to read, from Genesis, were incomprehensible: ‘and the serpent beguiled her and she did eat.’ The church was packed, floor and gallery, candlelit, parents and relatives somewhere in that mass of congregation, all of whom wore their best, their ‘Sunday’ clothes. I remember as I tried to peer over the eagle-masted lectern that it was so very strange: this voice was not mine, out there was something both me and not me. But it got done. ‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ and the page was turned for the next reader.

  My mother, a Wigton girl, was christened and confirmed in that church. She was married there and at some time soon will join my father who is buried there.

  The church was a strong strand in my childhood. Choir meant regular attendance and the choir practice, church services, Sunday school, the church youth club (the Anglican Young People’s Association), debates, outings, games and dances in the Parish Rooms. The Bible came into the school in morning assemblies, prayers, hymns and lessons called Religious Instruction. I was caught up in it, doused in it, bound in it, and then, in the heady liberation of adolescence, unbound. But there has continued to be a residue, stronger than a ‘trace memory’, but much less, as I said in the book, than the total Christian demand on a believer.

  This book grew out of that early experience. The language of the King James Version flowed into me, its stories and characters fed the imagination and its various promises and threats provided both meat for argument and grist for guilt.

  St Mary’s is a handsome Georgian church on the site of a huddled medieval church pulled down without any recorded regret. There are several fine stained-glass windows but on the north side there were three large empty windows which, a few years ago, I decided to fill with stained glass as a tribute to my parents and family and as a thanksgiving to the church for what I had got out of it.

  This was an unconscious education. The stories and words of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the Psalms and hymns, were sung and listened to for many years. They are still lodged in my mind. They were a gift. The music, too, the anthems we sang, the organ voluntaries we heard and the quiet ceremonies of a then benign, easy, undemanding church built up a hidden store of knowledge and sensations, church bells and candles, bowing to the altar, versicles and responses.

  I wanted the three new windows to bring the town into the church. Other windows told stories from the Bible. I wanted stories of Wigton, representing the congregations which had been the Church in that town for more than 800 years. To illustrate this I chose not only the school and the church itself, but the factory, the cattle auction, the rivers, the once prosperous now obsolete mills, the streets, terraced houses, the special features of the place and the people. The King James Bible brought them into the church with eyes and ears at last fully opened to the Faith they practised. Over the centuries many had lived and died for it.

  Brian Campbell, an artist and long-time friend, made the designs. Alex Haynes, crafted the stained-glass final version.

  Occasionally I go to the church when I am in the area. Its numbers have fallen as they have all over the country. I think there’s a gallantry about those who still assemble there. You see this most clearly when you go into one of our magnificent cathedrals in the late afternoon to listen to the incomparable music of the Choral Evensong. The choir can outnumber the congregation.

  They are few. But they have been few before and they hang on. Perhaps out of habit or nostalgia or perhaps because of an apprehension or hope for some intimation of the mystery of things – things that the recent President of the Royal Society said we shall never know about but sometimes think or feel that we sense.

  The whole idea – God, Genesis, Christ, Resurrection – is now to me a moving metaphor, a poetic way of attempting to understand what may be for ever incomprehensible. When I was six it was the truth about all of life.

  But in what those remembered words in the Bible hold, there is still for me a sonic echo of something Isaac Newton – a mathematician, and a Christian – said at the end of his life. He described his work as having been like that of a boy merely collecting pebbles on the shore ‘whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

&nbs
p; Hannah Whittingham has been invaluable in helping with the research for this book. She is widely gifted and I have been lucky that she found the time to work so energetically on this project.

  I am once again in debt to my friends Vivien Green and Julia Matheson whose counsel and practical help have been unstinting. I have been very fortunate to know and work with them over so many years. My wife, Cate Haste, has been unfaltering in her support.

  To the authors listed in the bibliography I owe a lot. This Book of Books has been built on books. Books are written to be read and studied: and to be used by later writers of other books. None more than the King James Bible.

  I am grateful to my publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, especially its exemplary non-fiction editor Rupert Lancaster and to Sam Richardson who was in at the beginning.

  Finally my warmest thanks to my friend Richard Simon, of whose generous reading and knowledge I was a beneficiary here, as I have been for many years.

  PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  © Alamy/Pictorial Press: 2 below. © The British Library: vi (C.35.I.11), 1 (C.188.a. 17, CXIV), 6 above right (G.11631), and below (C.70.aa.3). © Corbis Images: 5 below, 8 below, 10 below, 12 below, 14 above left/ attributed to Giotto, 14 centre right/painting by Cristofano Allori, 14 below/painting by Guercino, 16 above/photo Jim Bourg, 16 below/ photo Goran Tomasevic. © Mary Evans Picture Library: 4 centre right, 10 centre right, 13 above, 15 centre left, 15 below right/Marx Memorial Library. © Getty Images: 2 above/Time & Life Pictures, 3 above/ portrait by Nathaniel Hone, 3 below/painting by John Collet, 4 above and below, 5 above left and centre right, 6 above left, 7 above left, 7 below left/photo Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures, 12 above. © The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California: 9 above/portrait by Bass Otis/photo Bridgeman Art Library. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC: 7 above right/engraving by Samuel Hollyer, 8 above/photo Arthur Rothstein, 10 above/photo Timothy H. O’Sullivan, 11, 13 below. © National Portrait Gallery, London: 15 above right/portrait by John Singer Sargent/NPG 1746. Private Collection/photo Bridgeman Art Library: 9 below right/portrait by John Keenan. © Rex Features: 7 below right. © Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries: 9 below left/portrait by John Rising/photo Bridgeman Art Library.