God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  All that I mean in usinge thys boldnes, of puttinge myselfe into your Lordship’s presence by thys ragge of paper, ys to tell your Lordship that I ly in a corner, as a clodd of clay, attendinge what kinde of vessell yt shall please you to make of Your Lordship’s humblest and thankfullest and devotedst servant.

  The ‘poore worme’ who wrote this letter was no pitiable youth; Donne was almost fifty and probably accompanied the letter with a bribe.

  There was biblical sanction for all of this. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, a favourite text for Jacobean England, says quite straightforwardly: ‘Let euery soule bee subject vnto the higher powers: For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordeined of God. Whosoeuer therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist, shall receiue to themselues damnation.’

  The condition in Eden had been one of obedience; a steeply raked social structure was ordained by God; and so crawling to the great could be holy in England too.

  The climax of James’s journey into his new kingdom came on 3 May when he arrived at the enormous, multi-winged, many-towered palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire. This was no royal residence, although Elizabeth had often treated the house as if she owned it. Theobalds in fact belonged to Robert Cecil. James, who had scarcely before been outside Scotland, was overwhelmed by the riches of England and the welcome of its people. Cushioned by the grande luxe of Theobalds—the nearest comparison is a great nineteenth-century hotel, or a liner: the Titanic had several public rooms decorated in a wildly overblown Jacobean style—all the gratitude he had felt to Cecil during their secret correspondence, he now poured out to the nation as a whole: ‘a people so loving, so dutifull, and so deere unto us, may know and feele that we are as desirous to make them happy by our Justice and grace towards them in all reasonable things, as they have been redy to increase our comfort and contentment in yeelding their loyalty and obedience’. Monopolists were to be obliged to give up their monopolies, creditors to pay their debts, lawyers to reduce their fees. Heaven was about to descend on England.

  This proclamation was made from Theobalds, where Cecil had not stinted. The building, which was confiscated by parliament after the Civil War, sold off for its raw materials and demolished in about 1650, was everything the king could have dreamed of. It was enormous, an English Chambord, with five courtyards, three storeys high, stretched along a front a quarter of a mile long. The walls seemed to consist almost entirely of vast glazed surfaces. Golden lions holding golden vanes stood on the peak of one tower after another. James had been exposed to modern architecture—the palace at Falkland was a Renaissance building—but he would never have seen richness on such a scale.

  Little, crumpled Robert Cecil, ‘my elf, my beagle, my pygmy’, as James would part affectionately, part humiliatingly call him (Elizabeth had used the same tease-taunts), with his pale, almond-shaped face, his stooped figure, his evaluating eyes, guided the king around the stupendous palace: the hall decorated with the signs of the Zodiac, where the stars shone at night and which a mechanical sun traversed by day; another hall containing a painted map of England showing all the cities, towns and villages, as well as ‘the armorial bearings and domains of every esquire, lord, knight and noble who possess lands and retainers to whatever extent’. There was an open loggia in which the whole history of England was painted on the walls. In the Long Gallery were portraits of all the great men there had ever been. There were pleasure gardens. There were pictures of all the cities of Christendom. Life can never have seemed so rich. Cecil loved toys and rarities of all kinds, from tortoise-shaped clocks to the ‘nests of little boxes of China’ and the ‘cabinet of china gilt all over’ which were among his possessions at his death. He paid for lion cubs to be trained up in the Tower of London as pets for the king. He had a tame parrot which drank red wine from Bordeaux and walked up and down his dinner table making ‘his choice of meat’. After taking its fill, the bird used to sit ‘in a gentlewoman’s ruff all day’.

  The troubled and difficult soul of James Stuart, for so long exposed to parsimony, betrayal and violence in his native Scotland, had arrived in a world of marvels, as if England was a cabinet of rarities to which he had at last been given the key. He immediately elevated Robert Cecil to the peerage (and the following year made him Earl of Salisbury) the first of the fifty-six baronies, nineteen viscountcies, thirty-two earldoms, one marquisate and three dukedoms which James scattered like sequins across the country. The bridegroom was in the full and expansive flush of his honeymoon (James’s own comparison) and England, the heiress he had married, was happy for the moment to walk alongside him, glowing with the riches she had brought him.

  Two

  The Multitudes of People Covered the

  Beautie of the Fields

  And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept againe, and said, Who shall giue vs flesh to eate?

  We remember the fish, which wee did eate in Egypt freely: the cucumbers and the melons, and the leekes, and the onions, and the garlicke. […]

  And while the flesh was yet betweene their teeth, yer [ere] it was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague.

  And he called the name of that place Kibroth-hattaavah*: because there they buried the people that lusted.

  *That is, The graues of lust

  Numbers 11:4–5, 33–34

  Iames finally moved on from the enveloping luxuries of Theobalds and arrived at London on 7 May. He found a city full of flowers. James Nasmyth, who was to become chief surgeon to the king, had at last persuaded one of his Persian black fritillaries to bloom. He had seen a printed illustration, he had the bulbs from what he considered a good source, and now at last its dark plum-coloured pagoda of hanging heads was up and mysteriously beautiful in his Long Acre garden. Robert Cecil himself had a garden he treasured next to his house on the Strand, shaded with lime trees and where tulips from Crete and Turkey, globe flowers from the Peloponnese and American yuccas all grew. In the greenhouses, the artichokes, melons and cucumbers were coming on. The lamb’s lettuce, endives, rocket, marigolds, orache, spinach, chervil and rampion were all out, planted in the beds. Some of the more advanced gardeners were experimenting with the bitter leaves of chicory, known then as lattuca romana. Horse radish was grown as an ingredient for fish sauce along with both Spanish and sweet Virginian potatoes. Cauliflower was a rarity; it was difficult to get seed that would germinate.

  Even London, by far the biggest city in England, and on its way to becoming the biggest in Europe, over which on bad days a smog of coal smoke already hung, was still rural in its corners. The swallows were returning from the winter they had spent, as everyone knew, deep in the Cornish tin mines. Barnacle geese were breeding ‘underwater on such ships sides as have beene verie long at sea’. And with the coming of the spring the botanists examined the London plants. Timothy, the lovely early fox-tailed grass, was found ‘on the upland meadows between Islington and Highgate’. Royal ferns were growing in a bog on Hampstead Heath. There was meadow saxifrage in Gray’s Inn Lane, and the strange, weedy prickly lettuce on a high bank by the footpath next to it. The dark leaves and pink flowers of marsh woundwort, which helped to heal cuts and grazes, was growing next to the paths that led out to the villages of Kensington and Chelsea and in a small patch in Westminster near the Thames. On the abbey itself, the little yellow-spired herb called pennywort, a native of rocks and cliffs, now found only in Cornwall and the far west, grew over the door next to Chaucer’s tomb, which led out on the path to the old palace.

  Around these delicacies—and you could still get a cup of milk and a pot of clotted cream from the dairy farm just north of the city walls—London swelled and bubbled. The holiday atmosphere lasted for a while after James had reached the city. As he made his way through the suburbs, where the houses and tenements had crept out in a wide rash beyond the medieval walls, the cro
wds had been enormous, and as one observer who went out to see the king described it, ‘the multitudes of people in highwayes, fieldes, meadowes, and on trees, were such that they covered the beautie of the fieldes’. Hats were thrown in the air. People were killed in the crush. It was said by the Venetian Ambassador, perhaps believably, that 40,000 strangers and visitors had surged into London around the new court; its normal population was about 140,000. By the time James and his queen were crowned in July, the number of visitors had ballooned to an extraordinary 100,000. A new king, a time of flux, was an opportunity not to be passed up. Letters arrived from the kings and princes of Christendom. The spreading beneficence continued. Ancient Catholic priests and one or two enemies of the Elizabethan establishment were all released from the Tower. The sun was shining.

  Along with the crush of new suitors at the court came another, less welcome visitor. In its shadow the King James Bible came into being. By the end of May, the Council, in the king’s name, had already issued a royal proclamation that ‘Gentlemen were to depart the Court’, for ‘we find the sicknesse already somewhat forward within our City of London, which by concourse of people abiding there is very like to be increased’.

  There had been 112 deaths in London that week, thirty of them from the plague. This outbreak had slid in from the East, making its way across Europe from the steppes of Eurasia, first touching England in the east coast ports in 1602. With the gathering of people at the accession of a new king (it would happen again at the accession of Charles I in 1625, an ominous start to a pair of Stuart reigns), plague would almost inevitably strike the capital. London, or at least the poor and dirty parts of it, were a perfect breeding ground. By 23 June, in that week alone, London plague deaths were up to 158. By the end of the year the total would have reached 30,000.

  Disease exposes the assumptions of a society, and this ferocious outbreak of the plague throws the nature of Jacobean England into sudden highlight. People felt they understood the plague. It was a moral affliction which attacked cities because cities were wicked and disgusting. London was a sucking sink of iniquity, with something murderous and dissolving at its core. Disintegrating medieval palaces and abandoned monastic houses lay about the city like scavenged animals. Next to these half-rotting corpses, there was a strange and disturbing intensity, the product of a new and bewildering urge to cluster at the commercial centre of England. London was stretching, groaning, falling apart with its own growth. The open spaces which had brought air into the medieval city were filled with new buildings. All its sustenance was dragged in from the surrounding countryside, which for miles around had become one vast market garden. Fewer than half the houses in London had their own kitchen and almost none their own oven. It was a fast-food city, mutton pasties and fruit pies available at street stands; early asparagus would be there in season, swathed in butter. Tavern-keepers provided free ‘thincut slices of roast-beef on the bar’, heavily dosed with salt to increase customers’ thirst. Everything was for sale: the title of Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which was first performed in 1613, was a joke. There was no such thing.

  The city seemed to be rising and falling at the same time. Ministers were climbing into trees and preaching seditious novelties to the chance crowds in the graveyards below them. Crowds cluttered the narrow medieval thoroughfares. Outside the theatres, as the city corporation complained, ‘there is such a resort of people and such multitudes of coaches…that sometimes all our streets cannot contain them’.

  At the urging of radical Puritan ministers, maypoles, stored from one Maytime to the next under the eaves of city houses, were being cut up and used as firewood, each house allotted its length for an evening’s blaze. There were plans to pave the Strand but for now every winter it was ooze.

  London was more of an agglutination than any kind of classical construction, buildings stuck together and clotted as a mass of swallows’ or bats’ nests. The many official attempts in the first decade of the century to clarify and cleanse the city, to impose order and uniformity on its bubbling and anomalous being, repeatedly failed. This animal aspect of London was always too powerful. When William Harvey, the physician, anatomist of the human heart and friend of several of the Bible Translators, wanted to describe the different parts of the gut, the comparison that naturally came to mind was the streets of his own city: the alimentary canal, he wrote in 1613, was like the long wandering thoroughfare that ran ‘from Powles to Ledenhale, one way but many names, as Cheape, Powtry, &c.’.

  If the city was a body, in the summer of 1603 that body was diseased, or at least parts of it were, particularly those occupied by the poor. They suffered from plague more than the rich because they were wicked. The London parishes in which they lived were the disgusting ones, filled with reprobates: near the docks, in the suburbs outside the old walls where building had been haphazard and unregulated, at Houndsditch where dead dogs were indeed thrown into the rubbish-filled ditch. The word ‘suburb’ still carried some of its Latin effect. If urbs was the city itself, sub-urbs were the under-city, the lower part. Should any of the poor wander into the richer parishes, particularly if they were visibly sick or weak, the churchwardens would have them taken back to the slums with which London was ringed. Those who were dying in the back alleys of St Bartholomew Exchange or St Saviour’s Southwark were to be kept there. Eight hundred plague deaths occurred in a single building in 1603, an enormous, abandoned town palace, so subdivided that it could house 8,000 people. In the suburbs outside Cripplegate and Bishopsgate, growth had been so rapid that the parish officials trying to trace the boundaries on the annual beating of the bounds had to break their way through people’s gardens and backyards. Markets at Queenhithe, Billingsgate, Bridewell and Smithfield—as well as the city’s main granary across the river in Southwark—were the breeding grounds of rats, but also magnets for human vagrants, the corrupt and ragged fringes of unintegrated society. These were the places where the poor lived and where child mortality in an ordinary year ran higher than anywhere else in England. Approaching a quarter of all children born in England would die before they were ten (a rate higher than in any country in the modern world); in these slums, the proportion of child deaths could triple. Plague simply exaggerated the savage social distinctions of everyday life.

  But there was something strange about the plague: it seemed to pick and choose among its victims. Why? Nicholas Bound, a Puritan Sabbatarian, had the answer. His pamphlet, Medicines for the Plague, published in 1604, is alive with both the appalled anxiety of the time and a terrifying certainty over God’s role:

  For what is the cause that this pestilence is so greatly in one part of the land, and not another? and in the same citie and towne why is it in one part, or in one house, and not in another? and in the same house, why is it vpon one, and not vpon all the rest, when they all liue together, and draw in the same breath, and eate and drinke together, and lodge in the same chamber, yea sometimes in the same bed? what is the cause of this, but that it pleaseth the Lord in wisdom, for some cause to defend some for a time, and not the rest? Therefore let vs beleeue, that in these dangerous times God must bee our onely defence.

  As another preacher, Thomas Pullein, said in Ieremiah’s Teares, published in 1608, the plague is nothing but ‘the will of God rightfullie punishing wicked men’.

  Henoch Clapham, a wild and cantankerous Puritan controversialist, claimed in one 1603 pamphlet that people who saw anything in the plague but a working of the divine will were ‘atheistes, mere naturians and other ignorant persones’. Clapham had seen men and women, walking the streets, suddenly stumble and collapse, clearly knocked down by one of God’s avenging angels. One only had to inspect them afterwards to see ‘the plaine print of a blue hand left behind vpon the flesshe’. And what had medicine got to do with that? (The modern use of the word ‘stroke’ to mean an apoplectic seizure is a faint memory of that angelic blow.)

  By midsummer, London under plague now looked, sounded and smelled like
a city at war. It was by far the worst outbreak England had known. Here now, grippingly, and shockingly, the first and greatest of the Bible Translators appears on the scene. It is not a dignified sight. Lancelot Andrewes was a man deeply embedded in the Jacobean establishment. He was forty-nine or fifty, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was also Dean of Westminster Abbey, a prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral, drawing the income from one of the cathedral’s manors, and of Southwell Minster, one of the chaplains at the Chapel Royal in Whitehall, who under Elizabeth had twice turned down a bishopric not because he felt unworthy of the honour but because he did not consider the income of the sees he was offered satisfactory. Elizabeth had done much to diminish the standing of bishops; she had banished them from court and had effectively suspended Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose severe and Calvinist views were not to her liking. Andrewes, one of the most astute and brilliant men of his age, an ecclesiastical politician who in the Roman Church would have become a cardinal, perhaps even pope, was not going to diminish his prospects simply to carry an elevated title.

  Andrewes plays a central role in the story of the King James Bible, and the complexities of his character will emerge as it unfolds—he is in many ways its hero; as broad as the great Bible itself, scholarly, political, passionate, agonised, in love with the English language, endlessly investigating its possibilities, worldly, saintly, serene, sensuous, courageous, craven, if not corrupt then at least compromised, deeply engaged in pastoral care, generous, loving, in public bewitched by ceremony, in private troubled by persistent guilt and self-abasement—but in the grim realities of plague-stricken London in the summer of 1603, he appears in the worst possible light. Among his many positions in the church, he was the vicar of St Giles Cripplegate, just outside the old walls to the north of the city.