The king seals his first point: the new Bible is to look and feel as much as possible like the old.
Having established the grounds of continuity, the Rules then move on to deal with the question of commentary and explanation. The sixth instruction, repeating James’s outburst at Hampton Court, was in many ways the richest:
6. Noe marginal notes att all to be affixed, but only for ye explanation of ye Hebrew or Greeke Words, which cannot without some circumlocution soe breifly and fitly be expressed in ye Text.
A full exploration of this fascinating rule must wait until later—so much flows from it—but its bones are clear. The kind of notes with which the Geneva Bible was littered, so violently disliked by James, were not to be admitted. But the crucial point is this: there were to be no marginal notes ‘att all’, not even those which might conform to the ideology of the established Jacobean church. The text, as all good Protestants might require, was to be presented clean and sufficient of itself, except where the actual words of the original were so opaque that a ‘circumlocution’ might not explain them within the text. ‘Circumlocution’ did not mean then quite what it means now. Thomas Wilson in The arte of rhetorique, published in 1553 and in use throughout the sixteenth century, had described circumlocution as ‘a large description either to sett forth a thyng more gorgeous-lie, or else to hyde it’. The words of this translation, then, could embrace both gorgeousness and ambiguity, did not have to settle into a single doctrinal mode but could embrace different meanings, either within the text itself or in the margins. This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon, an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the translation, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text. This single rule lies behind the feeling which the King James Bible has always given its readers that the words are somehow extraordinarily freighted, with a richness which few other texts have ever equalled. Again and again, the Jacobean Translators chose a word not for its clarified straightforwardness (which had been Tyndale’s focus in the 1520s and ’30s, and the Geneva Calvinists’ in the 1550s) but for its richness, its suggestiveness, its harmonic resonances. That is the heart of the irenicon: divergence held within a singularity, James’s Arcadian vision made word.
7. Such quotations of places to be marginally sett downe, as shall serve for fitt reference of one Scripture to an other.
The Bible was to be seen, importantly, as one text. The Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament were a foretelling and a foreshadowing of the New. Each had their part, as James told his son Prince Henry:
The whole Scripture is dyted [dictated] by Gods Spirit…to instruct and rule the whole Church militant to the end of the world: It is composed of two parts, the Olde and New Testament: The ground of the former is the Lawe, which sheweth our sinne, and containeth iustice: the ground of the other is Christ, who pardoning sinne containeth grace.
Any edition of the Bible, relying on the voluminous commentaries of the early Christian Fathers, needed to sew these parts together. Grace was to be seen in the light of justice, and vice versa.
Having established the role of continuity, and an atmosphere of non-contentiousness, the Rules then move on to the mechanics at the heart of the translation, the precise workings of the joint enterprise. Rules 8, 9 and 10 lay out the geography of co-operation, the precise system by which individual understanding and scholarship was to be integrated into a single scriptural whole. Can James’s habit of thought be seen here? Perhaps. His years in Scotland had been devoted to reconciling warring interests, to getting factious parties to work together, and the reporting structures which the Rules establish are evidence of an almost obsessive need for agreement and unity. All the frustrations James was experiencing with a recalcitrant, unco-operative, fissive, argumentative and Anglocentric parliament could find their outlet here. The body of Translators was to be an academy of order, coherence and mutual respect.
The level of integration rises progressively through each of these three rules. The first, Rule 8, is about the workings within each of the six companies:
8. Every particuler man of each company to take ye same chapter or chapters, and having translated or amended them severally by himselfe where he thinks good, all to meete together, confer what they have done, and agree for their Parts what shall stand.
This was where the bulk of the work was to be done. Each member of each company, alone – ‘severally by himselfe’, no conferring allowed—was to translate or amend all the chapters in his allotted section. Only then were they to meet together, discuss the text and decide on their final submission. This too is a recipe for richness, a broadening of the mouth of the net before it narrows to a conclusion. It is the idea of a company at work, individual contributions tied to a common purpose and avoiding what would have been seen as either the Roman—over-heavy supervision from above—or the ‘libertine’ error, too great a release of unsupervised, individual energies. This Rule is, in other words, a portrait of the Jacobean ideal.
The next Rule then extends the principle:
9. As one company hath dispatched any one booke in this manner they shall send it to the rest to be considered of seriously and judiciously: for His Majestie is verie carefull of this poynt.
This was the only moment at which Bancroft’s Rules mention the king. It implies something about their relationship. Bancroft is clearly the author of the Rules as they stand, but he had clearly had deep discussions with the king about what they should contain. They are in other words a translation and formalisation by Bancroft of the king’s intentions.
The point James was particularly concerned with is an interesting one. Each company had to supervise the work of every other. What was the sub-text of that? It surely had some suspicion built into it. Not every company was to be relied on to do the work as the king would like it. In Rule 13, he would name Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster, as chairman or director of one of the six companies. His responsibility was to be the opening books of the Hebrew scriptures, from Genesis to the second Book of Kings. A second company, also based at Westminster, was to be chaired by William Barlow, Dean of Chester, royal chaplain, fulsome flatterer, the man Bancroft had already commissioned to produce an official account of the Hampton Court Conference. Barlow had skewed his account in the bishops’ favour: another safe pair of hands. Barlow and his team were to translate the New Testament Epistles. Four other companies, two from Oxford and two from Cambridge, were to be chaired by the King’s Professors of Hebrew (for the rest of the Old Testament) and of Greek (for the Apocrypha and the rest of the New Testament) in each place.
The king could clearly trust the two Westminster companies, chaired and directed by those loyal servants of the Crown. But what about the four Oxford and Cambridge companies? James would have known of Cambridge as the seed-bed of the English Presbyterian movement in the 1580s and ’90s. Laurence Chaderton, Master of Emmanuel, whom he had attempted to humiliate at Hampton Court, was bound to be on one of the Cambridge committees. And he would be joined by others of his persuasion. The same would apply to John Reynolds at Oxford. Was this Rule 9, over which the king was so exercised, an attempt to keep those Puritans, moderate as they were, within bounds?
Bancroft then applied belt and braces to the mechanism of mutual supervision. There was, finally, to be a general meeting at which the final, final text could be agreed:
10. If any Company, upon ye review of ye books so sent, really doubt, or differ uppon any place, to send them word thereof, note the place, and withal send their reasons; to which if they consent not, the difference to be compounded at ye generall meetinge, which is to be of the chiefe persons of each company, at ye ende of ye worke.
By the time they emerged from the general meeting, the words of the King James Bible would have gone through at least four winnowing processes. Nothing was being left to chance.
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p; Bancroft wasn’t satisfied with that. His final clutch of Rules are thick with an anxiety that things might go wrong. Again and again he introduces the words of hierarchy and control.
11. When any place of speciall obscuritie is doubted of, letters to be directed by authority to send to any learned man in the land, for his iudgment of such a place.
‘Every Bishopp’, Rule 12, was to admonish his clergy and to ask for their ‘particular observations’. He names the directors of each company (Rule 13) and then in Rule 14 the other sixteenth-century English translations that are to be consulted: ‘Tindall’s, Matthews, Coverdales, Whitchurch’s, Geneva’. The Bishops’ Bible is not mentioned because that is the ground against which all other translations are to be judged, but the list summarises the great tradition of English Reformation Bibles. ‘Tindall’ is of course William Tyndale, the pioneer in the 1520s and ’30s, finally garrotted and burnt in 1536 on a Flemish bon-fire, a martyr to the English scriptures. ‘Matthews, Coverdales, Whitchurch’s’ are the three versions of the Bible, all heavily dependent on Tyndale, which the English Crown sponsored and approved of under Henry VIII and Edward VI. ‘Geneva’ is the English Calvinist edition first produced by Englishmen exiled by Queen Mary in the 1550s. The notion of jointness, of this translation being a national enterprise, extends beyond the limits of the early seventeenth century to embrace nearly eighty years of effort and scholarship. The list is unremarkable except for what it leaves out: no mention of the great translation made by the English Catholics in exile at Douai near Rheims. The Translators ignored this omission.
Finally, in Rule 15, the last element of control. Yet further ‘Ancient and Grave Divines, in either of the Universities’, were to ensure that passages and references translated one way in the Old Testament were translated concordantly in the New. There had been ferocious controversies throughout the sixteenth century over precisely this problem. Distressingly, in the New Testament, Christ and the apostles, when quoting from the Hebrew scriptures, tended to use not the original Hebrew texts themselves but the Greek words of the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament made at Alexandria in about 130 bc. Often, even in the best texts, the words of the Septuagint do not faithfully reproduce the meanings of the Hebrew scriptures. Could Christ and the apostles have been wrong? Could the omniscient God, in the form of Jesus, be ignorant of his own word? It was clear that the standard of scholarship among Christ’s disciples was despicable. The Greek of the New Testament was coarse and clumsy, a steep descent from the heights of fifth-century Athenian elegance, ‘countrified and simple’ according to Erasmus, or apparently ‘concocted’, as Charles Bradlaugh, the Victorian atheist described the Gospels, ‘by illiterate, half-starved visionaries in some dark corner of a Graeco-Syrian slum’. Paul garbled quotations from Isaiah, Mark muddled Isaiah with Malachi, Luke included the name of Canain in a genealogy which was not there in the Hebrew Genesis, Matthew left out three kings in his genealogy of Jesus, then misquoted both the Hebrew and the Septuagint before attributing something said by Zechariah to Jeremiah. In a text which was said to have been dictated by God, this was an agonising and difficult problem. ‘One should tremble before each letter of the Bible’, Luther had said, ‘more than before the whole world.’ God was in every syllable and ‘no iota is in vain’. How modern scholarship could approach such a problem was something which only the most ancient and gravest divines could solve. It is a measure of James’s and of Bancroft’s joint ambition that they were willing to try. All that remained was to choose the men themselves.
Five
I am for the Medium
in All Things
For the word of God is quicke and powerfull, and sharper than any two edged sword, pearcing euen to the diuiding asunder of soule and spirit, and of the ioynts and marrowe, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Hebrews 4:12
The new Jacobean atmosphere of tolerance, discussion and openness—set within a frame of a new kind of royal, gilded, fatherly divinity—had begun to have its effect. A flood of English Roman Catholics started to return from the European continent. In the summer of 1603, a pair of futile, ill-conceived and half-related plots by Catholic extremists had been foiled when English Catholics loyal to James had betrayed them. The plotters and their friends were the lunatic fringe of Catholic opinion, and the mainstream, including the Jesuits, considered the plots ‘impudent folly’: impudent because they threatened the establishment of order in England; foolish because persuasion and influence, the ‘feigning, suing, and such-like’ at which the age excelled, was clearly the route to success. It soon emerged that the Jesuits themselves had betrayed the plotters to the Privy Council, having more allegiance to their own future prospects than to their co-religionists.
James was filled with gratitude. Although the Jesuit betrayal of the plots was probably the result of a power struggle between different groups of English Catholics, the effect was precisely the kind of inclusive politics James had always dreamed of. Here were Catholics displaying allegiance to a declaredly Protestant throne. It was a new world order, an irenic wholeness embracing them all. James’s response was to give them a break. For a year they would no longer have to pay the £20 a month fines which was the Elizabethan penalty for not attending church. The new age might be dawning.
The state’s reaction to the two plots is a map of the age: the plotters themselves were ruthlessly and uncompromisingly suppressed, some executed, others left to fester in the Tower. They included Robert Cecil’s longstanding enemy, Sir Walter Raleigh, who by modern standards of evidence was clearly not guilty of involvement in either plot. But he was a rival to Cecil and as such was ruthlessly removed from the scene, ridiculed and abused by the Crown lawyers at a show trial in Winchester and condemned, finally, to seventeen years of imprisonment. Beyond the guilty and the dangerous, however, James held out the prospect of an all-encompassing embrace to anyone and anything that might fall within the dream of national community. Destroy the extremists, whether Catholic plotters or those Puritans who could not conform to the habits of the Church of England, embrace a broad stretch of middle ground. That is the heart of all Jacobean policy—it is what any well-managed, civilised government would do—and of that middle ground the new Bible was to become both the expression and the symbol, the code and guidebook to a rich, majestic and holy kingdom.
In the summer and autumn of 1604, after parliament had been prorogued, both parts of the strategy came into play. Bancroft, and at times James himself, goading on his bishops, began to harry those Puritans who would not sign up to the idea that the surplice, the cross, confirmation, the use of rings in weddings and all the other remnants of symbolic religion in the English Church were perfectly good and holy practices. Those who wouldn’t sign, or ‘subscribe’ as the word at the time went, were expelled, a total of about eighty ministers from a body of about 8,000. Ninety-nine per cent of the Church of England, in other words, thought conformity the better path. Among the one per cent who did not were those who would in time become the leaders of the Pilgrim Fathers.
At the same time, Bancroft began to hire the men for the great translation and here it was breadth and inclusiveness which dictated the choice. The first Westminster company, charged with translating the first books of the Bible, had Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, as its director. He was known as ‘the Angell in the pulpitt’, the man more versed in modern and ancient tongues than any other in England, who could serve, it was thought, as ‘INTERPRETER-GENERAL’ at the Day of Judgement, but he had other skills, and another track record, which confirmed him as a member of the core establishment and recommended him to Bancroft and the king.
He had been used before in important political work, some fifteen years earlier when Bancroft was working for Whitgift rooting out the Separatist congregations in London. Andrewes, then in his mid-thirties and already recognised as the coming man, and as the cleverest preacher in England, could be relied on to do Bancroft’s
work for him. Highly detailed accounts survive of what Andrewes did for the ecclesiastical establishment: a representation, in other words, of what Bancroft would have known of him, the grounds on which he chose him as one of the principal Translators. Once again, it is not a dignified picture: his governing qualities are those of a man who knows how to exercise power.
Through the second half of the 1580s, the more extreme Separatist puritans, who considered each congregation a self-sufficient church of Christ, became the target of a campaign led by Richard Bancroft. They were to be found in private houses all around London, holding private conventicles in which their inspirational preachers were, it was reported to Bancroft, ‘esteemed as godds’. Bancroft, who in another life would clearly have been an excellent detective, had his spies in place. As a central player in the Crown establishment, he would have had an array of inducements to hand: money, prospects, threats, the persuasive words of a man with access to power. Those tools gave him access to all kinds of secret meetings. ‘After the Minister hath saluted everie one, both man and woman, at theire comynge into the Chamber with a kysse’, one report of such a Separatist meeting described, shocked at its impropriety,
a large Table beinge prepared for the purpose (which holdeth fortie or fiftie persons) he taking the chayre at the end thereof, the rest sitt down everie one in order:…the Minister hymself having receaved [communion] in both kyndes: the breade and the wyne which is left, passeth downe, and everye man without more a doe is his owne Carver.
The state church could not tolerate the freedom or the priest-lessness of such behaviour. Many Separatists—and they were overwhelmingly young, idealistic people, a tiny minority, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred in England as a whole—fled to the Netherlands but others were arrested and, eventually, some fifty-two were held for long periods in the string of hideous London gaols: the Clink, the Gatehouse, the Fleet, Newgate, the Counter Woodstreet, the Counter Poultry, Bridewell and the White Lion, some of the prisoners shut in the ‘most noisome and vile dungeons’, without ‘bedds, or so much as strawe to lye upon…and all this, without once producing them, to anie Christian triall where they might have place given them, to defend themselves’. One of them, the eighteen-year-old Roger Waters, was kept in irons for more than a year.
God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible Page 9