God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  Your assured

  Jo. Cosin.

  Norwch. Bp’s. Pallace, Aprill 4, 1619

  This is a rare sight of one of the sinews of the Jacobean church in action: private extortion by a high-level and ambitious church official of a little bribe or pourboire from the impoverished, simple rural clergy; a man looking out for his own, passing on a little tip by which advantage can be gained and the beginnings of a fortune made; and an awareness, in the insistence on the tip being kept secret, that it was wrong, that it ran full against the requirements of pastoral care which one sermon after another required of a bishop and his servants.

  It is in the light of that letter, and of the feeling of impotent contempt with which Puritans looked on at this world of corrupt bishops and their officials, that the most famous story told about John Overall must be seen. It is recorded by John Aubrey, the great seventeenth-century gossip, and is the kind of joky, subversive anecdote which the powerless always tell about the powerful. Whether it is true or not matters less than its atmosphere, which is like the stories that used to be told in Soviet Russia about the Nomenklatura: a behind-the-hands snigger fuelled by power on one side and by resentment and envy on the other.

  It is to do with John Overall’s lust. The poor man, who was forty-four in 1604, found it easier, he told his friends, to preach in Latin, which he had studied so hard and so long, and that he found it ‘troublesome to speak English as a continued oration’. Despite (or perhaps because of?) that rather unworldly removal from everyday discourse, the dean fell in love with and married the sexiest girl in London. Anne Orwell was irresistible:

  Face she had of filbert hue

  And bosom’d like a swan.

  Back she had of bended ewe

  And waisted by a span.

  Hair she had as black as crow

  From her head unto her toe,

  Down, down all over her,

  Hey nonny, nonny no.

  Even now there is no mistaking the desire in that. The world couldn’t help but imagine the Dean of St Paul’s in bed with his marvellous girl.

  Sadly, or excitingly to his contemporaries, Overall was unable to satisfy Anne’s sexual appetite and she eloped with the rather more glamorous Yorkshire squire, Sir John Selby. Overall sent a posse after her.

  The Dean of St Paul’s did search for his wife

  And where d’ye think he found her?

  Even upon Sir John Selby’s bed,

  As flat as any flounder.

  Overall had her forcibly brought back to the deanery at St Paul’s. London had never heard anything so hilarious. And what became of Anne? No word survives.

  Several of Andrewes’s team remain little more than names: Richard Clarke, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, whose collected sermons were said to be ‘a continent of mud’; Robert Tighe, vicar of All Hallows, Barking, the church in which Lancelot Andrewes had been christened; Geoffrey King, another Christ’s man, and in time professor of Hebrew at Cambridge; and Francis Burleigh, who had been a scholar at Pembroke, Andrewes’s own college. Even among the obscure, the connections continued to work. Those four have the look of workhorses, men flattered to be included, who could be asked to do much of the legwork, of which, if one considers the endless genealogies, or the delineation of the territories allotted to the seven tribes of Israel, there was a great deal.

  Beside them, however, there was something else. It shouldn’t be surprising that as broad and complex a figure as Lancelot Andrewes should have an inclusive and eclectic taste in companions and colleagues. Alongside Overall and the exotic Saravia (his parentage was partly Spanish) were three other men who had pursued a far from straightforward course as theologians and divines. The most eccentric (although a committed member of Andrewes’s ceremonious, anti-Puritan tendency in the church, later pilloried by the Puritans for it) was Richard Thomson, born in Holland of English parents, a brilliant linguist, which perhaps goes without saying, who would later be calumniated by William Prynne as ‘a debosh’ed English Dutchman, who seldom went one night to bed sober’. Thomson lived hard and fast and, although a fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge, was also part of much racier and riskier London set. Extraordinarily, for a Translator of the King James Bible, he was known as one of the wittiest of all translators (‘the great interpreter’) of the wildly obscene epigrams written by the poet Martial in the Rome over which Nero presided. Something about the knowing, post-austerity cynicism and wickedness of Martial’s world appealed to Jacobean England and many contemporary gallants tried their hand at English versions.

  How does this sit alongside a career in the Church of England? It is a true conundrum, perhaps the sharpest of all the instances where the remarkable work of biblical translation comes out of lives that might have been designed not to produce it. But Martial has a great deal to teach any writer. Everything he composed was honed to exactness. Every sentiment he expressed had been examined by a fierce intelligence. There is nothing lax, soft or expected in Martial’s epigrams: they are the product of a mind that has worked. Their satirical edge is created, as in all satire, not by the satirist but by the society that is being satirised.

  Anyone who could match Martial in his art, who was also a man of the church, and an acknowledged linguist, with correspondents in Italy, France and Germany, was a man to have in your company. The disciple of Martial would not accept the second-rate; and his mind would be bright enough to summon the best. A revealing gap opens up here. Andrewes could happily see a good, God-fearing, straight-living, honest and candid man like Henry Barrow condemned to death; and a debauched, self-serving degenerate like Thomson elevated to the highest company. Why? Because Barrow’s separatism was a corrosive that would rot the very bonds of Jacobean order; because that order was both natural and God-given; and because nothing could be more sinful than subversion of that kind. Goodness, in other words, was not a moral but a political quality and nothing in Thomson’s failings could approach the depth of Barrow’s wickedness.

  Besides, Andrewes could never be accused of priggishness. His belief in mercy was too real and his awareness of his own failings too strong. God’s majesty and love, his power of forgiveness, Andrewes said every week in his private prayers,

  is tender, sweet, better than life;

  hating nothing that it hath made,

  neglecting neither the young ravens,

  nor the sparrows,

  bringing back the lost sheep on the shoulder,

  sweeping the house for the piece of silver,

  binding up the wounds of the half-dead,

  opening Paradise to the thief

  who is standing at the door and knocking.

  Those are the words of the man who would always have had Richard Thomson in his company. He clearly loved him. When Andrewes became Bishop of Ely in 1609 he gave Thomson the living of Snailwell, a pretty and comfortable village a few miles from Newmarket, in the diocese of Ely, a living that afforded pleasurable ease, in which, like Noah, Thomson could plant his vineyard, cultivate his vines and feel rewarded for his self-indulgent life.

  The director drafted in two others with rich and specialist experience. William Bedwell was both a leading mathematician and, because his readings in medieval mathematical studies had led him down this path, an Arabist, one of England’s first. He was no admirer of Islam, being the author of a vituperative book on ‘the blasphemous seducer Mohammed’, but he was captivated by the theological, medical and mathematical genius of the Arabs. Arabic, he was also convinced, was an invaluable tool in the interpretation of Hebrew. Andrewes also provided him with a living, in the village of Tottenham, north of London, to add to the one he already had at St Ethelburgh’s, just up from the docks in the city. There, in April 1607, Bedwell gave communion to Henry Hudson and his crew, about to embark on their voyage in search of the north-west passage to Cathay.

  That stretching, expanding world had a still more intimate part to play in the making of the translation. John Layfield, another Cambridg
e man, a Greek scholar from Trinity, was an explorer and prose writer of real distinction, who left one of the most civil-minded and generous accounts ever written of the English arrival in the New World. Another Translator, the egregious George Abbot, who will appear later, gave another account of ‘the Americans’ which is as poisonous as Layfield’s is graceful. There was a crucial difference between them: Layfield had been to the New World, Abbot never had.

  In 1596, the Earl of Cumberland, a man in the mould of Essex or Raleigh, intensely Protestant, intensely brave and intensely patriotic, wanting to see England as a standard bearer for reformed truth across the world, led an expedition to Puerto Rico. Layfield was his chaplain and his chronicler. What Layfield brought to this exciting subject—it was a violent and dangerous expedition; hundreds died; Cumberland himself very nearly drowned in his armour as he lay, wounded, under Spanish fire, unable to lift himself from the shallow waters of a Puerto Rican rio—was an unabashed manliness of style, a smart, brisk way of telling a story in which piety or an adopted moralism had no part. Layfield is completely au fait with the details of navigation, ordnance and the science of fortification. Chaplain he might have been, but there was nothing diminished in that status. Even before they leave Portsmouth, Layfield displays his gift for clear and dramatic narrative, for instant characterisation, for a scene brought utterly alert. It is March on the south coast of England:

  While we were at morning prayer, his Lordship happens to see a gallant of the company (purposely I name him not) reading of Orlando Furioso; to whom himselfe in person went presently after Service, all the Company being by, and having told him that we might looke that God would serve us accordingly, if we served not him better; bad him be sure that if againe he tooke him in the like manner, he would cast his Booke over-boord, and turne himselfe out of the Ship.

  The task of the first Westminster company was to bring to life some of the great narratives of the Bible, the legends of creation, the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Saul and David, Solomon and Elijah. Of course a vital sense of narrative was a qualification for the work. Layfield’s chronicle is as bright-coloured an adventure as anything by Robert Louis Stevenson, a journey ‘running West and by south, but bearing still to the Westward’, with flocks of flying fishes skittering around their hull, the southern cross appearing over the tropical horizon, the sea changing colour as they head out into the deep Atlantic, ‘whereas before it was a cleere azure, it then began to incline to a deeper blacke’.

  Nothing about Layfield is cynical or even prejudiced. He meets the indigenes of Dominica with an open mind, even if amazed by ‘their red painting, laid so on that if you touch it, you shall finde it on your finger’. But he uses no violent or oppressive language and evinces no horror at these alien people: ‘They are men of good proportion, strong and straight limmed, but few of them tall, their wits able to direct them, to things bodily profitable.’ They will swop ‘any of their Commodities for an old Waste-coate, or but a Cap, yea but a paire of Gloves’. They long to acquire the language of their visitors—and the wonderful sight jumps to mind of American Indians learning English at the source, the pure and beautiful English of John Layfield, who was quite clearly entranced by the beauties of the still untrammelled Caribbean, its wonderful first-growth woods and its cooling waterfalls, its ‘Parrots and Parrachetoes as common as Crowes and Dawes in England’, the extraordinary grace of the Spanish settlements in Puerto Rico, which despite the heat that melted the glue which held their books together, and turned the English sweets they had brought with them into a gooey liquid, were ‘exceedingly delightful’. Everywhere you looked were ‘Guiavas, as bigge as a Peach like a very ripe great white Plum’, lemons and limes, ‘the goodliest Orenges that ever I saw’, plains and lawns, estancias, wind- and watermills, delicious ‘papaies, wild grapes as great as a good Musket-bullet, figs, pomegranates, muske-millions, pomecitrons…and soft, squeezable pineapples’ the taste of which, Layfield wrote in ecstasy, ‘I cannot liken it in the palate to any (me thinks) better then to very ripe Strawberries and Creame’.

  Layfield was among the men who translated the famous opening chapters of Genesis. He would have had a hand in writing this:

  And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow euery tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and euill. And a riuer went out of Eden to water the garden.

  As he did so he would have had in mind those incomparable forests of Dominica, where ‘the trees doe continually maintaine themselves in a greene-good liking’ – extraordinary phrase – ‘partly of many fine Rivers, which to requite the shadow and coolenesse they receive from the Trees, give them backe againe, a continuall refresshing of very sweete and tastie water’. The seventeenth-century English idea of Paradise, a vision of enveloping lushness, was formed by the seduction of an almost untouched Caribbean.

  Six

  The Danger Never Dreamt of,

  That is the Danger

  Yee are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkenesse.

  But let vs, who are of the day, bee sober, putting on the brestplate of faith and loue; and for an helmet, the hope of saluation.

  For God hath not appointed vs to wrath, but to obtain saluation by our Lord Iesus Christ.

  1 Thessalonians 5:5, 8–9

  Then the cataclysm. The entire world of the translation, and of its hopes for the future, was rocked and very nearly shattered by an event which fell—or, to be exact, almost fell—on Jacobean England in November 1605: the attempt by a group of desperate and marginalised Catholic renegades and romantics—terrorists is the word we would now use—to blow up the king, queen, princes, peers and other members of parliament at its opening on 5 November. It would come to define Jacobean England as much as September 11 2001 would shape the attitudes, fears and methods of revenge of the western world in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  Most Jacobean English Catholics, like most twenty-first century Muslims, would not have dreamt of upsetting a status quo in which, on the whole, they thrived. But a small and alienated set of them were dreaming of a form of salvation which the everyday and rather smug ordinariness of establishment life could not provide. The state had elaborate, overlapping and interlocking security arrangements which had identified and tracked some of these subversives, had infiltrated their networks, but had not thought the threat serious enough to act against them. They had concocted small plots and conspiracies and committed minor outrages in the previous few years, but those had felt like irritants, midgebites, not, in the end, threatening. There was a desire or a hope alive in the early years of James’s reign, as at the turn of the third millennium, that in some ways history was over, that it was possible to accommodate all shades of opinion in one mutually beneficial society, that the threat of the Roman Church, and of Spain, its military arm, belonged to the past. Both the English and the Spanish had happily signed a peace treaty in the summer of 1604 and after it trade boomed and customs dues had soared. (Cloth exports alone would surge by 25 per cent in the five years after the peace was signed.)Enrichissez-vous – ‘God make me rich,’ as Ben Jonson wrote in one masque for his patron Robert Cecil—was at the heart of establishment thinking in 1605 as much as 2001.

  The terrorist attack blew that complacency apart. The king, his family, his councillors and the whole range of English government had been within a few hours of death (or at least so Robert Cecil led them to imagine). The English became fixated on homeland security. An inclusive, irenic ideal of mutual benefit was replaced by a defensive/aggressive complex in which all Catholics, of all shades, never mind their degree of enthusiasm for the planned attack, were, at least for a time, identified as the enemy and required to subscribe to an oath of allegiance which made it clear that their duty as citizens of England far overrode any duty towards the whore of Rome. Parliament, which until then had been dominat
ed by a suspicion of Stuart profligacy, crypto-Catholicism and Scottishness, now fell over itself to provide money, loyalty and support for the king. The state had invaded and taken over the English conscience.

  November 5 1605 changed the world in which the translation was being made, but also confirmed the Translators in some of their most deeply held beliefs. The plot acted on the Jacobean imagination as a drama of everything that should not be, the theatre of the wrong. It seemed to emerge from a dark, subterranean place, threatening the well-being of the world above it. But that very threat strengthened the vision on which the new Bible was already founded: it became more important than ever that England, that upper, well-lit country, needed a version of the scriptures that would bind together its people, its church, and its king.

  Blackness was well-established as a mark of vice. At the very beginning of 1605, the queen had asked Ben Jonson to write a masque, an entertainment-cum-drama-cum-court ball, to be performed in Whitehall on Twelfth Night, and to be called the Masque of Blackness. The queen and ten of her beautiful young English aristocratic companions were to appear as blackamoors, an Aethiop Queen and the Daughters of Niger. Their azure and silver dresses designed by Inigo Jones, all lit by glimmering lantern light, were excitingly transparent, their breasts visible beneath the gauze, ‘their hayre thicke, and curled upright in tresses, lyke Pyramids’. The drama was arranged on ‘an artificiall sea…raysed with waves’, which seemed to move, and in some places the billow seemed to break.