God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  The whole story of the masque hinged on the expunging of an awful blackness. The Daughters of Niger, it was explained—as the queen and her ‘black’ ladies sat silent in a giant shell where lights shimmered on the upper rim—had always imagined they were beautiful until a poet had revealed to them that their blackness was ugly. Only a message from the Moon had showed them what they could do. If they travelled to a country whose name ended in ‘-tania’, they would find a man ‘who formes all beauty with his sight’. So far, they had trecked to Mauritania, Lusitania and Aquitania but to no avail. Now they had heard of a place called ‘Britania’, also known as ‘Albion’, which meant ‘the white country’ and which was

  Rul’d by a Sunne, that to this height doth grace it:

  Whose beames shine day and night, and are of force

  To blanch an Aethiope, and revive a Corse.

  England was the white country, the king a magical miracle worker, a source of light himself who could turn black into white, who could bring happiness and a kind of Protestant truth to the sad, blackened and benighted.

  It was ridiculous, and certainly seemed ridiculous to the sceptical members of the audience at the time. After the show was over, and before the banquet—chaos: the tables collapsed under the weight of sugar-glazed syllabubs and lark-stuffed pasties—the Spanish Ambassador bent to kiss the hand of the queen and came away with a black smudge on his face and lips.

  Ridiculous but significant: black was what England was not and the most revealing aspect of the plot was the extent to which the darkness of its origins were exaggerated. It remains uncertain to this day how much Robert Cecil or his spies knew of it in advance. Nor is it certain how much he encouraged its development, delaying any arrests until the plan was ripe enough to make its prevention the political triumph he required. He certainly loathed Catholics, Catholic priests and the Jesuits above all – ‘I condemn their doctrine,’ he had written to James when he was still in Scotland, ‘I detest their conversation.’ The Jesuits were ‘a generation of vipers’ who were happy to paddle their fingers in ‘the blood and crowns of Princes’. But neither Cecil nor the king had been bloodthirsty persecutors of the Catholics. James would rather Catholics were banished than executed. ‘I will never allow in my conscience’, he had written to Cecil, ‘that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion, but I should be sorry that Catholics should so multiply as they might be able to practise their old principles upon us.’ That was the old political point, as good for Catholics as for extremist Puritans: errors in faith could be tolerated as long as they didn’t threaten the order of the kingdom. The idea of blowing up parliament, needless to say, stepped over the line.

  Cecil’s spies seem to have entirely manufactured an element of the story which has been central to it ever since: the long dark tunnel which the plotters—or ‘Miners’ as they were called—are supposed to have dug from their house in Westminster under the House of Lords, the conduit along which they could bring their gunpowder. No such tunnel ever existed. Guy Fawkes was subjected to days on end of torture, personally authorised by James. ‘If he will not other wayes confesse,’ the king wrote, ‘the gentle torturs are to be first usid unto him, & sic per gradus ad ima tenditur.’ Latin was always useful to conceal, as if from oneself, the worst of instructions: the phrase means ‘and so by steps going on to the worst’, meaning from the manacles, in which a man hung from his wrists while his body danced in pain, to the big oak-framed rack in the Tower (there was only one of these instruments in England) on which a man was slowly stretched until the confession was squeezed out of him, and his body was left permanently maimed. So terrifying was the prospect of the rack that many confessed when taken into the room and shown it. It is not clear if Fawkes was racked or not—it was generally assumed he was—but still he could not bring the invented tunnel to mind and in his deposition to the court, its route, described as leading ‘to the cellar under the Upper House of Parliament’, was written in by another hand.

  Even the cellar in which, famously, Guy Fawkes and his co-plotters stored the powder with which to bring about their Catholic revolution, was not really a cellar. It was on the ground floor, with the chamber of the House of Lords on the first floor above it. This whole gamut of tunnel, darkness, cellar, the night-time discovery, in short, the whole operatic nocturnal of the plot, was nothing but the fantasy of dread at work. Here was the underside attempting to exact its revenge. And the Translators were there to play their part.

  The egregious William Barlow, by now Bishop of Rochester and author of the anti-Puritan account of the Hampton Court Conference, preached at Paul’s Cross, ‘the tenth day of November, being the next Sunday after the Discouerie of this late Horrible Treason’. He was a government man, but he was also, as one of the bishops who made up a full quarter of the House of Lords, a potential victim of the plot, and as such delivered the first version of the new line. The enemy from below was satanic in its wickedness, the king, their hoped-for victim, an unqualifiedly good man, the archetype of the good man, virtually a Christ-figure, ‘universal scholar, acute in arguing, subtle in distinguishing, logical in discussing’. All the attributes of civilisation belonged with him above ground; all the qualities of wickedness, including Catholicism, belonged below it. Light, majesty and truth had only just escaped being eclipsed by the satanic, the dark and the deceitful.

  It was an ancient and powerful opposition, now given new and polarising life. Gunpowder sermons became a yearly ritual in Jacobean England. The fifth of November became the day, far more than any anniversary of the Armada, on which God had saved Protestant England from the forces of darkness. ‘This Day of ours,’ Lancelot Andrewes told the king and court at Whitehall the following year, ‘this fifth of Nouember, [is] a day of God’s making; that which was done upon it, was the Lord’s doing.’ It was to be ‘consecrated to perpetuall memory, by a yearly acknowledgement to be made of it through out all generations’. And it was the hidden nature of the danger that made it so terrible. They knew nothing of the danger beforehand.

  We imagined no such thing; but that all had been safe, and we might haue gone to the Parliament, as secure as ever. The danger never dreamt of, that is the danger…Danger by undermining, digging deep under ground; that none could discerne…the danger not to be descried, not to be escaped, that is the danger.

  The plotters were ‘a brood of vipers, mordentes in silentio [biting in silence];still, not so much as a hisse, till the deadly blow had been given’. It was not men who had done this, ‘Not men; no, not savage wilde men: the Hunnes, the Heruli, the Turcilingi, noted for inhumanity; never so inhumane. Even among those barbarous people, this fact would be accounted barbarous.’ Not even beasts would have done it. ‘This is more than brutish, What Tiger, though never so inraged, would have made the like havock.’ No, this could only have been the devil’s work:

  so much bloud, as would have made it raine bloud; so many baskets of heads, so many pieces of rent bodies cast up and downe, and scattered all over the face of the earth. It York me to stand repeating these;…That ever age, or land, that our age, and this land should foster or breed such monsters!

  For years, Andrewes and other lesser preachers like him stood repeating these execrations. The plot and plotters were ‘black’, ‘foul’, ‘accursed’, ‘locusts from the nethermost hell’. Ten years after the plot had been discovered, the energy of loathing was undiminished. ‘Would they make men’s bowels fly up and down in the air?’ Andrewes asked. ‘Out with those bowels. Would they do it by fire? Into the fire with their bowels, before their faces. Would they make men’s bones fly about like chips? Hew their bones in sunder…They are not worthy to be inter opera Dei‘‘among God’s works.’’’ Andrewes, as the newly ordained Bishop of Chichester, would have been among those blown up by the plotters, but this rage, still so vital after so long, cannot be explained merely by the shock of a narrow escape. This conspiracy to destroy from below touched the most sensitive of place
s in the Jacobean psyche. Andrewes’s nightmare—and it is the national nightmare; these sermons were bestsellers, printed and distributed across the whole of England—is of brokenness, the world in pieces, all coherence gone, the parts to be collected up in baskets. It is the terror of anarchy and the loss of order, driven by the sense that order is no more than a taut and anxious skin drawn over the bubbling chaos below.

  Throughout the previous reign and on into this one, Jesuits and other Catholic priests had been imprisoned, often horribly tortured and executed. It is nowadays perfectly clear that the Jesuits did not in any way condone the Gunpowder Plot, but the accepted and convenient view held by the Jacobean political class—and Lord Burghley had reckoned that about 100 people were politically significant in England—was that the Jesuits were more implicated than any other group. Henry Garnet, a saintly, pacific man, with a sweet singing voice, was the Superior of the Order in England, a man hustled from one hiding place to the next along the clandestine networks and channels of Catholic England. (This secret life of priests living in hidden holes, squeezed into the gaps between walls and chimneys, lurking undetected in the dark within inches of those in the airy, well-lit rooms beside them, fuelled the vision of the Catholic as a man of darkness, his purposes unclear, his methods concealed, his whole existence dangerous.) Garnet had known, through the confessional, of the plotters’ intent. He had attempted and failed to persuade them to abandon their plans, but the seal of the confessional did not allow him to pass on what he knew.

  In the extreme atmosphere that followed the discovery of the plot, the distinctions between Catholics were erased and the distance Garnet had kept from the plot was given no credit. He was in fact seen as the chief seducer, the master plotter. As soon as the trap was sprung, Garnet went into hiding, finally ending up in January in Hindlip House, near Worcester, a secret Catholic refuge. The place was a warren of concealment. Walls were false, every room had a trap door or access to secret stairs. Many of the chimneys had double flues, one for the smoke, the other in which a priest could hide. The place was betrayed, the house searched and then occupied by government agents, who waited for the priests they guessed were hidden within its walls.

  Only after eight days, on Monday 27 January 1606, did Garnet and his companion Father Oldcorne emerge from their hiding place. They looked half-dead and their appearance terrified the men who were there to arrest them. The hole they had been crouching in was too small for either of them to stand up, and Garnet’s legs in particular were horribly swollen. One of the women of the house had given them sweet hot liquids through a straw that perforated the walls of the hole and they had some marmalade they had taken in there with them. But there was no means of drainage in the tiny closet; it was the smell of their own accumulating faeces which had finally driven the men into the open air. Their only option now was to put themselves in the hands of the Jacobean state, which would humiliate, torture, try and then kill them.

  Mr Henry Garnet, as the officials of the English state insisted on calling him, was deemed guilty of knowing about the conspiracy beforehand without reporting the plotters to the authorities. Those authorities did not accept that the secrecy of the confessional could not be abused. The conflict between his duty as a Catholic priest and his duty as an English citizen they considered no conflict at all. His was a treacherous, unreliable, seditious and above all a lying heart. Among the papers and books of Francis Tresham, one of the plotters, had been a manuscript written by Garnet entitled A Treatise on Equivocation. In it Garnet had elaborated on the circumstances in which the Jesuits considered it lawful not to tell the whole truth. A priest, for example, could say, when asked, that he was not a priest because he was not a priest of Apollo; or that he had never been over the seas, because he had never been over the Indian seas.

  These desperate measures were the product of scruple: only because Roman Catholics considered it a sin to lie, and only because the intolerance of the English Church and state made it necessary for them to lie, were they forced to descend to this kind of Jesuitical equivocation. For the officials of the English court, everything they most disliked about Roman Catholicism seemed to focus on Garnet’s pitiable figure: he had known about the plot before it occurred but had said nothing; he had been intimate with the satanic and bestial figures of the plotters, had administered the sacrament to them, but had done nothing material to sway them from their path; he was a liar; he was a man of dark and hidden recesses; he was the agent of the supranational Roman Church which had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and whose head was the Antichrist. This gentle, prematurely aged man, with grizzled, thinning hair and spectacles, was the figure through whom that terror of anarchy and wrongness had so nearly been visited on the kingdom. Of course he should be tortured (probably by sleep deprivation or perhaps drugged) and of course he must be executed. Cecil told him he didn’t care if Garnet lived or died. The king held interviews with him about some of the finer points of Roman theory and practice, centring on the secrecy of the confessional and its limits. Garnet finally broke that seal and admitted his foreknowledge of the plot. He was tried, convicted of treason, and dragged through the streets of London from the Tower on a hurdle to St Paul’s where a scaffold had been erected. This means of transport was part of the punishment because a traitor, as the words of his sentence described, was

  not worthy any more to tread upon the Face of the Earth whereof he was made: Also for that he hath been retrograde to Nature, therefore is he drawn backward at a Horse-Tail. And whereas God hath made the Head of Man the highest and most supreme Part, as being his chief Grace and Ornament; he must be drawn with his Head declining downward, and lying so near the Ground as may be, being thought unfit to take benefit of the common Air.

  Two of the Translators, George Abbot and John Overall, were there waiting for him at St Paul’s, ready to convert him even at the last to Protestantism. After everything he had gone through, Garnet of course refused. He expressed his horror at what the plotters had planned to do and asked all Catholics to accept their place in the kingdom, and to be quiet. Then the final absurdity. It was said, perhaps a Cecil-inspired rumour, that Garnet would confess the wrongfulness of his religion at the last moment. A man in the huge crowd shouted out, ‘Mr Garnet, it is expected you should recant.’

  Garnet said, ‘God forbid, I never had any such meaning, but ever meant to die a true and perfect Catholic.’

  The extraordinary Jacobean ability to dispute, to be witty on the brink of the precipice, at this of all moments, now came to the fore. John Overall, considering the claims of the Church of England to be the true primitive church, then said to the Jesuit, ‘But Mr Garnet, we are all Catholics.’ That curious reasonableness, Overall’s clever, witty face, that conversational tone, all in the presence of a violent death, the noose ready, the axe leaning on the block: no dissociation of sensibility here. Garnet could not agree with Overall’s suggestion—it is the sort of sally you would make at a dinner party—and his due punishment took its course.

  He shall be strangled, being hanged up by the Neck between Heaven and Earth, as deemed unworthy of both, or either; as likewise, that the Eyes of Men may behold, and their Hearts contemn him. Then he is to be cut down alive, and to have his Privy Parts cut off and burnt before his Face, as being unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any Generation after him. His Bowels and inlay’d Parts taken out and burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible Treason. After, to have his Head cut off, which had imagined the Mischief. And lastly, his Body to be quartered, and the Quarters set up in some high and eminent Place, to the View and Detestation of Men, and to become a Prey for the Fowls of the Air.

  The punishment, in its exaggerations and its pedantry, may seem like a kind of madness to us now. But here too the spirit of the age was at work. To do this to a man was to make a sermon of his body. It was to make his sin, in all its dimensions, apparent. The multiple destruction of his body was a clarification of his faults. It w
as judicial anatomy and, if this is not too grotesque an analogy, a kind of translation of inner and hidden sinfulness into open and explicit justice. It was a form of letting in the light.

  To show the world what he was made of, Garnet was strung up, and, exceptionally, was allowed to die by hanging before the executioner cut him down, castrated him, disembowelled him and quartered his body on the block. The crowd around this little party in St Paul’s Churchyard is said to have groaned and mumbled at the sight, not because it was a death sentence—over seventy thieves and murderers were executed every year in Jacobean England—but because, quite clearly, this was a good man killed for no good reason.

  Seven

  O Lett Me Bosome Thee, Lett Me

  Preserve Thee Next to My Heart

  Wash mee throughly from mine iniquitie, and clense me from my sinne.

  Purge me with hyssope, and I shalbe cleane: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

  For thou desirest not sacrifice: else would I giue it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.

  The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

  Psalm 51:2, 7, 16–17

  As the judicial murder of Henry Garnet was being enacted in the late spring of 1606, preparations were under way for the most extravagant celebration of monarchy the reign would witness. James’s brother-in-law, the vast, red, cream-tea-eating Christian IV, King of Denmark and Norway, the man who insisted that Danish beer should be stronger than any brewed in the world, was coming to visit his sister and her husband, newly elevated from the exigencies of Scotland to the lushness for which he had a famous appetite. James himself was something of a drinker—he liked the heady, sweet malmseys from southern Greece, a featherbed of a drink—but there was no keeping up with Christian and his Danes. They scandalised even the Jacobean court with the depth of unbuttoned drunkenness they unleashed on the capital. The peak of their wild career came towards the end of their visit on a four-day outing to Theobalds where Robert Cecil, now, thanks to James, Earl of Salisbury, and ever richer through various complex deals over customs dues which he had farmed out to a group of businessmen, taking a cut himself, doled out the luxury.