God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  Nothing was too much for the Danish revels. An artificial oak tree, full size, was bedecked with leaves made of taffeta on each of which was written the word ‘Welcome’. Drink flowed, men and women wallowed ‘in beastly delights’. It was, according to Sir John Harington, a vision to match ‘Mahomets paradise’. But, for a measure of how far court life stood outside the sort of regulated strictness which Puritan and God-fearing Englishmen believed in, nothing can quite match the events of the evening at Theobalds on which the masque of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was performed. Intended as a picture of wisdom and maturity—the plan for the entertainment had been Cecil’s own—it turned into alcohol-sodden chaos. Harington gave a full account:

  After dinner, the representation of Solomon his temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was made, or (as I may better say) was meant to have been made, before their Majesties, by device of the earl of Salisbury and others. – But, alass! as all earthly things do fail to poor mortals in enjoyment, so did prove our presentment hereof. The Lady who did play the Queens part, did carry most precious gifts to both their Majesties; but forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Maiesties lap, and fell at his feet, tho I rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand to make all clean. His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state; which was not a little defiled with the presents of the queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices and other good matters.

  Faith, Hope and Charity then appeared one by one to make their speeches. Faith was so drunk she couldn’t get a word out; Hope couldn’t stand upright and had to withdraw; only Charity, clearly the greatest of these, could say what she had to say—that Christian IV already had all the gifts that heaven could bestow and so there was nothing more she could give him—before returning to the lower hall where she found both Hope and Faith ‘sick and spewing.’

  It isn’t difficult to share the reaction of Puritans to such a world, particularly when the costs are considered. The royal household in the last year of Elizabeth’s reign had cost £47,000. By 1606, that had risen to over £100,000. Other costs were dropping: the end of the war in Ireland saved £300,000 a year, the Spanish peace still more on ships and men, but even those savings couldn’t counteract the gush of Jacobean largesse. The royal debt had stood at £422,749 on the death of Queen Elizabeth. By Michaelmas 1606, it had gone up by a third to £550,331. And still the fountain poured, £3,000 here, another £2,000 there. A handsome courtier called Sir Henry Rich, known as Harry, the younger son of the Earl of Warwick, was standing in Whitehall and saw £3,000 in coins being carried past him to the office of the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the royal household’s finance director. Harry Rich whistled at the sight and muttered half to himself that he wished he had that much money. The king overheard him muttering, asked what he had said, and on hearing the reply, said ‘Marry, shalt thou, Harry’, and ordered the money to be taken to Rich’s rooms. ‘You think now you have a great Purchase,’ the King said. ‘But I am more delighted to think how much I have pleasured you in giving this money, than you can be in receiving it.’ It was, as so often with James, a winning remark and betrays the instinct at the heart of all his extravagance: money was a love vehicle, a bond of patronage and gratitude, part of the dream of one nation in which the glory of royal riches bound the people to the throne.

  Of course it did nothing of the kind. The court was corrupt and everyone knew it. Gentlemen were bankrupting themselves to acquire positions there—and in the satellite courts of Queen Anne and the young Prince Henry—and then milking those positions to earn back the investment. Contractors to the court, in one investigation, were found to be marking up their supplies 3,000 per cent. James was aware of the rottenness, telling the Venetian Ambassador that if, as the Doge did in Venice, he executed all those who defrauded the state, he would soon have no subjects left. And he made his own efforts at economy: ordinances went out that only twenty-four rather than the accustomed thirty dishes were to be presented to him at lunch; and only twelve gallons of sack, dry Spanish wine, were to be issued by the Sergeant of the Cellar each day, for medicinal purposes only, and only to noblemen and their ladies. But they were meaningless gestures: the riot, the indebtedness, the corruption, the sale of offices, the cheating both of and by suppliers to the household, the sheer impetuosity of James’s giving, especially to a handsome face: it all raged on unchecked.

  How could this Bible emerge from such a world? A form of propagandist history, intent on seeing in the reign of James I the roots of the English (and American) people’s struggle for freedom from a degenerate and autocratic monarchy, will take the chaotic evening at Theobalds, the gross indulgence by James of his favourites, and the air of louche sexuality that hangs over it all, as evidence of a regime both out of touch and on the slide. What can one say of a king who on receiving £453,000 from a parliament in trauma after the Gunpowder Plot, immediately gave £44,000 of it to three of his Scottish friends who had lost too much money gambling? And another £800 on ‘spangles’ (little silver sequins) for his guard? The whole court was, as the satirist Thomas Dekker called them, a cluster of ‘spangle-babies’, men and women made juvenile by money.

  There is a sense, though, in which nothing could be more wrong than this judgement. James’s desire to hand out his riches; to get so spectacularly drunk; to put on a great show; to preside lovingly over the nation; to include as wide a variety of non-subversive opinion as possible in the church; and to make one non-divisive Bible—all were part of a single instinct to make whole, to bring peace, to act the father.

  The king who could get so drunk with his brother-in-law was also the king who was anxious for an inclusive church and an inclusive Bible. It was the dream of civilisation and for that dream to work the moderate Puritans clearly had to be included in its making. No Separatists or declared Presbyterians were to be included among the Translators. The heart of their thinking was divisive, not part of the unifying national project. But moderate Puritans could be and needed to be central to it. As a result, at least half of the new translation was put in their hands. Both John Reynolds at Oxford and Laurence Chaderton at Cambridge, the leading ‘plaintiffs’ at Hampton Court, came to take leading roles in their respective companies. Between them, Reynolds and Chaderton had the responsibility for the whole of the Old Testament apart from those books translated by Andrewes’s Westminster company. With them on board, no Puritan could claim this was not his Bible.

  ‘Puritan’: what did the word mean? It was of course an insult, a slur-word; no one would have claimed it for himself and its meaning was shifting, sometimes applied to extremists, sometimes to what was clearly the moral majority of Jacobean England. Puritanism, in short, was in the eye of the beholder. ‘Concerning the name,’ Giles Widdowes wrote in The schysmaticall puritan, ‘it is ambiguous and so it is fallacious.’ The difficulty is made worse because ‘Puritanism’ spreads effortlessly into so many different areas of seventeenth-century life: it could be said to involve daily habits and styles of dress; attitudes to the place of ceremonial in worship, and the relation of word to ceremony; fiercely held beliefs about the constitution of the church, what it should be, what it must not be, and the relationship of church to state; the question of what were called ‘things indifferent’ – those parts of Christian practice, such as the use of the surplice, which some might like and others abhor; and beliefs about the nature of God’s universe, the place of man within it and, crucially, the role of pre-destination. Had God designated some people for heaven and some for hell from the beginning of time? Would their own behaviour on earth have any effect on that destiny? Surely not, it was suggested, if all was pre-ordained? Why then should anyone behave well? If our destiny was settled, and our destination neither a punishment nor a reward for how we h
ad lived, then what should stop us behaving as wickedly as we liked? What purpose could there be in good works or a good life?

  The Bible itself was the answer to all those questions. It was the word of God, an enormous, direct, vastly complicated, infinitely interpretable account of what God meant by and for his creation. It was accessible to the people as a whole either through the lessons read to them every Sunday in church, or through sermons, or, to the literate minority, through reading the good book themselves. In the mid-sixteenth century, perhaps 30 per cent of the English gentry had been illiterate. By the 1620s, that figure had dropped effectively to zero. Lower down in society, the figures were worse – 55 per cent were illiterate among small yeoman farmers in the 1640s, and as much as 95 per cent among labourers at the same time—but at all social levels, the trend towards literacy was upwards, particularly among men and particularly in London, soon stretching far ahead of the rest of Europe. This increasingly word-orientated section of the population was the seed-bed in which the highly intellectual, questioning and quizzing form of religion we know as Puritanism had its beginnings. A puritan ate and drank the word of God. That word was his world. If the Bible authorised anything, by definition that was in concordance with God’s will and so by definition should be followed. Anything explicitly denied or disapproved of by the Bible should not be indulged. So, for example, Samuel Hieron, the Puritan pamphleteer and one of the organisers of the Millenary Petition, maintained that the Bible provided for the head of each household, ‘direction for his apparel, his speech, his diet, his company, his disports, his labour, his buying and selling, yea and for his very sleep’.

  Most people would have probably accepted that. The difficulty came in deciding on the lawfulness of religious behaviour and belief that were not mentioned in the Bible. If something wasn’t mentioned, did that mean God had no view on it? Or if it wasn’t mentioned, did that mean that God did not approve of it?

  That was certainly the understanding of the holy Separatist Henry Barrow, a view for which he died. Fasting in Lent, clergy appointed by the state, or by any grandee who held no place in the church, any ceremonies that were not explicitly authorised by scripture: all of these Barrow considered unlawful. Other Separatists and Presbyterians, or even reformists who wished to remain within an improved Church of England, considered fasting, holy days, kneeling at communion, most church officials (certainly bishops and archbishops), the baptising of infants who didn’t know what was happening to them, the churching of women after childbirth, getting married with a ring, all unlawful. Bancroft had an answer for them. There were no Christian kings mentioned in the Bible. Did that mean that Christian kings were unlawful? Didn’t religion have to change, at least in its relatively inessential practices, as the habits and practices of society changed? If the king, whose authority was essentially divine and who was God’s agent on earth, required it, then was it not the duty of every good man to obey, whatever the Bible said? The surplice was not mentioned in the Bible but the king wanted surplices to be used. It was obvious to Bancroft and the king that every God-fearing minister should therefore wear them.

  This was the territory across which the insult ‘Puritan’ would fly. ‘A puritan is such a one’, the London lawyer John Manningham wrote in 1602, ‘as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart.’ Anyone who took a stricter line on the demands of scripture than the person speaking could be labelled a Puritan. The critical division between extreme and moderate was on the question of royal authority: moderate Puritans accepted the authority of the church, and of the king as its head, even if they cavilled over points of doctrine; radical Puritans denied the authority of that state and would in the end rather separate themselves from the royal church than accept doctrines which they loathed. It was not the conventional modern conflict of freedom against authority, nor even a struggle for freedom of conscience or belief. This was not the age of toleration: it was a conflict of different visions of authority. ‘Let them chant what they will of prerogatives,’ Milton would write much later, ‘we shall tell them of Scripture; of custom, we of Scripture; of Acts and Statutes, still of Scripture, till…the mighty weakness of the Gospel throw down the weak mightiness of man’s reasoning.’ That was written in the heat of the Civil War, but if not so polarised, at least in embryo, that division between the rival claims of divine and worldly authority is apparent in the first decade of the century.

  It was a difference of emphasis that split the ‘Puritans’. It was the very fissure which James and Bancroft quite deliberately and very adroitly managed to deepen in the first years of the reign, when they expelled those eighty or so Puritans from the church between 1604 and 1606. For James, it was effective and practical politics: a means of achieving unity and uniformity in the church by excluding a small proportion of extremists.

  Those Puritans who were engaged on the new translation of the Bible were by definition moderates. They had accepted the royal commission which no dyed-in-the-wool Separatist could ever have done. But lurking under the skin of these conformists was a Puritan inheritance of a much fiercer kind.

  One of the Translators appointed to the Cambridge panel working on the Apocrypha left behind one of the most famous of all Puritan documents: his diary. It is a small bound paper book, with ninety-five leaves in it, each page measuring 5 inches by 6, a private object, devoted to an agonised conversation between the diarist and his conscience. It was written, a decade or so before the new translation was commissioned, by a man in his mid-twenties, Samuel Ward, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, later Milton’s college, famous with Emmanuel as a breeding ground of Puritan ministers.

  The diary gives an insight into the thought habits of at least one of the Translators, a puritan frame of mind to set alongside the riches of an Andrewes or the world-experience of a Layfield. The essence of the King James Bible lies precisely in the coming together of these mentalities, the enriched substance of Andrewes’s supremely well-stocked mind lit by the fierce white light of Puritanism.

  Ward was a Durham man, his father ‘a gentleman of more ancientry than estate’, and part of a large family, all of whom in their different ways continued to cadge off him as his career prospered. He became a friend and in many ways client of James Mountagu, the puritan dean who had whispered in the king’s ear at Hampton Court and who himself became a powerful figure in court–church circles, editing the king’s own works and publishing them in a splendid edition. Ward was also a friend of the physician William Harvey and sent him a petrified skull, which he thought might amuse the king.

  For all this, he was never the most sophisticated of men. He had a stammer and spoke extremely slowly, as slowly, it was said, as Moses. This was an ambivalent compliment in an age when the essential task of a minister was to preach, and this disability caused Ward infinite heart-searching and long, laborious hours practising his sermons. But it is his diary, the most private of documents, which reveals the astonishing turbulence of his mind. He is tossed from one agony to the next, from one self-indulgence to the next, from one moment of self-loathing and despair to the next of exhaustion and failure.

  The little manuscript notebook opens with some notes on a sermon by Laurence Chaderton. But then, undated, there is the plunge into the agonies of the Puritan mind:

  Prid, Desire of vaynglory, yea, in little things. Wearisomnes in Godes service. Non affection. No delite in Godes service. No care of exhorting my brethren. Non boldness in the confessing of Godes name. No delite in hearing Godes word, or in prayer, or in receyving of the Sacramentes. Shame in serving God.

  Poor man! Ward’s own high standards make for an ever-present sense of failure. But one must be careful in reading this. For a preacher to weep in the pulpit was considered in the seventeenth century a sign of God’s grace. It was an essential part of Protestant theology that in order to be saved you had to know you were damned. Behind the breast-beating—as every anti-Puritan play and libel endlessly repeated—there is an
under-tone, a subtle recognition, that these appalling failures are steps towards deliverance. For the Jacobean divine, as for the modern alcoholic, the road of regret always led to the palace of salvation.

  There is no doubt, though, that it is more than a pose. The confessions are real, shaming and often ridiculous enough for there to be no hint that this is a public document. It is an endoscope into one of the Puritan Translators’ hearts. Ward, to his own horror, is bored by one of Laurence Chaderton’s sermons. He gets angry with Mr Newhouse, his tutor, for the inordinate length of his prayers. Carnal desires sweep over him. ‘The adulterous thoughts’, he writes cryptically on 11 May 1595. A week later: ‘Thy wandering mynd on herbals att prayer tyme…Also thy gluttony the night before.’ He has a squabble with his roommate in Christ’s and the diary feels shame at ‘my excandescentia agaynst him in wordes’. The Puritan is no saint: that is his sorrow; he is aware of it, and that is his gift. ‘I must learne to desyre more after the Sundays than the Mundayes,’ Ward wrote, and to restrict ‘thy overmuch delite in these transitory pleasures of this world’. Nothing about which he could feel pleased gave him any pleasure. He was much too brilliant for his own good and reproached himself for ‘My overmuch quipping and desire of praise thereby’. It is surely significant that he flicks like this from ‘my’ to ‘thy’ and back again, alternately owning and disowning himself and his sins, both judge and accused in the court of his own conscience.