God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  June 14 1595, a Sunday, was a particularly disastrous day. Ward began by not wanting to go to chapel and didn’t listen to the sermon when he got there. He didn’t pray. He didn’t talk about holy things at dinner. He was appalled at his ‘immoderate use of Godes creatures’ – too much of the roast beef on offer in the college hall—and then went to sleep afterwards. He slept through the first afternoon sermon and through the second. He couldn’t stop himself chatting with his friends after that. He hadn’t encouraged any of them to do anything worth doing, unlike the good ‘Mr Chadderton, who hath such a living affection to the poor’. Ward failed to go to evening prayers and afterwards supped much too liberally. He didn’t take any left-overs to the poor women of the city, he didn’t encourage his fellow students to pray, congratulated himself, silently, on how good he was at Greek, laughed at others’ mistakes when they tried to keep up with him, was too pleased at his own skill in geometry, ‘magnified myself inwardly’ and he was sluggish in prayer. The whole day had been a cascade of error. ‘Thus sin I dayly agaynst the, O Lord,’ he told his diary.

  Ward was overflowing with a rumbustious Jacobean appetite for all forms of the world around him. He loved wine and beer, he ate far too much cheese, he laughed too much, he loved eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, he lusted after women and had exciting dreams about ‘the grievous sinnes in T[rinity] Colledg, which had a woman which was [?carried] from chamber in the night tyme’, and was far too jolly. On 15 July 1595, he wrote with deep regret of ‘My over great myrth as we went to Hynton’, a village outside Cambridge. When a crocodile was brought on exhibition to the university, Ward went to see it with his friend, James Mountagu, but even this engendered ‘proud thoughts’.

  Late summer was a testing time for this troubled soul as the trees in the college orchard came into fruit. September 15: ‘My crapula [surfeit] in eating peares in a morning.’ The next summer, Ward had a crisis over the plums fattening so temptingly in the orchard. On 18 July, he ate too many. More the following day, as well as raisins and drinks, and a great bonanza of them the following week. He was still racked by the plum problem in August. The damsons were hanging in clusters off the Christ’s College trees.

  August 8

  My longing after damsens. when I made the vow not to eat in the orchard. Oh that I could so long after Godes graces.

  A week later he was still guzzling.

  August 13

  My intemperate eating of damzens. also my intemperate eating of cheese after supper.

  Such a fatbelly was always finding himself dozing off in front of the Bible.

  Ward in the end gave in to his love of plums. After 1608, he gathered them in, becoming first chaplain to the Bishop of Bath and Wells (his old friend James Mountagu), with a living at Yatton, worth £50, became Master of Sidney Sussex College (where Oliver Cromwell was his student), and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity (£20 a year), tried to become Archdeacon of Bath (and failed), succeeded at Taunton (where he sublet a nice piece of church property to a Cambridge friend), became a prebendary at Wells, rector of Great Munden in Hertfordshire, a canon of York, rector of Terrington in Norfolk and a royal chaplain. It was a full flush. The agonised diary had long since ceased to be written. But people wrote to him, a little questioningly, about what was, in effect, Ward’s lucrative cluster of non-executive directorships. One had heard of his spectacular pluralism and warned him of ‘some of your friends, I know not whether they spake of it unto you, yet quipping at it behind your back, others of lower rankes wondrynge at it, and those whom I had thought never to have hard it, urginge your example to induce others to it’.

  Ward’s answer was that, like everything else, his material well-being was all God’s doing. He had remained true to his beliefs: the altar in Sidney Sussex, for example, remained an unadorned table in the middle of the chapel, and that ‘when I was unprouided (being only a fellow of Emmanuel) I could not neglect God’s Providence and was advised hereunto by my best Friends’.

  Friends, his appetite and God all told the older Ward the same thing: plums were delicious. Why let them rot on the tree? Besides, he deserved them. As he wrote in a consoling note to himself in 1614, when James Mountagu, Bishop of Bath and Wells, was deciding who might receive yet another juicy fruit from the tree of the Church of England, the post of canon residentiary at Wells Cathedral, ‘My Lord [ie Mountagu] may have good pretence for making me Res[identiary]. First, I was his first Chaplain. 2. I have small means. 3. I am a Doctor and Master of a College. 4. I was a Translator. Mr Young [his rival for the post] may have one of the other Prebends…’

  ‘I was a Translator’: it is the sort of phrase you might have put on your grave. And he got the job.

  Ward is, in a sense, an exception, only just part of the mainstream. His hero and mentor, Laurence Chaderton was central to it, the controlling figure, the node, of Cambridge Puritanism. He is one of the most charismatic of all the Translators, a man who seems to have been loved by all who knew him. He was already in his late sixties by the time of Bancroft’s commission, but he would live almost another forty years. No one quite knew how old he was when he finally died, aged 102 or 103 or 104, in 1640. He loved games, taking his place at the archery butts, the tennis and fives courts throughout his life. He used to botanise in the fields around Cambridge and planted trees which, it was said, matured and decayed in his own lifetime.

  By his mid-forties he had become established as one of the leading Puritans in Cambridge and when in 1584 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, decided to found a new college which would be a seminary for Puritan ministers, Chaderton was the obvious choice. He was reluctant but Mildmay forced his hand: if Chaderton wouldn’t be the master, Mildmay wouldn’t found the college. Chaderton succumbed and Emmanuel came into being. The new college was on the site of a suppressed Dominican friary and it was to be a strict place: no plays to be performed, no feasting, no ‘conversation’; future bishops were to be trained here and Emmanuel men have a way of floating up in any story. Henoch Clapham, who had pursued Andrewes over his disgraceful behaviour during the 1603 plague; Lewis Pickering, who had rushed to find James in Scotland and who had helped organise the Millenary Petition: both Emmanuel men. But Chaderton was subtler than his acolytes. He had been part of the radical push in the 1580s for a more thoroughly reformed church. Presbyterianism in 1580s Cambridge played the role of communism in the same 1930s colleges. All young men with any brilliance or vitality were part of the movement. Chaderton certainly was, as were his co-Emmanuel men and co-Translators, Francis Dillingham and Thomas Harrison. These young apostles were burning with the idea of a renewed, reformed and holy world. But Chaderton was subtle and never allowed his support for the deep reform, which Bancroft was striving so ingeniously to undermine, to emerge in public. There was clearly something canny about him and the entire strategy of the Emmanuel project was not open revolution but a silent seeding of the Church of England to bring it, as if by stealth, to a more reformed condition.

  Not that there was anything very secret about what went on in the college. The hall where the twelve fellows and their scholars dined was on the site of the Dominican church, and their own chapel, which had never been consecrated was, scandalously for the bishops, aligned north–south. Bedrooms for the undergraduates were in its loft, the only stained glass it had were the arms of the Queen of England, there was nothing, of course, resembling a cross, and the only furniture was a pulpit, an hourglass, a plain table and some plain wooden benches. Other, more wicked colleges like Gonville and Caius went in for ‘singing and organs’. Not at Emmanuel. Nor were there any surplices, or gowns, or corner-caps, and no kneeling for the sacrament, which they took sitting on benches around the communion table, passing both the bread and the wine from hand to hand, ‘one drinking, as it were, to another, like good fellows’, at least according to a hostile report smuggled out to Bancroft.

  Chaderton seems to have fostered an astonishingly loving atmosphere at
the college. A correspondence from his time as master survives in manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford between two young Emmanuel students who were clearly in love with each other. There is no suggestion of sex but the passion between these boys is unmistakable. One of them, William Sancroft, shared his room with Arthur Bonnest, the son of a minor gentleman from Hertfordshire. They lived together, read together and slept together. Bonnest seems to have contracted TB and gone home.

  Sancroft wrote to him: ‘I had a colleague in my studies, with whom I could communicate both my reading and my doubts. But now I sitt alone. Friendships (as one well said) are but Elemented in an universitie, and soe was ours, but they are best tried in the countrie, in absence I meane.’

  Bonnest replied: ‘Thou art oftener in my thoughts than ever; thou art nearer mee then when I embraced thee. Thou saiest thou lovest me: good, well repeat it againe and againe.’

  And Sancroft wrote back in kind: ‘O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart and give thee so large an interest there, that nothing may supplant thee.’

  It isn’t known what became of Bonnest. Sancroft, Chaderton’s star seedling, later became Archbishop of Canterbury, the only reason this correspondence has been preserved.

  This extraordinary and passionate atmosphere is one of the governing qualities of the time. The age was at ease with unbridled but apparently quite unsexual love between men. Even Cecil, discussing the intimate relationship between the king and his principal adviser, wrote to a friend: ‘As long as any matter of what weight soever, is handled only between the prince and the secretary, those counsels are compared to the mutual affection of two lovers, undiscovered to their friends.’

  That sense of closeness, of the possibility and richness of an unmediated intimacy, plays a shaping role in the translation. Among the many wonderful books of the Old Testament which Chaderton’s company translated was the Song of Songs, or the Song of Solomon, the great love lyric of the Bible. Some sixteenth-century reformers had been keen to exclude it, on the grounds of its immodesty and its fleshliness, but others, drawing on a long Jewish tradition, read it as an account of God’s love for his people and his church. That is how the luscious verses of the song are annotated in the King James Version: ‘A bundle of myrrhe is my welbeloued vnto me,’ the girl sings; ‘he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.’ And her lover replies, ‘Behold, thou art faire, my loue: behold, thou art faire, thou hast doues eyes.’ Chaderton calmly annotates: ‘The Church and Christ congratulate one another.’ The lover continues: ‘Thy two breasts, are like two yong Roes, that are twinnes, which feed among the lillies.’ (Chaderton: ‘Christ setteth forth the graces of the Church.’) ‘Thy lips, O my spouse! drop as the hony combe: hony and milke are vnder thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. (Chaderton, inscrutable to the last: ‘Christ sheweth his loue to the Church.’)

  That aching gap, between the ecstatic sexuality of the poem and of the rather helpful and interesting notes which the Translators provide, might make us smile now, but it was clearly not a comic effect that the Jacobean Translators were after. The modern reaction to their binding of the religious and the erotic experience is a measure of what Eliot called the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that occurred to English consciousness at some time later in the seventeenth century. We can no longer imagine that erotic passion and religious intelligence can be bound together into one living fabric. All we see in the commentary of Chaderton’s company is what looks like their prudishness, their refusal to see the erotic and the passionate for what it is. But in doing that, we patronise them, we assume they were trying to conceal what they were so clearly and so consciously making vital and present. The Sancroft–Bonnest correspondence, Andrewes’s private prayers, Donne’s sermons and sacred sonnets, the poetry of Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne, all show that a profoundly open ‘passionality’ is completely and immediately available to these men. Their lives and works are largely motivated by a frame of mind in which emotion, intellect, spirituality and desire do not exist in insulated compartments but feed and nourish each other in what Eliot might have called, but didn’t, an ‘association of sensibility’, a self-communicativeness which we have lost.

  Again and again, as the marginal alternatives make clear, they chose the more passionate, the more immediate, and the more exciting of the alternatives that were open to them. ‘Thou hast ravished my heart’, the lover tells his girl, not, as he might have done, ‘Thou hast taken away my heart’. They called the myrrh she poured on him ‘sweete smelling’ and in the margin suggested it might mean ‘running about’ or very liquid. In the most direct moment of the whole enchanted seduction, they wrote, ‘My beloued put in his hand by the hole of the dore, and my bowels were moved for him’. Although there is a euphemism here—the phrase ‘of the dore’ is in italics because it is not to be found in the Hebrew—they nevertheless placed in the margin a note which would give the even more explicit ‘and my bowels were moued in me for him’. Any close reader would realise that the fullest and most explicit statement they were suggesting was: ‘My beloued put in his hand by the hole, and my bowels were moued in me for him.’ This is not the work of people who are avoiding the rich and potent interpenetration of religion and flesh. It is in fact one of the greatest of all English celebrations of that union, culminating in the verse which the Translators entitled ‘The vehemencie of loue’. The girl of the song, the church, declares, in language as magisterial, passionate and imposing as the translation gets: ‘Set me as a seale vpon thine heart, as a seale vpon thine arme: for loue is strong as death, iealousie is cruel as the graue: the coales thereof are coales of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.’

  That is language which emerges from a world in which William Sancroft, future Master of Emmanuel, future archbishop, can say to his beloved Arthur, ‘O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart’. It is a world in which all divisions of existence—the bodily, the emotional, the intellectual and the spiritual—are one, and from which we are now utterly divorced.

  For these Puritans, and in a way we can scarcely understand now, the words of the scriptures were thought to provide a direct, almost intravenous access to the divine.

  Listen, for example, to an account given by a friend of the Translators, William Hinde, fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, of the last words and dying moments of his friend, another minister, John Bruen of Bruen Stapleford in Cheshire, whose life Hinde wrote. Bruen embodied the milieu from which this translation emerged. He was both the minister of his local church and squire of his local village, and every Sunday he used to walk through the fields the mile or so from his manor house to divine service, ‘leaving neither butler nor cooke behind him’, singing psalms as they went along the broad, fair path between the hedgerows, gathering his tenants and neighbours around him, ‘as a leader of the Lord’s host’, preaching to them when he got there, and then afterwards leading them all back—more psalms ‘and that psalme especially How pleasant is thy dwelling place’ because he loved Bruen Stapleford above all places on earth—to have lunch with him at home.

  Bruen took the word of God seriously, gave up the hunting and hawking he had loved as a young man, dispensed with his ‘foureteene couple of great mouthed dogges’, disparked his park, had the deer slaughtered and the cuts of meat distributed, demolished his hounds’ kennels and the cockpit, made his packs of cards useless by burning the four knaves in every one and put his backgammon set, its dice and its thirty men ‘into a burning oven which was then heating to bake pies’. In his house, instead of these entertainments, he had set up on desks, in his hall and in his parlour, ‘two goodly faire bibles of the best edition, and largest volume’ for his family and servants to read as ‘continuall residentaries’.

  When Bruen knew he was dying, he told Hinde that, hugely loved as he was, he wanted no elaborate mourning. ‘I wil have no blacks [mourning dress]. I love not any proud or pompous funerals.’ He didn’t want any s
how, nothing in other words beyond the verbal. And then, as he felt death coming on, he said this, the passionate erotic love poetry of the Song of Songs, melded in his mind with the words of Christ on the cross, rising effortlessly to his lips:

  ‘Come Lord Jesus, and kisse me with the kisses of thy mouth, and embrace me with the armes of thy love. Into thy hands do I commend my spirit; O come now, and take me to thine owne selfe; O come, lord Jesus, come quickly. O come, O come, O come.’ And so his spirit fainting and his speech failing, he lay quiet and still, for a little season.

  That strange, intense, distant, scarcely English world, made distant above all by the passion of its religious experience, is the one in which the familiar phrases of the King James Bible were made.

  Eight

  We have Twice and Thrice So Much Scope

  for Oure Earthlie Peregrination…

  Now I haue prepared with all my might for the house of my God, the gold for things to be made of gold, and the siluer for things of siluer, and the brasse for things of brasse, the yron for things of yron, and wood for things of wood; onix stones, and stones to be set, glistering stones, and of diuers colours, and all maner of precious stones, and marble stones in abundance.

  Euen three thousand talents of gold, of the gold of Ophir, and seuen thousand talents of refined siluer, to ouerlay the walls of the houses withal:

  1 Chronicles 29:2, 4

  On 22 May 1607, in the great gallery at Theobalds, Robert Cecil, the all-smiling secretary, who liked to pad silently from room to room, affecting invisibility, acting the part of the impresario who was nothing in himself but revealed all in the glamour of his productions, staged yet another show for the king and queen. He had hired Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones as writer and stage designer. The entertainment was intended to mark the most astonishing gesture of love and generosity from a subject to a king which the world had ever seen: to James (or, as the play pretended, to the queen, Anne) Cecil was giving his father’s enormous gilded palace in which they were all assembled, the family’s proudest possession. Emerging through a scene, designed by Inigo Jones, of ‘Columnes and Architrabe, Freeze, and Coronice’, a series of figures announced that the making of the gift would be a disaster to his own successors. But that didn’t matter. What was important was absolute loyalty and obedience to the king, to the idea of majesty he represented, and the greater ‘design’ – God’s institution of order in the world—of which kingship was the essential part. What were mere windows and walls next to that?