God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  Quite a lot, as it turned out. Ben Jonson did not write about this, nor Inigo Jones make it part of his mis-en-scène, but Cecil had been negotiating long and hard with the king over Theobalds. James had loved it and lusted after it ever since his first sunlit arrival in England four years before. He had often returned to its comforts and its glories and had been pressing Cecil to give it to him. The secretary now exacted his price: eighteen manors, including the huge old royal palace at Hatfield, only nine miles away, just as convenient for London, a mile or two off the Great North Road which James habitually took to go hunting at Royston and Newmarket. Through a series of subtle negotiations, Cecil established that in addition to the old medieval palace (all but one side of which he would demolish), Hatfield would come with a vast acreage around it. His father’s park at Burghley near Stamford was twice the size of Monaco, and the son was intent on matching the father. Well before the ceremonies at Theobalds, he had visited the site at Hatfield and had begun planning his palatial new house there. Of course, at this ceremony, he could look on his king with the most humble and beneficent smile.

  Unlike Theobalds, of which only a staircase remains, ripped out, sold off and reinserted in Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, Cecil’s great house at Hatfield, which was built in under four years, still survives. And although Hatfield is not quite unaltered—there have been fires and redecorations—for the most part its great rooms are still so like their original condition that to walk around them is like entering the world in which the King James Bible was made.

  The building, for which the first foundations were dug that August, and which cost £10,000 to build, another £28,000 to decorate—at a time when you could get a design by Inigo Jones for £10 and a Yorkshire gentleman would happily live on £100 a year—was complete by the spring of 1611. It is, in other words, the King James Bible’s exact contemporary, the product of precisely the same cultural moment, produced from precisely the same court culture, with precisely the same intention of celebrating and in a certain sense ‘housing’ James I and his dream of majesty. Can Hatfield House, then, be read as a companion to the Bible whose genesis is so close to its own?

  This is scarcely what conventional historians of Jacobean England have done, but it is possible to see some connections here. Enter Hatfield and all the ingredients of Jacobean court mentality hit you like a wave. First, there is a certain antiquarianism. Although the house is planned in a new way—no courtyards, a clustering of rooms into large and massy blocks, an open Italian loggia on the ground floor over which the Long Gallery runs—there is a recognisable medieval pattern in one’s arrival into a screens passage, with the great hall on one side and the kitchens on the other. The great Marble Hall itself reproduces the heart of a medieval house, and the staircase beyond it leads to the richer and more private rooms of the Cecils themselves. This is a deeply traditional arrangement of a great man’s house; no break here with the antiquity of England.

  But the place is dripping in Jacobean style, governed above all by the sheer love of stuff, the early modern lust for substance. Every element of the Marble Hall, with its screen at each end and its original tables and benches still in situ, is carved and enriched as no later taste would have contemplated. Bushy-bearded and vast-breasted hermaphrodites stare out from the hugely enriched screens. On the great staircase beyond it, every post is carved with intricate decoration, every pillar surmounted by a figure, heraldic lion or almost-classical, slightly disproportionate boy, playing the bagpipes or holding aloft not quite spherical spheres. In the seventeenth century both boys and lions were gilded, as was the huge carved pendant which hangs from the ceiling above them. Even the gates at the foot of the staircase, put there to prevent dogs from going upstairs, are pimpled and bobbled, no line left uncurled, no surface plain. In the long gallery on the floor above, to which the staircase gave access, yard after yard of decorated joinery extends in a long disappearing perspective in front of you, the ceiling patterned in interlocking arabesques, the painted fireplaces a display of the classical orders, many of the gilt and jewelled, rock crystal and pearl treasures on show collected by the Jacobean Cecils to decorate this place: it is the most beautiful surviving room of Jacobean England.

  Enrichment was all and that is one of the keys to Jacobean England: love of decorated stuff. In 1609 Cecil would set up England’s first shopping mall on the Strand, called Britain’s Burse, in tribute to his sovereign’s dream of unification. The world of Britain’s Burse was the world ‘Cecil-Hatfield’ (as its creator wanted it called) was intended to crown and was also the milieu from which the King James Bible would emerge. The country and the world were growing and bursting at the seams. The explorers of the previous century had ‘so muche enlarged the boundes of the Worlde, that now we have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination’. The globe had suddenly become elastic and from all the new corners came the delicious luxuries. Things had never been so rich. Goods were pouring into England: silks, lace, Venetian glass, tin-glazed ceramics, fine thick Italian paper, German swords and armour, Turkish carpets and Venetian instruments, metal-threaded textiles like the wonderful Italian silk worn by James’s Queen Anne, in which the peacock eyes sparkle across its glimmered surface. They came from the other end of the earth. ‘What doe you lacke?’ one of Ben Jonson’s sales boys asked, ‘What is’t you buy? Veary fine China stuffes, of all kindes and quallityes? China chaynes, China braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China knives, China boxes, China cabinetts.’

  At the grand opening of the Burse—with celebratory text by Ben Jonson—Cecil provided a special shop for the king and his wife and children over whose door was written: ‘All other places give for money, here all is given for love.’ Delicious and perfect presents were provided for the king and queen and princes. Throughout the little stalls of the Burse (no hammering of metals and no sale of vegetables, no dogs, no fighting and no whores allowed) all the most modern and glamorous objects of the mercantile world were on sale: eastern satins, golden bracelets, fans, umbrellas, sundials, silk-flowers, perspectives (precursors of the telescope), musical instruments, toy automata and singing birds were all on sale. Everything seemed to be from China or Virginia. For the true elite, England in the first decade of the seventeenth century was life on satin pillows.

  It was a culture of repetition, of piling richness on richness, in love with the exotic and with the exotic enriched. It wasn’t enough to have a china bowl; it should be set in a gilded mount. It wasn’t enough to have a wonderful dress; it should be slashed to show the more wonderful material beneath. Every surface was to be alive with decoration and illustration. Embroidery was to overlace richness. Plainness was poverty and unless courtiers looked glorious, they, or what they were seeking, could scarcely be considered. The Earl of Suffolk wrote to Sir John Harington with sage advice on coming to court:

  I would wish you to bee well trimmed; get a new jerkin well bordered, and not too short; the king saith, he liketh a flowing garment; be sure it not be all of one sort, but diversely coloured, the collar falling somewhat down, and your ruff well stiffened and brisky. We have lately had many gallants who failed in their suits for want of due observance of these matters. The King is nicely heedfull of such points, and dwelleth on good looks and handsome accoutrements.

  This love of variegation, of the multiplicity of things, overlay something else: an appetite for the undeniably solid. The hunger for substance was Victorian in its intensity. There is no Augustan or eighteenth-century conception of fineness or slenderness. Chippendale would not have thrived in Jacobean England. What was valuable to a Jacobean was robust and huge. Tables and sideboards sprouted fat melons clamped to their legs. From the high, plain and virginal concealment of Elizabethan taste, women’s necklines plunged through the first decade of the century to a deep, bosom-revealing immodesty. At court masques, the queen and her attendant ladies would appear dressed in nothing but the finest silk gauze.

  The two tastes
lay within each other: a love of stuff, of the material thing, was wrapped in a baroque entrancement with the flickering, the dramatic, the elaborated and the enriched. The interplay of these two aesthetic principles, of show and, in Hamlet’s famous phrase to his mother, of ‘that within which passeth show’, is one of the governing tensions of the great Jacobean translation of the Bible. Beauty was about firmness but it was also about brilliance; clarity vied with glitter; candour with bitter irony; simplicity with complexity; a vision of the pure with a relishing of the lush.

  In public the grandees who would have filled the rooms of Hatfield wore the strict and dignified blacks of the statesman (it was said to be a Spanish habit, a sober, imperial style). In private, all controls were off. The Earl of Northampton, the Henry Howard who had been Cecil’s go-between with James before the accession, a complex, political self-promoter, retired from a day dressed in nothing but black to sleep in a bed of Chinese lacquer, overdecorated with silver branches and his own coat of arms on the headpiece, with ‘the toppe and valance of purple velvett striped downe with silver laces and knottes of silver, the frindge blewe silke and silver with 8 cuppes and plumes spangled suteable, the 5 curtanes of purple taffeta with buttones and lace of silver, the counterpoint of purple damaske suteable laced.’ To wash, at night and in the morning, he had a generous silver basin, in the form of a shell, and a ewer in the shape of a mermaid. The rosewater sprang out into the bowl through the mermaid’s large and protuberant nipples.

  At Hatfield, Cecil also had a sumptuous bed, with its tester, valance and headpiece of crimson velvet, embroidered with his arms. But that lushness and fullness of Jacobean decor, of the Jacobean sense of the beautiful, required one further element: illumination. No buildings in English history until the twentieth century had such enormous light-admitting windows as these great private prodigy houses. The rooms encrusted with the beloved substantiality were also flooded with the all-revealing light. ‘Light’, Thomas Fuller, the church historian, wrote, was ‘God’s eldest daughter [and] a principall beauty in a building’. All rooms were arranged with a thought to how the light from the windows would fall into them at different times of the day. Modern conservators, struggling to preserve the gorgeousness of fabrics in vastly overlit rooms, are grappling with precisely the combination of qualities Jacobean taste required. Outside the walls of London, north of the Tower, enormous factories were set up to satisfy the demand for glass. Experts in glass were brought in from the Netherlands. And the grandees who commissioned the glass palaces had their portraits painted in the total, flattening light those windows provided.

  That depthlessness of Jacobean portraiture, in which there is no chiaroscuro, no moulding shadow, is often seen as a simple technical failure, the chasm between Holbein and Van Dyck. Cecil, like James, hated being painted, which is why nearly all images of him repeat the same, copied pose, in which his flat white face seems to lack definition, or even a third dimension. In portrait after portrait at Hatfield, as elsewhere, his face, with its unresponsive eyes, looks like an oval cut out of paper. But perhaps this two-dimensionality is a symptom of something else: here, even with the luxury and thickness of the Turkey carpet underfoot and the Venetian silk velvets on the table, the ostrich feathers in the band of the hat, the Indian pearls at its brim, the jewelled pommel of the German sword on its embroidered hanger at the waist, still there is, washing over it all, the clarity of a pure, unshadowed, Protestant light.

  One can read almost everything from this visual and aesthetic amalgam into the making of the King James Bible. Precious light is what the Translators of the King James Bible thought, at least in part, they were bringing to their readers. James himself had written that ‘it is one of the golden Sentences, which Christ our Sauiour vttered to his Apostles, that there is nothing so couered, that shal not be reuealed, neither so hidde, that shall not be knowen; and whatsoeuer they haue spoken in darkenesse, should be heard in the light’. Light was understanding. ‘Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light,’ wrote Miles Smith, the author of the Preface to the Bible, ‘that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.’

  The light of understanding was one of the qualities which Christ had brought to the world. Smith’s wonderful words, easy and without pretension; sensuous without affectation; profoundly generous, shaped by a desire to reveal the innermost secrets to all, might stand as representative for the underlying aim of all the Translators. When Lancelot Andrewes died, William Laud, his disciple and admirer, then Bishop of London, wrote simply in his diary, that Andrewes had been ‘the great light of the Christian world’.

  It may be difficult to think of an age in which multiple and apparently contradictory qualities are rubbed so closely together but the multiplicity—and the love of mixture, which took such striking form in the hugely exaggerated hermaphrodites which decorated so many of the great Jacobean interiors—was something from which the King James Bible would draw its vitality. The flat, overall illumination of Protestant ideology was all very well but for these sophisticates, pure, simple plainness was not enough. Francis Bacon, corrupt, brilliant and unlikeable, builder of his own great pair of houses, now disappeared, not far away at St Albans, famous for the pale-faced catamites he kept to warm his bed, the inventor of the English essay, later to be Lord Chancellor, and, later still, accused of corruption, to be thrown to parliament as a sop to their demands, defined in his essay ‘On Truth’ the subtle and shifting Jacobean relationship to light and beauty, to plainness and richness, to clarity and sparkle. ‘This same Truth’, he wrote,

  is a Naked, and Open day light, that doth not shew the Masques, and Mummeries, and Triumphs of the world, halfe so Stately, and daintily, as candlelights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearle, that sheweth best by day: But it will not rise to the price of a Diamond, or Carbuncle, that sheweth best in varied lights. A mixture of a Lie doth ever adde Pleasure.

  That shifting, layered sensibility is also, in part, the world into which the King James Bible was born. The king’s instructions were perfectly explicit: they were to use ‘circumlocution’, in other words language in which meaning was to be ‘sett forth gorgeously’. There was no terror of richness in this. Richness, as King David had known when he decorated the temple for God, was one of the attributes of God. Majesty, honour and power were gorgeous in themselves and the Jacobean sense of the beautiful loved both pearls and diamonds, both openness and ceremony. Miles Smith referred in his Preface to ‘the Sun of righteousness, the Son of God’, and it was the beams of that sun which the King James Translators would bring to the people. But the sense of clarity and directness was sewn and fused to those other Jacobean virtues: a pattern of order and authority; the majestic substance, the ‘meat’ of the word of God; the great ceremonial atmosphere of its long, carefully organised, musical rhythms, a ceremony of the word; an atmosphere both godly and kingly; both rich and pure, both multiplicitous and plain. This Bible, in other words, would absorb the full aesthetics of the age. You only have to read the Translators at full flood, feeling behind them the sense of unstoppable divine authority, to hear the immense, gilded majesty of the translation. In describing God’s assembling of the armies of a vengeful justice, they reached their apogee:

  And he will lift vp an ensigne to the nations from farre, and will hisse vnto them from the end of the earth: and behold they shall come with speed and swiftly.

  None shalbe weary, nor stumble amongst them: none shall slumber nor sleepe, neither shall the girdle of their loynes be loosed, nor the latchet of their shooes be broken.

  Their roaring shalbe like a lyon, they shall roare like yong lions: yea they shal roare and lay hold of the pray, and shall carie it away safe, and shall deliuer it.

  And in that day they shall roare against them, like the roaring of the sea: and if one looke vnto the land, behold darkeness
e and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heauens therof.

  Nine

  When we Do Luxuriate and Grow Riotous

  in the Gallantnesse of this World

  And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:

  And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.

  I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your highways shall be desolate.

  And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;

  Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.

  Leviticus 26:19, 21–4

  It was an intense, competitive and vitalised world. But the question remains: how did this Bible emerge from it? How did the selected men deliver? After the initial flurry of documents, there is a dearth of evidence almost until the final printed volume appeared in 1611. Once the king had decided it should happen; once Bancroft had disseminated the Rules; and once the Translators had been chosen, almost the entire process drops from view. A few tiny glimpses remain. In November 1604, the ubiquitous Lancelot Andrewes was asked to attend a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries to which he had been elected in the summer. He sent a note to Mr Hartwell, secretary of the society, to excuse his absence because ‘this afternoon is our translation time’. As the Oxford antiquary, Anthony á Wood, recorded, some of the Oxford translators began meeting once a week in John Reynolds’s rooms in Corpus Christi College, and ‘there as ’tis said, perfected the work, not withstanding the said Doctor, who had the chief hand in it, and all the while sorely afflicted with gout’. Beyond that, of the beginning of the process, there was for centuries almost nothing to say. More recently, though, scholars have made discoveries which throw some real light on the process, in particular three long-hidden manuscripts.