God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  By early 1609, having done his work on the Apocrypha, he was becoming increasingly ill-tempered and refused to come to London until he was ‘either fetched or threatned with a pursivant’, a government official with the powers to distrain and execute warrants. Even here, at this intimate level, there is no escaping the coercive presence of the Jacobean state. Downes pushed his case, complained to the Privy Council that he had worked harder than most and that he needed greater inducement than had already been provided. In May 1609, the king sent him £50.

  But money was tight. By the end of the decade, royal finances were nowhere near capable of paying for the project. In 1608, Cecil had taken over as Lord Treasurer and was now attempting some kind of rationalisation of royal funding, but with James unable to resist the repeated gratification of making marvellous gifts to his friends, Cecil was pouring money into a leaking bucket. He sold quantities of land, reassessed rents, gathered the money granted by parliament in 1606 after the Gunpowder Plot which was still coming in, imposed tariffs on everything except basic food and ships’ stores. By 1610 Cecil had managed to bring almost £1.2 million into the Treasury. In the same time, James doled out nearly £800,000 of that, the equivalent of building, panelling, equipping, gilding, decorating, upholstering, landscaping and in every way beautifying twenty Hatfields. The man was a money hose. And the claims of a few indigent Translators were not going to make much headway at court.

  There was, though, a commercial solution. Since 1577, the right to publish Bibles in English had been sold by the Crown as a monopoly to the Barker family, London printers, first Christopher, and then his son Robert. The Barkers had the right to publish and sell both the Bishops’ and the Geneva Bible but because no one liked the Bishops’ Bible, editions were few. They made their money from a run of Geneva editions, the pocket Bibles of Elizabethan England, in a string of different formats.

  The financing of the publication of the King James Bible remains obscure and only forty years later is there any record of what Barker paid. A 1651 pamphlet claimed that he ‘paid for the amended or corrected Translation of the Bible £3,500:by reason whereof the translated copy did of right belong to him and his assignes’. Is this what Barker paid the king, squeezed out of him by Cecil on the hunt for any source of cash he could find? It is not clear and the Whitehall fire of 1619 destroyed any documents dealing with the government end of the negotiations.

  Perhaps through Barker’s deal with Cecil, some money became available for the Translators, or at least those twelve who were now going to form part of the final shaping committee. Barker often sublet or subleased rights to individual editions of the Bible, or at least shared the risk on them, with other printers and publishers who were members of the Company of Stationers. That may have happened this time too because it was through the company that each man on the revising committee was paid thirty shillings a week—the equivalent of the relatively high annual salary of £75 – for the nine months or so it took to do the work, a total of about £675. The rest of the £3,500 presumably went into the leaking royal bucket.

  The general committee was to consider the translations produced by each of the six companies and make of them a single volume. There is no record of the membership of this review committee but something else, quite miraculously, has survived and it brings one more intimately into the heart of the translation process than any other document. Nearly all the notes and records of the Translators’ discussions have disappeared: destroyed, thrown away, considered irrelevant, reused for grocery bills or in the bindings of other books. But one document has survived, yet again unrecognised and unacknowledged for centuries, rediscovered only in the late 1950s, lurking unseen in the library of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. Again, it took a pair of American scholars—Gustavus Paine and the same Ward Allen who analysed the Bodleian copy of the Bishops’ Bible—to see these papers for what they were. They are remarkable. Here, for a brief moment, the making of the King James Bible, at its most crucial phase, can be seen occurring in front of your eyes. Jotted down in quickly assembled notes is the whole scene: the scholars arguing, consulting, losing their tempers, bringing in learned evidence from church fathers and classical authors, testing variants on each other, seeing what previous translators had done, insisting on the right rhythm, looking for the unique King James amalgam of the rich–plain word, the clarity within a majestic phrase, the court–Puritan perfection. It is as if the ghosts have walked on stage.

  The document—it runs to thirty-nine pages—is a copy made by a late-seventeenth-century antiquarian, William Fulman, of some notes made by one of the Cambridge Translators, John Bois, who had worked on the Apocrypha with Samuel Ward, the Puritan diarist, and under the directorship of Andrew Downes, the Regius Professor of Greek. Bois had been Downes’s pupil. It so happens that this John Bois, one of the near-anonymous of the world, was the subject of a memoir by his close friend, another clergyman and almost exact contemporary, Anthony Walker. As a result, Bois is the only one of the King James workhorses who steps out of the shadows. Walker’s short account of his friend’s life, which survives in a British Library manuscript and was printed in an eighteenth-century collection of curiosities, brims over with affection and admiration but it is also much more than that: evidence of the depth and complexity of religious and scholarly experience which each of those Translators would have brought to the task. In this short biography, one can sense how much the King James Bible is a flower that grows from the deep mulch of sixteenth-century England.

  In many ways, Bois’s life is a familiar story, the story of Reformation England. His father William had been the clever son of a Yorkshire clothier and after school, in the late 1540s or early 1550s, had been sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he took holy orders, fell under the influence of Martin Bucer, the fat, peace-loving, warm-hearted and compromise-minded leader of the Reformation in Strasbourg, who by then had been expelled from his city and was professor of divinity at Cambridge. Bois senior had a moment of revelation at Bucer’s feet. With the sheer human reasonableness of this man as his model, the papacy and all its power structures seemed suddenly unnecessary and William Bois ‘pull’d his neck from under his holinesses yoke’. He became a Protestant and at some time after 1553, as the Catholic regime of Queen Mary reimposed a loyalty to Rome, fled to the countryside.

  He escaped to Hadleigh in Suffolk, a few miles west of Ipswich, a port city, full of the most vibrant mercantile connections to the ideas and presses of Protestant Europe. Hadleigh was, for those few Marian years, the headquarters of a concealed English Protestantism, a tiny, secretive, English, rural Geneva, full of refugees from the terror. As John Foxe described it in his Book of Martyrs, Hadleigh then ‘seemed rather an university of the learned, than a town of cloth-making or labouring people’. William Bois concealed the fact that he was a clergyman, took a farm at Nettlestead just outside Hadleigh and married Mirabel Pooly, a Suffolk gentlewoman, when they were both in their mid-twenties. They had several children, but all except John died young.

  Walker had in his possession a Book of Common Prayer that had belonged to Mirabel Bois, on the flyleaf of which John Bois himself had written:

  This was my mother’s booke; my good mother’s book. Hir name was first Mirable Poolye; and then afterwards Mirable Bois; being so called by the name of her husband, my father, William Bois…She had read the Bible over twelve times, and the Book of Martyrs twice; besides other bookes, not a few.

  In the overwhelmingly male process of the translation, in which women appear only as the nagging wife, the mother of too many children, extravagant distractions from the seriousness of the male world, only Mirabel Bois rises into something like an independent existence.

  John was born on 4 January 1561. His parents, confronted with the death of one child after another, were ‘exceedingly careful’ with him and his education. His father, who exceptionally rarely in Elizabethan England knew both Hebrew and Greek, taught John so well that he had read the whole Bible
through, surely at his mother’s knee, by the time he was five. A year later he was writing in Hebrew himself. This was in his spare time. The little boy walked every day the four miles into Hadleigh where he received further instruction at the grammar school and walked back in the evening. It is another sign of the intimate, interlaced nature of early modern England that his greatest friend when a boy at school was another Translator, John Overall, later Dean of St Paul’s and Bishop of Norwich. They remained friends all their lives.

  Bois’s brilliance took him to St John’s in Cambridge when he was only fourteen, where he was ‘counted very early summer fruit’. Andrew Downes’s eyes sparkled at the arrival of such a boy. Bois already knew more Greek than any other scholar in the college. And Downes clearly loved and nurtured him.

  It was a high-pressured, intellectual upbringing and it produced the kind of person one might expect. Bois was a man of the book, often, at least in the summer time, going to the university library at four in the morning and staying till eight at night; and of a voracious intellectual appetite. He decided at one point to become an expert in medicine, bought a whole library of medical books, but then—a flicker of a joke from this serious man—found that ‘whatsoever disease he read of, he was troubled with the same himself’.

  He continued the life of the don with exemplary commitment and strictness, every week reading a Greek lecture to a group of fellows in his own rooms, usually at four o’clock in the morning, the men sitting round by candlelight. His fame spread beyond the university. The Earl of Shrewsbury nominated him one of his chaplains and in 1596 the rector of Boxworth in the flat rich land between Cambridge and Huntingdon, a Mr Holt, died with a curious provision in his will. He asked his friends ‘if it might be by them procured [that] Mr Bois of S. John’s might become his successor [as vicar of Boxworth], by the marriage of his daughter’.

  In September, the extraordinary meeting envisaged by Mr Holt took place. John Bois, now thirty-five, as unflirtatious and unseductive a bachelor as could be imagined, his life bound up in the arcana of the Greek manuscripts in the university library, his experience one of intellectual debate in the candlelit dawns of his college rooms, rode out to Boxworth to inspect Miss Holt, the parsonage to which she held the key, and the seismic change in life she represented. And Miss Holt, brought up in the village, an agricultural life, her father recently dead, sees, coming up the dusty autumn lane from Cambridge, this cleric, with his tendency to hypochondria, short-sighted, innocent, pale-skinned, so alien. What can the poor girl have thought?

  Anthony Walker is blandness itself: ‘he went ouer to see her, and soon after (they taking liking each of other) he was presented to the parsonage’. The emotional aspect of the marriage gets squeezed into the brackets; the substantive part, the claiming of the property, stands out in the open air.

  Bois moved his huge library to Boxworth parsonage. He proudly told his friends that every word preserved of any Greek author was to be found on his shelves. It was, he told Walker, ‘his darling’. Miss Holt—her christian name is never recorded—was left to get on with the management of their lives almost unaided. Bois was still wedded to his university existence, riding there almost every day to hear Downes and Edward Lively, the nominal director of the Chaderton company, lecture on his beloved texts. En route, Bois allowed his horse to find his own way there, never looking to steer him, but making notes in a little pocket paper-book of the questions ‘wherein he might require satisfaction of his learned friends in Cambridge’. On his way back in the evening, he used ‘to chewe the cud, and lay up his new encrease of knowledge in his safe cabinet, his memory’. The man was not of this world.

  Almost inevitably, things went wrong. Bois was not interested in money. He didn’t share any of the burdens of the family finances.

  He minding nothing but his book; and his wife through want of age and experience, not being able sufficiently to manage other things aright, he was, ere he was aware, fallen into debt. The weight whereof (though it were not great) when he began to feel, he, forthwith, parted with his darling (I mean, his library).

  The hurried sale meant that he received the worst possible price for the books. No record survives of what they were, but by chance the library of one of Bois’s co-Translators on the Apocrypha, William Branthwaite, has been preserved in its entirety. It fills one bay of the library in Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, of which Branthwaite was master. Bois’s shelves would have looked pretty much the same. Branthwaite had a thousand books (William Sancroft, the later, richer divine, had 5,000) and, as a modern historian of the college has written: ‘as the eye roams up from the folios below to the tiny octavos among the ceiling joists, one seems to follow a course in the history of learning, from the medieval Bible and its glossators to the continental protestant divines of the late 16th century’. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs sits alongside Roman Catholic histories of the church, St Bernard and Thomas Aquinas next to a huge range of Puritan commentary, as well as Greek and Hebrew texts: the world of the Translators is there.

  Not much imagination is needed to envisage the terrible scene in the Boxworth parsonage, the anger and resentment on both sides, the books being loaded into a cart to be taken back to the Cambridge booksellers, the dusty nothing left in the vacated shelves, the atmosphere in the house of failure and betrayal. Walker says that Bois thought of leaving his wife and going abroad but that ‘religion and conscience soon gave such thoughts a check’. Undoubtedly their poverty continued. They took in lodgers, including the sons of gentlemen to whom Bois would teach the rudiments. But the tension is palpable four hundred years later. Bois was a most particular man, full of a kind of exact and suppressed energy. He used to walk the twenty miles or so from Cambridge to his mother’s house at West Stow for dinner, and back again in the evening. He loved swimming and was intensely self-preservative, only ever eating two meals: dinner at midday, supper in the evening. Nothing ever passed his lips between the two, unless—the hypochondriac rising to the surface – ‘upon trouble of wind, some small quantitie of aqua-vitae [a brandy-like spirit] and sugar’. After lunch, he carefully picked at and rubbed his teeth so that he ‘carryed to his grave almost an Hebrew alphabet of [them]’. He used to walk after meals and would fast once or twice a week. He always studied standing up, never stood in the window to read and never went to bed with cold feet. As a result, he arrived at old age unwrinkled, with clear sight, perfect hearing, a fresh skin and his body sound ‘excepting a rupture, which he had for many years’.

  There is something off-putting about Anthony Walker’s portrait of his friend. Its enormous self-regard; its lack of love for his poor unintellectual wife (and the unspoken comparison with his adored Bible-reading mother, glowing in his memory as a figure from the heroic age of English martyrdoms); its preciousness; its arrogance—Walker says his ‘humility made him think not many below himself’; its self-congratulation: ‘neither did he want courage to reprove or advise, even the best and greatest of his friends and acquaintance, when he thought they stood in need of admonition’; its pickiness, that preservation of his teeth at a time when the English, awash with sugar from their new slave-worked plantations in the Caribbean, were embarking on their long career of oral decay. This is perhaps someone you might admire; it is not a man you would love.

  There was goodness in him, though. He regularly sent money to the prisoners in Ely gaol and gave £3 every Christmas to the poor of his parish. In church he spoke with great simplicity, knowing that to preach a complicated sermon to a rural parish was to drive a young and tender flock too hard, ‘a course more like to slay than feed their souls’. He could tell funny and delightful stories after supper. And he loved his children, four sons and three daughters. He prayed with them every day, kneeling with them on the bare bricks of the Boxworth parsonage floor. If they misbehaved, he didn’t reprove them but instead denied them the blessing ‘when, at usual times of morning and evening, they did in ordinary manner, request it. Not that he forbore to pray
[for them] but he was pleased to forbear the vocal pronunciation thereof, sometimes for one, sometimes for two days.’ All but two of them died before him, one as an infant, others in their teens, one at thirty. Two of them, his son Robert and his daughter Mirabel, died within a month of each other, of smallpox, in the early summer of 1623. That May, Bois wrote in his notebook: ‘Nulla unquam nox mihi acerbior fuit, quam illa, in qua Mirabella mea moriebatur.’ (Never has there been a more bitter night for me than that in which my Mirabel died.)

  When Bois was chosen as one of the Cambridge Apocrypha company, it might have come as some relief. He went to live in St John’s, returning to his family and parish in Boxworth only at weekends. Some of the Cambridge dons complained that they did not need ‘any help from the country’ but Bois, with his finicky precision, the awe-inspiring hours he devoted to his work, his monk-like removal from the world, was as great a scholar as England could provide. For four years he worked on the Bible, finishing his part early, and was then taken on as an assistant by another of the Translators (whose name is not recorded) who had been negligent and was not going to complete his portion on time.

  This curious man, somehow shrunken by the minuteness of his scholarship, became the amanuensis for the meeting of the final committee. His notes contain some hints of who was there. They are scattered with references to ‘A.D.’, his mentor, the old, irascible and greedy Andrew Downes. In addition, there are references to a C., a B., a D. Harmar and D.H., D: Hutch. and Hutch. D. Harmar is the only one who can be identified for sure. He was John Harmar, one of the Abbot–Savile group, and the warden of Winchester College. The others are uncertain. There was a Ralph Hutchinson, President of St John’s College, Oxford, who was a member of William Barlow’s company translating the Epistles, but he had died in 1606, well before the revising committee began to meet, probably in 1610. It must be another Hutchinson, maybe the William Hutchinson who had gone with Lancelot Andrewes to interview the Separatist Henry Barrow in his prison cell so many years before? That will never be known. As for the ‘C.’ and the ‘B.’, there are too many candidates to make any guess reasonable. Among the Translators were a Dr Clark, a Mr Burleigh and a Mr Binge, all equally obscure; as well as William Bedwell, William Barlow, Laurence Chaderton, Dr Branthwaite and Bois himself. Again, there is no telling.