God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  What is certain is that the meetings were voluble and at times fierce. It was John Bois’s glory hour. ‘Whilest they were conversant in this last businesse, he, & only he, tooke notes of their proceedings, which he diligently kept till his dying day.’ The entire procedure, apart from Bois’s note-taking—secretary to the secretaries, the ultimate recorder—was oral. The twelve of them sat with the sweet smell of the Stationers’ Hall’s new joinery in their nostrils, and according to a note made much later by John Selden, the radical jurist and parliamentarian,

  that part of the Bible was given to him who was most excellent in such a tongue (as the Apocrypha to Andrew Downes), and then they met together, and one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible, either of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian, etc. If they found any fault, they spoke up; if not, he read on.

  This is exactly the picture that Bois’s notes convey. The twelve of them are sitting around the room listening. Where everyone in the meeting accepted a reading, there is no note. Where someone objected, there is discussion, suggestion, variation. The noteless silences are as articulate as the interruptions, verse after verse going by with only the nodding of heads. But underlying that obvious point is something more important. This is the kingdom of the spoken. The ear is the governing organ of this prose; if it sounds right, it is right. The spoken word is the heard word, and what governs acceptability of a particular verse is not only accuracy but euphony. The new Bible, so extraordinarily carefully prepared, was intended to replace above all the Bishops’ or Church Bible, whose main function was to be read aloud in church on Sundays. The Geneva Bible, the Bible of the private Calvinist experience, printed in far smaller type, on far smaller pages, with encyclopaedic notes, maps of the Holy Land and of the route there from Egypt, plans of the temple in Jerusalem, diagrams of the Ark of the Covenant, computations of the age of the world, was perhaps at first intended to continue alongside the new Bible. No interdiction on its printing was issued until 1616. English Christianity was to persist, in other words, as the ‘medley-religion’ it had been since the Reformation. In private, Geneva-style interrogation and explication of the text; in public, in church, the baroque music of the King James manner, large, full-bodied, consciously beautiful. The listening divines in the Stationers’ Hall were, in one sense, the new book’s first audience, not its readers but its hearers, participating in, and shaping, the ceremony of the word.

  As Bois’s notes make clear, the meetings were brisk and far from dry. They got through some thirty revisions a day. Intriguingly, for the core discussion of the most formative text in the English language, the notes are in Latin. Was the conversation in the general meeting also in Latin, the lingua franca of international scholarship, in which these men’s lives had been steeped for decades? The atmosphere of Bois’s notes at least seems to hint at that. There are long disquisitions in Latin peppered with Greek words and phrases. Short and pointed remarks are made in Latin, focusing on the particular sub-text and implications of words in the Greek testament. Latin and Greek were the medium for Renaissance scholarship, for precision of thought. English was simply the target, the destination, not the language in which questions of precise meaning were naturally addressed. The English sentences were being prepared for others, the non-educated, who had no access to the essence of the text which these scholars, like Bois, had been drinking in for decades. The English, in other words, was itself subservient to the original Greek.

  That linguistic hierarchy is also one of the sources of the King James style. This English is there to serve the original not to replace it. It speaks in its master’s voice and is not the English you would have heard on the street, then or ever. It took up its life in a new and distinct dimension of linguistic space, somewhere between English and Greek (or, for the Old Testament, between English and Hebrew). These scholars were not pulling the language of the scriptures into the English they knew and used at home. The words of the King James Bible are just as much English pushed towards the condition of a foreign language as a foreign language translated into English. It was, in other words, more important to make English godly than to make the words of God into the sort of prose that any Englishmen would have written, and that secretarial relationship to the original languages of the scriptures shaped the translation.

  Of course, individual English words and phrases are held up and examined on the point of a knife. Where, in Romans 3:9, the Greek has the word ‘pqoevoleha’, proechometha, meaning ‘are we better?’, the Translators toy with something a little more inflected: ‘Are we safe, and out of danger? are we preferred? are we Gods darlings?’ before settling on the simple version: ‘are we better?’ For God’s attitude to those who request something, the final printed version says that he gives ‘and upbraideth not’. Someone at the meeting suggested ‘without twitting, or hitting in the teeth’, which were rejected, presumably on grounds of decorum: God would not twit or hit in the teeth. For the beauty of a flower before it is withered by the sun they try ‘the goodlynesse, sightlynesse of the appearance’ before settling on ‘the grace of the fashion of it’. They reject ‘a wavering-minded man’ for ‘a double-minded man’. And so on: endless careful picking of the nuance of sound and meaning, the finely balanced, the audibly intelligible, more often than not choosing a form of words that embraces and bridges an ambiguity.

  There are two moments involving Andrew Downes which are particularly revealing about the priorities at work. The first came when they were discussing Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. The apostle is reminding the Jews to behave well, to treat strangers courteously, ‘for thereby some haue entertained Angels vnawares’, when he suddenly interjects a verse (13:8) which in the printed version of the King James Bible says simply:

  Iesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to day, and for euer.

  Amidst all the exhortation towards good behaviour, those words appear to land from another dimension. When the Translators came to this passage, Andrew Downes suggested that the verse should read:

  Iesus Christ, yesterday, and to day the same, and for ever.

  His reason was not to do with meaning, but to do with sound, and the particular nature of the sound which his rearrangement would provide. ‘If the words are arranged in this way, the statement will be more majestic,’ he said. It is the only moment at which that all-important word appears in the discussions, and Downes was right: his version is more majestic than the one finally settled on; but his remark is important in showing that majesty was a quality being consciously sought in the Stationers’ Hall. These men are interested not only in clarity and fidelity but in a grandeur of statement which colours the translation as a whole. (The finished book would include a genealogy of Jesus, drawn up by the map-maker John Speed, showing his descent from David—God was kingly just as the king was godly.)

  A more passionate moment arose in their discussions over the first letter to the Corinthians 10:11. Here Paul is describing the sinful habits of the Jews in the past and the way in which God punished them. He then writes (as the verse appeared in the printed version of the King James Bible): ‘Now all these things happened vnto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition.’ This was a famous crux because the word that appears here as ‘ensamples’ – meaning ‘illustrative instances’ – translates the Greek word ‘stpoi’, typoi, which can be taken instead to mean ‘type’ or ‘archetype’. A fundamental difference in worldview hinges on that difference: were the Jews archetypes of sinfulness, representing everything that had been wicked on earth? Or had they merely gone wrong sometimes, their behaviour to be seen simply as examples of what not to do? Were the Jews in other words simply fallible like us or essentially wicked, not like us at all?

  Augustine had read ‘stpoi’ as ‘archetypes’ and condemned the Jews on the basis of this phrase to a collective and eternal damnation. The Roman Catholic English New Testament produced in Rheims in the 1590s had written ‘figure’, which tended down the same r
oute as Augustine, implying that those who lived before Christ were in a different category to those who lived after. Andrew Downes agreed with them. The word used in the King James Bible, he insisted, must also damn the Jews. ‘That the thought may be complete,’ Bois noted, ‘A.D. sharply and violently exerted himself beyond measure for the interpretation of Augustine, that is, that stpoi were understood as concerning the types and figures of the people of old.’ But the committee resisted. Bois notes: ‘The scope of the passage does not seem to admit this interpretation.’ Nevertheless, true to form, the Bible as published hedges its bets, printing ‘ensamples’ in the main text, ‘Or, Types’ in the margin beside it. The great irenicon held that both interpretations might be true.

  In the end, Andrew Downes’s jealousy of his brilliant pupil became too much. Through the translation, both of them had met Sir Henry Savile, and both had impressed him with their scholarship. He asked them to come to Eton to help with the preparation of the great edition of Chrysostom. (In Stationers’ Hall, they had beside them those volumes of the eight-volume set that had already been printed.) But Bois outshone his old master and, disastrously, Savile asked him to check the notes which Downes had made on Chrysostom. Anthony Walker rubs his hands at the story:

  At the end of the work, Sir Henry was pleased to manifest a little more approbation of [Bois’s] notes than of Mr Downes’s; who (mistaking the object of his anger, or it may be, giving place to envy, when he despaired of revenge) was so displeased with him, that he never was reconciled ’till his death.

  Bois, with his eye on the main chance, and thinking of the dull, repetitive poverty at home, clung closely to Savile. The smooth, diplomatic knight had said something charming to him once (‘He knew no reason why they should not live together’) and Bois interpreted that as meaning Savile would make him one of the well-fed and beautifully housed fellows at Eton. It may also have been Bois who told a famous joke to Lady Savile. She claimed never to have heard of Chrysostom and was bored and annoyed by her husband’s devotion to his enormous pile of Greek manuscripts. Coming up to him one day in the Eton library, she said, ‘Sir Henry, I would I were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me.’ Savile said nothing, but ‘one standing by’ – perhaps Bois—replied, ‘‘‘Madam, you must then be an almanack, that he might change every year.’’ Whereat she was not a little displeased.’ It is the kind of gauche, donnish, unworldly joke Bois might have made.

  For all his promises, Savile slipped out of this noose too. Bois was never made a fellow of Eton. And so Lancelot Andrewes, a better and a less self-serving man, did the right thing and in 1615 made Bois a prebendary of Ely Cathedral, where Andrewes was the bishop. Andrewes did it with grace, telling Bois that he had given him this promotion and this security freely, ‘without any one moving him thereto’.

  Bois eventually retired from Boxworth and spent the end of his life in the calm backwater of Ely. In January 1643, ‘when death began to look him in the face, he met him, not as an enemy, with fear; but as a long expected friend and old acquaintance’. All the same, he suffered a long and painful illness—it might have been cancer—unwilling to be visited, feeling happier alone, as he must have spent most of his life. The day before he died, he asked to be moved into the room where his wife had died the previous May, an act of companionship at the last. There John Bois died in great distress, unable in the end to bear the pain any longer, ‘groaning forth these words, ‘‘O my torment! my torment! my torment!’’’ He had never been heard to say anything of the kind before and those around him watched in horror.

  He was never famous, even at the time, because, as Walker said, Savile took all the credit for the Chrysostom and the five years Bois had spent on the translation ‘makes no noyse, because it carries no name’. He wasn’t a particularly good man, nor particularly likeable, nor a man of any scale. John Bois was no William Tyndale, Lancelot Andrewes or Henry Savile. But as Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester, who famously walked out of a sermon in Chipping Campden to go to the pub, wrote in his Preface to the King James Bible, ‘A man may be counted a vertuous man, though hee haue made many slips in his life…also a comely man and louely, though hee haue some warts vpon his hand, yea, not onely freakles vpon his face, but also skarres.’ That might be said of them all.

  Twelve

  Hath God Forgotten to Be Gracious?

  Hath He in Anger Shut Vp His Tender Mercies?

  And I will make of thee a great nation, and I wil blesse thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt bee a blessing:

  And I will blesse them that blesse thee, and curse him, that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

  Genesis 12:2–3

  By the spring of 1611, a final text had emerged, ready for the printer. After the revising committee had done with it, to the annoyance of the Cambridge Puritans, Richard Bancroft is said to have altered a few words, emphasising the role of bishops in the early church. Summaries at the beginning of each chapter and running heads at the top of each page were added by Miles Smith, the brilliant and pacific Bishop of Gloucester, and by Thomas Bilson, the archetype of the Jacobean courtier–politician–bishop, more often at court than in his Winchester diocese, endlessly scheming for place and advantage, one of the churchmen with direct access to James’s ear.

  It may well have been Bilson who wrote the Epistle Dedicatory to the King, placed at the front of the translation, following the grandiloquent baroque frontispiece for which the Fleming Cornelius Boel, a member of young Prince Henry’s household, and a client of Robert Cecil’s, was paid £10. Boel’s frontispiece is rigorously scriptural, with no hint of earthly powers (unlike the Bibles of Henry VII and Elizabeth, which often contained portraits of the monarch) and makes only a passing reference to the king. This is straightforwardly ‘The Holy Bible Conteyning the Old Testament and the New, Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: and with the former Translations diligently compared and reuised by his Maiesties Speciall Commandment. Appointed to be read in Churches.’ But the Epistle Dedicatory that follows has no such compunction. The glories of the Jacobean state are emblazoned here in unequivocal pomp and glory. The title of the Bilson’s Epistle is set in type far larger than anything in the text of the Bible itself, James is given far more prominence than anything to do with God, and his virtues are proclaimed like a gilded banner fluttering over the words of the translation. This is a book about kingdom, power and glory:

  TO THE MOST

  HIGH AND MIGHTIE

  Prince, Iames by the grace of God

  King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland

  Defender of the Faith, &c.

  Nor, in addressing this God-like figure, does Bilson stint: ‘Great and manifold were the blessings (most dread Soueraigne) which Almighty God, the Father of all Mercies, bestowed vpon vs the people of England, when first he sent your Maiesties Royall person to rule and raigne ouer us.’ James is the Sun that shines over us; his presence disperses all murk and mistiness. England itself is ‘our Sion’, James and God are virtually indistinguishable and the translation itself holds a divinely sanctioned place between the enemies on either side. It was a challenge, on one hand, to those ‘Popish persons at home or abroad’, whose only desire was to keep the people ‘in ignorance and darknesse’ – conveniently ignoring the great Catholic translation of the Bible made at the English college in Douai, from which these Translators had lifted many plangent phrases; and on the other a summons to those ‘self-conceited brethren, who runne their own ways, and giue liking unto nothing but what is framed by themselues, and hammered on their Anuile’. Here, in a few words, are the essential points of the Jacobean political programme. England is to be a model of irenic moderation. The majesty of God is to be elided with the majesty of King James; the light of the word is to be brought to those who are living in darkness; the subversive egotism of the harsher Puritans is to be rejected and revealed for the sterility it is. Bilson rises to his wildly overblown blessing:<
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  The Lord of heauen and earth blesse your Maiestie with many and happy dayes, that as his heauenly hand hath enriched your Highnesse with many singular and extraordinary graces; so you may be the wonder of the world in this later age, for happinesse and true felicitie, to the honour of that Great GOD, and the good of his Church.

  Miles Smith—and it is his greatest monument—then wrote the long and beautiful Preface to the translation. It is rarely printed with the Bible nowadays, but, if there is a slight smell of corruption about Bilson’s Epistle, Smith’s words exude all that is best about Jacobean England, the hopes for this translation and the beliefs in the power and value of the work which was now so nearly complete. Like Bilson’s letter, it is a defence of what they have done against the cavils of the Roman Catholics, and a paean to James as its progenitor. It insists on the virtues and necessity of translation, and snipes at the Catholics for their love of obscurity and darkness. It celebrates the virtues of accuracy but scoffs, happily enough, at the over-scrupulosity of the Puritans who insist on the same word being translated in the same way every time.