God's Secretaries

by Adam Nicolson

  This was the crux. James’s experience of angry and threatening Presbyterians in Scotland, who endlessly and loudly promoted the theory that kings were subject to God’s and so to the church’s judgement, was never going to return to that. It was too challenging and too uncomfortable. The beauty of the Church of England, with its full panoply of bishops and archbishops, was its explicit acceptance of the king as its head. Bishops without a king, an episcopal republic, was perhaps a possibility. But a king without bishops, subject to a presbytery, was always in danger of being removed; it was a revolution waiting to happen. Bishops were the sine qua non of the kind of monarchy and church James needed, wanted and believed in. ‘No bishops,’ he told Reynolds furiously, ‘no king.’ That, of course, was precisely the elision of the political and the religious points which the moderate Puritans had been anxious to avoid, and which the bishops, for months now, had been working to achieve. It meant one thing: the bishops’ party had won.

  Into this fierce, overheated atmosphere, where the mild divisions in the Church of England were being whipped into extremity by the quick, intellectual, joky, combative, slightly unsocialised banter, argument and bullying of the king, egged on by the excited Bancroft, the first suggestion, the seed of the King James Bible, dropped. It came from John Reynolds, at the end of a long list of suggestions. The petitioning ministers he represented would like ‘one only translation of ye byble to be authenticall and read in ye churche’.

  In another jotted-down account of the scene, Reynolds is more courteous: ‘May your Majesty be pleased that the Bible be new translated?’ Bancroft immediately slammed back at the idea: ‘If every man’s humour might be followed, there would be no end of translating.’ That is the voice of the instinctive authoritarian, happier with the status quo than with any possible revision of it, the voice of the bishop who at the Earl of Essex’s futile rebellion in 1601 had personally gathered a gang of pikemen around him, holding a pike himself, and had repulsed the slightly pathetic and misguided rebels at Ludgate, as they tried to enter the City of London.

  James, though, was a more complex character than the fierce anti-Puritan bishop, and craftier. Without hesitation—or at least in Barlow’s crawling account, where the words read as if they have been tidied up after the event—the king turns Reynolds’s suggestion on its head. Implicit in the Puritan divine’s request was a criticism of the official Elizabethan Bible, known as the Bishops’ Bible after the bishops who had translated it in 1568. It was a royalist and anti-Puritan document, larded with a frontispiece showing Queen Elizabeth and her ministers presiding over a bishop-dominated church. It was a Bible of the hierarchy, not of the people, and no Puritan liked it. Puritans preferred the translation of the Bible made by Calvinist Englishmen in the 1550s in Geneva, the headquarters of Calvinism. The Geneva Bible came interleaved with a large number of explanatory notes, many of them explicitly anti-royalist. The word ‘tyrant’, for example, which is not to be found in the King James Bible, occurs over 400 times in the Geneva text.

  Reynolds was without doubt asking for a revision to the Bishops’ Bible, probably in favour of the Geneva Bible which he would have used himself. That is the meaning of his phrase ‘one only translation’, which also makes a subtle appeal to James’s dream of unity. But James—and if Barlow’s account can be trusted, this is a witness to his quickness and sharpness—caught the suggestion and reversed it, ‘professing that he could neuer, yet, see a Bible well translated in English; but the worst of all, his Maiestie thought the Geneua to be’. Barlow explains why: ‘Withal he gave this caveat (upon a word cast out by my Lord of London) that no marginal notes should be added—having found in them which are annexed to the Geneva translation…some notes very partial, untrue, seditious, and savoring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits.’

  James was particularly exercised by the Geneva note at Exodus 1:19. It was an all-important passage, in his view, for understanding the nature of royal authority and the relationship between royal and divine instructions. It is also extraordinarily revealing about the difference between the Jacobean and the modern attitude to authority. In Ancient Egypt, Pharaoh had ordered the Jewish midwives to kill all the male children born to the Jewish people. The midwives disobeyed these royal instructions and saved all the baby boys. Pharaoh wanted to know why. ‘And the midwiues said vnto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are liuely, and are deliuered ere the midwiues come in vnto them.’

  This was, of course, a lie. Jewish pregnancies came to precisely the same term as any other. The modern reaction would surely be to admire the midwives’ courage in standing up to the Pharaoh and their presence of mind in telling a straightforward and quite convincing white lie. Their disobedience was brave and their deception clever. But the Genevan note ran as follows: ‘Their disobedience in this was lawful, but their deception is evil.’

  For James, their behaviour had been the essence of sedition. Their disobedience was wicked and their deception made it worse. It was clearly the midwives’ duty to obey the royal instruction, to conform to the authority of the powers that be and to murder the babies. James would have been on Herod’s side and no royally sanctioned translation of the Bible could tolerate any suggestion to the contrary.

  He expanded on what he would like the new Bible to be like.

  His Highnesse wished, that some especiall pains should be taken in that behalf for one vniforme translation…and this to be done by the best learned of both the Vniversities, after them to be reuiewed by the Bishops, and the chiefe learned of the Church; from them to be presented to the Priuy Councell; and lastly to bee ratified by his Royall authority; to be read in the whole Church, and no other.

  Everything implicit in the conference and in the competing constituencies in the country at large; everything that had been building up since Sir Robert Carey’s ride to Edinburgh nine months earlier; and, in a wider way, everything involved in the long cultural revolution that had been rolling across Europe for the previous eighty-five years: all of that came to a point in James’s response. Reynolds had wanted, when all the code was stripped away, a strict Puritan Bible, non-episcopal, the naked word of God, truly transmitted. And to that request James had said, in effect, ‘Yes; I will give you the very opposite of what you ask.’ A translation that was to be uniform (in other words with no contentious Geneva-style interpretations set alongside or within the text); with the learned authority of Oxford and Cambridge (which, at least in their upper echelons, were profoundly conservative institutions, both of which had sent to the king long and high-flown refutations of every point in the Puritans’ Millenary Petition); to be revised by the bishops (the very influence that Reynolds did not want); then given, for goodness’ sake, to the Privy Council, in effect a central censorship committee with which the government would ensure that its stamp was on the text, no deviationism or subversion allowed; and finally to James himself, whose hostility to any whiff of radicalism this afternoon had been clear enough. And this ferociously episcopal and monarchist Bible was to be the only translation that could be read in church: ‘no other’. The treasured Geneva Bible would be forced to retreat into the privacy of people’s homes and could no longer be used for public preaching.

  The deep paradox and lasting value of the King James Bible is its response to both Reynolds’s and James’s instincts. Once the cantankerous and oddly hysterical atmosphere of the conference had faded, the deeper and slower rhythms of Jacobean royal ideology took control. Those were the rhythms of James’s better side. His troubled upbringing had shaped a man with a divided nature. Later history, wanting to see him as a precursor for his son’s catastrophe, has chosen only the ridiculous aspects of James: his extravagance, his vanity, his physical ugliness, his weakness for beautiful boys, his self-inflation, his self-congratulatory argumentativeness. Some of that had been in evidence at Hampton Court. But there was another side to James which breathed dignity and richness: a desire for wholeness and consen
sus, for inclusion and breadth, for a kind of majestic grace, lit by the clarity of a probing intelligence, rich with the love of dependable substance, for a reality that went beyond show, that was not duplicitous, that stood outside all the corruption and rot that glimmered around him. These were the elements in James and in Jacobean court culture that came to shape the Bible which bears his name.

  Four

  Faire and Softly

  Goeth Far

  He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fooles shall be destroyed.

  Proverbs 13:20

  The stricter Puritans were disappointed with the outcome of Hampton Court—no great change to the church, and certainly no hint of revolution—but at court an air of optimism prevailed. The English Church would be unified, its Elizabethan squabbles forgotten. England and Scotland would become one country. Peace would be established in Europe. There would even be discussions with the Pope about the reunification of the Roman and the Protestant churches. Money and happiness would dance together through the increasingly elegant streets of London. James’s Arcadian vision of untroubled togetherness would descend on the soul of England like a balm.

  Much of that looks like a joke now. The seventeenth century would witness a civil war, in which a higher proportion of the British population was killed than in any war before or since. Throughout that century, attempts at imposing unity of belief or government stimulated only anarchy, violence and revolt. Scotland continued to loathe the very idea of a bishop and was affronted by the semi-papist horrors of the Book of Common Prayer. English suspicion of Scottish freeloaders remained as intense as ever and it was the Scots who eventually tipped Britain over into Civil War. In Ireland, native Catholics, treated as animals, were brutally replaced by incoming Scots and English settlers, and a mutually murderous history began which lasted into the twenty-first century. James’s dream of a unified and peaceful realm, guaranteed by his own Solomonic wisdom, was perhaps a fantasy too far. The whole of Europe had been convulsed by violence and change since the 1530s, wars which would continue into 1640s. The same cultural and political currents were running on the European mainland as in Britain; it is perhaps a measure of the excellence of Jacobean government, or at least of the vitality of James’s political ideals, that war in Britain did not break out until 1639.

  Almost the only remnant of that dream, a piece of flotsam after the tide has passed, is the King James Bible. Its great and majestic beauties, a conscious heightening of the word of God (often far more grandly expressed in Jacobean English than in earlier English translations or in the Hebrew or Greek of the original) is a window on that moment of optimism, in which the light of understanding and the majesty of God could be united in a text to which the nation as a whole, Puritan and prelate, court and country, simple and educated, could subscribe.

  As a sign of his willingness to consult with the representatives of the country, and not as any kind of duty, James summoned his first parliament of the reign in March. Bonhomie was not its mood. Most of its members were sympathetic to the Puritan cause and felt aggrieved at the lack of satisfaction the Puritan party had received at Hampton Court. James utterly mishandled them. He offered none of Elizabeth’s honeyed words but instead lectures on the nature of kingship, on his own nearness to God and, most explosively of all, on the fact that the MPs’ own privileges were not independent but derived from him. The witty, opinionated, sharp-edged talker in him torpedoed any kind of Solomonic judiciousness. The MPs, already deeply suspicious of the army of grasping Scots who had come down the Great North Road, would have nothing of any talk of union with Scotland. James might have commissioned himself an elaborate imperial crown, he might have himself described on coins as King of Great Britain, mountains of English gold might have ended up in the pockets of Scots courtiers, but the MPs knew they belonged to an English parliament. If they suddenly found themselves in a parliament of Great Britain, what would happen to their ancient and treasured privileges?

  The relationship between king and parliament went nowhere. Bitter speeches were made on both sides, which James’s late attempts at mollification did little to alleviate. Just along the Strand in London, peace negotiations were being conducted with a delegation of high-ruffed and black-suited Spaniards to bring the long war to an end. They moved easily towards their close in which every single one of the English negotiators, including Robert Cecil, received a handsome pension from the Spanish crown. But in the Palace of Westminster there was no such happy outcome. James scolded the members for their impertinence. The overwhelmingly difficult questions of finance, of tax in peacetime, of customs dues, were not resolved. Elysium seemed far less accessible than before and the parliament was dismissed in July. James’s hopes for a happily reconciled nation looked very distant, at least in the political sphere, and his relationship with parliament would continue to alternate between expressions of love and loyalty, and unfettered arguments over money and their respective rights. A desired amity was scuppered, in other words, by a perfectly real clash of interests.

  That political failure to achieve a sense of national unity, however, could, in a slightly paradoxical way, actually fuel James’s efforts to bring peace and coherence to the church. The church, and its new Bible, could be driven towards the perfect condition which parliament was so obstinately refusing to adopt. And in pursuit of that goal, James found the perfect lieutenant in Richard Bancroft.

  Old Archbishop Whitgift had died in February, after catching a cold travelling in his barge on the winter Thames. Bancroft was his nominated successor and would soon be elevated from London to Canterbury. Like any effective politician, he exuded the complexity of the age. He was a ferocious defender of the Church of England but was the readiest of servants and messengers for the king. He had pursued the Puritans with ferocity in the past and would now harry any Separatists out of the church, driving them to Amsterdam, Leiden and eventually America; and yet, in the matter of this new Bible, he created a team of Translators drawn from an extraordinarily wide spectrum, a generous slice of Jacobean England to be set to work on its central project. This is even more remarkable considering that Bancroft had objected violently to the idea of a new translation at all, having pleaded with James on his knees against it. But Bancroft was politician and monarchist enough to see that when James responded to the idea, the church should take the initiative and mould the new Bible to its own purposes.

  That summer Bancroft was a whirl of energy. Letter after letter from his office begins with his ‘verie hastie commendations’: ‘I have written so many letters about this matter of Translation,’ he wrote to the Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge University, ‘as keepinge no copies of them, I doe confound my self, forgetting what and to whom I have written.’ All excuses that any possible Translator might have, he told the Vice-Chancellor, had to be ‘sett aside’. This was the king’s commission and James hovers in the background of every instruction. It was ‘his Highness’ who was busy drawing up the rules for the Translators to follow. It was ‘his Majesties pleasure’ that the most learned men should be drawn in. And to a set of Cambridge scholars he wrote at the end of July: ‘I am persuaded his Royall mynde reioyceth more withe good hope, wch he hathe for the happy successe of that worke [the new Bible], then of his peace concluded with Spayne.’

  This is going far beyond your average Jacobean formalities. Bancroft, it is quite clear, was doing his master’s work and, as these letters reveal, the method, staffing and manner of the King James Bible stemmed from James himself. The Bible was to become part of the new royal ideology. Elizabeth had portrayed herself as a Protestant champion against the powers of Rome and Spain. That was now out of date. James, Rex Pacificus, was to make the Bible part of the large-scale redefinition of England. It had the potential to become, in the beautiful phrase of the time, an ‘irenicon’, a thing of peace, a means by which the divisions of the church, and of the country as a whole, could be encompassed in one unifying fabric founded on the divine authority o
f the king.

  It was from the beginning a tightly organised, tightly policed and tightly managed programme. In the arrangements for financing it, selecting and supervising the personnel and defining the methods and principles by which the translation was to be made, Bancroft performed his role as royal agent.

  First, the money: there was very little of it to spare. Elizabeth, from her expenditure on the war against Catholicism in Ireland and the Netherlands, as well as at sea, had left the Exchequer destitute. James’s own expectations of the riches of England were going to make things worse. In July, Bancroft wrote to his fellow bishops on the king’s behalf. He had a set of Translators in mind but ‘in this number divers of them have either no ecclesiastical preference at all, or else so very small, as the same is far unmeet for men of their deserts, and yet, We of ourself in any convenient time cannot well remedy it’. The bishops would have to pay for the translation themselves by finding livings for the Translators of £20 a year or upwards. Bancroft then wrote on his own behalf to explain the situation. The king, his loyal archbishop explained, had wanted to pay the costs himself, but his advisers had thought otherwise:

  some of my lords, AS THINGS NOW GO, did hold it inconvenient. I must require you in his Majesty’s name, according to his good pleasure in that behalf, as soon as possibly you can, you send me word what shall be expected from you…For I am to acquaint his Majesty with every man’s liberality towards this most godly work.