God's Secretaries

by Adam Nicolson

  A wicked, mean, greedy, self-indulgent, vituperative, pompous bishop? It is certainly possible, before one reads a word that Abbot wrote, to see him as that, an obdurate brute, coarsened by rage and the worst of the Protestant inheritance.

  There is more to him. He could joke about his devotions to Jonah. ‘Before that I can come to this fourth chapter,’ he wrote, ‘the fourth year has now expired.’ He could write lyrically and movingly about the fading of earthly life: ‘remember how that every winter the glory of the trees and all the woods is decayed; their leaves lie in the dust, their cheerful green is but blackness—the sap and life is held in the root within the ground—all the tree doth seem dead’. That is not far from what John Donne might have written. Or on sin, which

  is like a smoke, like fire, it mounteth upward, and comes even before God to accuse us; it is like a serpent in our bosom, still ready to sting us; it is the devil’s daughter. A woman hath her pains in travail and delivery but rejoiceth when she seeth a child is born; but the birth of sin is of a contrary fashion; for all the pleasure is in the bringing forth, but when it is finished and brought forth, it tormenteth us continually; they haunt us like tragicall furies.

  Eloquence, though, is not the preserve of the virtuous—or even the entertaining. A version of Abbot’s interminable disquisitions on the tale of Jonah was published in 1600 and a copy of it is preserved in the Cambridge University Library. An early-seventeenth-century reader, pen in hand, began to pick his way through it.

  When we do luxuriate and grow riotous [Abbot began one magnificent passage] in the gallantnesse of this world…and with the vntamed heyfer which is full fed, and growne perfectly wanton, we kicke against the sole author of our happinesse and beatitude; with the Magnificoes of the world, and great-mouthed Gloriosoes we do both contemn our brethren, and speake against the Highest.

  The reader, alerted perhaps by the marvellous vigour of this Puritan contempt for those he is accusing of contempt, starts to write in the margin. But then the grandeur of the language begins to lose him. Abbot relishes the word ‘audacitie’. The margin notes: ‘audacitie is boldnes’. From then on the reader is reduced to parsing for himself, converting Abbot’s Latinisms into English. For Abbot’s ‘defigrement’ he writes ‘illes’, for ‘impetuous’ ‘violent’, for ‘alacritie’ ‘cheerfulnes’ and finally for Abbot’s baffling ‘inculcating’ and ‘insinuation’ there are just stars and underlinings. What on earth could these words have meant? And after page 43, the seventeenth-century reader gives up. Abbot is boring and the remaining 592 pages are entirely unmarked. Along with the other oceans and continents of Jacobean biblical exegesis, they had never been read.

  It isn’t difficult to see how the King James Bible emerges from this pattern of thought and language. There is an immense and sonorous dignity to Abbot’s style, a torque towards grandeur, a natural majesty, but also an understanding of metaphor, of the sudden vitalising presence of the autumn leaves, the smoke, the woman in labour, the heifer kicking and dancing around the early summer meadow, fat with new grass, as happy as the Magnificoes and Gloriosoes even then parading at court. The gift of this language-moment, the great Jacobean habit of mind on which the King James Bible rides for chapter after chapter and book after book, is this swinging between majesty and tangibility, the setting of the actual and perceptible within an enormous and enriching frame, the sense of intimacy between great and small, the embodiment of the most universal ideas in the most humble of forms, the sense in other words that the universe, from God to heifer, is one connected fabric.

  Amazingly, Abbot was also the author of a bestselling guide to the world, which remained in print for sixty-five years, going through five editions, the last in 1664. This work, intended for his pupils, probably envisaged by him as a spare time entertainment, far less significant than the great work on Jonah, turns out to be the place in which one can come closest to George Abbot, to see behind the gauze of the man in the pulpit, the church administrator, the court politician. Off his guard, he reveals himself and by extension his age and its curious mixture of openness, inquiry and blinkered hostility.

  A briefe Description of the whole worlde is in many ways a wonderful and humane book, full of enthusiasm. France ‘is one of the most rich and absolute Monarchies of the world’. Civilisation is not a European phenomenon: ‘The people of Chyna are learned in almost all artes. No Country yeeldeth more precious Marcandize, then the workmanship of them.’ There is no grandeur of language here, nor any romance in Abbot’s description of the world, but an exact, plain, reliable and unvitriolic appreciation of the virtues of others. It’s the Calvinist on tour. If the Africans are ‘exceedingly blacke’, that is no mark against them. In fact, Africa, as Pliny had said, is a source of marvels and here, remarkably, from one of the most conservative of all those involved in the translation, is a straightforward denial of creationism:

  Often times new and strange shapes of Beasts are brought foorth there: the reason whereof is, that the Countrie being hott and full of Wildernesses, which haue in them litle water, the Beastes of all sortes are enforced to meete at those few watering places that be, where often times contrary kinds haue coniunction the one with the other: so that there ariseth new kinds of species, which taketh part of both.

  Abbot’s astonishing theory of the origin of species—God’s creation is not immutable; the changes in that creation come about through the influence of the environment; sex is the crucial transmitter and transformer of genetic identity—does not quite stumble on the theory of natural selection but is moving in that direction. The King James Bible is the work of people who were dazzlingly open, at least in some parts of their minds, to the new spirit of scientific inquiry.

  Elsewhere, a more familiar Abbot appears. The Irish are ‘rude, and superstitious’, the Scots ‘barbarous’ and the Jesuits filled with a ‘blind zeal’. But what he had heard of the native Americans—having never been there, and clearly not having discussed them with his fellow Translator John Layfield, who had—left him quivering with shock and rage. They were

  naked, vnciuill, some of them deuourers of mans flesh, ignorant of shipping, without all kinde of learning, hauing no remembrance of historie or writing among them: never hauing hard of any such religion as in other places of the world is knowne: but being utterly ignorant of Scripture, & Christ or Moses, or any God: neither hauing among them any token of crosse, Church, temple, or deuotion, agreeing with other nations.

  As one part of the background to the King James Bible, this is an important passage. The Americans encountered by Europeans on arrival were to be condemned because they weren’t literate: ‘There was no sort of good Literature to bee found amongst them,’ Abbot wrote. Not only were they not like the English, they were not like the people of the Old World, who, for all their differences, were united from here to China by this one thread: they all wrote and read. Even if God was English, the Bible was not. It had come from the riches of the Mediterranean culture which Abbot and all cultivated Englishmen deeply admired. As scholars and linguists, they were not in any way xenophobic; but the textlessness of the Americans, that was a radical and shocking difference. Abbot could only imagine that it was the work of the devil:

  In all ages it hath appeared, that Sathan hath vsed ignorance as one of the chiefest meanes, whereby to encrease idolatrie, and consequently to enlarge his kingdome: it were otherwise incredible, that any who have in them reason and the shape of men, should be so bruitishly ignorant of all kinde of true religion, and understanding deuotion.

  Lying behind that are the famous words of St Paul—the rubric scalded into every Puritan’s heart – ‘In understanding be men’, and much of the coming English experience in America will stem from it: as people of the book, of rationality, of text, of translation, of the Bible, eventually of this Bible, of the word, they are of their essence set against other human beings, or at least beings with the shape of men, who are in thrall to Satan precisely because they do not possess or
understand the word. The American Indians had, Abbot recognised, some virtues. They could be kind, affable and hospitable to strangers but, in the light of everything else, those qualities were not enough: they did not possess the one thing it was essential to possess. They were shut out from the truth.

  Alongside Abbot in this second Oxford company were three of the most powerful of all the Translators. No company had a greater density of egos than this. James Mountagu, the Dean of the Chapel Royal who had whispered so intimately in the king’s ear at the Hampton Court Conference, found his place in this all-important company, as did Thomas Ravis, first Bishop of Gloucester, and then of London. Ravis was another uncompromisingly political bishop, a man who had out-Bancrofted Bancroft in his pursuit of the seditious Nonconformists with whom Gloucester was stuffed. It was his enthusiasm in search of the quarry that recommended him to the archbishop and landed him the London job. Christianity was not a religion of love and forgiveness for these men and Ravis arrived in London brimming over with an appetite to nail his enemies. Of all places in England, London had the largest proportion of Nonconformists, both Presbyterians who wanted to remain part of the church but could not accept that everything in the Book of Common Prayer was sanctioned by scripture; and the most deeply entrenched Separatists, who were unwilling to submit to the authority of any established church at all.

  These distinguished and powerful men gathered together to translate the key passages of the New Testament in the rooms of the most glamorous of the Translators, Sir Henry Savile. He stands out from the rest, a scholar, courtier, politician, educationalist, mathematician and astronomer. If Laurence Chaderton had the sweetest nature, Lancelot Andrewes the most passionate soul, John Layfield the most charming manner and George Abbot the most alarming glare, then Henry Savile undoubtedly had the most exotic and alluring presence. He was, according to the indefatigable gossip John Aubrey, ‘an extraordinary handsome man, no lady having a finer complexion’. That must have been when he was young. The earliest portrait that survives of him, a superb picture by the Fleming Hieronimo Custodis, was painted in 1594 when he was forty-five, mid-career, and it is a strikingly manly image: one hand on hip, in the self-proclaiming way of the Renaissance courtier, the other hanging easily at the side of his basket-hilted sword, a doublet both black (the colour of statesmanship) and richly embroidered (no denier of the world). Beside him a blank folio book lies open on a table, an enigmatic symbol: yet to be written in? Savile’s own uninscribed future? But it is Savile’s head, that great intellectual instrument, held above a huge simple ruff, which draws one’s attention. He looks like a buccaneer, a scratchy beard and moustache, his thinning hair pushed roughly back across his ears, a big aggressive vigour in his stance. If this man was the greatest scholar of his age, there is not a whiff of the library about him. At the heart of the portrait are the eyes, curiously painted, their look slewed a little sideways, avoiding the viewer’s own, inescapably duplicitous, on the make.

  He was born in 1549 in a family of poor Yorkshire gentry. But Oxford wasn’t quite ready for such a strong draught. Bruno found it ‘a constellation of ignorant, obstinate pedants: a herd of donkeys and swine’. That is what Savile meant; but he was not a man for rudeness.

  It was a flourish of challenges, from someone who felt he had a great deal to teach the world. Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge often sent their promising young fellows abroad to buy books for their libraries (which were tiny; it was thought a great achievement during Savile’s time at Merton that he increased their number of printed books from 300 to 1,000), and in 1578 Savile was sent out on a long European tour. Merton paid for it, £613s 4d, and with him went a small party of other brilliant young intellectual and aristocratic Elizabethans: Henry Neville, later a Jacobean diplomatist; George Carew, another Jacobean statesman; and Philip Sidney’s younger brother Robert, all founder members of the Society of Antiquaries. They went to France, Poland; Bohemia, Germany, Austria and Italy, including Rome, visiting and impressing the greatest European humanists, scholars and astronomers with their sophisticated, multilingual charm and cleverness. Robert Sidney seems to have decided to split from Savile, who was acting as something of a tutor to him. His brother Philip sent him a letter:

  I have written to Mr Savile, I wish you kept still together, he is an excellent man…and for your sake I perceive he will do much, and if ever I be able I will deserve it of him…Now (dear brother) take delight likewise in the mathematics, Mr Savile is excellent in them.

  These were blue-chip connections into the heart of the English cultural and political establishment and Savile must have felt that the wind was in his sails. The commonplace book he kept on this early version of the Grand Tour (bound in limp vellum, with Italian paper) has also survived and it is full of the life-loving and self-admiring brio of a brilliant young man abroad. In ’, of the political structures of the Poles, then in French ‘et des droits roiaux’, of the royal prerogatives, and finally in Italian, ‘la forma del governo’.

  The smugness of Henry Savile found its source not only in his own cleverness but also in the welcome he was getting from the great scholars of Renaissance Europe—one wrote to a friend recommending him as ‘praestantissimi iuvenis’, in the first rank of youth—and the sheer delight he was taking in the pleasures around him and the company he kept. For years afterwards, he would get letters (in Latin) from his Italian and German friends reminiscing over the days when they ‘used to converse so delightfully together in Venice’. Any idea that the culture from which the King James Bible emerged was parochial or insular, the great statement of an embattled island nation cut off from the corrupt and worldly currents of a degenerate continent, could not be further from the truth. A river of European influences runs through it, and through no more open a conduit than Henry Savile.

  He was already intrigued by the works and figure of St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century patriarch of Constantinople, whose elegant, conversational, witty and morally fierce sermons often left the Byzantine aristocrats in his congregation caught between laughter and dread at his ridicule of their wealth and pretensions. Chrysostom is a Jacobean figure, in his immediacy, his tendency to dramatise rather than to analyse and desiccate, his conjuring the vision, for example, at the Day of Judgement, of the poor calmly waiting for heaven, their small bags packed and ready beside them, while the rich ‘in great perplexity, are wandering about, looking for a place to bury their gold, or someone they can leave it with! Why, O man, dost thou seek thy fellow slaves?’

  This is just the perplexity, and just the divided consciousness, of the Jacobean rich, and Chrysostom’s taunting voice is calculated to appeal to the sophistication of a Savile. By the 1580s he had already hired a professional researcher from Chania in Crete—there was a Venetian connection—to search for the oldest and purest of the Chrysostom manuscripts and to buy them. Savile recommended the agent look in Patmos, the beautiful island in the eastern Aegean where the monastery of St John was said to harbour the greatest treasures, and to acquire what he could. It was a lifelong fascination for Savile which culminated in his great edition of Chrysostom’s work, printed and published between 1610 and 1612 at the appalling cost of £8,000. By then, Savile had assembled 15,800 sheets of manuscript (which he presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford). All the great libraries of Europe had been searched, not only in Mount Athos, Constantinople and the island of Chalce, but in Paris, Vienna, Augsburg and Munich. To copy, analyse and translate, Savile hired some of the best scholars in England, including John Bois and Andrew Downes, Cambridge Greek scholars working on the Apocrypha for the King James translation. It is typical of the man that he consulted, and acknowledged, two of the great Jesuit scholars, Andreas Schott and Fronton du Duc, with no narrow-minded sectarian thought that their allegiance to the pope disqualified them from the task. The work was published in eight beautiful volumes, and was a commercial disaster, mounds of copies remaining unsold, even when reduced from the original £9 (about half the annual
salary of a country vicar) to a knockdown £4 or even £3. But perhaps Savile was not concerned with commerce. Forget, as he would have wished, the copies mouldering in the Eton store (his contemporaries gossiped about little else) and remember instead the set still to be found in the great Sansovino library in Venice, which Savile sent to the Doge in January 1614, each volume bound in crimson satin.

  Savile’s edition of Chrysostom has been called ‘the one great work of Renaissance scholarship carried out in England’. But there is no need to be too naive about the point and purpose of the scheme. It is a self-erected monument to a cosmopolitan, glorious and vain-spirited man who had climbed hard. On his return to England in 1582, the queen ‘taking a liking to his parts and person’ first made him her tutor in Greek and three years later procured him the wardenship of Merton. Savile had arrived. Lord Burghley and Francis Walsingham were his patrons, the Earl of Essex his intimate. A famous moment of Savile’s wit is preserved from a conversation with Essex. The earl asked him what he thought of poets. ‘They are the best of writers,’ Savile said, ‘next to them that write prose.’