by Melvyn Bragg
He walked awkwardly because of a childhood bout of rickets; he wore heavily padded clothes to ward off a dagger thrust; he was unprepossessing in an age when the dandyism of the male was peacocked abroad, particularly in London. This was a man who wrote a book on demonology and – on biblical authority, ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (Exodus) – had ‘witches’ burned to death after questioning them himself at a trial in Edinburgh. This was also a man who wrote the defining book on the Divine Right of Kings and believed that the King was God’s representative on earth, that the King was outside the law and that kings alone could and did speak directly to God, who ruled Above as the King ruled Below.
His journey south from Edinburgh, which took months, was, for James and his family, a triumphal entry into a form of paradise, unforeseen. He was greeted with crowds wherever he went. Merchants of towns and cities gave him heavy purses of gold. Great landowners entertained him in houses luxurious beyond any dwelling he had ever seen. His passion for deer hunting was indulged in the richest forests he had known. Entertainments were provided for himself and his family. No flattery was too thick to lay on. He was seduced, ravished and, on that dalliance of a journey south, wholly converted to the opulence and flattering of England. He came in from a small cold country and, still vigorous in his early middle years, found treasures. His debts became a scandal.
Along the way south he was petitioned by Presbyterians. They were well organised. They were alight at the prospect of a King who had praised the Presbyterian Church in Scotland and declared himself to be happy with it and proud to be part of it. The beleaguered Presbyterians of England, strong in determination and educational influence but a minority in numbers and with no supporters at court, saw their chance and seized it. All the way along the road the man who would be crowned king in Westminster received closely argued documents, signed, it was claimed, by 1,000 Presbyterian clergy sympathetic to the cause. His past was not easily to be cast off.
There was yet another visitation of the plague in London in 1603 and James’s coronation was celebrated only briefly in the capital. He was then hurried away eight miles up the River Thames to Hampton Court. This was to be where his Bible was to be born.
Hampton Court, a palace of a thousand rooms, princely halls, and gardens and ornaments fit for kings and queens, was just one of the stupendous buildings ordered and paid for by Thomas Wolsey. He was the son of a butcher in the town of Ipswich in the east of England. He had won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, and at fifteen earned his BA, ‘a rare thing and seldom seen’. He scaled the ladder of the medieval academic world, was ordained, became Dean of Lincoln Cathedral and then chaplain to Henry VIII.
With the King’s admiration and favour filling his sails, this precocious boy turned into a heat-seeking missile aimed at greater and greater power. He became one of the mighty diplomats of Europe, Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor of England and a cardinal with a firm eye on the papacy as his final earthly posting. In Church and state he carried all before him and pursued a ruthless policy of appropriating rich Church titles and lands. Precious stones ringed his fingers, rarest satins and silks clothed him, mistresses and sycophants constantly plumped up the pillowed comforts of a sovereign’s life in his palace beside the Thames.
James took to Hampton Court as to the manner born. He began what became an addiction to extravagance. There were feasts and masques, in one of which his young wife and her friends appeared lightly masked but otherwise gauzed in near nakedness. Shakespeare and his company were bidden up river to preview Macbeth in the Great Hall. Shakespeare’s three witches were thought to have entertained the new King. This second kingship called up some luxuriating part of James’s mind. The sensualities of that frozen kidnapped boy bullied by Presbyterians, used as a pawn by ambitious Scottish noblemen, now demanded to be sated. He found a new world and although he had delivered a lover’s farewell to Scotland, saying he would return there often, he went back only once in twenty-two years. He was King of England now and he pillaged this paradise ruthlessly.
Since Tyndale’s Bible, the first printed Bible in English, there had been several others. Despite some notes and small amendments, it was the case that again and again Tyndale’s version remained the basis for these subsequent translations into Early Modern English. Tyndale was only lightly edited by Miles Coverdale for his 1539 Bible: the Great Bible, ‘authorised’ by Henry VIII, had Tyndale’s work on the New Testament and the early books of the Old Testament as its foundation. The Geneva Bible (1560), which became the most influential of all until the King James Version, took Tyndale’s Bible and the Great Bible as its basis, as did the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. Even the Douay-Rheims New Testament of 1582, a Roman Catholic version, used Tyndale.
These several Bibles were confusing and an embarrassment. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign Parliament spoke of the need to reduce ‘the diversity of Bibles now extant in the English tongue’. Nothing was done.
It was an ideal opportunity for this new biblically erudite King. In January 1604, a few months after the hurried coronation in Westminster Abbey, and following his spectacular Twelfth Night theatricals, King James opened the Hampton Court Conference.
Religion was the potent political and intellectual currency of the day. It was the only arena of great debate and James used this occasion to show off his paces. The Privy Council was there, as were many bishops. Although it was they who had suggested it, there were only four Puritan clerics and they were not even invited to the opening service. So much, they would have been right to think, for James’s recent passionate declaration of loyalty to the Presbyterian Church in Scotland.
On the first day James made a five-hour speech, much of it in Latin. He attacked the Church of England so expertly and relentlessly that some thought he had shipped his Presbyterianism down from Edinburgh intact. Only the canniest listeners, like Launcelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster, saw him as ‘playing’ the Puritan. But the speech left no one in any doubt of his learning and his religious zeal. Indeed, some thought his vehemence was rather coarse, even boastful.
Then on the second day, the Puritans, high on expectation, were allowed in to the court. He turned on them. His opening speech, only one hour this time, was on the subject ‘Religion is the soul of a Kingdom and Unity the life of Religion’. I think that he had studied the triangular balancing act of Elizabeth I. She enforced, in law, the state’s Protestantism; kept many of the Catholic forms and practices; and tolerated at arm’s length the radical Puritans. Above all she was seen to be moderate. James knew about lack of moderation from his Scottish experience. This now seemed too raw and too disruptive from the perspective of this more complex and nuanced terrain.
So when the Puritans came forward with their rather modest proposals, minor changes in the rights of the Church – to forbid the making of the sign of the Cross at certain points in the service and the enforced wearing of a wedding ring and the end of absentee clergy, which had enabled Wolsey, for instance, to pile up his wealth – James turned down all of their requests.
‘I will have one doctrine and one discipline, one religion in substance and in ceremony,’ said James. The more they pressed the angrier he became, until he declared: ‘If this be all they have to say, I will make them contain themselves or harry them out of the land.’ In the ecstasy of this accomodating and sumptuous Anglicanism, he had sown the seeds of what was to become an exodus of some of the best educated and most serious-minded people in the kingdom. In his excitement at pleasing the English establishment in his newfound land, he had paved the way for the nonconformists to leave England and found their own newfound land – America.
In one other respect the mysterious law of unexpected consequences was already at work at that Hampton Court Conference. For one of the four Puritans, John Reynolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, petitioned the King to consider a new translation of the Bible. The Anglican establishment objected most strongly, but on this one subject,
possibly flattered by the glory that would accrue to him, or perhaps as a consolation prize for the Presbyterians, the King acceded. And the politician in him realised that a single Bible, ultimately authorised and controlled by the King himself, and a King as steeped in Bible scholarship as he was, could play a starring role in bringing and holding his new domain together.
Out of Wolsey’s most Catholic Hampton Court on the Thames came one Bible, one authorised version controlled by one King. One King by Divine Right. One Bible that would eliminate those radical suggestions which appeared in the margins of the Geneva Bible. One Bible that would show the world what the King and God and the heavenly and earthly kingdom were really made of. A book to re-order the world.
Which it did.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE FOUR COMPANIES
James began work immediately. He had already said at the conference: ‘I profess I could never yet see a Bible translated well into English . . . I wish some special pains were taken for an uniform translation which should be done by the best learned men in both universities, then revised by Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by Royal Authority, to be read in the whole church, and none other.’
That became his battle plan. And the book that proved that a work of lasting value, unique significance and unparalleled popularity could be assembled by committee got under way. King James put his oar in even before the work had begun. Not only did he outline the schedule – and see that it was followed – he marked the cards of those he chose to make the new translation.
The Geneva Bible, the most popular of all the Bibles published at that time, had irritated James in Edinburgh where he had to bite his tongue. In London it was loosened and he rounded on his tormentor. His chief objection to the Geneva Bible was not the translation of the Scriptures but the marginal notes, which he saw as ‘untrue, seditious and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits’. He pointed out that in Exodus i, 17, in its marginal notes the Geneva Bible had commended the example of civil disobedience shown by Hebrew midwives. In 2 Chronicles xv, 16, the notes stated that King Asa’s mother should have been executed, not just deposed for her idolatry. This, he thought, could be used to reflect badly on his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who had indeed been executed. Worse, Exodus challenged the Divine Right of a King to be above the law.
There would be no marginal notes in his new Bible. Nor was the word ‘tyrant’, which appeared more than 400 times in the Geneva Bible, to be used.
James grasped what many later ideologues and rulers and tyrants grasped – that authority was secured by the enforcement of detail. Just as Marxists, Leninists and Maoists argued for months on apparently hair-splittingly different interpretations of their own sacred books, so here James saw the Bible as his outward and visible authority. It would be his Bible. No notes.
But the overall guidance still left a great deal of room for manoeuvre. In King James’s Bible, the ambiguities of the language and the multiple possible uses to which the stories could be put were to prove both a book for the establishment and, equally, a book with revolutionary potential. Yet at the time of publication it seemed that the Book of Books had become solely the Book of the King. The Scriptures would serve the state and only through the King of the state would they serve God. He wanted the Bible to sound familiar and it did; he wanted it revised by his own selection of great scholars and it was.
The country, at that intellectually blossoming time in its history, was quite remarkably well served with scholars in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon. James had only to cast out his net to haul in a glittering catch of linguists.
The scheme was set up in a few months. The preliminary translation took four years. There were nine months of review and revision in London. Then followed final revisions, including that of the King. From the court it would make its way to the Royal Printer.
Fifty-four scholars were sifted from the mass of bibliophiles who had accreted in Oxford and Cambridge and around Westminster. Deaths and illnesses culled the field a little and probably forty-seven were active. A mighty and intellectually dazzling host from a small country to be funnelled into one book. Almost all of them came from the south-east of England, which both characterised and unified the English, which in that period was a quilt of dialects. About 25 per cent of the translators were Puritans, evidence of an impressive fight-back after their humiliation at Hampton Court.
These men took their work with gravity. To them, the Scriptures were the books of eternal life, the guides to daily life, the story of Jesus Christ, the only Saviour, the history of the world and the Word of God. They were not timid in their learning. One of the reasons the book has lasted and was so resonant is that it was scrupulously tested by superbly learned minds whose life’s work had been to fathom ancient religious texts. They took translation seriously and, in his preface to the Bible, Miles Smyth defended this memorably. He wrote: ‘Translation it is that openeth the window to let in the light; 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, even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well.’
Smyth also wrote: ‘we never sought to make a new translation, nor yet a bad one to make a good one, but to make a good one better; or out of many good ones, one principal good one.’
The scholars worked in six committees, two based in Oxford, two in Cambridge and two in Westminster. The Bible was carved up between them. The majority was firmly Anglican. The committees worked separately until completion when two from each committee met to revise and harmonise the whole. The King did not pay them. Either their colleges supported them or they were steered towards well-paid parishes and dioceses which gave them the time to do the work. They worked in an orderly, even a drilled manner, for years. A contemporary, John Selden, in his Table Talk, writes: ‘the translation in King James’ time took an excellent way. That part of the bible was given to him who was most excellent in such a tongue . . . 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.’
‘He read on.’ That is crucial. From the beginning the Bible in England had been a preaching and a teaching Bible. Wycliffe and Tyndale were aware that they were delivering their translated Scriptures into a largely illiterate society. They wrote as scholars for scholars, but they also wrote as preachers for everyone who needed to be reached. Later it would be read not only in churches and in vast open air rallies, but in schools and homes, in meetings and conferences. It would be quoted by soldiers on the battlefield and nurses in hospitals and its poetry would later be translated into the gospel songs. In this as in much else, they modelled themselves on the practice of Jesus Christ who spoke directly to the people.
The scholars had a substantial library at their disposal. Not only the versions in English, beginning with Wycliffe, but the Complutensian Polyglot (of 1517, in which Hebrew, Latin and Greek were printed side by side), the Antwerp Polyglot of 1572, the Tremellius-Junius Bible of 1579, Sebastian Münster’s Latin translation of the Old Testament, Theodore Bega’s translation of the New Testament; Latin translations of the whole Bible by Sanctes Pagninus, Leo Judo and Sebastian Castalio; the Zurich Bible, Luther’s German Bible; the French Bibles of Lefèvre d’Étaples (1534) and Olivétan (1535); Casiodoro de Reina and Cypriano de Valera (1569) in Spanish; Diodati in Italian; the 1,600-year-old Latin Vulgate by St Jerome and commentaries by early Church fathers, rabbis and other contemporary scholars. And, of course, Tyndale.
Since Tyndale’s day, Greek and especially Hebrew scholarship had advanced rapidly; there were more and better Hebrew grammars and the scanning of existing versions was fine-toothed. All the more remarkable then that Tyndale’s final version still accounted for about 80 per ce
nt of the King James New Testament and the same percentage obtained in those books he had translated of the Old Testament. Yet the contribution by these later scholars was important both for the grand authority their reputations brought to it and for the work of improvement and finessing they undertook.
The First Westminster Company was led by Dean Launcelot Andrewes, of whom it was said he ‘might have been interpreter general at Babel’. He went to Cambridge University at sixteen, where he met and befriended Edmund Spenser, the poet, author of The Faerie Queen. It appears that he was studious and ‘avoided games of ordinary recreation’. He climbed rapidly up the Church ladder until he became Dean of Westminster Abbey and one of the twelve chaplains to Queen Elizabeth I.
We are told that he mastered fifteen languages and had an outstandingly tenacious memory. Grotius, the leading Dutch legal authority and historian, said that meeting Andrewes was ‘one of the special attractions of a visit to England’. It is said that King James sometimes slept with Andrewes’s sermons under his pillow and was in awe of him. T.S. Eliot, almost four centuries later, praised his gift for ‘taking a word and developing the world from it’. Too Latinate and self-absorbed for some, but to the greatest poet of the twentieth century he was a literary hero.
As merely one example, Eliot takes Tyndale’s opening lines of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the water.’
He then quotes Andrewes, whose words he claims are much superior: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’
Thirty-nine words compared to Tyndale’s twenty-nine. The key words ‘void’, ‘darkness’, ‘deep’ are Tyndale. I prefer Tyndale. Nevertheless, T.S. Eliot is to be respected and many have agreed with his judgement about this and others of Andrewes’s rephrasings.
