The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Eliot was much indebted to Andrewes. In his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ he took phrases from him for some of his most admired poetry. From a sermon of Andrewes on the Three Wise Men in 1622, he used and echoed: ‘It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it . . . the ways deep, the winter sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter.’

  Andrewes and his committee met in the Jerusalem Chamber, still part of the original Abbey House at Westminster.

  Other members included Hebrew specialists, Greek scholars and Latinists. One was so fluent in Latin that he found it difficult to talk in English at any length. Another had a permanently faithless wife whose public infatuation with sex saddened him but did not sever his marriage nor, it seems, interfere with his concentration on the translation.

  The First Cambridge Company was led by Edward Lively, the Regius Professor of Hebrew, whose thirteen children disabled him from living a life without debt. There was the Regius Professor of Divinity from Cambridge, one of the four Puritans who had attended the Hampton Court Conference. Another scholar had lived through the reigns of four Tudors and two Stuarts and died aged 105, still able to read a copy of the Greek Testament in ‘very small type’ ‘without spectacles’.

  The First Oxford Company was headed by John Hardinge, Regius Professor of Hebrew. The most powerful man on that committee, though, was John Reynolds, not only President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but the man who had successfully suggested the idea of a new Bible to James I at Hampton Court. He was variously described as a ‘living library’ and ‘a university unto himself’. He was a moderate Puritan, understanding of the Roman Catholic position, a tried and trusted friend and respecter of Jews, and a man who literally, it was thought, wasted away in his service to translation. He died in 1607 and looked ‘the very skeleton’. Other Puritans were not as tolerant: one, Thomas Holland, would say, on parting company, ‘I commend you to the love of God and to the hatred of Popery and superstition.’

  These three companies devoted themselves to the Old Testament. The word ‘company’ for what might better be described as a ‘committee’ indicates the power of fashion of the day. London was a nest of companies: the Actors’ Companies, the Livery companies, the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the East India Company . . . There was something vaguely martial and also convivial about a company and that seems to have rubbed off on these biblical companies.

  The Second Oxford Company and the Second Westminster Company worked on the New Testament, the Second Cambridge Company on the Apocrypha now sadly omitted from the King James Version.

  James drew up fourteen rules after consultation with Bishop (later Archbishop) Bancroft and Robert Cecil, his principal secretary of state. Their aim was to ensure the translation was a conservative one. Perhaps to emphasise that, they kept words and phrases and sentences that had already drifted out of fashion, even archaic, like ‘verily’ and ‘it came to pass’. By retaining them, they ensured that the new Bible from the beginning had a halo of antiquity, a feeling of immemorial validity.

  From January 1609, a General Committee of Revision met in London to examine the new version. According to one of the three translators entrusted with the task, only a few of their changes made it into the final version. The companies had done well. From this committee it went to two other translators. One of them, Miles Smyth, wrote the preface. On to Archbishop Bancroft, who made fourteen of his own changes, rather resented by Miles Smyth. It was then finally presented to the King and from the court sent off to the printers.

  The Bible was about to be born again and this, the Authorised Version, would, with some retouching along the way, remain the standard English Bible until well into the twentieth century. In many parts of the world it still is and where it has been superseded its loss is often lamented and there are cries to bring it back.

  Just as the Scottish King, thrifty in everything save his indulgences, would not pay the translators, so he left the printers to fend for themselves.

  Although called the Authorised Version, the King James Bible was never officially authorised. That would have required an Act of Parliament. But within the title the words ‘By his majestie’s special commandment’ and ‘Appointed to be read in churches’ and the common knowledge of King James’s decisive role allow that ‘Authorised’ to be used without too much historical embarrassment. America has it more accurately with the ‘King James Version’.

  The printing proved to be a strain. Bibles had been a trade monopoly since the time of Henry VIII and the custom of a cut of the profits, a royalty going to royalty to acknowledge their royal approval, was well established by James’s day. Bibles and theological books were not only good business, they were the biggest proportion of the book business. Under Queen Elizabeth I, in 1577, Thomas Barker secured a monopoly on Bibles. A decade later, by intensive lubrications at court, he had it extended for the whole of his lifetime and that of his son, who became the King’s Printer, solely responsible in 1611 for the publication of the Bible.

  It would be lavish, splendid and very expensive. Barker had to set aside an eye-watering sum, £3,500 (in Jacobean times, a king’s ransom). He had to look for partners. They came and they brought troubles and disputes and debts which put him in prison for the last ten years of his life. But even in his cell he remained the King’s Printer and held on to the copyright.

  It was printed in 1611 with the title ‘The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties speciall Comandement. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie Anno Domini 1611’. The New Testament bore a title, the same but for the opening line: ‘the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ . . .’

  It cost twelve shillings bound, ten shillings loose leaf. The folio edition was handsome, heavy and designed to impress. The smaller and cheaper quarto edition was on the streets a year later. There were no illustrations. It contained a table for the reading of the Psalms at matins and evensong, a Church calendar, an almanac and a table of holy days and observances. Some of this dropped away as later versions appeared, most notably in 1629, 1638 and 1762 at Cambridge and, most successfully, in 1769 at Oxford.

  Punctuation, spelling and capitalisation were often erratic. Of the 1,500 misprints in the first years some are memorable. For instance there was the omission of ‘not’ from the commandment ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’. This became known as ‘the wicked Bible’. The printers were fined. Then there was the ‘vinegar Bible’, where ‘vinegar’ crept in instead of ‘vineyard’. And the ‘murderer’s Bible’, where there was ‘let the children first be killed’ instead of ‘filled’. Hating ‘life’ became hating ‘wife’.

  There were disputes. For example, the same Greek verb meaning ‘rejoice’ was translated not only as ‘rejoice’ but also as ‘glory’. ‘We rejoice in . . .’, ‘we glory in . . .’ and ‘we also joy in . . .’. Variation had suited the poetic and illuminating mind of Tyndale and that was one of the characteristics his successors imitated. The fluidity and the rush of richness in and the bounty of almostsynonyms in the Roman-Germanic-Norse-French-English language at the time was too tempting to resist.

  But it has been pointed out that literally a liberty had been taken and the cry of Richard III, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ might not have been improved with the introduction of ‘steed’ and ‘nag’. And though the Authorised Version was more Latinate than earlier versions, Anglo-Saxon words still predominated and Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as in Shakespeare, gave the language its dynamism: ‘Song of Songs’, ‘King of Kings’, ‘And the word was made flesh’, ‘man of war’, ‘I am the way, the truth and the light’, ‘three score and ten’, ‘And the word was with God. And the word was God.’

  The fi ercest critic of the day was a Puritan Hebre
w scholar, Hugh Broughton, who had not been included on the list of translators – very likely because of his tendency to argue with everyone who dared to disagree with him. King James asked for advice from independent scholars and Broughton weighed in. ‘It is so ill done . . . Tell his Majesty I had rather be rent in pieces by wild horses than that any such translation by my comment should be urged upon poor churches. It crosseth me and I require it to be burnt!’ He was not alone, though his intemperance was exceptional.

  At first people did not take to it. In some matters, and certainly in this case, people prefer old lamps to new. The Bishops’ Bible ceased to be printed but its translated bulk still stayed on the lecterns in many of the churches. Its words were familiar and it had its hold. It took time for James to decree that his Bible be the sole Bible in churches. After that it took over the lecterns throughout the kingdom.

  Then there was the Geneva Bible, much loved, conveniently priced and sized, the portable sustenance of the faith for generations. That too held on and was not entirely supplanted until the middle of the century.

  St Jerome, after the years spent turning the Bible into the Latin current in his day at the end of the fourth century, encountered equally harsh opposition which embittered him. He would have been pleased that Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, in his book Leviathan quotes the Bible only in the Latin of St Jerome and disdained the King James Version. Many of the educated preferred what they had studied at university. The beauties of the new Bible’s prose were to be discovered, admired and then loved rather later.

  It was the will of James I that made the book happen. It was the poetry of it and a civil war in the kingdoms of Britain and a purposeful and valiant push west across the Atlantic to America that embedded it.

  ‘The scholars who produced this masterpiece are mostly un-known and unremembered,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill, not, as it turns out, correctly. ‘But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world.’

  And a scholar’s voice, that of Professor Albert Stanborough Cook, of Yale University in the 1920s: ‘No other book has penetrated and permeated the hearts and speech of the English race as has the Bible.’

  Finally, from the historian Lord Macaulay: ‘If everything else in our language should perish, it would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.’

  Now, 1611, it was done and out in the world. It would help create new worlds and be part of the rise and fall of empires. It would be crucial in shaping America, its faith, its democracy and its language. All this potential was compact in dangerously crowded, small ships which set off from ports in the west of England to find and found a New England, which they did, Bibles in hand, God’s English their guide.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE MAYFLOWER AND THE COVENANT

  There is something of the Ark about the Mayflower. On 6 September 1620, 102 people set off from Plymouth in Devon on the south coast of England. This boat, the Mayflower, was ninety feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Today you can see a full-scale replica berthed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is a thing of beauty, gleaming, perfect: and very small.

  In 1620 it leaked, stank, bulged with people and furniture, livestock and stores and forced its way across the storm-stricken North Atlantic for sixty-six days. To imagine that small vessel in the turbulence of a Northern Atlantic late autumn is to be reminded of Noah. When the Flood came to drown the earth, God told Noah to build a wooden ark, and in this he put the birds and the beasts and men and women who would survive the Flood and begin God’s work on earth once more.

  Thirty-five of those on board the Mayflower would have embraced the comparison and sought strength from it. These thirty-five believed that they were God’s favoured people, heirs to the Israelites of the Old Testament. They had entered into a covenant with each other and with God who expected greater service from them than from anyone else. Their religion was based on Calvinism: they were Separatists, they were the Elect. It is likely that most of them took the Geneva Bible, and their reading of the Bible told them so.

  Like the King James Version, it was largely based on the work of Tyndale. When the King James Version took over, which it did in a few years, there was not much that was new. The disturbing marginal notes had gone. But the Separatists would then ink in their own marginal notes. They were the ‘Chosen’ and they watched every step they took. Few groups in history can have taken their calling with such fearless seriousness. It was those qualities as much as their faith which put their stamp on the language, the constitution and the morality of America. These people of the book were the crucible in the making of the new nation. They made it as a tribute to the book.

  They also made it, as they saw it, through God’s providence. The following is one of the only known primary source accounts of the journey of the Mayflower, written by William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation. The extract begins when the Mayflower finally set sail successfully, having been beaten back to Plymouth by violent storms:September 6. These troubles being blown over, and now all being compact together in one ship, they put to sea again with a prosperous wind, which continued divers days together, which was some encouragement unto them; yet according to the usual manner many were afflicted with sea sickness. And I may not omit here a special work of God’s providence.

  There was a proud and very profane young man, one of the seamen, of a lusty, able body, which made him the more haughty; he would always be condemning the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations, and did not let to tell them, that he hoped to help to cast half of them overboard before they came to their journey’s end, and to make merry with what they had; and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear most bitterly. But it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard. Thus his curses light on his own head, and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.

  In this next extract, besides once more showing the hardships of the voyage, a more benevolent God is revealed:And as for the decks and upper works they would caulk them as well as they could, and though with the working of the ship they would not long keep staunch, yet there would otherwise be no great danger, if they did not overpress her with sails. So they committed themselves to the will of God, and resolved to proceed. In sundry of these storms the winds were so fierce, and the seas so high, as they could not bear a knot of sail, but were forced to hull, for divers days together. And in one of them, as they thus lay at hull, in a mighty storm, a lusty young man (called John Howland) coming upon some occasion above the gratings, was, with a seele of the ship thrown into the sea; but it pleased God that he caught hold of the topsail halyards, which hung overboard, and ran out at length; yet he held his hold (though he was sundry fathoms under water) till he was hauled up by the same rope to the brim of the water, and then with a boat hook and other means got into the ship again, and his life saved; and though he was something ill with it, yet he lived many years after, and became a profitable member both in church and commonwealth.

  Finally at their destination, they had no doubt what must be done before all else: ‘Being thus arrived in a good harbour and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.’

  After sixty-six days, after one death and one birth, they had landed near what they called Plymouth Rock. On rocky ground they built their church. They faced a winter of which one of their number wrote: ‘they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what cou
ld they see but a hideous and desolate place, full of wild beasts and wild men – and what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not.’

  By the end of that first winter, half of them had died.

  They were woefully unprepared for the task of settlement. The author Bill Bryson has written: ‘You couldn’t have had a more helpless group of people to start a new society. They brought all the wrong stuff, they didn’t really bring people who were expert in agriculture or fishing. They were coming with a lot of faith and not a great deal of preparation.’ These people had travelled before – to the Netherlands where they had sought refuge for their godly task. But in that country there was a language and an economy with which they were familiar.

  They saw alien peoples and the uncultivated wilderness. Yet it was their destination and they sturdily called it ‘New England’. Out of this desert walked their saviour. He was an Indian, Tisquantum, nicknamed Squanto. The settlers would have had every justification for adding his appearance to the calendar of miracles. His knowledge, intelligence and kindness got them through that winter and beyond.

  Squanto had been kidnapped by English sailors fifteen years before and taken to London where he was trained to be a guide and an interpreter for the fishermen who regularly travelled the 3,000 miles across the North Atlantic to bring back rich hauls from the teeming, scarcely harvested seas of the North Atlantic and Cape Cod. Squanto escaped, and trekked back to his tribe. He found it all but wiped out by one of the European diseases that were to bring successive plagues to the Native Americans. He travelled on and you might feel justified in saying, ‘God alone knows how,’ he ended up next to the same rock as the helpless colonists from Devon. As Bill Bryson notes: ‘He taught them not only which things would grow but also how to fertilise corn seed by adding little pieces of fish – the fish would rot and actually fertilise the seed – and he taught them how to eat all kinds of things from the sea.’