God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible
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The first is a vellum-bound book, of about 125 pages, the page size slightly smaller than foolscap, the paper gratifyingly thick and substantial. It belonged at one stage of its life to William Sancroft, the passionate Emmanuel undergraduate who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. He gave it to the library housed above the cloisters of the archbishop’s London palace at Lambeth, where Richard Bancroft had established it—England’s first public access library—in 1610.
This manuscript, number 98, remained in the library, uninspected and unvalued, until a Californian scholar, E. E. Willoughby, recognised it for what it was in 1955. It is still there today and can be requested from the shelves by anyone who walks in off the Embankment. Why is it not more famous? Why not more treasured? It should be, because this, very nearly uniquely, is as near as any of us will ever come to a manuscript of the King James Bible.
Its title is An English Translation of the Epistles of Paule the Apostle, and each page is ruled out in red ink into double columns with a margin to left and right. Only the left-hand column and margin are used; throughout the book the right-hand column, and its margin, remain blank. Except for one or two italic notes, the entire text is written in the spiky, cursive manner of the secretary-hand, the style of handwriting used in English legal documents from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. And that gives a hint to its character. Any tendency to believe that the creation of this Bible was an act of passionate inspiration; or that somehow in the age of Shakespeare and Donne, the making of this book was a wild eruption of untutored genius—that fantasy is dispelled within seconds of opening the manuscript. It is like an accountant’s document, businesslike, its double-ruled columns more like a ledger than a work of literature. It is a version of the Epistles, prepared by the second Westminster company under William Barlow before being circulated, according to Bancroft’s Rules, to the other companies and to other learned men in the kingdom. There is no telling which of Barlow’s company wrote it, but the manuscript has clearly gone through several hands. Missing words have been supplied, letters added, spelling corrected, punctuation changed. It has an air of carefulness, efficiency, good government, not of inspiration: it exudes a particularly bureaucratic kind of holiness.
There must once have been many such manuscript books, prepared for circulation, the second blank column awaiting the remarks of other scholars and divines. We know this, because another remarkable discovery has been made: a letter requesting the return of such a manuscript book when it was needed for the final editing process. The letter was written on 5 December 1608 by William Eyre, a fellow of Emmanuel, who has no other known connection with the translation, to James Ussher, then the young Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and later a great scholar, owner of the Book of Kells, who employed agents to scour the Middle East for ancient manuscripts, and famous, along with the puritan preacher John Lightfoot of Cambridge, as the man who calculated that God had created the earth on Sunday 23 October 4004 bc, at nine o’clock in the morning, London time, or midnight in the Garden of Eden.
Eyre’s letter to Ussher brings one close to the atmosphere surrounding the work. ‘In my absence from Cambridge,’ he wrote, ‘there was an order taken from the Kings Matie by the Arch B. of Canterb. that the translation of the Bible shalbe finished and printed as soone as may be.’
It has often been suggested that James played no part in the translation after commissioning it. All the documents of the Privy Council between 1600 and 1613 were destroyed in a Whitehall fire and, apart from this and Bancroft’s early letters, there is no official record of James’s interest. Protestant and anti-royalist historians have jumped on this. The king may, in a passing fancy, have begun the process, they have maintained, but he didn’t have anything to do with its completion or coming forth. In fact, given how thin any kind of surviving evidence is, it is remarkable how often James’s concern for the project appears, and always with the same note of urgency and concern to get it right and get it done ‘as soone as may be’, not to lose the project in the swamps of academic indigence.
Eyre continued: ‘Hereupon I am earnestly requested to gett agayne that copy of our part wch I lent you for D. Daniel his use.’ What Eyre means by ‘our part’ is not clear, but it is at least likely that these are the books of the Old Testament translated by Laurence Chaderton and his company. Nor does anyone know who D. Daniel is. That is not a name associated with the translation. Clearly, the whole process was spread more widely through the intellectual community of the British isles than any document records.
‘[F]or albeit there be 2 fayer written copies out of it; yet there will be use of it because I noted in the margent…the places wch were doubted of. And this marking of places that want consideration is not in the others.’ Eyre was anxious that Ussher should send the annotated copy back ‘so soone as you can after my letters come to your hands’.
This is the world in which the Lambeth MS. 98 has its being. It is very modern: company life, a memo that has gone astray, the chairman requiring a report, a project which had been stalled a little, with too many opinions canvassed from too many experts, needing now to be wrapped up and delivered.
The third document is more intimate with the process of translation than either the Lambeth manuscript or the Eyre letter. It is a record of a scholar in the very process of translating. It too had been lying ignored for centuries in a famous British library and it too was discovered by the indefatigable Dr Willoughby on his great 1950s trawl. He found it in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, James’s favourite place in England. On his famous visit to the library in August 1605, surrounded by the chained-up books, he told the assembled dons, with all the eloquence and charm of which he was capable:
Were I not a King, I would be a University-man. And I could wish, if ever it be my lot to be carried captive, to be shut up in this prison, to be bound with these chains, and to spend my life with these fellow captives which stand here chained.
The book which Dr Willoughby discovered was an edition of the Bishops’ Bible printed in 1602. This, of course, was the Elizabethan version of the English Bible on which Bancroft’s Rules required the Translators to base their own. Forty copies, in unbound sheets, were said to have been acquired for their use and distributed to them. The Bodleian volume was probably one of those sets, later bound together. It was acquired by the library in 1646 for 13s 4d and catalogued as ‘a large Bible wherein is written down all the Alterations of the last translacõn’. What no one realised at the time, or for another three centuries, was that this Bible was not only an account of the alterations made; it was an instrument in the translation itself.
As another American scholar, Dr Ward Allen, has shown, one can trace in this Bible the very heart of the process. Marked on its pages are the first suggestions of an individual Translator who had this Bible in his rooms. He would then have taken it to the weekly meeting of his company, where the others would discuss and analyse his choices and decisions. Their comments and corrections were then added. One can read it now like an oscilloscope trace of the very act of translation itself.
This is not the place for a long analysis, but it is instructive to look at one example from Luke. In Luke 1:57, the moment when Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, the herald of Christ, gives birth, the Bishops’ Bible text reads:
Elizabeths time came that she should bee delivered, and she brought forth a son.
This, incidentally, is almost exactly the wording of William Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament. It is an uncomplicated and straightforward moment, almost certainly too prosaic for Jacobean taste and, in one minute particular, inaccurate. The King James Translator on his own in his room marked the verse very carefully with Greek letters, as follows:
Elizabeths time came that she should bee delivered, and she brought forth a son.
and in the margin beside it wrote ‘ Now’ and ‘ was fulfilled’, with the intention presumably that the verse should read:
Now Elizabeths time was ful
filled that she should bee delivered, and she brought forth a son.
That is the suggestion he took to the weekly meeting. His co-Translators didn’t entirely like what he had done. They accepted his inclusion ‘Now’, translating a word which is in the Greek, and giving an extra flick both of vitality and of conversational engagement to the verse, the storyteller drawing you in. But his other suggestion was rejected. The phrase ‘was fulfilled’ was a brave attempt at just the kind of lexical enrichment the Jacobeans enjoyed, and on which the King James Bible, almost subliminally, often relies. It carries a double hidden pun: not only had the time come for Elizabeth’s son to be born, but she was both filled full with the child in her womb and fulfilled in her role and duty as the mother of the Baptist.
The idea is marvellous but the word is not quite right, a little dense, even a little technical. So ‘was fulfilled’ is crossed out in the margin and replaced with ‘full time came’. As a result, the reading in the King James Bible, with which the English-speaking world has been familiar ever since, is Tyndale plus first Oxford Translator plus revision by the Oxford company:
Now Elizabeths full time came that she should bee deliuered, and she brought forth a sonne.
It is undoubtedly the best, more accurate for its inclusion of ‘Now’ and wonderfully subtle in the phrase they landed on. ‘Full time came’ is irreproachably English, simple, accessible, conceptually rich, as full of potent and resonant meanings as Elizabeth was with child. In Jacobean English, full can mean plump, perfect and overbrimming, and all of those meanings are here. It is difficult to imagine anything being better done, but it wasn’t thought good enough for the twentieth-century translators of the New English Bible. They settled on:
Now the time came for Elizabeth’s child to be born, and she gave birth to a son.
That is a descent to dreariness, to a level of banality below Tyndale’s, perhaps even unaware of what the second Oxford company’s subtle minds had given them. The modern world had lost the thing which informs every act and gesture of Hatfield, of the King James Bible, and of that incomparable age: a sense of encompassing richness which stretches unbroken from the divine to the sculptural, from theology to cushions, from a sense of the beauty of the created world to the extraordinary capabilities of language to embody it.
This is about more than mere sonority or the beeswaxed heritage-appeal of antique vocabulary and grammar. The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority. The language of the King James Bible is the language of Hatfield, of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.
That group of Oxford Translators was meeting in Merton, the oldest college in Oxford. The college register had noted them gathering there first on 13 February 1605, a good fire going, books summoned for consultation from the college library. They represented the heart of the translation process, given the responsibility for some of the key Christian texts: the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation, a book of such violence and inflammatory imagery that many sixteenth-century Protestants had wished it excluded from the Bible. Only the Epistles, which were given to the second Westminster company, under the control of Bancroft’s hyper-loyalist William Barlow, were of anything like equal importance. This was the solid core of the Jacobean church establishment, and no one with any hint of dissension from it was allowed near these texts. There were, as usual, the workhorses on the committee: a fellow of St John’s called John Peryn (or Pern) who resigned his other posts to concentrate on the translation; another called Ralph Ravens, a country vicar of whom little is known beyond his name; John Harmar, warden of Winchester College; and Dr Hutten, canon of Christ Church. All were learned Greek scholars, they had connections with the great—Harmar, a committed Calvinist, translator of the sermons of Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, had been a client and protégé of the Earl of Leicester—but they were not of the same standing as the heavy-hitting power-players who surrounded them.
The men at the core of this Oxford group were deeply engaged with the realities of money and power. That political involvement brought a worldliness and glamour which provided a certain steel. And that raises an intriguing question: was the King James Bible so alive precisely because the Translators weren’t entirely good?
George Abbot was perhaps the ugliest of them all, a morose, intemperate man, whose portraits exude a sullen rage. Even in death, he was portrayed on his tomb in Holy Trinity, Guildford, as a man of immense weight, with heavy, wrinkled brow and coldly open, staring eyes. He looks like a bruiser, a man of such conviction and seriousness that anyone would think twice about crossing him. What was it that made George Abbot so angry?
Much of it can be put down to what he would have learned from his parents of their suffering when young. They had been poor people, living in a small cottage next to the bridge in Guildford. His father was a clothworker—a member of one of the educated, urban trades which, along with printers, bookbinders and booksellers, upholsterers, pewterers, barbers and cooks, provided the seed-bed in which early Protestantism grew in England, as in the rest of Europe. Both Abbot parents, the church historian Thomas Fuller recorded, ‘embraced the truth of the Gospel in King Edward’s days and were persecuted for it in Queen Mary’s reign’. The precise nature of their suffering is not recorded.
They were certainly a brilliant and ambitious family. One of George Abbot’s brothers became Master of Balliol and then Bishop of Salisbury, another Lord Mayor of London and Governor of the East India Company, where he made a nabob’s fortune, in 1614 alone earning 60 pounds in weight of gold from the import of Indian commodities. George himself became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the cleverest and the gloomiest, fiercely Calvinist, anti-papist, anti-ceremony, but in equal measure, anti-Separatist and anti-libertarian. He of course supported the idea of bishops, but only as what was called ‘a superintending pastorate’, in the eyes of God indistinguishable from any other minister. He could be the most crawling of royal supplicants, saying in one pamphlet of James’s life that it was ‘so immaculate and unspotted that even malice itself could never find true blemish in it’. The king, in Abbot’s opinion, could be compared in virtue, intelligence, wisdom and wit to David, Solomon, Josiah, Constantine the Great, Moses, Hezekiah and Theodosius. Abbot devoted a paragraph each to these comparisons. But this was a bluff. In his heart, Abbot was no courtier, and when it came to a conflict between royal and divine authority (over the famous divorce case of Lady Essex in the following decade) he, unlike other more intensely royalist bishops such as Lancelot Andrewes, voted for what he saw as God’s interest (no divorce) over the king’s explicit desire for a divorce to be granted.
Abbot tried his hand at court manipulation. James was always vulnerable to male charm and beauty and Abbot had a part in introducing to him the most entrancingly beautiful boy, George Villiers, soon to be Duke of Buckingham, hoping that advantage would flow from such a lovely connection. Villiers, however, soon learned to ignore him and Abbot entered the last period of his life alienated from the court and in disgrace. Shooting deer in Hampshire one Tuesday in July 1621, he killed a gamekeeper by mistake. One Tuesday every month, he fasted, denying himself the meat pies he loved, in penance. He died in 1633, an outmoded and isolated figure.
It is easy enough to misinterpret men like George Abbot. He was stern, intransigent and charmless. He had no modern virtues and in a modern light can look absurd. Early every Thursday morning from 1594 to 159
9, he preached a sermon on a part of the Book of Jonah. That is 260 Thursdays devoted to a book which, even if it is one of the jewels of the Old Testament—a strange, witty, surreal short story—is precisely four chapters long, a total of forty-eight verses. Abbot devoted over five sermons to each of them. (He was not alone in that; his brother Robert was the author of a vast commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans of such tedium that it remains in manuscript to this day; Arthur Hildersham, one of the pushiest of the Puritans, wrote 152 lectures on Psalm 51: if the Word of God encompassed everything, as these men sincerely believed, then no balloon of commentary or analysis could ever be enough. The age had word-inflation built into it.)