God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  Savile never took holy orders—he was the only one of the Translators not to—and that proved a problem when his eye settled on the next plum to be picked from the establishment tree. The provostship of Eton, with a fountain of patronage flowing from it, was, according to the statutes of the college, only to be held by a minister of the church. Savile wanted it. He manoeuvred hard to get it. Essex pressed his case but failed. The queen, responding to her favourite’s requests on Savile’s behalf, made Savile her secretary of the Latin tongue, and Dean of Carlisle ‘in order to stop his mouth from importuning her any more for the provostship of Eton’. Savile then shamelessly turned to Essex’s rival, Robert Cecil, to press his case. ‘The man that may do most in this matter’, he wrote to him, ‘is your father [Lord Burghley], from whom one commendation in cold blood and seeming to proceed of judgement, shall more prevail with the Queen than all the affectionate speech that my lord of Essex can use.’ When it was pointed out that Savile was unqualified for the post because of the statutes, he replied ‘the queen has always the right of dispensing with statutes’.

  Savile, perhaps the pushiest of the Translators, that buccaneer spirit bursting out around the edges of the scholar, won the case. In 1596, he became, despite all the regulations, Provost of Eton. It was there that he gathered all the Hellenists and all the documents for his monumental edition of Chrysostom. He didn’t renounce Merton. Far from it. Merton, which he had already beautified with a new library and lodgings, which he had elevated into a college full of distinguished men by carefully seeking out the most promising of the undergraduates to be fellows, was now to be his milch-cow. He transferred his favourites to Eton, conveniently near Windsor so that when the court came down, gloriosoes and grandees could visit and discourse learnedly with the fellows there. And he used all of Merton’s resources to his own ends.

  The Merton fellows considered themselves betrayed by their high-flying warden who ‘hath been negligent and unprofitable by his personall absence from the colledge for the most parte of the years he hath been warden ther’. He had accepted money from a benefactor’s will which had been meant to go towards improving the fellows’ ‘commons’ and had taken a long time to hand on the benefits; he had let out a college manor to a friend on very favourable terms and had kept back some of the rent for himself; and had taken ‘secret bribes or fines for the leases and turning the same to private use, to the common hinderance of the society’. Savile had, in other words, squeezed Merton for all it was worth. A brilliant man, a handsome man, a man of enormous energies and breadth of interests (he would, among all this, found the first chairs in geometry and astronomy at Oxford): all that is undeniable. But was this Translator of the Holy Bible a good man? There is not much evidence of that.

  He was, of course, a reader of Machiavelli. He knew how to negotiate the shoals and rapids of court life. But there was a moment—and he is the only Translator of whom this is true—when he very nearly came adrift. Lurking beneath this surface brilliance and careful self-promotion within the double world of university and court, there is another faintly subversive layer. When he was still a young fellow of Merton in the 1570s, acting as second bursar, Savile had given disquisitions on two strikingly non-establishment themes:Terra movetur circulariter – the cautious and riskless policies of the Cecils—this is the argument over appeasement—then surely, according to Tacitus, it was the duty of someone in the position of the Earl of Essex to rebel, ‘not to establish his owne souveraignety…but to redeeme his cuntrye from tyranny and bondage’. And the tyranny and bondage was not that of the queen but of the loathed Cecils who, it was believed in the Essex camp, held the queen in thrall.

  Savile’s great friend, a west country Greek scholar called Henry Cuffe, whom he had made a fellow at Merton, became Essex’s private secretary. Cuffe wrote regularly to Savile at Eton or Merton, reporting on the secrets and the fears of the Essex circle. Their fevered plottings for an anti-Cecil coup came to a head in the spring of 1601, when Essex made his hopeless attempt on the throne in London. He had surprisingly wide support, including five earls, three barons and sixteen knights. James VI in Scotland had written to him encouragingly, but Cuffe had burnt the letter out of loyalty to his master. Cuffe and Savile were both implicated. Savile himself had all his papers impounded and was held under house arrest in the provost’s rooms at Eton, but Cuffe was in far more deeply. Many of those whom he had attempted to woo on Essex’s behalf gave evidence against him. Savile, who was never as subversive-minded as either Essex or his secretary, slipped smoothly out of any noose. Cuffe? He hardly knew the man, had never discussed anything of the kind with him. Savile kept his valuable posts. He would in time—it was said for £1,000 – get himself a knighthood. Cuffe was condemned to death and in his will left £500 to the Henry Neville, now Sir Henry, with whom Savile had gone gallivanting around Europe thirty years before, and

  With the like affection I desire that there may be given to my true and dear friend, Sir Henry Savile, £100; and I beseech him to continue the memory of his unfortunate friend, and ever to think charitably of him, however some endeavour to ruin and deface as well his name as his estate.

  There is no evidence that Savile did anything to have Cuffe remembered with either honour or dignity. The Jacobean court could afford few such luxuries. Instead, perhaps, as the Oxford company translated St John’s Gospel, Savile might have reflected on loyalty, on the fate of Cuffe and Essex, on his own standing in the Jacobean world, his comfortable place by its warming fires, and Peter’s denial of Christ:

  Then saith the damosell that kept the doore vnto Peter, Art thou not also one of this mans disciples? He sayth, I am not.

  And the seruants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coales, (for it was colde) and they warmed themselues: and Peter stood with them, and warmed himselfe.

  Ten

  True Religion is in No Way

  a Gargalisme Only

  It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing: the wordes that I speake vnto you, they are Spirit, and they are life.

  John 6:63

  By 1608, the campaign by the Church of England and its bishops against radical Nonconformists had reached something of a lull. The pursuit and expulsion of Puritans had peaked two or three years before. Many, on financial grounds, had signed the necessary documents of conformity and been allowed to keep their places. At the same time, the threat of international Catholicism had faded after the imagined horrors summoned by the Gunpowder Plot had turned out largely to be phantoms and mirages. A Europe-wide debate was now going on, at least in print and among the elite, over the competing claims of religion and state, obedience to the pope or to the king, loyalty to God or nation—and in the course of it Lancelot Andrewes defended the English Church against the attacks of Roman cardinals—but it was an intellectual affair, hardly troubling the everyday lives of the English people.

  There were, of course, arguments: between the respective rights of Crown and parliament, over money as ever and the king’s ability to impose customs dues, over the power and jurisdictions of common law and the ecclesiastical courts. But England was not on any high road to civil war. These were the digestive rumblings of a complex, old and mature society going through its motions. Essentially, for all the extravagance of the king and parliament’s voluble assertion of its ancient rights, peace reigned. In diocese after diocese in England, the records show that neither Catholics nor extreme Puritans were being hunted down. Pax and Concordia reigned rather sleepily over the country and, on the whole, in quiet corners, without much intervention or harassment, English men and women were getting on with their lives and their religion. Revolution, martyrdom, the heroism of exile—these hardly featured in the landscape. The country was relatively fat on a series of good harvests, pursuing its interests, in many ways sharing a common idea of what was good: a Christian, orderly commonwealth.

  As if on cue, in 1608, golf was introduced from Scotland for the first time, played around
a 5-hole course on Blackheath, south of London. The leather balls, stuffed with feathers, lasted no more than one game each, particularly if it rained. At 5 shillings a time, it was a ruinously expensive but a strangely consoling pursuit, fitted to a country replete with contentment.

  That is not how it looks from America. For Americans, the spring and summer of 1608 burns in the history of religious belief and the struggle for freedom of conscience as the months in which those Separatists who would later sail for New Plymouth on the Mayflower, known to us (but never to them) as the Pilgrim Fathers, finally gave up the struggle of living in England, unable to tolerate its oppressions any longer, and left, after great travails, for the freedoms of Amsterdam and then Leiden.

  How can this be explained? How can one of the most pacific moments in English history be the source of something which, in retrospect, looks like one of its greatest ruptures? It is, in part, a question of scale and of perspective. From the point of view of the English establishment, the events in the small agricultural communities around Scrooby and Gainsborough, on the borders of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, were no more than minor irritations at the outer edge of their concerns. There was a tiny cell of radical thinking here—with strong Cambridge connections, a stream of fire-breathing preachers coming north from the university city—wedded to all those extreme Puritan beliefs which the broadly tolerant English Church and state felt unable to accommodate. The Separatists’ model was the ancient church of Antioch, in which there had been neither bishop nor clergy of any kind, and which was ruled ‘by the Spirit’, manifesting itself through the congregation. It was the congregation that appointed and ordained its own pastors, teachers, lay elders and deacons. In these gatherings, often in stables and outhouses, away from the sight of the church authorities, the priesthood of all believers was a living reality. Their services might last four hours, much of which was spent in prayer, often extempore, with no help from any prayer book, an unregulated, private spirit guiding the prophesyings of the faithful. Anyone, whether artisan or peasant, could expound the meaning of the scriptures. They held as their guiding sign the words of St Peter to all members of the church: ‘But yee are a chosen generation, a royall Priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, that yee should shewe forth the praises of him, who hath called you out of darknes into his marueilous light.’ The accompanying note in the Geneva Bible, which the Scrooby Separatists would have read, makes it quite clear. People like them, it reassured them, were God’s elect. They were the true believers and the rest of the world, who clearly did not attend as closely as they did to the very word of God, would be damned to hell. ‘And lest any man should doubt whether he is chosen or not, the apostle calls us back to the voice of the gospel sounding both in our ears and minds.’ Listen to the words of the Bible and you will be saved. Nothing else is necessary. It is that singularity of conviction which drove the Puritan and pilgrim experience.

  Of course, those words of Peter’s carry an explosively subversive charge. A congregation of ploughmen and farriers to be described as ‘a royal priesthood’? Labourers and carters God’s own people? Where did that leave the institutions of king, bishop and church? Floundering in the wilderness or swallowed up, as a Separatist would have said, in a tide of their own corruption. Such Puritans would have felt themselves adrift in a world of wickedness. Earlier in 1607, when a flood invaded the low-lying moors of Somerset, it had been a sudden physical confirmation of everything that was wrong with England. ‘Sinne overflowes our soules,’ an anonymous pamphleteer had crooned, ‘the Seas of all strange impieties have rusht in upon us: we are covered with the waves of abhomination and uncleannes: we are drowned in the black puddles of iniquity: wee swim up to the throates, nay even above the chins in Covetousness.’

  That is not a frame of mind any government would happily condone, and clearly a coherently managed state church, with its necessary belief in a God-ordained central order and authority, could not tolerate the survival of such a Separatist cell. From time to time, ever since Bancroft’s campaign had begun in 1604, one or two of the Scrooby Separatists had been summoned to account for their practices and beliefs, held in town lock-ups and fined. But this was no Stalinist state, and it was far from being a ferocious campaign of extermination. Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, had even written to Cecil to suggest that the Puritan clergy in his archdiocese should be given more time to conform. In 1606, Hutton died and was succeeded by a genial and slightly lackadaisical man called Tobias Matthew, famous for his courtesy and his lack of interest in church administration, more concerned with preaching than anything else, a pattern in many ways of the Jacobean churchman. And it is this gentle and scholarly man who has been portrayed by American Puritan historians, beginning with William Bradford, the great early governor of the Plymouth Settlement, who had grown up as a boy in Lincolnshire, as the Jacobean Antichrist itself.

  The archbishop, beginning his term of office with some unaccustomed vigour, offered three alternatives to the Separatists—subscription to the rule of the church, imprisonment or exile—terms which in a liberal age might seem monstrous but which in the seventeenth century were a model of reasonable government. But reasonableness was not the medium of this encounter. ‘The ceremonies and service book, and other popish and anti-christian stuff’ seemed to the Separatists ‘the plague of England’. The bishops, Bradford thought, were consumed with ‘inveterate hatred against the holy discipline of Christ in his church’, persecuting those who ‘would not submit to their ceremonies and become slaves to them and their popish trash, which have no ground in the word of God’.

  The Scrooby Separatists were indeed looked for, arrested when they could be found, imprisoned and more often than not soon released to go into exile. But the community was put under severe strain by this treatment, as was the intention. Bradford put it more colourfully:

  They could not continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings of those which now came upon them. For some were taken and clapped up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to flee and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihoods.

  In the summer of 1607, about fifty of them, having sold up their possessions, made their way to Boston on the Lincolnshire coast where a boat had been hired to take them to Amsterdam. But, in a scene with intense biblical resonances, echoing partly the Exodus out of Egypt, partly Jesus’s betrayal by Judas, the captain of the ship revealed their presence and intentions to the authorities. The town constables of Boston ‘rifled and ransacked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea even the women further then became modesty; and then carried them back into the town, and made them a spectacle and wonder to the multitude, which came flocking on all sides to behold them’.

  It was a catastrophe. Events then took a significant turn. In contrast to everything that had been done to the Jesuits in London two years earlier, the essential civility of Jacobean England came to the fore. A large number of people in Boston were sympathetic to Puritan ideas—many from the port would emigrate to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s—and these poor refugee Separatists were treated quite properly. Of course they were held, but even Bradford says they were ‘used courteously’ and with ‘favor’. The Privy Council in London, 120 miles away, had to be consulted, at a time when even royal mail travelled at two miles an hour but, after a delay of a month, the entire party except for seven of its leaders was released and sent back to Scrooby. Soon enough, the leaders were also released on bail.

  Clearly, the Separatists had to try again, and this second attempt in the spring of 1608, leaving from the site of Immingham dock on the Humber, also very nearly failed. More boats, more payments, more chaos, the men in one craft, women and children in another, a muddle over tides, the two halves of the party becoming separated, the menfolk already underway, running before the tide with a
panicky captain, suddenly seeing their women and children stranded on the shore, descended on by an armed party of constables, arrested and taken away, with no one able to help them. It was a disaster: the men had all the money with them. Their families were left penniless in a hostile England and under arrest. A fearsome south-westerly storm got up and blew the men’s ship almost to the coast of Norway—Jonah and St Paul in their minds, the sailors despairing of life, the Separatists crying out, ‘Yet Lord thou canst save, yet Lord thou canst save!’ – fourteen days of terror before the storm at last dropped and they could make their way, chastened and convinced of God’s intervention, to the Low Countries, all the time uncertain of the fate of their families.

  Meanwhile, in England, their women were in pitiful distress, ‘weeping and crying on every side’, as Bradford wrote, ‘some for their husbands, that were carried away in the ship; others not knowing what should become of them, and their little ones; others again melted in tears, seeing their poor little ones hanging about them, crying for fear, and quaking with cold’.

  Again, even on the evidence of such a hostile witness as William Bradford, some sense of fairness and justice in the English judicial system came into play. No one quite knew what to do with the abandoned families,