God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  for to imprison so many women and innocent children for no other cause (many of them) but that they must go with their husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would cry out of them; and to send them home again was as difficult, for they alleged, as the truth was, they had no homes to go to.

  And so they too were let go, to emigrate to the Low Countries, where ‘in the end, notwithstanding all these storms of opposition, they all got over at length, some at one time and some at another, and some in one place and some in another, and met together again according to their desires, with no small rejoicing’.

  This moving story of a small group of people, driven by a passionate belief in the strict purity of their devotion to the word of God and an equally passionate rejection of worldly authority in favour of a divinely sanctioned life, scarcely registered on the consciousness of England. The most authoritative modern history of the Jacobean church and its bishops devotes a single dismissive sentence to the episode: ‘One of the few signal successes of the York commission [a church tribunal] in these years’, Dr Kenneth Fincham wrote recently, ‘was the destruction of a Separatist cell at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire.’ Nothing more, and that, in effect, is how Jacobean England would have seen it too: a pimple scratched, an annoyance excised, some troublemakers gone abroad so that the real business of the country could be allowed to continue. Puritan America had its origins in a small and unimportant piece of church administration, by which the church’s own presiding officer was frankly bored.

  It may have been a marginal incident but it was in many ways a central and symbolic moment in the history of the English Reformation and of Jacobean England. Reduced to essentials, the struggle at the heart of the European Reformation had been the conflicting claims of word and of ceremony, of the verbal and the visual, of a naked and direct relationship to God through scripture against a mediated, elaborated and socialised approach through an ancient church, guided by tradition. And that was precisely the conflict that was in play at Scrooby. Surplices, the cross, bishops, authority, kneeling and all the elaboration of a symbolic religion were rejected in favour of the word. It was the word that drove them into prison, near-shipwreck, exile, and later, for many of them, struggle and an early death in the New World.

  The sheer wordiness of the Separatists’ religion was extraordinary. In each four-hour service, several passages would be read from the Geneva Bible and then long, analytical explanations given of what they meant. Before any psalms were sung (without accompaniment) they too would be explained. Prose expanded to fill the time. After the psalms and after the readings, members of the congregation would then give their own interpretation of what the texts meant. All this was done standing up, after the practice of the primitive church. Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before ad 537.

  The words of scripture, and an intellectual consideration of them, were the essence of Separatist Christianity and in many ways of Protestant Christianity itself. Some Separatist pastors took this one step further: if the Bible was the word of God, it was intended to be conveyed to men in its original languages. Every translation, however good, was bound to contain errors and so by definition could not be used. If God had spoken in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, then those were the languages in which he should be heard. John Smyth, originally from Gainsborough, but by 1608 pastor of the Brethren of the Separation of the Second English Church at Amsterdam, its congregation made up of Lincolnshire farmers, decided that they needed to hear the scriptures in the original. One can only imagine the effect on the poor exiles from Gainsborough: hour on hour of Smyth reading out passages of Hebrew and Greek of which they had not the faintest understanding, desperately looking for the sanctity in this.

  Smyth was an eccentric—after realising that no other ecclesiastical authority could be as pure as himself, he dunked himself in holy water and became famous as the Se-Baptizer or Self-Baptist—but his position is only a distortion and exaggeration of what everyone in Protestant Europe believed. John Reynolds, the moderate Oxford Puritan, had encouraged his students to read ‘the Worde of God, and that, if it may be, ovt of the uerie well-spring, not out of the brookes of translacyons’. But even in translation, the word ruled. In early seventeenth-century England, endlessly and repetitively, the word of God was preached in the 8,000 or so pulpits across England. It was the ocean in which everyone swam. Attendance at sermons was compulsory. Many people would hear two or three on a Sunday in which every last echo of meaning would be squeezed from the words of the Bible. And week after week, preachers would occupy their pulpits, analysing texts, pursuing moral and theological arguments, exercising the difficult and demanding skills that hold a congregation’s attention. They were clearly good at it. Laurence Chaderton, the moderate Puritan leader, once paused after two hours of a Cambridge sermon. The entire congregation stood up and shouted, ‘For God’s sake go on!’ He gave them another hour.

  There can never have been a time in which Englishmen were so thoroughly drenched in the word. James I used to sleep, it was said, with Lancelot Andrewes’s sermons under his pillow. Andrewes himself could speak for an hour, to an enraptured audience, on the multiple significances of a single word. He could, as T. S. Eliot said in admiration, ‘derive the world from a word’, squeezing it, stretching it, crushing and contorting it, so that every conceivable facet of its meaning could be made apparent. Not until the tortured analyses of twentieth-century literary criticism was so much applied to so little.

  But it wasn’t little! At moments of intensity and crisis, the natural direction a man’s thoughts took would not be, as it now might, towards the inarticulate, drowning in the struggle to express the extremities of experience in a language that seems scarcely adequate or sufficient for the task, but to the words of scripture from which they had all drawn their sense of reality, their sense of how the world was, for their entire conscious lives. In a sense that almost no one now understands, the words of the Bible were the ultimate and encompassing truth itself. That depth of belief in the sufficiency of language is also one of the shaping forces of the King James Bible.

  The king himself was obsessed with words. He was a book man to his core. He commissioned an elaborate history of his mother’s reign; he dictated every word of every royal proclamation himself; he loved epigrams, tales and long analyses of theological problems; he wrote endless letters; with Bancroft’s help he had drawn up the instructions for the Translators himself. Words, as instruments of government, were part of a king’s service to God. He was the only person ever to have occupied the English throne to have his works collected—political treatises, designed to guide his sons towards good government, blasts against tobacco and witches, translations of the Psalms, endless theological tracts—bound in a magnificent edition published in 1616. In earlier times, his loyal editor James Mountagu wrote, a king might have been more at home with a pike. This one wielded a pen, just as Moses, David and Solomon had done. England was a kingdom of the word. On the frontispiece to his Workes, James stands beside a table on which there is a book inscribed with the words Verbum Dei. Government would have been impossible and unthinkable without it.

  If the words of the Bible were the foundation of all understanding, nothing could be more important than a text which was both accurate and intelligible. Precision in Bible scholarship and in translation was the foundation stone of the Reformation. High fidelity reproduction was a moral as well as a technical quality and it was axiomatic that Translators and scholars could approach the text only in a mood of humility and service. ‘He who does not believe even one part of it,’ Luther had said, ‘cannot believe any of it.’

  This attitude had stiffened and deepened as the Reformation had taken hold and it was Calvin who, in a typically passionate and forthright passage in his gr
eat and often revised work, The Institutes of Christian Religion, set the word of God on its throne. He wrote of it as earlier churchmen would have spoken of the pope. The words of the Bible should compel

  all the virtue, glory, wisdom, and rank of the world to yield and obey its majesty; to command all from the highest to the lowest trusting to its power to build up the house of Christ and overthrow the house of Satan. The apostles and their successors were sure and authentic amanuenses of the Holy Spirit; and, therefore, their writings are to be regarded as the oracles of God.

  Those who originally wrote the words of the Bible had been God’s secretaries, as loyal, as self-suppressing, as utterly disposed to the uses of the divine will as those royal secretaries, the Cecils, had so conspicuously been to Elizabeth and James. Self-abnegation in the service of greatness was the ideal.

  Secretaryship is one of the great shaping forces behind the King James Bible. There is no authorship involved here. Authorship is egotistical, an assumption that you might have something new worth saying. You don’t. Every iota of the Bible counts but without it you count for nothing. The secretary knows that. Like Robert Cecil, he can be clever, canny, resourceful and energetic but, for all the frustrations, he does not distort the source of his authority. A secretary, whether of God or of king, is in a position of dependent power. He has no authority independent of his master, but he executes that authority without hesitation or compromise. He is nothing without his master but everything through him. Loyalty is power and submission control. For this reason, biblical translation, like royal service, could only be utterly faithful. Without faithfulness, it became meaningless.

  By the early seventeenth century, a crucial difference had developed in translation theory between sacred and non-sacred texts. Anyone thinking of translating history, poetry, foreign tales or works of classical rhetoric, taking their cue from Cicero and a couple of words of Horace, would despise the literalist as a plodding, and scarcely civilised pedant. Any well-educated man would take a text in a foreign tongue and absorb its meaning so that he could reproduce something like it in his own language. Literalism, a word for word translation, would do nothing more than transfer the corpse of the original into a new language, not the living thing. Cicero, when translating Demosthenes and other great Athenian orators, ‘did not translate them as an interpreter’, he wrote, ‘but as an orator myself, keeping the same ideas and forms, or as one might say, the ‘‘figures’’ of thought, but in language which is more suitable to the way we speak’.

  This, of course, was also a question of authority. Cicero did not consider himself subservient to the Greeks he was translating. He was at least their equal. Why, then, should he suppress his own eloquence on their behalf? Luther, fascinatingly, the grandfather of all Reformation translators, had taken a Ciceronian view of his task. When faced with translating a Bible text, he had written, ‘You’ve got to go out and ask the mother in her house, the children in the street, the ordinary man at the market. Watch their mouths move when they talk, and translate that way. Then they’ll understand you and realise that you are speaking German to them.’ His whole idea, he said, was ‘to make Moses so German that no one would suspect he was a Jew’.

  Of course, the King James Translators were heir to this double and in some ways contradictory tradition. Lutheran accessibility ran directly counter to Calvinist secretarial strictness. It was a problem the Translators had to navigate, as will emerge. But there is another, all-important element which comes into play in the first decade of the seventeenth century in England and which had a shaping influence on the translation: a growing love of ceremonial, of a sense of religion which goes beyond the merely verbal and begins to take up the more luscious, musical and sensuous elements which extreme Puritanism would reject as popish trash.

  There are all sorts of signals in the air. In Westminster Abbey, Jacobean churchmen, encouraged by the king, started to enrich the way services were held, in a manner no Puritan could have tolerated. Rich old copes and canopies, showing images of Christ and Mary, probably from before the Reformation, were bought out and dusted down. Effigies of all the kings of England were ‘repayred, robed and furnished at the King’s Majestie his charge’ (£70) and rehoused in a specially built ‘presse of wain-scott’. Christian IV, between the parties, was taken to see them. A royal tomb was built for Elizabeth and an elaborate second funeral was held for James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was reinterred in the Henry VII chapel, the royal sepulchre of the Tudor dynasty. Money was found for a new organ, a better choir, and a body of clerks to copy out sheet music for the choir to sing. Anthems were commissioned to be sung every day at morning prayer. Tudor England had never seen anything like it.

  At Hatfield, Robert Cecil was clearly moving in the same direction. He was utterly entranced by music and had at least two vastly expensive and beautifully decorated organs made for the house. No stained- or painted-glass windows had been commissioned or installed in England since the 1530s. Everything about stained glass—its distortion of clear pure light; its reliance on imagery rather than the word; its sense of ecclesiastical luxury—ran against the essential mood of Puritan and even Protestant ideas. Yet despite this, and ground-breakingly, Cecil’s new palace included an elaborate and luxurious scheme for a highly coloured and heavily decorated chapel, not only with a beautiful and expensive organ, but with the most gorgeous set of painted glass windows ever commissioned in Jacobean England. They are still there, their blues, yellows and reds as brilliant as ever, their Old Testament stories set within painted scenes that somehow elide the ancient (semi-classical, semi-medieval) with the realities of the seventeenth-century landscape: the passover in a house with glazed and diamond-leaded windows, well-coursed brickwork, with oak beams and ceilings; Moses and his bulrushes by a Hertfordshire stream, next to a house with dormer windows and obelisks in the garden. This is not what the congregations at Scrooby or Amsterdam would have admired. Nor, though, are they a sign of a return to Roman Catholicism. Cecil and the administrators of the Abbey were all fierce anti-Catholics. Instead, these are signs of something that hadn’t happened before, an enriching and ceremonialising of the English Church, a subtle shift away from the dominance of the word, and an embracing of the idea that majesty, godliness, enrichment and ceremony could all be part of one new vision.

  Nowhere does this new ceremonialising instinct appear more clearly than in the figure of Lancelot Andrewes. It is easy to portray him in an unflattering light, as a machine politician, crushing the spirit of individualists such as Henry Barrow. But there is far more to Andrewes than that, a depth and a delicacy to him, a tenderness and a kind of humane sagacity which goes beyond the sometimes violent polarisations of the age. His sermons were famous at the time and, after his death, at the command of Charles I, they were published in a handsome folio volume. His editors were his disciples, William Laud, then Bishop of London, and John Buckeridge, Bishop of Ely. And from their immense, complex fabric one repeated warning emerges. Words are not enough. A Puritan religion dependent on dry analysis is insufficient. As Buckeridge said in the preface: ‘true Religion is in no way a gargalisme only, to wash the tongue and mouth, to speake good words; it must root in the heart, and then fructifie it in the hand; els it will not clense the whole man’.

  Andrewes had devoted his life to the word, but he distrusted it. It was his whole existence, he had been obsessed by his studies as a boy in a way which even his contemporaries thought a little unnatural—he never played a game—and his sermons picked up and toyed with the words of scripture, ‘crumbling’ them as George Herbert would later say, teasing them apart for the meanings they might bear, but still the word was not enough. The sermons to which the English were exposed every week should not be the only route to God. ‘All our ‘‘holiness’’ is in hearing,’ he had lectured the court in one sermon, ‘all our service ear-service.’ But human beings should be more than their ears.

  His own practice was different. When Archbish
op Laud finally fell, was arrested and tried in 1643–44, mounds of papers were produced by parliamentarians who had searched his rooms for evidence that he had been leading the Church of England on the path to Rome. Among them, to Puritan horror-cum- delight, was a description of the chapel that had been furnished by Bishop Andrewes, then long dead. It is a measure, in secret, of the kind of religion to which Andrewes felt most deeply drawn. It is richness and heaviness itself, an embroidered, brocaded, gilt-thickened and hidden world. You must imagine it in an England of stark wooden clothless tables placed in the clear-lit naves of English churches, the ten commandments up on the wall, no images, no crucifixes, no atmosphere beyond the proclaimed word. It is as if Andrewes’s chapel was the only place in colour. On the altar were two large candlesticks, a dish for alms and a cushion on which the prayer book rested. There was a silver canister for the communion wafers, a ‘tonne’ or little barrel for the wine, a round basin with spouts for the water, two patens or plates on which the bread was put during the Eucharist, and a chalice ‘having on the outside of the bowl Christ with the lost sheep on his shoulders; on the top of the cover, the wise man’s star’. There was a basin, ewer and towel for the priest to wash his hands, and five copes, two altar cloths and ‘a cloth to lay over the chalice, wrought with coloured silk’. Most remarkable of all, the furniture of this gilded shrine included a three-sided ‘censer, wherein the clerk putteth frankincense at the reading of the first lesson’.

  That too is scarcely what people imagine when they think of the circumstances in which the King James Bible, the great monument of English and North American Protestantism, was made. Andrewes, as ever, justified this by an appeal to the practice of the primitive church. Incense was not papist, it was apostolic. ‘Our religion you miscall modern sectarian opinions,’ he once told the Roman Cardinal Bellarmine in a famous exchange of pamphlets made just as the King James Bible was being prepared: ‘I tell you if they are modern, they are not ours; our appeal is to antiquity, yea even to the most extreme antiquity. We do not innovate; it may be we renovate what was customary with those same ancients, but with you has disappeared in novelties.’