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Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson


A fascinating, lively account of the making of the King James Bible.James VI of Scotland – now James I of England – came into his new kingdom in 1603. Trained almost from birth to manage rival political factions, he was determined not only to hold his throne, but to avoid the strife caused by religious groups that was bedevilling most European countries. He would hold his God-appointed position and unify his kingdom. Out of these circumstances, and involving the very people who were engaged in the bitterest controversies, a book of extraordinary grace and lasting literary appeal was created: the King James Bible.47 scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London translated the Bible, drawing from many previous versions, and created what many believe to be the greatest prose work ever written in English – the product of a culture in a peculiarly conflicted era. This was the England of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Bacon; but also of extremist Puritans, the Gunpowder plot, the Plague, of slum dwellings and crushing religious confines. Quite how this astonishing translation emerges is the central question of this book.Far more than Shakespeare, this Bible helped to create and shape the language. It is the origin of many of our most familiar phrases, and the foundations of the English-speaking world. It was a generous and deliberate decision to make the Bible available to the common man: not an immediate commercial success, but which later became a bestseller, and has remained one ever since.Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the early years of the first Stewart ruler, and the scholars who laboured for seven years to create the world's greatest book; immersing us in a world of ingratiating bishops, a fascinating monarch and London at a time unlike any other.









POWER AND GLORY

Jacobean Englandand the Making of the King James Bible

ADAM NICOLSON















COPYRIGHT (#ulink_fe94a4ef-2162-57fa-a7ea-8b1718017cc2)


HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublisbers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2003

Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2003

Portrait/Literature by Committee copyright © Sam Leith 2004

Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007108947

Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007380701 Version: 2016-12-07




PRAISE (#ulink_8920d2ab-a2c8-50a4-8ade-68eaa608a9aa)


‘This fascinating story is told with brilliance by Adam Nicolson.’

Glasgow Herald

‘An engaging and moving account … marvellous.’

Economist

‘Power and Glory … pays that Bible eloquent tribute, not least in its passionate homage to the power of language as, and in, history. His own words give us not only the rich history but a moving commemoration of the Bible that has so much shaped our utterances and lives.’

Independent

‘Nicolson’s portraits of Jacobean intellectuals, theologians, politicians and princes overlay the lasting achievement that underpins this book. His approach to personalities humanises the beauty and ceremony of the biblical prose that still transcends its makers.’

The Times

‘Conversational, witty and engaging. It is extraordinarily readable … Adam Nicolson gives us a swashbuckling and fastmoving account of the accession of King James I of England and VI of Scotland in 1603 … he catches the spirit of the age in his own literary style … There is power and glory here in spadefuls, and a great deal of kingdom too.’

The Tablet

‘One wouldn’t think an account of the translation of the Bible would prove an enthralling read, but Adam Nicolson’s narrative has a sweep of grandeur at which a brief review like this can only hint. This is history with masterly writing and a cast of bizarre characters. Highly recommended.’

Irish Examiner

‘It is a popular book as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt … Nicolson’s excitement is contagious.’

New Yorker

‘Nicolson shows us in captivating detail how the diverse translators of the King James Bible captured compelling debates that remain relevant to this day.’

Newsweek

‘A readable, immaculately researched book … The author has a clear understanding of the time, the issues involved and, above all, of the people who made the King James Bible. He could not have told his story more compellingly.’

Country Life

‘Adam Nicolson’s stunning history of the Authorised Version is really a prosopography, a study of the dynamic group of scholars who put together what some call the best book in the English language. Nicolson’s focus on the words these men left behind enables him to combine scholarship with a greater emotional sensitivity.’

Observer

‘Adam Nicolson’s book is unobtrusively learned, rich in curious and purposeful detail, an ideal balance between fervent enthusiasm and elegantly witty detachment. The story of the translation’s origins and production is a subject which, one always felt, would be nice to hear from a really sparkling and sharp guide. This volume strikes me as exactly that, a brilliantly entertaining, passionate, funny and instructive telling of an important and gripping story.’

PHILIP HENSHER, The Spectator

‘Adam Nicolson has a nose for quirks, follies and ironies … Nicolson fascinatingly demonstrates how these translators took the plain, sinewy prose of the fugitive martyr William Tyndale – written 80 years previously – and polished it to gem-like brightness, looking for words which would resonate with passion and ring sonorously amid the solemnity of worship … He has written a marvellous book: there are few more stylish or sensitive introductions than this to the personalities, the sights and the smells, as well as to the words, of Jacobean England.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Nicolson really deserves at least an 18-gun salute. Power and Glory is a fine piece of history, ecclesiology and literature all rolled into one and, what’s more, like the Authorised Version itself, it sings.’

Guardian

‘This is an easygoing, companionable exploration of Elizabethan and Jacobean England … will delight the general reader, for whom it was written … Nicolson takes one back to the Bible with a fresh eye and ear, which is not easily done these days.’

New Statesman

‘The story of the seven years between commissioning and printing fascinates from start to finish. It is told in a way which combines scholarship and entertainment.’

Independent on Sunday

‘Vivid, exhilarating, consistently intelligent, you can almost taste the air breathed by these Jacobean heroes, who gave English its most famous book. History at its best.’

SIMON JENKINS



‘Nicolson vividly evokes many aspects of Jacobean England: the secret police, religious passions, a profligate court, an atmosphere of emotional extravagance, splendid architecture, stained glass … Adam Nicolson has deepened my understanding of the greatest work of English prose, for which I am grateful.’

Literary Review




CONTENTS


Cover (#ud30fe05e-39cd-5eaa-aa26-422e4bdbce89)

Title Page (#ufeccbc30-c684-54d6-9832-74ecf9f7e773)

Copyright (#uc50e4cf2-26b2-5f2d-9482-48521b9b77ee)

Praise (#ue8421653-ff2c-58d4-b539-8ff279fd79ee)

Preface (#u0ae0b676-0fd3-532f-92b9-58095189b1d4)

1 A poore man now arrived at the Land of Promise (#uc5b29302-0263-5703-a26b-884490218e54)

2 The multitudes of people covered the beautie of the fields (#uae9a69b6-6b26-575a-ad87-9780cd1b41f6)

3 He sate among graue, learned and reuerend men (#uf3a050bf-55be-55f7-a887-877964b3251e)

4 Faire and softly goeth far (#litres_trial_promo)

5 I am for the medium in all things (#litres_trial_promo)

6 The danger never dreamt of, that is the danger (#litres_trial_promo)

7 O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart (#litres_trial_promo)

8 We have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination … (#litres_trial_promo)

9 When we do luxuriate and grow riotous in the gallantnesse of this world (#litres_trial_promo)

10 True Religion is in no way a gargalisme only (#litres_trial_promo)

11 The grace of the fashion of it (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut vp his tender mercies? (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendices (#litres_trial_promo)

A The Sixteenth-century Bible (#litres_trial_promo)

B The Six Companies of Translators (#litres_trial_promo)

C Chronology (#litres_trial_promo)

Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Portrait (#litres_trial_promo)

Life Drawing (#litres_trial_promo)

Top Ten Favourite Reads (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)

A Critical Eye (#litres_trial_promo)

Literature by Committee (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

Have you read? (#litres_trial_promo)

If You Loved This, You’ll Like … (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PREFACE (#ulink_ad43c3c6-90e9-5c44-97f4-dfcd75e1f563)


The making of the King James Bible, in the seven years between its commissioning by James VI & I in 1604 and its publication by Robert Barker, ‘Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majestie’, in 1611, remains something of a mystery. The men who did it, who pored over the Greek and Hebrew texts, comparing the accuracy and felicity of previous translations, arguing with each other over the finest details of chapter and verse, were many of them obscure at the time and are generally forgotten now, a gaggle of fifty or so black-gowned divines whose names are almost unknown but whose words continue to resonate with us. They have a ghost presence in our lives, invisible but constantly heard, enriching the language with the ‘civility, learning and eloquence’ of their translation, but nowadays only whispering the sentences into our ears.

Beyond that private communication, they have left few clues. Surviving in one or two English libraries and archives are the instructions produced at the beginning of the work, a couple of drafts of short sections sketched out in the course of it, some fragments of correspondence between one or two of them and a few pages of notes taken at a meeting near the end. Otherwise nothing.

But that virtual anonymity is the power of the book. The translation these men made together can lay claim to be the greatest work in prose ever written in English. That it should be the creation of a committee of people no one has ever heard of – and who were generally unacknowledged at the time – is the key to its grandeur. It is not the poetry of a single mind, nor the effusion of a singular vision, nor even the product of a single moment, but the child of an entire culture stretching back to the great Jewish poets and storytellers of the Near Eastern Bronze Age. That sense of an entirely embraced and reimagined past is what fuels this book.

The divines of the first decade of seventeenth-century England were alert to the glamour of antiquity, in many ways consciously archaic in phraseology and grammar, meticulous in their scholarship and always looking to the primitive and the essential as the guarantee of truth. Their translation was driven by that idea of a constant present, the feeling that the riches, beauties, failings and sufferings of Jacobean England were part of the same world as the one in which Job, David or the Evangelists walked. Just as Rembrandt, a few years later, without any sense of absurdity or presumption, could portray himself as the Apostle Paul, the turban wrapped tightly around his greying curls, the eyes intense and inquiring, the King James Translators could write their English words as if the passage of 1,600 or 3,000 years made no difference. Their subject was neither ancient nor modern, but both or either. It was the universal text.

The book they created was consciously poised in its rhetoric between vigour and elegance, plainness and power. It is not framed in the language, as one Puritan preacher described it, of ‘fat and strutting bishops, pomp-fed prelates’, nor of Puritan controversy or intellectual display. It aimed to step beyond those categories to embrace the universality of its subject. As a result, it does not suffer from one of the defining faults of the age: a form of anxious and egotistical self-promotion. It exudes, rather, a shared confidence and authority and in that is one of the greatest of all monuments to the suppression of ego.

It is often said that the King James Translators (a word that was capitalised at the time), particularly in the New Testament, did little more than copy out the work of William Tyndale, done over eighty years before in the dawn of the Reformation. The truth of their relationship to Tyndale, as will emerge, is complex but the point is surely this: they would have been pleased to acknowledge that they were winnowing the best from the past. They would not have wanted the status of originators or ‘authors’ – a word at which one of their Directors, Lancelot Andrewes, would visibly shudder. They took from Tyndale because Tyndale had done well, not perfectly and not always with an ear for the richness of the language, but with a passion for clarity which the Jacobean scholars shared. What virtue was there in newness when the old was so good?

Of course, the King James Bible did not spring from the soil of Jacobean England as quietly and miraculously as a lily. There were arguments and struggles, exclusions and competitiveness. It is the product of its time and bears the marks of its making. It is a deeply political book. The period was held in the grip of an immense struggle: between the demands for freedom of the individual conscience and the need for order and an imposed inheritance; between monarchy and democracy; between extremism and toleration. Early Jacobean England is suffused with this drama of authority and legitimacy and of the place of the state within that relationship. ‘The reformers’, it has often been said, ‘dethroned the Pope and enthroned the Bible.’ That might have been the case in parts of Protestant Europe, but in England the process was longer, slower, less one-directional and more complex. The authority of the English, Protestant monarch, as head of the Church of England, had taken on wholesale many of the powers which had previously belonged to the pope. The condition of England was defined by those ambiguities. In the years that the translation was being prepared, Othello, Volpone, King Lear and The Tempest – all centred on the ambivalences of power, the rights of the individual will, the claims of authority and the question of liberty of conscience – were written and staged for the first time. The questions that would erupt in the Civil War three decades later were already circling around each other here.

But it is easy to let that historical perspective distort the picture. To see the early seventeenth century through the gauze of the Civil War is to regard it only as a set of origins for the conflict. That is not the quality of the time, nor is the King James Bible any kind of propaganda for an absolutist king. Its subject is majesty, not tyranny, and its political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one indivisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole. Its grandeur of phrasing and the deep slow music of its rhythms – far more evident here than in any Bible the sixteenth century had produced – were conscious embodiments of regal glory. It is a book written for what James, the self-styled Rex Pacificus, and his councillors hoped – a vain hope, soon shipwrecked on vanity, self-indulgence and incompetence – might be an ideal world.




ONE A poore man now arrived at the Land of Promise (#ulink_f40d96de-baaf-5724-9389-6a5a7a1996f4)


And the LORD magnified Solomon exceedingly in the sight of all Israel, and bestowed vpon him such royal maiestie as had not bene on any king before him in Israel.

1 Chronicles 29:25

Few moments in English history have been more hungry for the future, its mercurial possibilities and its hope of richness, than the spring of 1603. At last the old, hesitant, querulous and increasingly unapproachable Queen Elizabeth was dying. Nowadays, her courtiers and advisers spent their lives tiptoeing around her moods and her unpredictability. Lurching from one unaddressed financial crisis to the next, selling monopolies to favourites, she had begun to lose the affection of the country she had nurtured for so long. Elizabeth should have died years before. Most of her great men – Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, even the beautiful Earl of Essex, executed after a futile and chaotic rebellion in 1601 – had gone already. She had become a relict of a previous age and her wrinkled, pasteboard virginity now looked more like fruitlessness than purity. Her niggardliness had starved the fountain of patronage on which the workings of the country relied and those mechanisms, unoiled by the necessary largesse, were creaking. Her exhausted impatience made the process of government itself a labyrinth of tact and indirection.

The country felt younger and more vital than its queen. Cultural conservatives might have bemoaned the death of old values and the corruption of modern morals (largely from Italy, conceived of as a louche and violent place), but these were not the symptoms of decline. England was full of newness and potential: its population burgeoning, its merchant fleets combing the world, London growing like a hothouse plum, the sons of gentlemen crowding as never before into the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, plants and fruits from all over the world arriving in its gardens and on its tables – but the rigid carapace of the Elizabethan court lay like a cast-iron lid above it. The queen’s motto was still what it always had been: Semper eadem, Always the same. She hadn’t moved with the times. So parsimonious had she been in elevating men to the peerage that by the end of her reign there were no more than sixty peers in the nobility of England. Scarcely a gentleman had been knighted by the queen for years.

That drought of honours was a symptom of a kind of paralysis, an indecisive rigidity. None of the great issues of the country had been resolved. Inflation had transformed the economy but the Crown was still drawing rents from its properties that had been set in the 1560s. The relationship between the House of Commons and the queen, for all her wooing and flattery, had become angry, tetchy, full of recrimination. The old war against Spain, which had achieved its great triumph of defeating the Armada in 1588, had dragged on for decades, haemorrhaging money and enjoying little support from the Englishmen whose taxes were paying for it. The London and Bristol merchants wanted only one outcome: an end to war, so that trade could be resumed. Religious differences had been buried by the Elizabethan regime: both Roman Catholics, who wanted England to return to the fold of the Roman Church, and the more extreme, ‘hotter’ Protestants, the Puritans, who felt that the Reformation in England had never been properly achieved, had been persecuted by the queen and her church, fined, imprisoned and executed. Any questions of change, tolerance or acceptance had not been addressed. Elizabeth had survived by ignoring problems or suppressing them and as a result England was a cauldron which had not been allowed to boil. Later history – even in the seventeenth century itself – portrayed Elizabeth’s death as a dimming of the brilliance, the moment at which England swopped a heroic, gallant, Renaissance freshness for something more degenerate, less clean-cut, less noble, more self-serving, less dignified. But that is almost precisely the opposite of what England felt at the time. Elizabeth was passé, decayed. A new king, with wife, children (Anne was pregnant with their sixth child) an heir for goodness’ sake, a passionate huntsman, full of vigour, a poet, an intellectual of European standing, a new king, a new reign and a new way of looking at the world; of course the country longed for that. Elizabeth’s death held out the prospect of peace with Spain, a new openness to religious toleration, and a resolution of the differences between the established church and both Catholics and Puritans. More than we can perhaps realise now, a change of monarch in an age of personal rule meant not only a change of government and policy, but a change of culture, attitude and belief. A new king meant a new world.

James Stuart was an unlikely hero: ugly, restless, red-haired, pale-skinned, his tongue, it was said, too big for his mouth, impatient, vulgar, clever, nervous. But his virtues, learned in the brutal world of Scottish politics, were equal to the slurs of his contemporaries. More than anything else he wanted and believed in the possibilities of an encompassing peace. He adopted as his motto the words from the Sermon on the Mount, Beati Pacifici, Blessed are the Peacemakers, a phrase which, in the aftermath of a European century in which the continent had torn itself apart in religious war, would appear over and over again on Jacobean chimneypieces and carved into oak testers and overmantels, crammed in alongside the dreamed of, wish-fulfilment figures of Peace and Plenty, Ceres with her overbrimming harvests and luscious breasts, Pax embracing Concordia. The Bible that is named after James, and whose translation was authorised by him, was central to his claim on that ideal.

James was in bed, but not yet asleep, when he learned that he had become King of England. He had been King of Scotland since he was one year old, when his mother Mary, Queen of Scots had been deposed thirty-five years before. He had spent his life in the wings and now, at last, his great scene was about to begin. A rather handsome and deeply indebted English gentleman, Sir Robert Carey, who at different times had been a commander against the Spanish Armada and a court dandy – just the sort of glamorous and rather sexy man to whom James was instinctively drawn – had ridden night and day on his own behalf to bring the news of Elizabeth’s death to Scotland. For decades, Carey had been living beyond his means and was desperate for advancement. This was his main chance too. Having fallen off his horse and been kicked in the face en route, he finally reached the palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh on the evening of 26 March 1603, some seventy hours after Queen Elizabeth had died in her palace at Richmond on the Thames. His head was bleeding from his fall.

Several weeks before, as Elizabeth had entered what was clearly her terminal illness, long, moping, energyless silences absorbing her, Carey had arranged for a string of horses to be waiting at inns all along the Great North Road and now he was well ahead of the game. Not until the following day were the proclamations made in Shrewsbury or York, and in Bristol only the day after that. But the English Privy Council already had their own spies in place at the Scottish court, and were curious to know how James had taken the news. ‘Even, my Lords,’ their reporter, Sir Roger Aston, told them later that week, ‘like a poore man wandering about 40 years in a wildernesse and barren soyle, and now arrived at the Land of Promise.’

It was the most perfect moment of James’s life. He received Carey in his bedroom. The Englishman knelt before the king and ‘saluted him by his title of England, Scotland, France and Ireland. Hee gave me his hand to kisse, and bade me welcome.’ James wanted to know what letters Carey brought with him from the English Council, but Carey had to confess he had none. This was private enterprise, against the wishes of the English Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, and the only sign that Carey had brought from the south was a sapphire ring, which James had once sent to Carey’s sister, Philadelphia, Lady Scroope, with the express purpose that she would return it as soon as she knew that Elizabeth had died.

It was enough. James had come into his own. He rewarded Carey with a place as one of the Grooms of the Bedchamber. Or so he promised; within a few weeks Carey was squeezed out of the position, probably by Cecil, who objected to the vulgarity of Carey’s dash north, perhaps by jealous and ambitious Scots. For them, as much as for James, the kingdom of England, increasingly rich, populous, powerful, well governed and civilised, lay to the south glittering like a jewel, or at least a money pump, a promise of riches after years of making do.

The Scottish crown was one of the weakest in Europe. It had no money and could command no armed strength of its own. England, France and Spain wooed and threatened it in turn. The Scottish magnates plotted and brawled with each other. The culture was murderous and James had no natural allies. The Presbyterian Church, taking its cue from the words of the Apostle Peter (‘We ought to obey God rather than men’) and of Calvin (‘Earthly princes deprive themselves of all authority when they rise up against God … We ought rather to spit in their faces than to obey them’) considered the king and the monarchy inferior both to the word of God and to those who preached it. In 1596, the firebrand Presbyterian Andrew Melville had told James exactly where he stood: ‘I mon tell yow, thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Chryst Jesus the King, and his Kingdome the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and of whase kingdome nocht a king nor a lord nor a heid, bot a member.’

To survive in this net of hostility, James had been forced to compromise and dissemble, to become cunning and to lie. His favourite tag was from Tacitus: ‘Those who know not how to dissimulate, know not how to rule.’ His face had become sly, his red, tufty moustache hanging down over his lips, his eyes somehow loose in their sockets. He regards his portrait painters with an inward, wary, intellectual look. Out of his mouth he would occasionally shoot harsh, witty, testing jokes. The sight of a drawn sword could make him faint and on his body the glorious gold-threaded doublets and ermine capes looked like fancy-dress; a private, isolated, cunning man disguised as a king. Elizabeth had been painted holding a rainbow, standing astride the map of England, bedecked with the symbols of purity. James in his portraits (he hated being painted) never reached for any mythological significance: he sat or stood red-faced, bad-tempered, irredeemably a man of this world, no distant image of a king but a king whose task, as God’s lieutenant, was to resolve and unify the tensions and fractures of his kingdom.

His upbringing had been deeply disturbed. David Rizzio, secretary and lover of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered in an adjoining room as she listened to his screams. James was in her womb at the time. His father, the charming Henry Darnley, was murdered by his mother’s next lover, the Earl of Bothwell, blown up when lying ill in his Edinburgh house. James never saw his mother after he was one year old and, although baptised, like her, a Catholic, was then put in the care of a string of terrifying Presbyterian governors, in particular George Buchanan, a towering European intellectual, the tutor of Montaigne, friend of Tycho Brahe, who considered the deposing of wicked kings perfectly legitimate, and whose memory continued to haunt James in adult life. As a boy king, he had been a trophy in the hands of rival noble factions in Scotland, kidnapped, held, threatened and imprisoned. ‘I was alane,’ he wrote later, ‘without fader or moder, brither or sister, king of this realme, and heir apperand of England.’

James retreated from the brutality and anarchy. He became chronically vulnerable to the allure of beautiful, elegant, rather Frenchified men. He loved hunting, excessively, an escape from the realities, at one point killing every deer in the royal park at Falkland in Fife, which had to be restocked from England. It has been calculated that he spent about half his waking life on the hunting field. And he became immensely intellectual, speaking ‘Greek before breakfast, Latin before Scots’, composing stiff Renaissance poetry, full of a clotted and frustrated emotionality, translating the Psalms, capable on sight of turning any passage of the Bible from Latin to French and then from French to English.

In 1584, when James was eighteen, the French agent Fontenoy sent home a report on this strange, spiky-edged, intellectualised, awkward and oddly idealistic king:

He is wonderfully clever, and for the rest he is full of honourable ambition, and has an excellent opinion of himself. Owing to the terrorism under which he has been brought up, he is timid with the great lords, and seldom ventures to contradict them; yet his special concern is to be thought hardy and a man of courage … He speaks, eats, dresses, dances and plays like a boor, and he is no better in the company of women. He is never still for a moment, but walks perpetually up and down the room, and his gait is sprawling and awkward, his voice is loud and his body is feeble, yet he is not delicate; in a word he is an old young man.

Fontenoy had asked him about the time he spent hunting: ‘He told me that, whatever he seemed, he was aware of everything of consequence that was going on. He could afford to spend time in hunting, because when he attended to business he could do more in an hour than others could do in a day.’

Behind the bravado lay weakness. Scotland was no place to be a king. The English throne, infinitely more powerful in relation to the nobility than his own; supported by the structures and doctrines of the church, rather than eroded and undermined by them; rich, potent and admired – all this awaited him like a harbour tantalisingly visible from far out to sea, but, until Elizabeth’s death, only to be longed for and lusted after.

Elizabeth taunted him. James had often sent his spies to Whitehall or to Richmond to see how near to death the ageing queen was coming. But the English Council was aware of this too and whenever a curious Scotsman seemed to be watching and attending on the queen more carefully than usual, it was arranged for him to stand waiting in a lobby from where he could see, ‘through the hangings, to the queen dancing to a little fiddle’. Over and over again, James would hear reports of her fitness and her vigour.

Meanwhile, she dandled her kingdom and her money in front of his eyes. There were other claimants to the English throne, but none so strong. Both his mother and father carried Tudor genes but Elizabeth would make nothing sure. In 1586, all too vaguely, she had promised to do nothing that would take away from ‘any greatness that might be due to him, unless provoked on his part by manifest ingratitude’. She began to send him money, and in the letters that accompanied the cash, Elizabeth allowed herself to speak to James from the enormous and magnificent height of an imperial throne. As she wrote to him in June 1586:

Considering that God hath endewed ws with a crown that yeildeth more yerly profeit to us, than we understand yours doth to youe, by reason of the dissipation and evill governement thereof of long tyme before your birth, we have latelie sent to youe a portion meete for your awin privat use.

The English carefully varied the amount from year to year, sometimes £3,000, sometimes £5,000, so that James would never quite know where he stood. The Scots always called the grant an ‘annuity’ – a payment due every year – and the English ‘a gratuity’, made out of the kindness of their hearts. The English policy had its effect. Although James’s mother was a Catholic, and although he had flirted with the Catholic states in Europe and had made vague, lying promises to English Roman Catholics that he would introduce something like toleration when he acceded to the English throne, he had never done anything to put his chances of succession in jeopardy. He had been bought. By the time of Elizabeth’s death – she died, in the end, ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’, so quietly that no one was quite sure of the precise time of her death – James’s mouth was dry with years of panting.

It was a difficult role to play. Although there is no evidence of his affection for a mother he hadn’t seen since he was an infant, James had been forced to acquiesce in her execution in 1587. The unstated but implicit assumption was that he had bargained that acceptance for a recognition of his title to the English throne. The conventional modern view of such an upbringing would be negative: such abuse would be bound to destroy the person. James, for all his strange, unaccommodated behaviour, went precisely the other way. The outcome of his violent, threatened youth was not someone filled with vitriol and vengeance, although James could be foul-mouthed, but what might be called exaggeratedly social behaviour, a longing for acceptance and a desire for a life and a society in which all conflicting demands were reconciled and where all factions felt at home. At his twenty-first birthday, he had invited all the warring magnates and grandees of Scotland to walk hand in hand through the streets of Edinburgh. It was a ritual, a pantomime of the good society which lasted scarcely longer than the birthday itself; Scotland was not suited to amity. But England was different and for James it must have seemed that at last, that dream of coherence would become a reality.



The reign began with a month-long fiesta during which James was introduced to England and England to James. In London, the Secretary of State, little shrunken Robert Cecil, his back humped like a lute, his wry neck holding his head to one side, his twisted foot giving him an awkward stance, read out the proclamation of the new king at four in the morning in the Tudor palace at Richmond, at 10 a.m. at the ramshackle royal palace in Whitehall, then in great state at various places in the City of London. Cecil, subtle, secretive, immensely courteous and prodigiously hard-working, was at the heart of English government, as his father, Lord Burghley, had been before him. Both were royal servants intent on continuity and on the coherence of the state. They were merciless in the destruction of their enemies, against whom they deployed an array of spies, charm and money. Only when Robert Cecil died did the world discover the reality. He had sunk himself into almost irretrievable debt. He had plotted and misinformed against everyone. Through the impartiality of his courtesy and the ubiquity of his deceit, he had maintained his unrivalled position of influence. As his father had done with Elizabeth before her accession, Cecil had been in secret correspondence with James, via an intermediary, for two years.

In letter after letter, Cecil flattered and cajoled him, portrayed England as a place of civility and charm, a featherbed into which James could at last relax after all the stony travails of his Scottish youth. The warm and civilised care which Cecil lavished on the future king represented to James everything he hoped of England. And, of course, the letters portrayed Cecil himself as the indispensable gatekeeper who could usher James into the promised land. The Earl of Essex, before his disastrous rebellion and death in 1601, had been playing the same role. Once Essex was out of the way, Cecil had slid smoothly into position and now at last, with the queen dead, he could bring the secret arrangements to conclusion: he dispatched the English Privy Council’s envoys to Scotland. They invited James ‘to repair into England with all speed’.

‘Good news makes good horsemen’, and before James began his long progress south, a stream of interested Englishmen made their way to Holyrood, anxious to mould and influence the reign from its very beginning. Lewis Pickering, a Puritan gentleman from Northamptonshire, soon to be involved in the widespread manoeuvrings for the reform of the English Church, was one of the first to be admitted to James’s presence. Would the king look more kindly than Elizabeth on the need to banish all papist practices from the English Church? Would the Reformation in England at last be made complete by the Calvinist king? Political to his core, James would not dream of giving more than a gracious answer. Dr Thomas Neville, envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed him. Neville was one of the most passionate opponents of extreme Puritanism, and of everything Pickering represented. Would the king stand firm for the House of Bishops against all the demands of the Presbyterian clergy in England? Would he support the status quo? Surely the last thing he wanted was to turn the English Church into anything resembling the church of John Knox and George Buchanan? Again, no answer. Others clustered in their sycophancy. Sir Oliver Cromwell, uncle of the regicide, came to pay his respects. ‘One saith hee will serve him by daie,’ the world-weary wit and courtier Sir John Harington wrote to a friend, ‘another by night. The women are for servynge him both day and nighte.’

James requested cash from the Privy Council and it arrived by the coachload. They sent £5,000 in gold and £1,000 in silver. Jewellery for his Danish Queen Anne arrived from London (although not the Crown Jewels which were not allowed out of the country) as well as a selection of Elizabeth’s hundreds of garnet- and pearl-encrusted dresses. Six geldings and a coach with four horses were dispatched to bring the king into England. On 5 April 1603, leaving his wife and children to follow him, James left Edinburgh for a journey through his new kingdom. It lasted over a month, spreading on through the beautiful spring weather into May. Nobility, gentlemen and chancers from north and south of the border accompanied him. It was a cavalcade. Most rode on horses. The wife of the French Ambassador was carried to London in ‘a chair with slings’, eight porters hired for the task, four to carry, four to relieve them.

The English turned out in their thousands to see the spectacle. James may have been unaware that the Privy Council had instructed them to do so and ‘if any shall be found disobedient, negligent or remisse therein, these are to let them know, that they are to sustaine such condigne punishment as their offense in that behalfe deserveth’. The gaiety had a whip at its back and the glittering pageant was an instrument of authority.

In Berwick-on-Tweed, all the guns of the border fortress town were fired at once. It was to be for the last time. The newly unified country needed no internal border fortresses and money could be saved if the garrison was dispersed. James was invited to fire one cannon himself. In Newcastle all prisoners were released except those in prison for ‘treason, murther and papistrie’. All those gaoled for debt had those debts paid off. James was hosing the money around him. In York a conduit ran all day with white wine and claret. At Worksop, the king was entertained to ‘excellent, soule-ravishing musique’ by the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had hurried from Whitehall to meet him there.

James was nothing but bonhomie. The previously violent and lawless Scottish borders were to become, he announced, the ‘very heart of the Country’ in the new united empire of Great Britain, a phrase in use since the 1540s when Henry VIII and Edward VI had been anxious to unite England and Scotland, but now given a whole new Jacobean impetus. James had ordered new signets in which the rose and the thistle were to be intertwined. Unity and togetherness was his dream. An ensign for shipping was to be designed in which the Scottish saltire of St Andrew and the English cross of St George were to float side by side so that neither should have precedence over the other. There was to be a single currency in which the 20-shilling gold piece was to be called ‘The Unite’, with ‘Our picture’ on one side and ‘Our Armes Crowned’ on the other, emblazoned with the Latin motto Faciam eos in gentem unam, I shall make them into one nation. Here, in a practical and symbolic programme, the dream of authority and wholeness was, in James’s vision at least, to become reality.

The new king would soon discover, however, that seventeenth-century Englishmen had about as much love for union, whether fiscal or political, as their modern descendants. The dream of unity – an abstract, intellectualised, Scottish and hence European ideal of political togetherness – would within a year fall foul of an English conservatism which valued its own hard-won freedoms far above any high-falutin’ ideas of political unity. England was England, the rosbifs dominated parliament, civilisation stopped at the Cheviots and the English Channel and ever, alas, would it remain so.

For the time being, life was a holiday. Largesse had been pouring in an unending fountain from James’s hand. He had, in places, literally showered the streets with gold coins. Teams of the gentry were queueing up to be knighted, 237 of them in the first six weeks of the reign, 906 in the first four months, a sudden gush from the Fount of Honour, which under Elizabeth’s last years had run virtually dry.

Then, on 21 April, as the pageant arrived at Newark in Lincolnshire, James made his first mistake. It was a bad one.

In this Towne, and in the Court, was taken a cut-purse doing the deed; and being a base pilfering theefe, yet was a Gentleman-like in the outside. This fellow had good store of coyne found about him; and upon examination confessed that he had from Barwick to that place plaied the cut-purse in the Court … His Majestie hearing of this nimming gallant directed a warrant presently to the Recorder of New-warke, to have him hanged, which was accordingly executed.

What can have possessed James? Perhaps he was rattled by the presence of a thief in the midst of all this springtime hope and optimism? Maybe he assumed that the English king, so much more powerful than the Scottish, could from time to time behave with autocratic authority? Maybe, in a complex and troubled personality, it was simply a blip, an aberration? He could certainly behave very oddly at times. (Later in his reign, travelling back to Scotland, he dismounted at the border between the two countries and lay down across it to demonstrate to his courtiers how two kingdoms could exist in one person.) Whatever the cause, here in Newark he made the wrong decision.

Summary execution was not done in England, nor had it been for centuries. The government habitually tortured and executed people and displayed their heads (hard-boiled, so that the skin went black and had some resistance to the weather) on spikes at the south end of London Bridge, but none of this was done without going through the proper procedures. The Privy Council alone could authorise torture and execution. James’s summary justice made all the talk of peacemaking and constitutional kingship look hollow. The courtiers were appalled. ‘I heare our new Kinge hath hanged one man before he was tryed,’ Sir John Harington wrote. ‘Tis strangely done; now if the wynde bloweth thus, why not a man be tryed before he hath offended?’ A doubt was sown that James did not really comprehend the promised land in which he had arrived. Was the Scottish king suddenly out of his depth in the more evolved world of English politics? Was he likely to override or ignore the long established rule of the common law, of which the English were deeply proud? Harington would play it carefully. ‘I wyll keepe companie with my oves and boves, and go to Bathe and drinke sacke.’ Or so he told his friends; in fact, he had sent James an elaborate and expensive astrological lantern by which the king could tell his fortune, and composed elegant, supplicatory letters to his new sovereign. Nothing was entirely as it seemed.

The thief dead, the show went on. James appeared one day as Robin Hood, ‘his clothes as green as the grass he trod on’. At Exton in Rutland he hunted ‘live hares in baskets’. Outside Stamford, visible from miles away, ‘an hundred high men, that seemed like the Patagones, huge long fellows of twelve and fourteene feet high, that are reported to live on the Mayne of Brasil, neere to the Streights of Megallane’ turned out to be ‘a company of poore honest suitors, all going upon high stilts’. Outside Huntingdon, a crowd on their knees begged James to reopen some common land which had been enclosed and denied to them. The king ignored the request. Another crowd from Godmanchester greeted him with seventy ploughs, drawn by seventy plough-teams, but that too was just a show, another means, however oblique, of asking for money.

This was not the serious business, not the power-playing which would become more intense and more real once the cavalcade reached London. For now it was play-acting. For a few days, the king and the itinerant court stayed at Hinchinbrooke Abbey outside Huntingdon. It was the house of Sir Oliver Cromwell, MP, himself a loyal monarchist, drainer of the Fens, and subscriber to the planting and cultivating of Virginia. Cromwell put on a spectacular show for the new king and for the crowds, providing ‘bread and beefe for the poorest’, meat and wine ‘and those not riffe-ruffe, but ever the best of the kinde’ for the gentry. Cromwell gave the king a gold cup, ‘some goodly horses’, a pack of ‘flete and deep-mouthed houndes’ as well as ‘divers hawkes of excellent winge’. Everything was calculated to make England look like an Arcadia of riches, and James appeared to believe the propaganda.

England was salivating over James, submissive and obsequious in turns, in a way that is so unabashed that it strikes us as odd. But this too requires an act of the imagination. Submissiveness and obsequiousness were signals of the social order at work. Social differences between men were not an unfortunate result of economics or power politics, nor a distortion of how things ought to be but a sign that society was well ordered. Life, happily, was arranged on a slope as steeply pitched as a church spire. What looks to us now like the most unctuous kind of self-abasement was symbolic of civilisation. A man making a request to his superior happily knelt before him, as a straightforward sign of submission. Plaintiffs knelt in court, children to their fathers, MPs and bishops when addressing the king. When John Donne hoped he might become Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, a position in the gift of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the king’s favourite, Donne wrote to him:

All that I mean in usinge thys boldnes, of puttinge myselfe into your Lordship’s presence by thys ragge of paper, ys to tell your Lordship that I ly in a corner, as a clodd of clay, attendinge what kinde of vessell yt shall please you to make of Your Lordship’s humblest and thankfullest and devotedst servant.

The ‘poore worme’ who wrote this letter was no pitiable youth; Donne was almost fifty and probably accompanied the letter with a bribe.

There was biblical sanction for all of this. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, a favourite text for Jacobean England, says quite straightforwardly: ‘Let euery soule bee subject vnto the higher powers: For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordeined of God. Whosoeuer therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist, shall receiue to themselues damnation.’

The condition in Eden had been one of obedience; a steeply raked social structure was ordained by God; and so crawling to the great could be holy in England too.

The climax of James’s journey into his new kingdom came on 3 May when he arrived at the enormous, multi-winged, many-towered palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire. This was no royal residence, although Elizabeth had often treated the house as if she owned it. Theobalds in fact belonged to Robert Cecil. James, who had scarcely before been outside Scotland, was overwhelmed by the riches of England and the welcome of its people. Cushioned by the grande luxe of Theobalds – the nearest comparison is a great nineteenth-century hotel, or a liner: the Titanic had several public rooms decorated in a wildly overblown Jacobean style – all the gratitude he had felt to Cecil during their secret correspondence, he now poured out to the nation as a whole: ‘a people so loving, so dutifull, and so deere unto us, may know and feele that we are as desirous to make them happy by our Justice and grace towards them in all reasonable things, as they have been redy to increase our comfort and contentment in yeelding their loyalty and obedience’. Monopolists were to be obliged to give up their monopolies, creditors to pay their debts, lawyers to reduce their fees. Heaven was about to descend on England.

This proclamation was made from Theobalds, where Cecil had not stinted. The building, which was confiscated by parliament after the Civil War, sold off for its raw materials and demolished in about 1650, was everything the king could have dreamed of. It was enormous, an English Chambord, with five courtyards, three storeys high, stretched along a front a quarter of a mile long. The walls seemed to consist almost entirely of vast glazed surfaces. Golden lions holding golden vanes stood on the peak of one tower after another. James had been exposed to modern architecture – the palace at Falkland was a Renaissance building – but he would never have seen richness on such a scale.

Little, crumpled Robert Cecil, ‘my elf, my beagle, my pygmy’, as James would part affectionately, part humiliatingly call him (Elizabeth had used the same tease-taunts), with his pale, almond-shaped face, his stooped figure, his evaluating eyes, guided the king around the stupendous palace: the hall decorated with the signs of the Zodiac, where the stars shone at night and which a mechanical sun traversed by day; another hall containing a painted map of England showing all the cities, towns and villages, as well as ‘the armorial bearings and domains of every esquire, lord, knight and noble who possess lands and retainers to whatever extent’. There was an open loggia in which the whole history of England was painted on the walls. In the Long Gallery were portraits of all the great men there had ever been. There were pleasure gardens. There were pictures of all the cities of Christendom. Life can never have seemed so rich. Cecil loved toys and rarities of all kinds, from tortoise-shaped clocks to the ‘nests of little boxes of China’ and the ‘cabinet of china gilt all over’ which were among his possessions at his death. He paid for lion cubs to be trained up in the Tower of London as pets for the king. He had a tame parrot which drank red wine from Bordeaux and walked up and down his dinner table making ‘his choice of meat’. After taking its fill, the bird used to sit ‘in a gentlewoman’s ruff all day’.



The troubled and difficult soul of James Stuart, for so long exposed to parsimony, betrayal and violence in his native Scotland, had arrived in a world of marvels, as if England was a cabinet of rarities to which he had at last been given the key. He immediately elevated Robert Cecil to the peerage (and the following year made him Earl of Salisbury) the first of the fifty-six baronies, nineteen viscountcies, thirty-two earldoms, one marquisate and three dukedoms which James scattered like sequins across the country. The bridegroom was in the full and expansive flush of his honeymoon (James’s own comparison) and England, the heiress he had married, was happy for the moment to walk alongside him, glowing with the riches she had brought him.




TWO The multitudes of people covered the beautie of the fields (#ulink_c3b7c3f1-06a8-5a36-b035-e801e4a8f765)


And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept againe, and said, Who shall giue vs flesh to eate?

We remember the fish, which wee did eate in Egypt freely: the cucumbers and the melons, and the leekes, and the onions, and the garlicke. […]

And while the flesh was yet betweene their teeth, yer [ere] it was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague.

And he called the name of that place Kibroth-hattaavah


(#ulink_feaf67c9-f018-5c8a-8a4f-d5a2cd7eed49): because there they buried the people that lusted.

Numbers 11:4–5, 33–34

Iames finally moved on from the enveloping luxuries of Theobalds and arrived at London on 7 May. He found a city full of flowers. James Nasmyth, who was to become chief surgeon to the king, had at last persuaded one of his Persian black fritillaries to bloom. He had seen a printed illustration, he had the bulbs from what he considered a good source, and now at last its dark plum-coloured pagoda of hanging heads was up and mysteriously beautiful in his Long Acre garden. Robert Cecil himself had a garden he treasured next to his house on the Strand, shaded with lime trees and where tulips from Crete and Turkey, globe flowers from the Peloponnese and American yuccas all grew. In the greenhouses, the artichokes, melons and cucumbers were coming on. The lamb’s lettuce, endives, rocket, marigolds, orache, spinach, chervil and rampion were all out, planted in the beds. Some of the more advanced gardeners were experimenting with the bitter leaves of chicory, known then as lattuca romana. Horse radish was grown as an ingredient for fish sauce along with both Spanish and sweet Virginian potatoes. Cauliflower was a rarity; it was difficult to get seed that would germinate.

Even London, by far the biggest city in England, and on its way to becoming the biggest in Europe, over which on bad days a smog of coal smoke already hung, was still rural in its corners. The swallows were returning from the winter they had spent, as everyone knew, deep in the Cornish tin mines. Barnacle geese were breeding ‘underwater on such ships sides as have beene verie long at sea’. And with the coming of the spring the botanists examined the London plants. Timothy, the lovely early fox-tailed grass, was found ‘on the upland meadows between Islington and Highgate’. Royal ferns were growing in a bog on Hampstead Heath. There was meadow saxifrage in Gray’s Inn Lane, and the strange, weedy prickly lettuce on a high bank by the footpath next to it. The dark leaves and pink flowers of marsh woundwort, which helped to heal cuts and grazes, was growing next to the paths that led out to the villages of Kensington and Chelsea and in a small patch in Westminster near the Thames. On the abbey itself, the little yellow-spired herb called pennywort, a native of rocks and cliffs, now found only in Cornwall and the far west, grew over the door next to Chaucer’s tomb, which led out on the path to the old palace.

Around these delicacies – and you could still get a cup of milk and a pot of clotted cream from the dairy farm just north of the city walls – London swelled and bubbled. The holiday atmosphere lasted for a while after James had reached the city. As he made his way through the suburbs, where the houses and tenements had crept out in a wide rash beyond the medieval walls, the crowds had been enormous, and as one observer who went out to see the king described it, ‘the multitudes of people in highwayes, fieldes, meadowes, and on trees, were such that they covered the beautie of the fieldes’. Hats were thrown in the air. People were killed in the crush. It was said by the Venetian Ambassador, perhaps believably, that 40,000 strangers and visitors had surged into London around the new court; its normal population was about 140,000. By the time James and his queen were crowned in July, the number of visitors had ballooned to an extraordinary 100,000. A new king, a time of flux, was an opportunity not to be passed up. Letters arrived from the kings and princes of Christendom. The spreading beneficence continued. Ancient Catholic priests and one or two enemies of the Elizabethan establishment were all released from the Tower. The sun was shining.

Along with the crush of new suitors at the court came another, less welcome visitor. In its shadow the King James Bible came into being. By the end of May, the Council, in the king’s name, had already issued a royal proclamation that ‘Gentlemen were to depart the Court’, for ‘we find the sicknesse already somewhat forward within our City of London, which by concourse of people abiding there is very like to be increased’.

There had been 112 deaths in London that week, thirty of them from the plague. This outbreak had slid in from the East, making its way across Europe from the steppes of Eurasia, first touching England in the east coast ports in 1602. With the gathering of people at the accession of a new king (it would happen again at the accession of Charles I in 1625, an ominous start to a pair of Stuart reigns), plague would almost inevitably strike the capital. London, or at least the poor and dirty parts of it, were a perfect breeding ground. By 23 June, in that week alone, London plague deaths were up to 158. By the end of the year the total would have reached 30,000.

Disease exposes the assumptions of a society, and this ferocious outbreak of the plague throws the nature of Jacobean England into sudden highlight. People felt they understood the plague. It was a moral affliction which attacked cities because cities were wicked and disgusting. London was a sucking sink of iniquity, with something murderous and dissolving at its core. Disintegrating medieval palaces and abandoned monastic houses lay about the city like scavenged animals. Next to these half-rotting corpses, there was a strange and disturbing intensity, the product of a new and bewildering urge to cluster at the commercial centre of England. London was stretching, groaning, falling apart with its own growth. The open spaces which had brought air into the medieval city were filled with new buildings. All its sustenance was dragged in from the surrounding countryside, which for miles around had become one vast market garden. Fewer than half the houses in London had their own kitchen and almost none their own oven. It was a fast-food city, mutton pasties and fruit pies available at street stands; early asparagus would be there in season, swathed in butter. Tavern-keepers provided free ‘thincut slices of roast-beef on the bar’, heavily dosed with salt to increase customers’ thirst. Everything was for sale: the title of Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which was first performed in 1613, was a joke. There was no such thing.

The city seemed to be rising and falling at the same time. Ministers were climbing into trees and preaching seditious novelties to the chance crowds in the graveyards below them. Crowds cluttered the narrow medieval thoroughfares. Outside the theatres, as the city corporation complained, ‘there is such a resort of people and such multitudes of coaches … that sometimes all our streets cannot contain them’.

At the urging of radical Puritan ministers, maypoles, stored from one Maytime to the next under the eaves of city houses, were being cut up and used as firewood, each house allotted its length for an evening’s blaze. There were plans to pave the Strand but for now every winter it was ooze.

London was more of an agglutination than any kind of classical construction, buildings stuck together and clotted as a mass of swallows’ or bats’ nests. The many official attempts in the first decade of the century to clarify and cleanse the city, to impose order and uniformity on its bubbling and anomalous being, repeatedly failed. This animal aspect of London was always too powerful. When William Harvey, the physician, anatomist of the human heart and friend of several of the Bible Translators, wanted to describe the different parts of the gut, the comparison that naturally came to mind was the streets of his own city: the alimentary canal, he wrote in 1613, was like the long wandering thoroughfare that ran ‘from Powles to Ledenhale, one way but many names, as Cheape, Powtry, &c.’.

If the city was a body, in the summer of 1603 that body was diseased, or at least parts of it were, particularly those occupied by the poor. They suffered from plague more than the rich because they were wicked. The London parishes in which they lived were the disgusting ones, filled with reprobates: near the docks, in the suburbs outside the old walls where building had been haphazard and unregulated, at Houndsditch where dead dogs were indeed thrown into the rubbish-filled ditch. The word ‘suburb’ still carried some of its Latin effect. If urbs was the city itself, sub-urbs were the under-city, the lower part. Should any of the poor wander into the richer parishes, particularly if they were visibly sick or weak, the churchwardens would have them taken back to the slums with which London was ringed. Those who were dying in the back alleys of St Bartholomew Exchange or St Saviour’s Southwark were to be kept there. Eight hundred plague deaths occurred in a single building in 1603, an enormous, abandoned town palace, so subdivided that it could house 8,000 people. In the suburbs outside Cripplegate and Bishopsgate, growth had been so rapid that the parish officials trying to trace the boundaries on the annual beating of the bounds had to break their way through people’s gardens and backyards. Markets at Queenhithe, Billingsgate, Bridewell and Smithfield – as well as the city’s main granary across the river in Southwark – were the breeding grounds of rats, but also magnets for human vagrants, the corrupt and ragged fringes of unintegrated society. These were the places where the poor lived and where child mortality in an ordinary year ran higher than anywhere else in England. Approaching a quarter of all children born in England would die before they were ten (a rate higher than in any country in the modern world); in these slums, the proportion of child deaths could triple. Plague simply exaggerated the savage social distinctions of everyday life.

But there was something strange about the plague: it seemed to pick and choose among its victims. Why? Nicholas Bound, a Puritan Sabbatarian, had the answer. His pamphlet, Medicines for the Plague, published in 1604, is alive with both the appalled anxiety of the time and a terrifying certainty over God’s role:

For what is the cause that this pestilence is so greatly in one part of the land, and not another? and in the same citie and towne why is it in one part, or in one house, and not in another? and in the same house, why is it vpon one, and not vpon all the rest, when they all liue together, and draw in the same breath, and eate and drinke together, and lodge in the same chamber, yea sometimes in the same bed? what is the cause of this, but that it pleaseth the Lord in wisdom, for some cause to defend some for a time, and not the rest? Therefore let vs beleeue, that in these dangerous times God must bee our onely defence.

As another preacher, Thomas Pullein, said in Ieremiah’s Teares, published in 1608, the plague is nothing but ‘the will of God rightfullie punishing wicked men’.

Henoch Clapham, a wild and cantankerous Puritan controversialist, claimed in one 1603 pamphlet that people who saw anything in the plague but a working of the divine will were ‘atheistes, mere naturians and other ignorant persones’. Clapham had seen men and women, walking the streets, suddenly stumble and collapse, clearly knocked down by one of God’s avenging angels. One only had to inspect them afterwards to see ‘the plaine print of a blue hand left behind vpon the flesshe’. And what had medicine got to do with that? (The modern use of the word ‘stroke’ to mean an apoplectic seizure is a faint memory of that angelic blow.)

By midsummer, London under plague now looked, sounded and smelled like a city at war. It was by far the worst outbreak England had known. Here now, grippingly, and shockingly, the first and greatest of the Bible Translators appears on the scene. It is not a dignified sight. Lancelot Andrewes was a man deeply embedded in the Jacobean establishment. He was forty-nine or fifty, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was also Dean of Westminster Abbey, a prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral, drawing the income from one of the cathedral’s manors, and of Southwell Minster, one of the chaplains at the Chapel Royal in Whitehall, who under Elizabeth had twice turned down a bishopric not because he felt unworthy of the honour but because he did not consider the income of the sees he was offered satisfactory. Elizabeth had done much to diminish the standing of bishops; she had banished them from court and had effectively suspended Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose severe and Calvinist views were not to her liking. Andrewes, one of the most astute and brilliant men of his age, an ecclesiastical politician who in the Roman Church would have become a cardinal, perhaps even pope, was not going to diminish his prospects simply to carry an elevated title.

Andrewes plays a central role in the story of the King James Bible, and the complexities of his character will emerge as it unfolds – he is in many ways its hero; as broad as the great Bible itself, scholarly, political, passionate, agonised, in love with the English language, endlessly investigating its possibilities, worldly, saintly, serene, sensuous, courageous, craven, if not corrupt then at least compromised, deeply engaged in pastoral care, generous, loving, in public bewitched by ceremony, in private troubled by persistent guilt and self-abasement – but in the grim realities of plague-stricken London in the summer of 1603, he appears in the worst possible light. Among his many positions in the church, he was the vicar of St Giles Cripplegate, just outside the old walls to the north of the city.

The church was magnificent, beautifully repaired after a fire in 1545, full of the tombs of knights and aldermen, goldsmiths, physicians, rich men and their wives. The church was surrounded by elegant houses and the Jews’ Garden, where Jews had been buried before the medieval pogroms, was now filled with ‘fair garden plots and summer-houses for pleasure … some of them like Midsummer pageants, with towers, turrets and chimney-tops’.

But there was another side to Cripplegate. This was the London that was overflowing its own bounds, ‘replenished with many tenements of poor people’, many of the streets filled with bowling alleys and dicing houses, the part of London where, as one royal proclamation said, there was ‘a surcharge of people, specially of the worse sort, as can hardly be either fed and sustained, or preserved in health or governed from the dearth of victuals, infection of plague and manifold disorders’. There were too many Irish people here, and, as all Jacobeans knew, the Irish meant plague. There was a playhouse, the Fortune, modelled on the Globe, and the air was thick with stench from the seventy breweries in the parish. This was the London of Grub Street, not yet filled with scribblers for the press, but with the diseased poor. No part of London suffered more horrifyingly in the plague of 1603. ‘Open graves where sundry are buried together’ were dug in the parish, ‘an hundred hungry graves each to be filled with 60 bodies’. The graves, Thomas Dekker, the sardonic, sententious, gossiping newsmonger of plague London, wrote, were ‘like little cellars, piling up forty or fifty in a Pit’. At the beginning of the year, there were about 4,000 people in Lancelot Andrewes’s parish. By December 1603, 2,878 of them had been killed by the disease.

Andrewes wasn’t there. He had previously attended to the business of the parish, insisting that the altar rails should be retained in the church (which a strict Puritan would have removed), doubling the amount of communion wine that was consumed (for him, Christianity was more than a religion of the word) and composing a Manual for the Sick, a set of religious reassurances, beginning with a quotation from Kings: ‘Set thy house in order, for thou shalt die.’ And he certainly preached at St Giles’s from time to time. But throughout the long months of the plague in 1603, he never once visited his parish.

It was generally understood that by far the best way to avoid catching the plague was to leave the city. Contemporary medical theory was confused between the idea of a disease spreading by contagion and by people breathing foul air, but the lack of certainty didn’t matter: the solution was the same. Go to the country; fewer people, cleaner air. From late May onwards, James and his followers had been circling London, staying at Hampton Court and Windsor, hunting at Woodstock in Oxfordshire or at Royston in Hertfordshire, staying at Farnham, Basing, Wilton and Winchester. It was, as Cecil described it, ‘a camp volant, which every week dislodgeth’. For the king to absent himself (even though the crowds accompanying his travels took the plague with them, infecting one unfortunate town after another) was only politic. But for the vicar of a parish to do so was another question.

The mortality had spread to Westminster. In the parish of St Margaret, in which the Abbey and Westminster School both lie, dogs were killed in the street and their bodies burnt, month after month, a total of 502 for the summer. The outbreak was nothing like as bad as in Cripplegate, but Andrewes, who as dean was responsible for both Abbey and school, with its 160 pupils, was not to be found there either. He had ordered the college closed for the duration and had gone down himself to its ‘pleasant retreat at Chiswick, where the elms afforded grateful shade in summer and “a retiring place” from infection’. He might well have walked down there, as he often did, along the breezy Thameside path through Chelsea and Fulham ‘with a brace of young fry, and in that wayfaring leisure had a singular dexterity to fill those narrow vessels with a funnel’. He was lovely to the boys. ‘I never heard him utter so much as a word of austerity among us,’ one of his ex-pupils remembered. The Abbey papers still record the dean’s request in July 1603 for ‘a butler, a cooke, a carrier, a skull and royer’ – these last two oarsmen for the Abbey boat – to be sent down to Chiswick with the boys. Richard Hakluyt, historian of the great Elizabethan mariners, and Hadrian à Saravia, another of the Translators, signed these orders as prebendaries of the Abbey. Here, the smallness of the Jacobean establishment comes suddenly into focus. Among the Westminster boys this summer, just eleven years old, was the future poet and divine George Herbert, the brilliant son of a great aristocratic family, his mother an intimate of John Donne’s. From these first meetings in a brutal year, Herbert would revere and love Andrewes for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, in Cripplegate, the slum houses were boarded up, the poor died and in the streets the fires burned. Every new case of the disease was to be marked by the ringing of a passing bell down the street. Each death and burial was rung out too so that ‘the doleful and almost universal and continual ringing and tolling of bells’ marked the infected parishes. From far out in the fields, you could hear London mourning its dead. In the week of 16 September, the outbreak would peak at 3,037 dead. Proportionately, it was a scale of destruction far worse than anything during the Blitz.

Was Andrewes’s departure for Chiswick acceptable behaviour? Not entirely. There was the example of the near-saintly Thomas Morton, one of John Donne’s friends and the rector of Long Marston outside York, later a distinguished bishop, who, in the first flush of this plague epidemic as it attacked York in the summer of 1602, had sent all his servants away, to save their lives, and attended himself to the sick and dying in the city pesthouse. Morton slept on a straw bed with the victims, rose at four every morning, was never in bed before ten at night, and travelled to and from the countryside, bringing in the food for the dying on the crupper of his saddle.

Alongside this, Andrewes’s elm-shaded neglect of the Cripplegate disaster looks shameful. While he was at Chiswick, he preached a sermon on 21 August that compounded the crime. ‘The Rasor is hired for us,’ he told his congregation, Hakluyt and Herbert perhaps among them, ‘that sweeps away a great number of haires at once.’ Plague was a sign of God’s wrath provoked by men’s ‘own inventions’, the taste for novelty, for specious newness, which was so widespread in the world. The very word ‘plague’ – and there is something unsettling about this pedantic scholarship in the face of catastrophe – came from the Latin plaga meaning ‘a stroke’. It was ‘the very handy-worke of GOD’. He admitted that there was a natural cause involved in the disease but it was also the work of a destroying angel. ‘There is no evill but it is a sparke of God’s wrath.’ Religion, he said, was filled by Puritan preachers with ‘new tricks, opinions and fashions, fresh and newly taken up, which their fathers never knew of’. The people of England now ‘think it a goodly matter to be wittie, and to find out things our selves to make to our selves, to be Authors, and inventors of somewhat, that so we may seem to be as wise as GOD, if not wiser’. What could be more wicked than the idea of being an Author? Let alone wittie? Newness was the sin and novelty was damnable. ‘That Sinn may cease, we must be out of love with our own inventions and not goe awhoring after them … otherwise, his anger will not be turned away, but his hand stretched out still.’

The educated, privileged and powerful churchman preaches his own virtue and ignores his pastoral duties, congratulating himself on his own salvation. The self-serving crudity of this stance did not escape the attentions of the Puritans. If Andrewes sincerely believed that the plague was a punishment for sin and ‘novelty’, and if he was guiltless on that score, then why had he run away to Chiswick? Surely someone of his purity would have been immune in the city? And if his pastoral duties led him to the stinking death pits of Cripplegate, as they surely did, why was he not there? Did Andrewes, in other words, really believe what he was saying about the omnipotent wrath of the Almighty?

In a way he didn’t; and his hovering between a vision of overwhelming divine authority and a more practical understanding of worldly realities, in some ways fudging the boundaries between those two attitudes, reveals the man. Henoch Clapham, the angry pamphleteer, lambasted Andrewes in his Epistle Discoursing upon the Present Pestilence. All Londoners, Andrewes included, should behave as though plague was not contagious. Everybody should attend all the funerals. There was no need to run away. It was a moral disease. If you were innocent you were safe. And not to believe that was itself a sin. How innocent was Andrewes in running to save his own skin? Did the innocent require an elm-tree shade? Clapham was slapped into prison for asking these questions. To suggest that the Dean of Westminster was a self-serving cheat was insubordinate and unacceptable. Andrewes interrogated him there in a tirade of anger and attempted to impose on him a retraction. Clapham had to agree (in the words written by Andrewes):

That howsoever there is no mortality, but by and from a supernatural cause, so yet it is not without concurrence of natural causes also … That a faithful Christian man, whether magistrate or minister, may in such times hide or withdraw himself, as well corporeally as spiritually, and use local flight to a more healthful place (taking sufficient order for the discharge of his function).

Clapham refused to sign this and stayed in prison for eighteen months until he finally came up with a compromise he could accept: there were two sorts of plague running alongside each other. One, infectious, was a worldly contagion, against which you could take precautions. The other, not infectious, was the stroke of the Angel’s hand. A pre-modern understanding of a world in which God and his angels interfered daily, in chaotic and unpredictable ways, was made to sit alongside something else: the modern, scientific idea of an intelligible nature. The boundary between the two, and all the questions of authority, understanding and belief which hang around it, is precisely the line which Andrewes had wanted to fudge.

If this looks like the casuistry of a trimming and worldly churchman, there were of course other sides to him. Down at Chiswick, as throughout his life, the time he spent in private, about five hours every morning, was devoted almost entirely to prayer. He once said that anyone who visited him before noon clearly did not believe in God. The prayers he wrote for himself, first published after his death in 1648 as Preces Privatae, have for High Church Anglicans long been a classic of devotional literature. Andrewes gave the original manuscript to his friend Archbishop Laud. It was ‘slubbered with his pious hands and watered with his penitential tears’. This was no rhetorical exaggeration: those who knew him often witnessed his ‘abundant tears’ as he prayed for himself and others. In his portraits he holds, gripped in one hand, a large and absorbent handkerchief. It was a daily habit of self-mortification and ritualised unworthiness in front of an all-powerful God, a frame of mind which nowadays might be thought almost mad, or certainly in need of counselling or therapy. But that was indeed the habit of the chief and guiding Translator of the King James Bible: ‘For me, O Lord, sinning and not repenting, and so utterly unworthy, it were more becoming to lie prostrate before Thee and with weeping and groaning to ask pardon for my sins, than with polluted mouth to praise Thee.’

This was the man who was acknowledged as the greatest preacher of the age, who tended in great detail to the school-children in his care, who, endlessly busy as he was, would nevertheless wait in the transepts of Old St Paul’s for any Londoner in need of solace or advice, who was the most brilliant man in the English Church, destined for all but the highest office. There were few Englishmen more powerful. Everybody reported on his serenity, the sense of grace that hovered around him. But alone every day he acknowledged little but his wickedness and his weakness. The man was a library, the repository of sixteen centuries of Christian culture, he could speak fifteen modern languages and six ancient, but the heart and bulk of his existence was his sense of himself as a worm. Against an all-knowing, all-powerful and irresistible God, all he saw was an ignorant, weak and irresolute self:



A Deprecation



O LORD, Thou knowest, and canst, and willest

the good of my soul.

Miserable man am I;

I neither know, nor can, nor, as I ought will it.

How does such humility sit alongside such grandeur? It is a yoking together of opposites which seems nearly impossible to the modern mind. People like Lancelot Andrewes no longer exist. But the presence in one man of what seem to be such divergent qualities is precisely the key to the age. It is because people like Lancelot Andrewes flourished in the first decade of the seventeenth century – and do not now – that the greatest translation of the Bible could be made then, and cannot now. The age’s lifeblood was the bridging of contradictory qualities. Andrewes embodies it and so does the King James Bible.



By the late summer of 1603, the Privy Council was cancelling Bartholomew Fair, ordering the demolition of slums and starting to clear out ‘the great confluence and accesse of excessive numbers of idle, indigent, dissolute and dangerous persons’. Meanwhile, other movements were afoot which would shape the birth of the King James Bible. Outside the central religious and political establishment, plans were being laid to steer that establishment in a direction which neither Elizabeth nor those around her had ever contemplated nor would ever have allowed.

The Puritan reformists within the Church of England saw the new reign as a chance for a new start. One of their secular leaders, Lewis Pickering, had already buttonholed the king in Edinburgh, and on James’s way south a petition had been presented to him, signed it was said by a thousand ministers, asking for a reformation of the English Church, to rid it of the last vestiges of Roman Catholicism and to bring to a conclusion the long rumbling agony of the English Reformation. ‘Renaissance’ was not a word that was known or used in seventeenth-century England, but ‘Reformation’ was and it was clear to the reformists that a full Reformation had never occurred in England. Now, perhaps, at last, with a Scottish king, well versed in the ways of Presbyterianism, brought up under the ferocious eye of George Buchanan, there was an opportunity to turn the Church of England into a bona fide Protestant organisation, as purified of Roman practices as those on the continent of Europe. This Millenary Petition, named after its thousand signatures, was the seed from which the new translation of the Bible would grow.

The king, filled with delight at his reception in England, the wonderful hunting that was laid on, the fat and eminently shootable stags that were provided (his habit was to ride hard and fast and to end the hunt with an embarrassing tendency to miss), had agreed to a conference at which all the outstanding church issues could be discussed with the Puritans and with their opponents, the defenders of the status quo, the bishops and deans, the leading intellectuals and ecclesiastical politicians of the church. The conference had been a Puritan idea and was cannily calculated to appeal to James’s idea of himself as the new Solomon, judiciously sowing peace where there had been discord, a notion of himself as the great doctor, the therapeutic king who would usher in an age of sacred and beneficent peace.

Throughout that exciting summer of 1603, as it felt for a moment that England was going to change, the Puritans were busy raising the stakes. Word was sent around the counties that the old complaints could be given new life. Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, as revised in 1552, embodying the English compromise between Protestant language and Catholic ceremonies, had always been for the Puritans ‘an unperfect booke, culled and picked out of the popishe dunghill, the Masse boke full of all abhominations’. Now they could say so. Bishops, they claimed, were nowhere endorsed by the word of Christ. Trumped up, fat ‘pomp-fed prelates’ could not ‘clayme any other authorities than is geeven them by the statute of the 25 of Kynge Henry the 8’. They were royal placeholders, parasitical government officials, nothing to do with God or his church. A sudden electric current ran through the English shires. The Puritans arranged public debates on the question of the wearing of the surplice, and on the use of the cross, on the bishops’ laying on of hands at confirmation, and on the all-important question of whether ministers should be learned or not. In a Catholic or sub-Catholic church, where the visual and the ceremonial dominated the verbal and intellectual, it scarcely mattered if the priest was well qualified; he was simply the conduit for divine meaning. But in a proper, pure reformed church, the minister needed to be, more than anything else, an effective preacher of the word, not a mere ‘dumme dogge’, as the phrase went at the time – it came from Isaiah – who would go through the motions and convey nothing of the intellectual spirit of reformed Christianity.

The suggestion of a conference appalled the bishops. All these old issues which had riven the church in the 1570s and ’80s, and which had been effectively shut down since then by rigid suppression, were now to be given new life. James’s all-too-Scottish and intellectual readiness to talk through difficult questions was going to release a log-jam. Everything in the new Jacobean England suddenly felt more fluid than before and a conference with the Puritans on the future governance and doctrines of the English Church was going too far.

One needs reminding, perhaps, of just how passionate was the loathing among Puritans of that symbolic strain in the English Church. Few modern Christians, however severe, would be quite as brave as Richard Parker, the author of A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with AntiChrist in Ceremonies: especially in the Signe of the Crosse, published in London in 1607, who was keen to point out to the ignorant, at some length, ‘the idolatrie of the Crosse, the Superstition of the Crosse, the Hipocrisie of the Crosse, the impietie of the Crosse, the injustice of the Crosse and the soule murther of the Crosse’. The cross was ‘a part of deuill worship … The vsing of the Crosse is but an idle apishe toye, and lighter than the surplice, which is also too light.’

Why did these things matter so much? Why did people care about the wearing of a surplice, or the emblem of the cross, or the use of a ring in the wedding service? Why was so much agony expended on the relative weight of symbol and word, of text and ceremony, on the precise bodily movements of Englishmen at prayer? There is a straightforward answer: two entirely different and opposing worldviews, and two views of the nature of human beings, are bound up in this debate. For the strict reformers, only the naked intellectual engagement with the complexities of a rational God would do. All else was confusion and obfuscation. The word was the route to understanding. Everything else was mud in the water. Men were essentially thinking and spiritual creatures. Bodily observance was an irrelevance. A Calvinist religion, as Milton later said, was ‘winnow’d, and sifted, from the chaffe of overdated Ceremonies’. It was free of irrelevance. The only desire of ceremonialists like Lancelot Andrewes and his disciple William Laud was to distort this precious purified religion of the word. ‘They hallow’d it, they fum’d it, they sprincl’d it, they be deck’t it,’ Milton raged, ‘not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure Linnen, with other deformed, and fantastik dresses in Palls, and Miters, gold, and guegaws fetcht from Arons old wardrobe.’

For those like Andrewes who held on to the place of symbol in the life of religion (and they were a small if powerful minority even among the bishops of the Jacobean church), and who saw God not as an intellectual system but as a mystery, the stripping of the altars was an unpardonable arrogance. The church had always used ritual and ceremony to approach the divine. It was the conduit through which grace could reach the believer. Only big-headed modern ‘novelists’ could assume that, without any guidance from the wisdom of the church fathers, ordinary people could approach God direct, as no one had done since the Apostles. Mystery for Andrewes required ceremony and a respect for the inherited past.

Bowing to the name of Jesus was the hinge and fulcrum of this debate. The later pamphleteer William Prynne (whose cheeks were to be branded on the orders of William Laud with the letters SL standing for ‘Seditious Libeller’ – Prynne called them ‘Stigmata Laudiana’) considered the habit of bowing ‘a meere Popish Inuention of punie times’. And, anyway, bowing at the name of Jesus ‘disturbes and interupts men in their deuotions, by auocating their bodies and minds from those serious duties about which they are imployed and to which they should be wholy intent’. Prayer was as serious and technical as a law lecture; and what did bobbing and dipping have to do with that? A habit of mind further from the passionate emotionalism of Andrewes’s private prayers it would be difficult to imagine. These were the polarities across which the King James Bible was to have its life and being.

The organisers of the petitioning campaign were canny, or at least thought they were. The line they had to follow was precise. Even if the bishops felt alarmed at any kind of change to the status quo, they knew James himself would be quite open to an examination of the theological basis of the Church of England. It was one of his areas of expertise and he was relaxed and even intrigued by the idea of discussing doctrine and the form of church ceremonial. He had been brawling with the Scottish Presbyterians on these subjects for years.

What he would not tolerate, however, was any suggestion of his own royal authority being questioned. The royal supremacy over church and state was the foundation of his position as King of England, the very reason he felt so at home in this marvellous new country he had inherited. That melding of secular and religious authority had been the secret at the heart of the immensely successful Tudor monarchy. In Scotland, and in other fully reformed countries in Europe, the new churches had established themselves as powers quite distinct from and independent of the state. In Catholic countries all the potency of the Protestant idea, the great revolutionary engine of sixteenth-century Europe, had been put to ends directly in conflict with the state. Uniquely in England, an increasingly powerful state had made itself synonymous with a – more or less – Protestant Church. This state Protestantism was the great and accidental discovery of the English Reformation. It bridged the divisions which in the rest of Europe had given rise to decades of civil war.

But now in the summer and autumn of 1603, the existence of a Protestant state church made the Puritans’ task extremely tender. Precisely because the head of the church was also the head of state, it was critical for their cause to separate theological questions from political. They had to establish themselves as politically loyal even while asking for changes to the state religion and the form of the state church. And it was equally critical for the bishops to conflate them. Throughout the summer the bishops maintained that any questioning of the doctrine and articles of the Church of England was politically subversive, dangerous and to be expunged. Anti-Puritan propaganda flooded the country. The Puritans were teetering along a narrow rock ledge and they wrapped their suggestions in swathes of submissive cotton wool. They addressed James, they said, ‘neither as factious men affecting a popular parity in the Church [no hint of getting rid of the bishops], nor as schismatics aiming at the dissolution of the state ecclesiastical [they wanted to distinguish themselves from the true extremists, who took from the New Testament that each congregation should be independent and free of all worldly authority] but as faithful servants of Christ and loyal subjects’. Describing themselves as ‘Ministers of the Gospell, that desier not a disorderly innovation [nothing was more loathsome to the seventeenth-century mind than the idea of innovation; ‘novelist’ was a term of abuse, ‘primitivist’ of the highest praise] but a due and godlie reformation’, they laid on the supplicatory language:

Thus with all dutifull submission, referring our selues to your Maiesties pleasure for your gracious aunswere, as God shall direct you, wee most humblie recommend your Highness to the Devine maiestie, whom wee beseech for Christ, his sake to dispose your royall harte to doe herein what shalbee to his glorie, the good of his Churche, and your endles Comforte.

Things weren’t quite so unctuous in private. Both Lewis Pickering and Patrick Galloway, a Presbyterian minister who had come south with James, were making sure that the campaign didn’t look like a conspiracy. Galloway wanted ‘a resident Moyses in euerye parishe’ but there were to be many different petitions each with slightly different wording, and not too many ministers on one petition. Nothing should be done to make it look like a set-up. No one was to ask for the removal of bishops outright. In all the parishes across the country, ministers were to stir up the people to ask for a reformation. They were to pray ‘against the superstitious ceremonies, and tirannie of Prelates’. Lawyers were instructed to prepare some draft bills for parliament to bring about the changes they wanted. Scholars were hired to write learned treatises. It was precisely like a modern, single-issue campaign, dragooning the media, whipping up local excitement, lobbying in private, agitating in public.

Petitions and representations streamed into the court. The two sides were gathering for the climax: bishops and the conservative establishment on one side; radical reformists on the other; with the king in between, sympathetic to some of the radical demands but also to the idea of no disturbance, no disruption to good order. Majesty was attentive; a good king was a listening king. The conference between the two sides had been set for 1 November. It was assumed, on past form, that the plague would have ebbed by then, but because the outbreak had been so devastating, the conference was delayed until after Christmas. It would be held in early January.

Meanwhile, at the end of October, and under pressure from the bishops, James issued a proclamation. He faced both ways. An episcopal church was ‘agreeable to God’s word, and near to the condition of the primitive church’. Nevertheless, there were ‘some things used in this church [which] were scandalous’. The king, who felt that he had in himself ‘some sparkles of the Divinity’, would resolve the agony. He would not countenance ‘tumult, sedition and violence’, he didn’t want ‘open invectives or indecent speeches’, but his conference would consider ‘corruptions which may deserve a review and amendment’. The parties were to meet in the Tudor brick palace of Hampton Court on 12 January. There the idea for a new translation of the Bible would be born.




(#ulink_7c57fda7-b28a-562d-a37e-39925a540276)That is, The graues of lust




THREE He sate among graue, learned and reuerend men (#ulink_b2cb19e4-385a-570c-8901-466a88fe4e32)


Now I beseech you brethren by the name of our Lord Iesus Christ, that yee all speake the same thing, and that there be no diuisions among you: but that ye be perfectly ioyned together in the same minde, and in the same iudgement.

1 Corinthians 1:10

Christmas at Hampton Court had been draining. Late in December 1603 an already exhausted and clearly distracted Cecil wrote to his friend Lord Shrewsbury: ‘We are nowe to feast seven ambassadors; Spayne, France, Poland, Florence and Savoy, besydes maskes and mvch more; during all wch time, I wold with all my hearte I were with that noble Ladie of yours, by her turfe fire.’

By mid-January, the partying and the politicking were over and the king and Council could turn their minds to the conference which would discuss the future of the church. The letters issuing the invitations had gone out from the Privy Council and on the appointed day at nine o’clock in the morning, the great men of the Church of England, a clutch of future Translators (a word that was capitalised at the time) among them, gathered at the palace. It was freezing. The banks of the Thames were encrusted with ice and enormous fires burned in the Renaissance fireplaces which Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII had installed here seventy years before. Old John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was surrounded by the men whose appointments by the Crown he had sponsored and argued for. The bishops around him were all, in some way or other, reliant on him for their status and their well-being. He had been the great manager of the Elizabethan church, the queen’s ‘husbandman’, who had pursued with equal ruthlessness the papists who wished to return England to the dominion of the pope; Presbyterians, who would be rid of all bishops and archbishops, replacing their authority with local committees; and those Puritan Separatists who believed in no overarching structure for the church beyond their own, naturally fissive local gatherings. Now, with the ecclesiastical magnates of England gathered around his frail and shrinking presence, he was facing the last challenge from a new king, son of a Catholic queen, brought up by Presbyterian divines: an uncertain quantity.

The Lord Bishops of London, Durham, Winchester and Worcester, of St David’s in the far west of Wales, of Chichester, Carlisle and Peterborough were fully robed in the uniform the church required and which the Puritans loathed: the tippet (a long rich silk scarf draped around the shoulders); the big-sleeved rochet or episcopal surplice, much loved by the bishops, an ocean of ceremonial cambric; a chimere, a loose over-mantle, which, throughout the Middle Ages and until the early years of Elizabeth, had been of a dazzling scarlet silk, but which, under Calvinist influence was thought ‘too light and gay for the episcopal gravity’, now had become strict and elegant black satin – it was Whitgift’s black chimere that led Elizabeth to call him ‘my little black husband’; and on their heads as they came in, but then removed, the three- or four-cornered caps which were the mark of a divine or of a member of the universities. The mitre, which had been worn before the Reformation, and would return later in the seventeenth century to Milton’s disgust, was for now banished as a sign of popish ceremony. With the bishops came the next generation of ecclesiastical power-brokers, the Deans of the Chapel Royal, of St Paul’s, of Chester, Windsor and, silent, his famous public serenity intact, Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster. All, in a year or two, would be bishops themselves.

This Tudor Hampton Court, before Christopher Wren transformed it in the 1690s into a massive red-brick slab of power and grandeur, an attempt at an English Versailles, was a fairy palace, full of little towers and toy battlements, weathervanes that caught the light, as romantic and play-chivalric as an illumination in a Book of Hours. Here and there, the Italian craftsmen imported by the cardinal and king had contributed a terracotta medallion or a frieze of satyrs. Plaster ceilings, in which large pendant bosses hung down over the heads of the churchmen, and whose panels were filled with papier mâché roses and sculpted ostrich feathers, were painted light blue and gold. Braziers stood glowing in the rooms.

The delegates were ushered by the Gentlemen of the Royal Household into the Presence Chamber, just before eleven. A large cloth of state, emblazoned with the royal arms, hung on the far wall. A velvet-covered chair – the king’s – stood empty a few feet, ‘a prettie distance’, in front of it. It was perhaps the chair that survives at Knole, given by the king to the Earl of Dorset in 1606, its back and seat, under the velvet, formed from a thick canvas bag stuffed with feathers, and its egg-shaped finials studded with gilt nails. Beside it, the Lords of the Privy Council were standing in groups, and, lined up, sitting on a plain wooden bench or form, the Puritans with whom the bishops and the deans were to dispute. One of the gentlemen there, writing to a friend in the country, said that the four of them looked as if they were wearing their ‘clokes and Nitecaps’.

This seems at first like a cartoon of Jacobean England: the grand theatre of the royal Presence Chamber, derisive courtiers, satin-lined prelates, a self-indulgent king, and a pitiable line-up of put-upon and ascetic Puritans, sitting on their bench more like the accused at a trial than the equal partners in a negotiation for the future of the church. But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The four representatives of the Puritan party were in fact old friends of many of the bishops and deans. John Reynolds or Rainolds, one of the Puritans, was not only Master of Corpus Christi Oxford but had been Dean of Lincoln Cathedral, a position in the gift of the archbishop himself. So happy was Reynolds at Lincoln and then at Corpus Christi, that he had had actually refused a bishopric offered him by Queen Elizabeth. Here in the Presence Chamber he found himself face to face with his oldest friend, Henry Robinson, now Bishop of Carlisle. They had known each other since they were boys, they had been at Oxford together; as Jacobean England was an expressive culture (strait-laced continentals remarked on how often and warmly the English kissed), the two men would certainly have embraced. Robinson had taken a different path from Reynolds, but in many ways was indistinguishable from his friend. An evangelical Calvinist, an assiduous preacher, scarcely bothering to enforce the strict anti-Puritan requirements (ministers in his diocese did not have to kneel for communion nor always wear a surplice), a ferocious pursuer of Catholics in the Protestant north: there was more uniting these men than dividing them.

Two of the other Puritans, John Knewstubs and the charming, mild-mannered Laurence Chaderton, had been at Cambridge with Lancelot Andrewes and used to have ‘constant meetings’ with him there. Their lives had certainly diverged – Chaderton and Knewstubs both had a radical Presbyterian past behind them, of which Andrewes would certainly have disapproved – but even so there was a great deal uniting them. They had all studied the ancient languages together, read the Bible together and teased out the details of ‘Grammatical Interpretation’ together, ‘till at last they went out, like Apollos, eloquent men, and mighty in the Scriptures’.

This was not an encounter of parties at each other’s throats. Chaderton, who was now the Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and one of the most loved of all men in that university, had also as an undergraduate been the greatest friend of Richard Bancroft, another man who now stood opposite him, as his chief opponent and Bishop of London, scourge of Puritans and Whitgift’s chosen successor for the see of Canterbury. When they were students together at Cambridge, during one of the often-repeated clashes between town and gown, Chaderton had actually saved Bancroft from a mob of enraged citizens.

Bancroft had become a severe, ruthless sleuth after Puritan error. As Whitgift’s right-hand man in the 1580s and ’90s he had hunted out and destroyed the Elizabethan Presbyterian movement (of which Chaderton and Knewstubs had been a part). It was a bruising process, which according to Thomas Fuller, the seventeenth-century church historian, ‘hardened the hands of his soul, which was no more than needed for him who was to meddle with nettles and briars’. That is certainly what Bancroft looks like in his portraits: a weather-tested man, as rough as a hill-farmer, ruthless with any opposition. But he and Chaderton remained friends. Both were from Lancashire where wrestling is a traditional sport and the two men, Master of Emmanuel and Bishop of London, liked to wrestle when they met.

The establishment of Jacobean England was as small as a village. It was intimate with itself, engaged in endless conversation. The currency of this world was talk between people who had known each other all their lives, and the intimacy of those relationships was crucial to the nature of the conference and its outcome, and to the qualities of the Bible that would eventually emerge from it. As usual, in what is billed as a critical public meeting, a great deal had been squared off in private beforehand. There had been manoeuvrings for months, a little ballet at the heart of seventeenth-century England, in which bishops, both Calvinist and anti-Calvinist, moderate reformists, politically radical Puritans, an episcopally-minded but reformist-sympathetic king and a wary Council, had danced around each other, if not with swords out, at least with hands on hilts. And this was the result.

The true extremists, those who wanted to dismantle the Church of England and replace it either with a confetti of independent and Separatist congregations or with a true Presbyterian system from which bishops were to be abolished, had been excluded. Many of them were meeting in London at this very moment, frustrated and outplayed. James had said quite explicitly that he didn’t want the ‘brainsick and heady preachers’ but ‘the learned and grave men of both sides’. That is what he had got. The so-called Puritan party had probably been chosen by the Privy Council, perhaps by Cecil. Various preparatory lists and suggestions survive; those eventually chosen were the most moderate, bishop- and king-friendly. Dressed up as a meeting of opposites, this conference was in fact the bringing together of a near-consensus.

Not all the people gathered in this room were well born, and hypersensitivity to class origins coloured all relationships, but that is far from the whole story. The Cecils themselves had been little more than Welsh farmers only sixty years before (and remained crushingly aware of the meanness of their origins). Lancelot Andrewes’s father had been a master mariner in London, Bancroft’s a minor member of the northern gentry, Whitgift’s a Grimsby merchant, Chaderton’s a rich squire who taught him to hunt and little else. But brilliance and education had lifted them all into the intimacy of this elite. These were the people in whose hands the future of the Church of England lay and they all knew each other. They were deeply opposed on important issues but a single envelope, what would nowadays be called a single discourse, contained them, and much of the peaceableness of England can be explained by that. One governing culture was accessible to the gifted sons of great and relatively humble families. It is not difficult to imagine the murmured conversations between them as they stood waiting in groups as the winter sunshine made its way through the thick grey-green panes of the Tudor windows.

The only outsider, ironically enough, was the king. He had scarcely known bishops, and never seen the surplice or the cross before coming to England. He spoke with an acutely Scottish accent, and pronounced his Latin and Greek in ways the English could scarcely understand. And as the incident at Newark had shown, his touch was not always sure. It was in many ways James’s sheer oddness which steered the conference into its rather dark and confused channels.

First he sent word that the reformists should retire. He wanted to speak to the bishops and deans alone; they were to sit on one side of the room. The Privy Council was to sit and listen on the other. The four Puritans left and the Lord Chamberlain shut the door behind them. After a while, as the lords and bishops waited there in silence, the king came in. He was charm itself, ‘passed a few pleasant gratulations with some of the Lords’, and then sat down in the chair that stood in front of the cloth of state. He kept his hat on as he surveyed the great Englishmen around him.

He was of course practised in the role. He had been king of a bitterly divided nation for as long, quite literally, as he could remember and now he wooed his audience. ‘Salomon speaketh’, the unctuous William Barlow, Dean of Chester, reported, in the ever-repeated cliché of the reign. James’s words, falling on the ears of his amazed and delighted hearers, Barlow said, were ‘like Apples of gold, with pictures of siluer’.

Barlow’s account makes it seem as if king and bishops had shown little but love and harmony to each other, but they hadn’t. Barlow (a Translator – he would chair the key committee in charge of the New Testament epistles) was lying. The king had fiercely attacked the bishops and openly slapped them down. The dean was the official propagandist for the bishops’ cause, and his pamphlet was a carefully slanted version of events. When he tried to dedicate it to Robert Cecil, Cecil refused. Anyone whose method of survival was distance and non-commitment would certainly not have wanted to be identified so thoroughly with a single party. Barlow was acting on Bancroft’s instructions. Bancroft wanted to make it appear that the king was on the bishops’ side. But there were others, more objective (their identity has never been established), taking notes at the same time and it is clear from what they wrote that things on this first day were far from harmonious.

James did begin smoothly and graciously.

It pleased him both to enter into a gratulation to Almightie God (at which wordes he put off his hat) for bringing him into the promised land, where Religion was purely professed; where he sate among graue, learned and reuerend men; not, before, elsewhere, a King without state, without honour, without order; where beardless boys would braue him to his face.

It was charming, crafty, complicit, flattering, collusive, the speech of a politician three decades on a throne. A smile hangs about the words, his doffing of his hat to God surely a witticism, the description of England as the promised land surely an act of flattery to the Englishmen around him.

The bishops, too, began emolliently. Poor old John Whitgift addressed the king on his knees as they discussed technical points about baptism, confirmation, the too frequent use of excommunication. Whitgift and Bancroft quoted both the Bible and ‘Mr Calvin’. James congratulated himself on his own moderation. It was only a matter of months ago, he told them, that he was berating a Scots minister on not paying enough attention to the rite of baptism; now he had to instruct these English bishops on revering it too highly. Again, there is that Jamesian note of seriousness and jokiness lying unresolved together.

The kneeling bishops insisted that the Church of England as it had stood these last forty years was as near the perfect state of the primitive church as any in the world. And if the church had persisted well enough for forty years, then why the need to change anything? Suddenly this was too much, and James could be patient and politic no longer: ‘It was no reason that because a man had been sicke of the poxe 40 years, therefore he shoold not be cured at length.’

It was a coarse interjection: had anyone previously compared the Church of England to a man with the clap? James, clearly, was not entirely reliable, unwilling to be boxed into the conservative, anti-Puritan compartment the bishops would have liked. History may have confined James to a proto-absolutist, Divine Right of Kings advocate, but the reality, inevitably, was more complicated. To the bishops’ horror, James began to lecture them, ‘playing the puritan’ as Andrewes later described it. They were not to pursue Nonconformists with the violence they were accustomed to (this was aimed at both Whitgift and Bancroft for their stamping out the English Presbyterians under Elizabeth) but were to treat them ‘more gently than euer they had don before’. These statements were politically canny – the bishops were still unsure where James stood – and were a means of establishing him as the holder of the ring, the Solomon-like judge and arbiter who belonged to no one side. Anyway, the questions implied, why did these bishops think that their church, unlike any other human institution, was not corrupt and in need of repair? What arrogance was that? Wasn’t everything in this world subject to decay and decline? Where did they think they were? In some kind of perfected heaven? The atmosphere of the conference had suddenly sharpened.

In the discussion on baptism, the Bishop of Peterborough then made a fool of himself. Apropos of nothing much, he said that he knew of one case in which an ancient father had baptised with sand instead of water. ‘Whereto his Majesty answered pleasantly, “A turd for the Argument. He might as well have pissed on them, for that had been more liker to water than sand.”’ The bishop’s reputation never recovered. Bancroft, who in his organisational ability could exercise a cold rationality but who could also turn intemperate and angry, ‘now spake with too ruf boldness’. He had been goaded by the figure before him of James Mountagu, Dean of the Chapel Royal.

Mountagu embodies all the unclassifiability of Jacobean attitudes to state and religion, to holiness and power. He would in time become both a Translator and a bishop. He edited, with a lake full of obsequiousness, the king’s own collected works. He was a beautifully mannered aristocrat, with one brother an earl, the other a baron. He sounds like a Cavalier in the making. Surely a figure such as Mountagu should have been repulsed by Calvinist severity and strictness, by the whole notion of Puritanism? He wasn’t. He was deeply sympathetic to the reformist camp, having been Master of the Puritan Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. At this period, at the head of each of his letters, he used to put the word ‘Emmanuel’, meaning ‘God be with us’, a signal among the stricter sort of the supremacy of scripture over the worldly structures of the church. He did his best to promote the hotter Protestants within the church and would not accept any kind of lush ceremonial, nor any hint of a drift back to Rome.

Bancroft loathed him. For Bancroft, bishops and the accustomed hierarchy were agents of the divine. The true church couldn’t hope to rely on the Bible alone. Almost no one understood what it meant and so people like Mountagu represented a most alarming subversion of the order on which civilised life relied. Now their simmering hostility boiled over. At one point early that afternoon, when the dean leaned over and whispered in the king’s ear – he was giving him some details on ancient baptism – Bancroft could contain himself no longer. ‘Speake out, Mr Doctor, and do not crosse us, underhand,’ he shouted violently across the room. Barlow would report none of this.

They had been talking for three hours. It was not a good atmosphere. This was a court that knew everything about duplicity and politicking, constantly aware of the unreliability of language and men, of whisperings in ears and comments muttered behind the hand, but which nevertheless valued a courteous surface, the smooth and upholstered working of the demands of power. Robert Cecil, a well-honed liar, sitting with the Council to one side, said nothing. Sitting among the deans, Lancelot Andrewes, who had often preached against the very offences of pluralism and nepotism which he and all the others practised, remained silent. And Bancroft’s faux pas allowed James to resume his unique combination of Solomon-like distance and joky vulgarity. Religion, he told them, was the soul of a kingdom, and unity the life of religion. He would clear up some doubts, he would have a few passages changed in the prayer book, in the rubrics rather than the body of the text, ‘to be inserted by waie rather of some explanation than of any alteration at all’. He would see the Puritan party on Monday morning. He was not looking forward to it: ‘howsoeuer he lived among Puritans, and was kept for the most part, as a Ward under them, yet, since hee was the age of his Sonne, 10. years old, he euer disliked their opinions; as the Sauiour of the world said, Though he liued among them, he was not of them.’

With that breathtaking comparison between his own position and Christ’s walking among the heathen, James dismissed the bishops and deans. It was a confession that, in effect, he had been playing with them. He may have appeared to be taunting them with the very charges the Puritans were laying against them, but, when it came to the point, James wanted to buttress the established church. Nevertheless, Solomon-like to the end, he was anxious that the established church itself should be cleansed of impurities. It is the classic Jamesian position: self-congratulatory, vain, and perhaps, in the end, surprisingly, and against the odds, rather wise.

On Monday, the tactics were exactly and intelligently handled by James to put the burden of proof on the Puritans. Unless they could show that there was something in scripture explicitly condemning the bishops’ administration of confirmation, or the use of the cross in baptism, or of the ring in a wedding service, or kneeling to receive communion, or the wearing of the surplice, or about the institution of episcopacy itself, he would not interfere with the accustomed ceremony or government of the church. That church, for all its abuses, was a comfortable bed in which to set a monarchy. Any radicalisation of it, diminishing the power and status of the bishops, or replacing them with presbyteries, inherently argumentative and overweening groups of know-all elders or presbyters, would, in essence, be too Scottish. The last thing he wanted was a return to the horrors north of the border. Presbyteries represented everything he most loathed and despised.

James may have been rude, challenging and clever with the bishops. Now, he was even worse with the Puritans. The four ‘plaintiffs’, as Barlow called them, were ushered into the Presence Chamber, where little ten-year-old Prince Henry was sitting beside his father on a stool. With them were Thomas Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, the most political of all courtier bishops, a member of the Privy Council, who scarcely ever visited his diocese except to administer oppressive justice and who with Miles Smith would play a critical role in the final stages of the translation, and Bancroft. No Henry Robinsons or James Mountagus, nor any other sympathetic bishops here: just the two hard-core royal apologists.

It must have been alarming. James told them: ‘he was now ready to heare, at large, what they could obiect or say; and so willed them to beginne: whereupon, they 4 kneeling downe, D. Reynolds the Foreman began’. They were on the spot. James was famous across Europe as a theological disputant. Seventeenth-century hunting often involved the enclosing of semi-tame animals within the pales of a park and then slaughtering them at one’s leisure, sometimes from a stand in front of which the animals would be driven. And now this too felt a little like another day at that strange, enclosed kind of chase.

It lasted five hours and the Puritans were humiliated. James sniped at them and pursued them into awkward corners, occasionally calling in Bilson and Bancroft, ‘and then for variety sake, rather then for necessity’. The four Puritans tried to parry the blows. John Reynolds was ‘the principall mouthe and speaker’, Chaderton ‘mute as any fishe’, Knewstubs spoke a little about his loathing of the cross (for which Lancelot Andrewes, at least in one account, took him to task) and the fourth, an obscure and moderate preacher called Thomas Sparke or Sparkes (who within a year or two would share with Bancroft the idea that bishops like kings were appointed by God), said hardly anything at all. But James was freewheeling through their points as though dancing in a kind of theological party. ‘We have kept suche a revell with the puritanis heir these two days,’ he wrote afterwards to the violent anti-Puritan and duplicitous crypto-Catholic, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton.

I have pepperid thaime as soundlie, as ye have done the papists … They fledde me so from argument to argument, without ever ansouring me directlie, ut est eorum moris [as is their way], as I was forcid at last to saye unto thaime, that if any of thaime hadde bene in a colledge disputing with thair skollairs, if any of thaire disciples hadde ansourid thaim in that sorte, thay wolde have fetchid him up in place of a replye & so shoulde the rodde have plyed upon the poore boyes buttokis.

Poor, dignified, generous Reynolds and Chaderton stood as if in the stocks, the royal squibs falling around them. Reynolds named the familiar abuses: the ceremony of confirmation, which had no basis in scripture, where adult baptism was the only recognised form of induction into the church; the use of the cross as a kind of magic symbol; the surplice – a papist joke, which clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with Christ, the apostles, or anything discoverable in scripture; kneeling at communion – another piece of superstitious symbolism, as though the bread and wine were indeed the blood and body of Christ, when it was an essential aspect of all Protestant thought that they were merely reminders of what had happened on the cross, not a magical re-enactment of it, and not to be bowed to. To Lancelot Andrewes, always insistent on the value of ceremony, this was absurd. Did Protestants pretend, he asked, that God ‘will have us worship him like elephants, as if we had no joints in our knees?’

James dismissed all the Puritan objections. He was familiar with them all. They were the points which any Scots Presbyterian would have made and which strict English Protestants, dissatisfied with the compromise of the English Church, had been making since the 1550s. Everyone knew the territory; there were no surprises, but the atmosphere was nasty. These were moderate and distinguished men, suggesting moderate changes. But James – and Bancroft who seems to have been in an excitable state at the theatre unfolding around him – was treating them like extreme schismatics from the outer reaches of Anabaptist lunacy. Nothing like this had ever happened under Elizabeth, simply because Elizabeth, a more distant and less engaged monarch, basing her authority on the aura of that very distance, would not have countenanced it. James enjoyed the roughness of theological argument and Bancroft’s eyes must have been wide with delight.

Reynolds, who had never married, said he didn’t like the phrase ‘with my body I thee worship’, which formed part of the marriage service. James couldn’t resist a vulgarity: ‘Many a man speaks of Robin Hood’, he said, ‘who never shot his bow; if you had a good wife yourself, you would think that all the honour and worship you could do her were well bestowed.’ It was said with a leery grin, the paterfamilias taunting the celibate. Reynolds said he didn’t like the sign of the cross. James told him that by making such an objection he was playing into the hands of the papists.

Bancroft, after addressing the king on his knees, was then allowed to abuse the Puritans, calling them ‘schismatic scholars, breakers of your laws; you may know them by their Turkey grograins’, a concentrated insult from the beautifully and correctly dressed bishop. A ‘grograin’ was a gown in grogram, a coarse cloth, part wool, part silk, often worn by merchants. These moderate Puritans, Bancroft was telling the king in his frenzy, were breaking the dress code. What else might they want to break? Was the body of the church safe in their hands? His remarks might be taken as a joke until it is remembered that Bancroft had been closely involved in the pursuit, arrest, interrogation and execution of all those Puritans and Separatists in the past whom he and Whitgift considered a threat to the English Church. It is the kind of joke that is made in totalitarian show-courts.

Reynolds then raised the question of church government. Should the bishop alone be judge and administrator in his diocese? Or could there be a kind of committee of other ministers to help him? That was Reynolds’s reasonable meaning. But he used the wrong word. He must have cursed himself as it slipped out. Why shouldn’t the bishops govern, Reynolds suggested, ‘ioyntly with a Presbyterie of their brethren the pastors and Ministers of the Churche’. The word presbytery released a torrent in the king. A presbytery? ‘If you aim at a Scots Presbytery, it agreeth as well with monarchie as God and the devil!’: ‘He would haue the Presbitery buried in silence for these 7 yeares, and yf then he grewe idle, lasie, fatt, and pursie [short of breath], I will set vp a Presbitery (saith he) to exercise my body and my patience.’

This was the crux. James’s experience of angry and threatening Presbyterians in Scotland, who endlessly and loudly promoted the theory that kings were subject to God’s and so to the church’s judgement, was never going to return to that. It was too challenging and too uncomfortable. The beauty of the Church of England, with its full panoply of bishops and archbishops, was its explicit acceptance of the king as its head. Bishops without a king, an episcopal republic, was perhaps a possibility. But a king without bishops, subject to a presbytery, was always in danger of being removed; it was a revolution waiting to happen. Bishops were the sine qua non of the kind of monarchy and church James needed, wanted and believed in. ‘No bishops,’ he told Reynolds furiously, ‘no king.’ That, of course, was precisely the elision of the political and the religious points which the moderate Puritans had been anxious to avoid, and which the bishops, for months now, had been working to achieve. It meant one thing: the bishops’ party had won.

Into this fierce, overheated atmosphere, where the mild divisions in the Church of England were being whipped into extremity by the quick, intellectual, joky, combative, slightly unsocialised banter, argument and bullying of the king, egged on by the excited Bancroft, the first suggestion, the seed of the King James Bible, dropped. It came from John Reynolds, at the end of a long list of suggestions. The petitioning ministers he represented would like ‘one only translation of ye byble to be authenticall and read in ye churche’.

In another jotted-down account of the scene, Reynolds is more courteous: ‘May your Majesty be pleased that the Bible be new translated?’ Bancroft immediately slammed back at the idea: ‘If every man’s humour might be followed, there would be no end of translating.’ That is the voice of the instinctive authoritarian, happier with the status quo than with any possible revision of it, the voice of the bishop who at the Earl of Essex’s futile rebellion in 1601 had personally gathered a gang of pikemen around him, holding a pike himself, and had repulsed the slightly pathetic and misguided rebels at Ludgate, as they tried to enter the City of London.

James, though, was a more complex character than the fierce anti-Puritan bishop, and craftier. Without hesitation – or at least in Barlow’s crawling account, where the words read as if they have been tidied up after the event – the king turns Reynolds’s suggestion on its head. Implicit in the Puritan divine’s request was a criticism of the official Elizabethan Bible, known as the Bishops’ Bible after the bishops who had translated it in 1568. It was a royalist and anti-Puritan document, larded with a frontispiece showing Queen Elizabeth and her ministers presiding over a bishop-dominated church. It was a Bible of the hierarchy, not of the people, and no Puritan liked it. Puritans preferred the translation of the Bible made by Calvinist Englishmen in the 1550s in Geneva, the headquarters of Calvinism. The Geneva Bible came interleaved with a large number of explanatory notes, many of them explicitly anti-royalist. The word ‘tyrant’, for example, which is not to be found in the King James Bible, occurs over 400 times in the Geneva text.

Reynolds was without doubt asking for a revision to the Bishops’ Bible, probably in favour of the Geneva Bible which he would have used himself. That is the meaning of his phrase ‘one only translation’, which also makes a subtle appeal to James’s dream of unity. But James – and if Barlow’s account can be trusted, this is a witness to his quickness and sharpness – caught the suggestion and reversed it, ‘professing that he could neuer, yet, see a Bible well translated in English; but the worst of all, his Maiestie thought the Geneua to be’. Barlow explains why: ‘Withal he gave this caveat (upon a word cast out by my Lord of London) that no marginal notes should be added – having found in them which are annexed to the Geneva translation … some notes very partial, untrue, seditious, and savoring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits.’

James was particularly exercised by the Geneva note at Exodus 1:19. It was an all-important passage, in his view, for understanding the nature of royal authority and the relationship between royal and divine instructions. It is also extraordinarily revealing about the difference between the Jacobean and the modern attitude to authority. In Ancient Egypt, Pharaoh had ordered the Jewish midwives to kill all the male children born to the Jewish people. The midwives disobeyed these royal instructions and saved all the baby boys. Pharaoh wanted to know why. ‘And the midwiues said vnto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are liuely, and are deliuered ere the midwiues come in vnto them.’

This was, of course, a lie. Jewish pregnancies came to precisely the same term as any other. The modern reaction would surely be to admire the midwives’ courage in standing up to the Pharaoh and their presence of mind in telling a straightforward and quite convincing white lie. Their disobedience was brave and their deception clever. But the Genevan note ran as follows: ‘Their disobedience in this was lawful, but their deception is evil.’

For James, their behaviour had been the essence of sedition. Their disobedience was wicked and their deception made it worse. It was clearly the midwives’ duty to obey the royal instruction, to conform to the authority of the powers that be and to murder the babies. James would have been on Herod’s side and no royally sanctioned translation of the Bible could tolerate any suggestion to the contrary.

He expanded on what he would like the new Bible to be like.

His Highnesse wished, that some especiall pains should be taken in that behalf for one vniforme translation … and this to be done by the best learned of both the Vniversities, after them to be reuiewed by the Bishops, and the chiefe learned of the Church; from them to be presented to the Priuy Councell; and lastly to bee ratified by his Royall authority; to be read in the whole Church, and no other.

Everything implicit in the conference and in the competing constituencies in the country at large; everything that had been building up since Sir Robert Carey’s ride to Edinburgh nine months earlier; and, in a wider way, everything involved in the long cultural revolution that had been rolling across Europe for the previous eighty-five years: all of that came to a point in James’s response. Reynolds had wanted, when all the code was stripped away, a strict Puritan Bible, non-episcopal, the naked word of God, truly transmitted. And to that request James had said, in effect, ‘Yes; I will give you the very opposite of what you ask.’ A translation that was to be uniform (in other words with no contentious Geneva-style interpretations set alongside or within the text); with the learned authority of Oxford and Cambridge (which, at least in their upper echelons, were profoundly conservative institutions, both of which had sent to the king long and high-flown refutations of every point in the Puritans’ Millenary Petition); to be revised by the bishops (the very influence that Reynolds did not want); then given, for goodness’ sake, to the Privy Council, in effect a central censorship committee with which the government would ensure that its stamp was on the text, no deviationism or subversion allowed; and finally to James himself, whose hostility to any whiff of radicalism this afternoon had been clear enough. And this ferociously episcopal and monarchist Bible was to be the only translation that could be read in church: ‘no other’. The treasured Geneva Bible would be forced to retreat into the privacy of people’s homes and could no longer be used for public preaching.

The deep paradox and lasting value of the King James Bible is its response to both Reynolds’s and James’s instincts. Once the cantankerous and oddly hysterical atmosphere of the conference had faded, the deeper and slower rhythms of Jacobean royal ideology took control. Those were the rhythms of James’s better side. His troubled upbringing had shaped a man with a divided nature. Later history, wanting to see him as a precursor for his son’s catastrophe, has chosen only the ridiculous aspects of James: his extravagance, his vanity, his physical ugliness, his weakness for beautiful boys, his self-inflation, his self-congratulatory argumentativeness. Some of that had been in evidence at Hampton Court. But there was another side to James which breathed dignity and richness: a desire for wholeness and consensus, for inclusion and breadth, for a kind of majestic grace, lit by the clarity of a probing intelligence, rich with the love of dependable substance, for a reality that went beyond show, that was not duplicitous, that stood outside all the corruption and rot that glimmered around him. These were the elements in James and in Jacobean court culture that came to shape the Bible which bears his name.




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