Читать книгу Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible - Adam Nicolson - Страница 8

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^*: 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.

^* That is, The graues of lust