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CHAPTER FOUR

THE KING JAMES VERSION IS COMMISSIONED

When Elizabeth I lay on her deathbed in March 1603, she was surrounded by some very apprehensive men. Who was to succeed her? She had been the Pope’s prime official target for assassination; there had been rebellions within her own country; a great fleet, the Spanish Armada, had set out from a Catholic country, Spain, immeasurably more powerful than her own. Its aim was to invade her England and destroy her rule. But it failed. Over the years she had managed to navigate her way through the poisonous domestic conspiracies of Catholics and the resentments of Presbyterians.

Elizabeth I was probably the best educated person to sit on the throne of England. She had seen the greatest flowering of artistic, entrepreneurial and intellectual genius in her country’s history. And her island realm had begun to call itself an empire.

She had been a monarch for more than forty years. Now, clearly at the end of her days, she had still not announced her successor. It was a time of murderous politics, when killing was often the preferred option for succession to a crown and paid assassins slunk around Europe like plague rats. These her last days, 22 March and 23 March in 1603, were a dangerous time for her courtiers as they watched the dying of a monarch, married to her country as she had said. But even now it seemed that she would not declare her successor.

We are told that ‘her face became haggard and her frame shrank almost to a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to change her dresses for a week. A strange melancholy settled down upon her. Gradually her mind gave way . . . food and rest became alike distasteful. She sat day and night propped up with pillows on a stool, her finger on her lips, her eyes fixed on the floor without a word.’ The Privy Council was summoned on 22 March.

She had lost the power of speech. But when yet again they asked her who should succeed her and brought up the name of the King of Scotland, she did the final service for her country. At the sound of his name she raised her wasted arms above her head and brought the fingers together to form a crown. It was done. The next morning she died ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’.

The messengers on horses saddled and bridled in anticipation immediately raced the 400 miles north to Edinburgh up what became the Great North Road, along dark tracks, through rivers and forests, buying fresh mounts along the way, riding, bloodied and bruised, day and night to the Scottish capital to tell King James VI of Scotland that he had been proclaimed James I of Scotland and England, Ireland, Wales and France.

As they rode north, Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, went with trumpeters and heralds to the gates of Whitehall and Cheapside to proclaim that the Queen was dead, long live the King. There were bonfires to celebrate the peaceful transition and to prepare the way for the imperial funeral of Elizabeth I and the majestic journey south of the new King. New to London, he had been King of Scotland for more than thirty years. It was a crown he had inherited when he was a one-year-old child. And he had children of his own! There would be heirs. The throne was doubly assured. This was the man who would commission the Bible known by his name.

His childhood would have been called traumatic had the word been invented. His mother was Mary Queen of Scots. She was an ardent Catholic and a magnet for conspirators against her cousin, Elizabeth I. Mary’s lover had been slaughtered in front of her; rival groups had kidnapped the child and held him prisoner in grim, cold, isolated Caledonian castles. The country was racked by the clashing and tormented arguments of fanatically stern Presbyterians who demanded the King’s attention and were wholly unafraid to tick him off. He declared himself a lover of Presbyterianism.

There was then the death and execution of his exiled Roman Catholic mother and a life spent in sifting the signs coming from Elizabeth in London. Out of this, remarkably, he emerged as a man very sure of himself. Perhaps his scholarship grounded him.

His learning, especially his biblical learning, was on a par with that of the best biblical scholars of the day when such learning dominated the intellectual agenda. Biblical scholarship was then seen as the greatest discipline of the intellect as well as being the golden key to the word of God Himself as delivered in the Scriptures. The child James was taught Latin before he knew Scots.

At the age of eight, his learning was such that he could call on anyone to open the Bible and whatever the chapter or verses, he would instantly be able to translate it from Latin into French and from French into English. As an adolescent he became obsessed with making metrical translations of the Psalms; he boasted that he had read the Bible in most languages and could argue the case as well as any man. His love of books extended to poetry and philosophy; he wrote poetry and a book about the evils of tobacco. But the Bible was the hub of his learning.

He walked awkwardly because of a childhood bout of rickets; he wore heavily padded clothes to ward off a dagger thrust; he was unprepossessing in an age when the dandyism of the male was peacocked abroad, particularly in London. This was a man who wrote a book on demonology and – on biblical authority, ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (Exodus) – had ‘witches’ burned to death after questioning them himself at a trial in Edinburgh. This was also a man who wrote the defining book on the Divine Right of Kings and believed that the King was God’s representative on earth, that the King was outside the law and that kings alone could and did speak directly to God, who ruled Above as the King ruled Below.

His journey south from Edinburgh, which took months, was, for James and his family, a triumphal entry into a form of paradise, unforeseen. He was greeted with crowds wherever he went. Merchants of towns and cities gave him heavy purses of gold. Great landowners entertained him in houses luxurious beyond any dwelling he had ever seen. His passion for deer hunting was indulged in the richest forests he had known. Entertainments were provided for himself and his family. No flattery was too thick to lay on. He was seduced, ravished and, on that dalliance of a journey south, wholly converted to the opulence and flattering of England. He came in from a small cold country and, still vigorous in his early middle years, found treasures. His debts became a scandal.

Along the way south he was petitioned by Presbyterians. They were well organised. They were alight at the prospect of a King who had praised the Presbyterian Church in Scotland and declared himself to be happy with it and proud to be part of it. The beleaguered Presbyterians of England, strong in determination and educational influence but a minority in numbers and with no supporters at court, saw their chance and seized it. All the way along the road the man who would be crowned king in Westminster received closely argued documents, signed, it was claimed, by 1,000 Presbyterian clergy sympathetic to the cause. His past was not easily to be cast off.

There was yet another visitation of the plague in London in 1603 and James’s coronation was celebrated only briefly in the capital. He was then hurried away eight miles up the River Thames to Hampton Court. This was to be where his Bible was to be born.

Hampton Court, a palace of a thousand rooms, princely halls, and gardens and ornaments fit for kings and queens, was just one of the stupendous buildings ordered and paid for by Thomas Wolsey. He was the son of a butcher in the town of Ipswich in the east of England. He had won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, and at fifteen earned his BA, ‘a rare thing and seldom seen’. He scaled the ladder of the medieval academic world, was ordained, became Dean of Lincoln Cathedral and then chaplain to Henry VIII.

With the King’s admiration and favour filling his sails, this precocious boy turned into a heat-seeking missile aimed at greater and greater power. He became one of the mighty diplomats of Europe, Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor of England and a cardinal with a firm eye on the papacy as his final earthly posting. In Church and state he carried all before him and pursued a ruthless policy of appropriating rich Church titles and lands. Precious stones ringed his fingers, rarest satins and silks clothed him, mistresses and sycophants constantly plumped up the pillowed comforts of a sovereign’s life in his palace beside the Thames.

James took to Hampton Court as to the manner born. He began what became an addiction to extravagance. There were feasts and masques, in one of which his young wife and her friends appeared lightly masked but otherwise gauzed in near nakedness. Shakespeare and his company were bidden up river to preview Macbeth in the Great Hall. Shakespeare’s three witches were thought to have entertained the new King. This second kingship called up some luxuriating part of James’s mind. The sensualities of that frozen kidnapped boy bullied by Presbyterians, used as a pawn by ambitious Scottish noblemen, now demanded to be sated. He found a new world and although he had delivered a lover’s farewell to Scotland, saying he would return there often, he went back only once in twenty-two years. He was King of England now and he pillaged this paradise ruthlessly.

Since Tyndale’s Bible, the first printed Bible in English, there had been several others. Despite some notes and small amendments, it was the case that again and again Tyndale’s version remained the basis for these subsequent translations into Early Modern English. Tyndale was only lightly edited by Miles Coverdale for his 1539 Bible: the Great Bible, ‘authorised’ by Henry VIII, had Tyndale’s work on the New Testament and the early books of the Old Testament as its foundation. The Geneva Bible (1560), which became the most influential of all until the King James Version, took Tyndale’s Bible and the Great Bible as its basis, as did the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. Even the Douay-Rheims New Testament of 1582, a Roman Catholic version, used Tyndale.

These several Bibles were confusing and an embarrassment. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign Parliament spoke of the need to reduce ‘the diversity of Bibles now extant in the English tongue’. Nothing was done.

It was an ideal opportunity for this new biblically erudite King. In January 1604, a few months after the hurried coronation in Westminster Abbey, and following his spectacular Twelfth Night theatricals, King James opened the Hampton Court Conference.

Religion was the potent political and intellectual currency of the day. It was the only arena of great debate and James used this occasion to show off his paces. The Privy Council was there, as were many bishops. Although it was they who had suggested it, there were only four Puritan clerics and they were not even invited to the opening service. So much, they would have been right to think, for James’s recent passionate declaration of loyalty to the Presbyterian Church in Scotland.

On the first day James made a five-hour speech, much of it in Latin. He attacked the Church of England so expertly and relentlessly that some thought he had shipped his Presbyterianism down from Edinburgh intact. Only the canniest listeners, like Launcelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster, saw him as ‘playing’ the Puritan. But the speech left no one in any doubt of his learning and his religious zeal. Indeed, some thought his vehemence was rather coarse, even boastful.

Then on the second day, the Puritans, high on expectation, were allowed in to the court. He turned on them. His opening speech, only one hour this time, was on the subject ‘Religion is the soul of a Kingdom and Unity the life of Religion’. I think that he had studied the triangular balancing act of Elizabeth I. She enforced, in law, the state’s Protestantism; kept many of the Catholic forms and practices; and tolerated at arm’s length the radical Puritans. Above all she was seen to be moderate. James knew about lack of moderation from his Scottish experience. This now seemed too raw and too disruptive from the perspective of this more complex and nuanced terrain.

So when the Puritans came forward with their rather modest proposals, minor changes in the rights of the Church – to forbid the making of the sign of the Cross at certain points in the service and the enforced wearing of a wedding ring and the end of absentee clergy, which had enabled Wolsey, for instance, to pile up his wealth – James turned down all of their requests.

‘I will have one doctrine and one discipline, one religion in substance and in ceremony,’ said James. The more they pressed the angrier he became, until he declared: ‘If this be all they have to say, I will make them contain themselves or harry them out of the land.’ In the ecstasy of this accomodating and sumptuous Anglicanism, he had sown the seeds of what was to become an exodus of some of the best educated and most serious-minded people in the kingdom. In his excitement at pleasing the English establishment in his newfound land, he had paved the way for the nonconformists to leave England and found their own newfound land – America.

In one other respect the mysterious law of unexpected consequences was already at work at that Hampton Court Conference. For one of the four Puritans, John Reynolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, petitioned the King to consider a new translation of the Bible. The Anglican establishment objected most strongly, but on this one subject, possibly flattered by the glory that would accrue to him, or perhaps as a consolation prize for the Presbyterians, the King acceded. And the politician in him realised that a single Bible, ultimately authorised and controlled by the King himself, and a King as steeped in Bible scholarship as he was, could play a starring role in bringing and holding his new domain together.

Out of Wolsey’s most Catholic Hampton Court on the Thames came one Bible, one authorised version controlled by one King. One King by Divine Right. One Bible that would eliminate those radical suggestions which appeared in the margins of the Geneva Bible. One Bible that would show the world what the King and God and the heavenly and earthly kingdom were really made of. A book to re-order the world.

Which it did.