Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. Adam Nicolson
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 didnât want the âbrainsick and heady preachersâ but âthe learned and grave men of both sidesâ. 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 Andrewesâs father had been a master mariner in London, Bancroftâs a minor member of the northern gentry, Whitgiftâs a Grimsby merchant, Chadertonâs 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 Jamesâs 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, âpassed a few pleasant gratulations with some of the Lordsâ, 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. âSalomon speakethâ, the unctuous William Barlow, Dean of Chester, reported, in the ever-repeated cliché of the reign. Jamesâs words, falling on the ears of his amazed and delighted hearers, Barlow said, were âlike Apples of gold, with pictures of siluerâ.
Barlowâs account makes it seem as if king and bishops had shown little but love and harmony to each other, but they hadnât. Barlow (a Translator â 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 bishopsâ 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 Bancroftâs instructions. Bancroft wanted to make it appear that the king was on the bishopsâ 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 âMr Calvinâ. 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: âIt was no reason that because a man had been sicke of the poxe 40 years, therefore he shoold not be cured at length.â
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 bishopsâ horror, James began to lecture them, âplaying the puritanâ 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 âmore gently than euer they had don beforeâ. These statements were politically canny â the bishops were still unsure where James stood â 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? Wasnât 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. âWhereto his Majesty answered pleasantly, âA turd for the Argument. He might as well have pissed on them, for that had been more liker to water than sand.ââ The bishopâs reputation never recovered. Bancroft, who in his organisational ability could exercise a cold rationality but who could also turn intemperate and angry, ânow spake with too ruf boldnessâ. 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