The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
words still predominated and Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as in Shakespeare, gave the language its dynamism: ‘Song of Songs’, ‘King of Kings’, ‘And the word was made flesh’, ‘man of war’, ‘I am the way, the truth and the light’, ‘three score and ten’, ‘And the word was with God. And the word was God.’
The fi ercest critic of the day was a Puritan Hebrew scholar, Hugh Broughton, who had not been included on the list of translators – very likely because of his tendency to argue with everyone who dared to disagree with him. King James asked for advice from independent scholars and Broughton weighed in. ‘It is so ill done . . . Tell his Majesty I had rather be rent in pieces by wild horses than that any such translation by my comment should be urged upon poor churches. It crosseth me and I require it to be burnt!’ He was not alone, though his intemperance was exceptional.
At first people did not take to it. In some matters, and certainly in this case, people prefer old lamps to new. The Bishops’ Bible ceased to be printed but its translated bulk still stayed on the lecterns in many of the churches. Its words were familiar and it had its hold. It took time for James to decree that his Bible be the sole Bible in churches. After that it took over the lecterns throughout the kingdom.
Then there was the Geneva Bible, much loved, conveniently priced and sized, the portable sustenance of the faith for generations. That too held on and was not entirely supplanted until the middle of the century.
St Jerome, after the years spent turning the Bible into the Latin current in his day at the end of the fourth century, encountered equally harsh opposition which embittered him. He would have been pleased that Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, in his book Leviathan quotes the Bible only in the Latin of St Jerome and disdained the King James Version. Many of the educated preferred what they had studied at university. The beauties of the new Bible’s prose were to be discovered, admired and then loved rather later.
It was the will of James I that made the book happen. It was the poetry of it and a civil war in the kingdoms of Britain and a purposeful and valiant push west across the Atlantic to America that embedded it.
‘The scholars who produced this masterpiece are mostly un-known and unremembered,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill, not, as it turns out, correctly. ‘But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world.’
And a scholar’s voice, that of Professor Albert Stanborough Cook, of Yale University in the 1920s: ‘No other book has penetrated and permeated the hearts and speech of the English race as has the Bible.’
Finally, from the historian Lord Macaulay: ‘If everything else in our language should perish, it would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.’
Now, 1611, it was done and out in the world. It would help create new worlds and be part of the rise and fall of empires. It would be crucial in shaping America, its faith, its democracy and its language. All this potential was compact in dangerously crowded, small ships which set off from ports in the west of England to find and found a New England, which they did, Bibles in hand, God’s English their guide.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MAYFLOWER AND THE COVENANT
There is something of the Ark about the Mayflower. On 6 September 1620, 102 people set off from Plymouth in Devon on the south coast of England. This boat, the Mayflower, was ninety feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Today you can see a full-scale replica berthed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is a thing of beauty, gleaming, perfect: and very small.
In 1620 it leaked, stank, bulged with people and furniture, livestock and stores and forced its way across the storm-stricken North Atlantic for sixty-six days. To imagine that small vessel in the turbulence of a Northern Atlantic late autumn is to be reminded of Noah. When the Flood came to drown the earth, God told Noah to build a wooden ark, and in this he put the birds and the beasts and men and women who would survive the Flood and begin God’s work on earth once more.
Thirty-five of those on board the Mayflower would have embraced the comparison and sought strength from it. These thirty-five believed that they were God’s favoured people, heirs to the Israelites of the Old Testament. They had entered into a covenant with each other and with God who expected greater service from them than from anyone else. Their religion was based on Calvinism: they were Separatists, they were the Elect. It is likely that most of them took the Geneva Bible, and their reading of the Bible told them so.
Like the King James Version, it was largely based on the work of Tyndale. When the King James Version took over, which it did in a few years, there was not much that was new. The disturbing marginal notes had gone. But the Separatists would then ink in their own marginal notes. They were the ‘Chosen’ and they watched every step they took. Few groups in history can have taken their calling with such fearless seriousness. It was those qualities as much as their faith which put their stamp on the language, the constitution and the morality of America. These people of the book were the crucible in the making of the new nation. They made it as a tribute to the book.
They also made it, as they saw it, through God’s providence. The following is one of the only known primary source accounts of the journey of the Mayflower, written by William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation. The extract begins when the Mayflower finally set sail successfully, having been beaten back to Plymouth by violent storms:
September 6. These troubles being blown over, and now all being compact together in one ship, they put to sea again with a prosperous wind, which continued divers days together, which was some encouragement unto them; yet according to the usual manner many were afflicted with sea sickness. And I may not omit here a special work of God’s providence.
There was a proud and very profane young man, one of the seamen, of a lusty, able body, which made him the more haughty; he would always be condemning the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations, and did not let to tell them, that he hoped to help to cast half of them overboard before they came to their journey’s end, and to make merry with what they had; and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear most bitterly. But it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard. Thus his curses light on his own head, and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.
In this next extract, besides once more showing the hardships of the voyage, a more benevolent God is revealed:
And as for the decks and upper works they would caulk them as well as they could, and though with the working of the ship they would not long keep staunch, yet there would otherwise be no great danger, if they did not overpress her with sails. So they committed themselves to the will of God, and resolved to proceed. In sundry of these storms the winds were so fierce, and the seas so high, as they could not bear a knot of sail, but were forced to hull, for divers days together. And in one of them, as they thus lay at hull, in a mighty storm, a lusty young man (called John Howland) coming upon some occasion above the gratings, was, with a seele of the ship thrown into the sea; but it pleased God that he caught hold of the topsail halyards, which hung overboard, and ran out at length; yet he held his hold (though he was sundry fathoms under water) till he was hauled up by the same rope to the brim of the water, and then with a boat hook and other means got into the ship again, and his life saved; and though he was something ill with it, yet he lived many years after, and became a profitable member both in church and commonwealth.
Finally at their destination, they had no doubt what must be done before all else: ‘Being thus arrived in a good harbour and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.’
After sixty-six days, after one death and one birth, they had landed near what they called Plymouth Rock. On rocky ground they built their church.