The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
power of the word. Improper speech, blasphemy, slander, cursing, lying, railing, reviling, scolding, threatening and swearing were crimes. Curse God and you were in the stocks. Deny the Scriptures and you would be whipped and possibly hanged. These colonists set out to honour the language and it started in the schoolrooms. This began with the New England Primer, which sold over 3 million copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every English-speaking family in America must have worked their way through this clear and well-constructed teaching aid. It was stocked from the Bible.
A.In Adam’s Fall we all sinned
B.Heaven to find, the Bible mind
C.Christ crucify’d for sinners died
D.The Deluge drowned the earth around
E.Elijah hid by ravens fed
F.The judgement made Felix afraid
G.As runs the grass our life doth pass
H.My book and Heart must never part
J.Job feels the rod, yet blesses God
Some commentators would call this propaganda. Some have said its effect on the minds of the young could be called ‘child abuse’. It set out to promote literacy and you were being made literate in order to study the Bible. But the law of unexpected consequences was to take that literacy far away from study of the King James Version.
The King James Version became an Anglo-American literary story and, more widely, an English-speaking story – Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, parts of India and Africa. There would be developments which took America further away from the English of the Pilgrim Fathers and other early settlers. There would be great seams of new words from other European and then Eastern immigrants who poured into the United States.
American English, extended and embellished by all these new Americanised tongues, would go on and soon deliver its own greatness in books and speeches and songs. But the genesis of the country’s language lay in the King James Version. The vital early achievement of letting no other language speak for this New World was down to the early Puritan settlers. And it could be credited, through the centuries, with making that enormous, patchwork, multiracial continent into a single and often a cohesive force.
John Adams, who would become the second President of the United States, prophesied in a letter in 1780: ‘English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age. The reason for this is obvious, because of the increasing population in America, and their universal connection with all nations, will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use.’
While the early colonists were digging English into New England, back in the mother country the King James Version became a crucial factor in civil war and revolution.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE BIBLE IN THE CIVIL WARS (1642-51)
The King James Bible crept hesitantly into the light. The expensive and bulky Bishops’ Bible was chained to the lecterns in the churches. The cheap and argumentative Geneva Bible remained a general favourite. It needed laws to unchain the one and prohibitions to stamp out the other, and that took some time. About a generation. By the mid-1630s, the new version was being read to most congregations and it was in the hands of hungry readers; hundreds of thousands bought it, more listened to it.
The Bible was out of its Latin straitjacket. It could be interpreted by anyone who read it. This state of affairs disturbed the establishment profoundly. What had been theirs was now everybody’s and that, they thought, could only cause trouble and they were right. Once released, it was open to comment and challenge and the ‘interpretations’ were multitudinous. Most of all, many often self-educated reform men and women found that in the Bible there was no direct authority for infant baptism, fasting, marrying with a ring, nor most of the paraphernalia and hierarchical practices in the Churches. This began what became a dangerous course of questioning.
Next they discovered that the Bible could be used to say the unsayable, to change the law, even to kill a king. From being the weapon of the rulers, the Bible in a few years became the weapon of those who for centuries had been ruled over and overruled.
Its public arrival coincided with the bloody, revolutionary Civil Wars in the middle of the seventeenth century. The words of the biblical prophets, the acts of the Old Testament kings and occasionally one or two phrases of Jesus Christ played an essential role in these wars. The King James Version was instrumental in the execution of King James’s son. His Bible was out in the world now, with an energy of its own and it was sucked into the conflict.
Christopher Hill, in his magnificent study The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, reminds us of the landscape of the thinking of that time. More than a thousand years of Christian presence in the islands of Britain had instructed most of the people in its ways and caught them in its spells. But the people were silenced. Now it changed: the King James Bible became the book through which the people could speak and act.
Since 1517, the shot of the Reformation had set fire to the Christian world and in the mid-seventeenth century its fury flamed higher than ever before. There was in Europe a virulent war, Catholics against Protestants, which was to last for thirty years. The Antichrist (the Pope) had to be slaughtered. The godless Protesters had to be slaughtered. God was claimed by both sides. Paranoia and hatred on both sides were pitched to what we might now call hysterical fanaticism. Religion was all in all. It blotted up all their thought systems and blotted out what did not fit.
It is difficult for many of us now to imagine how binding the Christian faith was in that Civil War conflict. It was in your daily bread, your daily work, it guided your laws, your actions, your words. As if you had been dipped in hot wax and emerged for ever as a candle whose purpose was to be alight for God, the Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Church and hope of eternal life. You could privately, secretly, disagree; you could be disobedient or argumentative or indolent. But in the mid-seventeenth century, in the drama into which the King James Bible was enrolled as a major force, it trapped you as surely as the earth was recently proved to be trapped around the sun.
The Bible was not a programme. It was not any single lesson. It was a well of adaptable wisdom and a pit of fertile contradictions. In the tormented argument which provoked and helped shape the course of action in Britain between 1625 and 1649 it spoke in conflicting tongues and all of them sought and found authority in the words of God or His prophets. It made the war respectable: it justified slaughter: it aided liberation. It was both a source of truth and a serpents’ nest.
Henry VIII had appointed himself head of the Church as well as of the state and put religion and politics together in the same box and there they stayed. James I believed that he ruled by Divine Right and was finally answerable only to God. There were grumbles but the strength of English law, Parliament and behind them both Magna Carta, was felt as an effective brake should it be needed. Also James’s shrewd intelligence, overlaid though it was with his unceasing over-excitement and over-indulgence in the lush and louche excesses of those rich and promiscuous Englishmen who swarmed about him, just about saw him through.
His son, Charles I, who came to the throne in 1625, was not so intelligent, a hardliner on Divine Right, wholly convinced that he was outside and above the law and did not need Parliament. His promiscuity was not with sensuality but with Catholicism and that was not to be tolerated. His wife was Roman Catholic. He wanted their son to make a good Catholic marriage. He refused to support the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War.
It is proof of how deeply divinity was thought to hedge a king and how tightly the traditional obligations held, that for seventeen years Charles I seemed to get away with playing the tyrant. But during that time the voraciously read and often radically interpreted Bible undermined his position. By the end of the 1630s the King was under attack from a revolutionary force. The Bible was its battering ram. Having been for centuries the book of authority, it became, now that it was available in English, the book of rebellion. It pervaded