Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible

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Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson

A fascinating, lively account of the making of the King James Bible.James VI of Scotland – now James I of England – came into his new kingdom in 1603. Trained almost from birth to manage rival political factions, he was determined not only to hold his throne, but to avoid the strife caused by religious groups that was bedevilling most European countries. He would hold his God-appointed position and unify his kingdom. Out of these circumstances, and involving the very people who were engaged in the bitterest controversies, a book of extraordinary grace and lasting literary appeal was created: the King James Bible.47 scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London translated the Bible, drawing from many previous versions, and created what many believe to be the greatest prose work ever written in English – the product of a culture in a peculiarly conflicted era. This was the England of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Bacon; but also of extremist Puritans, the Gunpowder plot, the Plague, of slum dwellings and crushing religious confines. Quite how this astonishing translation emerges is the central question of this book.Far more than Shakespeare, this Bible helped to create and shape the language. It is the origin of many of our most familiar phrases, and the foundations of the English-speaking world. It was a generous and deliberate decision to make the Bible available to the common man: not an immediate commercial success, but which later became a bestseller, and has remained one ever since.Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the early years of the first Stewart ruler, and the scholars who laboured for seven years to create the world's greatest book; immersing us in a world of ingratiating bishops, a fascinating monarch and London at a time unlike any other.

POWER AND GLORY

Jacobean Englandand the Making of the King James Bible

ADAM NICOLSON

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_fe94a4ef-2162-57fa-a7ea-8b1718017cc2)

HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublisbers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2003

Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2003

Portrait/Literature by Committee copyright © Sam Leith 2004

Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007108947

Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007380701 Version: 2016-12-07

PRAISE (#ulink_8920d2ab-a2c8-50a4-8ade-68eaa608a9aa)

‘This fascinating story is told with brilliance by Adam Nicolson.’

Glasgow Herald

‘An engaging and moving account … marvellous.’

Economist

‘Power and Glory … pays that Bible eloquent tribute, not least in its passionate homage to the power of language as, and in, history. His own words give us not only the rich history but a moving commemoration of the Bible that has so much shaped our utterances and lives.’

Independent

‘Nicolson’s portraits of Jacobean intellectuals, theologians, politicians and princes overlay the lasting achievement that underpins this book. His approach to personalities humanises the beauty and ceremony of the biblical prose that still transcends its makers.’

The Times

‘Conversational, witty and engaging. It is extraordinarily readable … Adam Nicolson gives us a swashbuckling and fastmoving account of the accession of King James I of England and VI of Scotland in 1603 … he catches the spirit of the age in his own literary style … There is power and glory here in spadefuls, and a great deal of kingdom too.’

The Tablet

‘One wouldn’t think an account of the translation of the Bible would prove an enthralling read, but Adam Nicolson’s narrative has a sweep of grandeur at which a brief review like this can only hint. This is history with masterly writing and a cast of bizarre characters. Highly recommended.’

Irish Examiner

‘It is a popular book as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt … Nicolson’s excitement is contagious.’

New Yorker

‘Nicolson shows us in captivating detail how the diverse translators of the King James Bible captured compelling debates that remain relevant to this day.’

Newsweek

‘A readable, immaculately researched book … The author has a clear understanding of the time, the issues involved and, above all, of the people who made the King James Bible. He could not have told his story more compellingly.’

Country Life

‘Adam Nicolson’s stunning history of the Authorised Version is really a prosopography, a study of the dynamic group of scholars who put together what some call the best book in the English language. Nicolson’s focus on the words these men left behind enables him to combine scholarship with a greater emotional sensitivity.’

Observer

‘Adam Nicolson’s book is unobtrusively learned, rich in curious and purposeful detail, an ideal balance between fervent enthusiasm and elegantly witty detachment. The story of the translation’s origins and production is a subject which, one always felt, would be nice to hear from a really sparkling and sharp guide. This volume strikes me as exactly that, a brilliantly entertaining, passionate, funny and instructive telling of an important and gripping story.’

PHILIP HENSHER, The Spectator

‘Adam Nicolson has a nose for quirks, follies and ironies … Nicolson fascinatingly demonstrates how these translators took the plain, sinewy prose of the fugitive martyr William Tyndale – written 80 years previously – and polished it to gem-like brightness, looking for words which would resonate with passion and ring sonorously amid the solemnity of worship … He has written a marvellous book: there are few more stylish or sensitive introductions than this to the personalities, the sights and the smells, as well as to the words, of Jacobean England.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Nicolson really deserves at least an 18-gun salute. Power and Glory is a fine piece of history, ecclesiology and literature all rolled into one and, what’s more, like the Authorised Version itself, it sings.’

Guardian

‘This is an easygoing, companionable exploration of Elizabethan and Jacobean England … will delight the general reader, for whom it was written … Nicolson takes one back to the Bible with a fresh eye and ear, which is not easily done these days.’

New Statesman

‘The story of the seven years between commissioning and printing fascinates from start to finish. It is told in a way which combines scholarship and entertainment.’

Independent on Sunday

‘Vivid, exhilarating, consistently intelligent, you can almost taste the air breathed by these Jacobean heroes, who gave English its most famous book. History at its best.’

SIMON JENKINS

‘Nicolson vividly evokes many aspects of Jacobean England: the secret police, religious passions, a profligate court, an atmosphere of emotional extravagance, splendid architecture, stained glass … Adam Nicolson has deepened my understanding of the greatest work of English prose, for which I am grateful.’

Literary Review

CONTENTS

Cover (#ud30fe05e-39cd-5eaa-aa26-422e4bdbce89)

Title Page (#ufeccbc30-c684-54d6-9832-74ecf9f7e773)

Copyright (#uc50e4cf2-26b2-5f2d-9482-48521b9b77ee)

Praise (#ue8421653-ff2c-58d4-b539-8ff279fd79ee)

Preface (#u0ae0b676-0fd3-532f-92b9-58095189b1d4)

1 A poore man now arrived at the Land of Promise (#uc5b29302-0263-5703-a26b-884490218e54)

2 The multitudes of people covered the beautie of the fields (#uae9a69b6-6b26-575a-ad87-9780cd1b41f6)

3 He sate among graue, learned and reuerend men (#uf3a050bf-55be-55f7-a887-877964b3251e)

4 Faire and softly goeth far (#litres_trial_promo)

5 I am for the medium in all things (#litres_trial_promo)

6 The danger never dreamt of, that is the danger (#litres_trial_promo)

7 O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart (#litres_trial_promo)

8 We have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination … (#litres_trial_promo)

9 When we do luxuriate and grow riotous in the gallantnesse of this world (#litres_trial_promo)

10 True Religion is in no way a gargalisme only (#litres_trial_promo)

11 The grace of the fashion of it (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut vp his tender mercies? (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendices (#litres_trial_promo)

A The Sixteenth-century Bible (#litres_trial_promo)

B The Six Companies of Translators (#litres_trial_promo)

C Chronology (#litres_trial_promo)

Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Portrait (#litres_trial_promo)

Life Drawing (#litres_trial_promo)

Top Ten Favourite Reads (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)

A Critical Eye (#litres_trial_promo)

Literature by Committee (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

Have you read? (#litres_trial_promo)

If You Loved This, You’ll Like … (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PREFACE (#ulink_ad43c3c6-90e9-5c44-97f4-dfcd75e1f563)

The making of the King James Bible, in the seven years between its commissioning by James VI & I in 1604 and its publication by Robert Barker, ‘Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majestie’, in 1611, remains something of a mystery. The men who did it, who pored over the Greek and Hebrew texts, comparing the accuracy and felicity of previous translations, arguing with each other over the finest details of chapter and verse, were many of them obscure at the time and are generally forgotten now, a gaggle of fifty or so black-gowned divines whose names are almost unknown but whose words continue to resonate with us. They have a ghost presence in our lives, invisible but constantly heard, enriching the language with the ‘civility, learning and eloquence’ of their translation, but nowadays only whispering the sentences into our ears.

Beyond that private communication, they have left few clues. Surviving in one or two English libraries and archives are the instructions produced at the beginning of the work, a couple of drafts of short sections sketched out in the course of it, some fragments of correspondence between one or two of them and a few pages of notes taken at a meeting near the end. Otherwise nothing.

But that virtual anonymity is the power of the book. The translation these men made together can lay claim to be the greatest work in prose ever written in English. That it should be the creation of a committee of people no one has ever heard of – and who were generally unacknowledged at the time – is the key to its grandeur. It is not the poetry of a single mind, nor the effusion of a singular vision, nor even the product of a single moment, but the child of an entire culture stretching back to the great Jewish poets and storytellers of the Near Eastern Bronze Age. That sense of an entirely embraced and reimagined past is what fuels this book.

The divines of the first decade of seventeenth-century England were alert to the glamour of antiquity, in many ways consciously archaic in phraseology and grammar, meticulous in their scholarship and always looking to the primitive and the essential as the guarantee of truth. Their translation was driven by that idea of a constant present, the feeling that the riches, beauties, failings and sufferings of Jacobean England were part of the same world as the one in which Job, David or the Evangelists walked. Just as Rembrandt, a few years later, without any sense of absurdity or presumption, could portray himself as the Apostle Paul, the turban wrapped tightly around his greying curls, the eyes intense and inquiring, the King James Translators could write their English words as if the passage of 1,600 or 3,000 years made no difference. Their subject was neither ancient nor modern, but both or either. It was the universal text.

The book they created was consciously poised in its rhetoric between vigour and elegance, plainness and power. It is not framed in the language, as one Puritan preacher described it, of ‘fat and strutting bishops, pomp-fed prelates’, nor of Puritan controversy or intellectual display. It aimed to step beyond those categories to embrace the universality of its subject. As a result, it does not suffer from one of the defining faults of the age: a form of anxious and egotistical self-promotion. It exudes, rather, a shared confidence and authority and in that is one of the greatest of all monuments to the suppression of ego.

It is often said that the King James Translators (a word that was capitalised at the time), particularly in the New Testament, did little more than copy out the work of William Tyndale, done over eighty years before in the dawn of the Reformation. The truth of their relationship to Tyndale, as will emerge, is complex but the point is surely this: they would have been pleased to acknowledge that they were winnowing the best from the past. They would not have wanted the status of originators or ‘authors’ – a word at which one of their Directors, Lancelot Andrewes, would visibly shudder. They took from Tyndale because Tyndale had done well, not perfectly and not always with an ear for the richness of the language, but with a passion for clarity which the Jacobean scholars shared. What virtue was there in newness when the old was so good?

Of course, the King James Bible did not spring from the soil of Jacobean England as quietly and miraculously as a lily. There were arguments and struggles, exclusions and competitiveness. It is the product of its time and bears the marks of its making. It is a deeply political book. The period was held in the grip of an immense struggle: between the demands for freedom of the individual conscience and the need for order and an imposed inheritance; between monarchy and democracy; between extremism and toleration. Early Jacobean England is suffused with this drama of authority and legitimacy and of the place of the state within that relationship. ‘The reformers’, it has often been said, ‘dethroned the Pope and enthroned the Bible.’ That might have been the case in parts of Protestant Europe, but in England the process was longer, slower, less one-directional and more complex. The authority of the English, Protestant monarch, as head of the Church of England, had taken on wholesale many of the powers which had previously belonged to the pope. The condition of England was defined by those ambiguities. In the years that the translation was being prepared, Othello, Volpone, King Lear and The Tempest – all centred on the ambivalences of power, the rights of the individual will, the claims of authority and the question of liberty of conscience – were written and staged for the first time. The questions that would erupt in the Civil War three decades later were already circling around each other here.

But it is easy to let that historical perspective distort the picture. To see the early seventeenth century through the gauze of the Civil War is to regard it only as a set of origins for the conflict. That is not the quality of the time, nor is the King James Bible any kind of propaganda for an absolutist king. Its subject is majesty, not tyranny, and its political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one indivisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole. Its grandeur of phrasing and the deep slow music of its rhythms – far more evident here than in any Bible the sixteenth century had produced – were conscious embodiments of regal glory. It is a book written for what James, the self-styled Rex Pacificus, and his councillors hoped – a vain hope, soon shipwrecked on vanity, self-indulgence and incompetence – might be an ideal world.