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

The delegates were ushered by the Gentlemen of the Royal Household into the Presence Chamber, just before eleven. A large cloth of state, emblazoned with the royal arms, hung on the far wall. A velvet-covered chair – the king’s – stood empty a few feet, ‘a prettie distance’, in front of it. It was perhaps the chair that survives at Knole, given by the king to the Earl of Dorset in 1606, its back and seat, under the velvet, formed from a thick canvas bag stuffed with feathers, and its egg-shaped finials studded with gilt nails. Beside it, the Lords of the Privy Council were standing in groups, and, lined up, sitting on a plain wooden bench or form, the Puritans with whom the bishops and the deans were to dispute. One of the gentlemen there, writing to a friend in the country, said that the four of them looked as if they were wearing their ‘clokes and Nitecaps’.

This seems at first like a cartoon of Jacobean England: the grand theatre of the royal Presence Chamber, derisive courtiers, satin-lined prelates, a self-indulgent king, and a pitiable line-up of put-upon and ascetic Puritans, sitting on their bench more like the accused at a trial than the equal partners in a negotiation for the future of the church. But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The four representatives of the Puritan party were in fact old friends of many of the bishops and deans. John Reynolds or Rainolds, one of the Puritans, was not only Master of Corpus Christi Oxford but had been Dean of Lincoln Cathedral, a position in the gift of the archbishop himself. So happy was Reynolds at Lincoln and then at Corpus Christi, that he had had actually refused a bishopric offered him by Queen Elizabeth. Here in the Presence Chamber he found himself face to face with his oldest friend, Henry Robinson, now Bishop of Carlisle. They had known each other since they were boys, they had been at Oxford together; as Jacobean England was an expressive culture (strait-laced continentals remarked on how often and warmly the English kissed), the two men would certainly have embraced. Robinson had taken a different path from Reynolds, but in many ways was indistinguishable from his friend. An evangelical Calvinist, an assiduous preacher, scarcely bothering to enforce the strict anti-Puritan requirements (ministers in his diocese did not have to kneel for communion nor always wear a surplice), a ferocious pursuer of Catholics in the Protestant north: there was more uniting these men than dividing them.

Two of the other Puritans, John Knewstubs and the charming, mild-mannered Laurence Chaderton, had been at Cambridge with Lancelot Andrewes and used to have ‘constant meetings’ with him there. Their lives had certainly diverged – Chaderton and Knewstubs both had a radical Presbyterian past behind them, of which Andrewes would certainly have disapproved – but even so there was a great deal uniting them. They had all studied the ancient languages together, read the Bible together and teased out the details of ‘Grammatical Interpretation’ together, ‘till at last they went out, like Apollos, eloquent men, and mighty in the Scriptures’.

This was not an encounter of parties at each other’s throats. Chaderton, who was now the Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and one of the most loved of all men in that university, had also as an undergraduate been the greatest friend of Richard Bancroft, another man who now stood opposite him, as his chief opponent and Bishop of London, scourge of Puritans and Whitgift’s chosen successor for the see of Canterbury. When they were students together at Cambridge, during one of the often-repeated clashes between town and gown, Chaderton had actually saved Bancroft from a mob of enraged citizens.

Bancroft had become a severe, ruthless sleuth after Puritan error. As Whitgift’s right-hand man in the 1580s and ’90s he had hunted out and destroyed the Elizabethan Presbyterian movement (of which Chaderton and Knewstubs had been a part). It was a bruising process, which according to Thomas Fuller, the seventeenth-century church historian, ‘hardened the hands of his soul, which was no more than needed for him who was to meddle with nettles and briars’. That is certainly what Bancroft looks like in his portraits: a weather-tested man, as rough as a hill-farmer, ruthless with any opposition. But he and Chaderton remained friends. Both were from Lancashire where wrestling is a traditional sport and the two men, Master of Emmanuel and Bishop of London, liked to wrestle when they met.

The establishment of Jacobean England was as small as a village. It was intimate with itself, engaged in endless conversation. The currency of this world was talk between people who had known each other all their lives, and the intimacy of those relationships was crucial 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 didn’t want the ‘brainsick and heady preachers’ but ‘the learned and grave men of both sides’. 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 Andrewes’s father had been a master mariner in London, Bancroft’s a minor member of the northern gentry, Whitgift’s a Grimsby merchant, Chaderton’s 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 James’s 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, ‘passed a few pleasant gratulations with some of the Lords’, 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. ‘Salomon speaketh’, the unctuous William Barlow, Dean of Chester, reported, in the ever-repeated cliché of the reign. James’s words, falling on the ears of his amazed and delighted hearers, Barlow said, were ‘like Apples of gold, with pictures of siluer’.

Barlow’s account makes it seem as if king and bishops had shown little but love and harmony to each other, but they hadn’t. Barlow (a Translator – 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 bishops’ 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 Bancroft’s instructions. Bancroft wanted to make it appear that the king was on the bishops’ 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 ‘Mr Calvin’. 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: ‘It was no reason that because a man had been sicke of the poxe 40 years, therefore he shoold not be cured at length.’

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 bishops’ horror, James began to lecture them, ‘playing the puritan’ 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 ‘more gently than euer they had don before’. These statements were politically canny – the bishops were still unsure where James stood – 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? Wasn’t 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. ‘Whereto his Majesty answered pleasantly, “A turd for the Argument. He might as well have pissed on them, for that had been more liker to water than sand.”’ The bishop’s reputation never recovered. Bancroft, who in his organisational ability could exercise a cold rationality but who could also turn intemperate and angry, ‘now spake with too ruf boldness’. 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 both a Translator and a bishop. He edited, with a lake full of obsequiousness, the king’s own collected works. He was a beautifully mannered aristocrat, with one brother an earl, the other a baron. He sounds like a Cavalier in the making. Surely a figure such as Mountagu should have been repulsed by Calvinist severity and strictness, by the whole notion of Puritanism? He wasn’t. He was deeply sympathetic to the reformist camp, having been Master of the Puritan Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. At this period, at the head of each of his letters, he used to put the word ‘Emmanuel’, meaning ‘God be with us’, a signal among the stricter sort of the supremacy of scripture over the worldly structures of the church. He did his best to promote the hotter Protestants within the church and would not accept any kind of lush ceremonial, nor any hint of a drift back to Rome.

Bancroft loathed him. For Bancroft, bishops and the accustomed hierarchy were agents of the divine. The true church couldn’t hope to rely on the Bible alone. Almost no one understood what it meant and so people like Mountagu represented a most alarming subversion of the order on which civilised life relied. Now their simmering hostility boiled over. At one point early that afternoon, when the dean leaned over and whispered in the king’s ear – he was giving him some details on ancient baptism – Bancroft could contain himself no longer. ‘Speake out, Mr Doctor, and do not crosse us, underhand,’ he shouted violently across the room. Barlow would report none of this.

They had been talking for three hours. It was not a good atmosphere. This was a court that knew everything about duplicity and politicking, constantly aware of the unreliability of language and men, of whisperings in ears and comments muttered behind the hand, but which nevertheless valued a courteous surface, the smooth and upholstered working of the demands of power. Robert Cecil, a well-honed liar, sitting with the Council to one side, said nothing. Sitting among the deans, Lancelot Andrewes, who had often preached against the very offences of pluralism and nepotism which he and all the others practised, remained silent. And Bancroft’s faux pas allowed James to resume his unique combination of Solomon-like distance and joky vulgarity. Religion, he told them, was the soul of a kingdom, and unity the life of religion. He would clear up some doubts, he would have a few passages changed in the prayer book, in the rubrics rather than the body of the text, ‘to be inserted by waie rather of some explanation than of any alteration at all’. He would see the Puritan party on Monday morning. He was not looking forward to it: ‘howsoeuer he lived among Puritans, and was kept for the most part, as a Ward under them, yet, since hee was the age of his Sonne, 10. years old, he euer disliked their opinions; as the Sauiour of the world said, Though he liued among them, he was not of them.’

With that breathtaking comparison between his own position and Christ’s walking among the heathen, James dismissed the bishops and deans. It was a confession that, in effect, he had been playing with them. He may have appeared to be taunting them with the very charges the Puritans were laying against them, but, when it came to the point, James wanted to buttress the established church. Nevertheless, Solomon-like to the end, he was anxious that the established church itself should be cleansed of impurities. It is the classic Jamesian position: self-congratulatory, vain, and perhaps, in the end, surprisingly, and against the odds, rather wise.

On Monday, the tactics were exactly and intelligently handled by James to put the burden of proof on the Puritans. Unless they could show that there was something in scripture explicitly condemning the bishops’ administration of confirmation, or the use of the cross in baptism, or of the ring in a wedding service, or kneeling to receive communion, or the wearing of the surplice, or about the institution of episcopacy itself, he would not interfere with the accustomed ceremony or government of the church. That church, for all its abuses, was a comfortable bed in which to set a monarchy. Any radicalisation of it, diminishing the power and status of the bishops, or replacing them with presbyteries, inherently argumentative and overweening groups of know-all elders or presbyters, would, in essence, be too Scottish. The last thing he wanted was a return to the horrors north of the border. Presbyteries represented everything he most loathed and despised.

James may have been rude, challenging and clever with the bishops. Now, he was even worse with the Puritans. The four ‘plaintiffs’, as Barlow called them, were ushered into the Presence Chamber, where little ten-year-old Prince Henry was sitting beside his father on a stool. With them were Thomas Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, the most political of all courtier bishops, a member of the Privy Council, who scarcely ever visited his diocese except to administer oppressive justice and who with Miles Smith would play a critical role in the final stages of the translation, and Bancroft. No Henry Robinsons or James Mountagus, nor any other sympathetic bishops here: just the two hard-core royal apologists.

It must have been alarming. James told them: ‘he was now ready to heare, at large, what they could obiect or say; and so willed them to beginne: whereupon, they 4 kneeling downe, D. Reynolds the Foreman began’. They were on the spot. James was famous across Europe as a theological disputant. Seventeenth-century hunting often involved the enclosing of semi-tame animals within the pales of a park and then slaughtering them at one’s leisure, sometimes from a stand in front of which the animals would be driven. And now this too felt a little like another day at that strange, enclosed kind of chase.

It lasted five hours and the Puritans were humiliated. James sniped at them and pursued them into awkward corners, occasionally calling in Bilson and Bancroft, ‘and then for variety sake, rather then for necessity’. The four Puritans tried to parry the blows. John Reynolds was ‘the principall mouthe and speaker’, Chaderton ‘mute as any fishe’, Knewstubs spoke a little about his loathing of the cross (for which Lancelot Andrewes, at least in one account, took him to task) and the fourth, an obscure and moderate preacher called Thomas Sparke or Sparkes (who within a year or two would share with Bancroft the idea that bishops like kings were appointed by God), said hardly anything at all. But James was freewheeling through their points as though dancing in a kind of theological party. ‘We have kept suche a revell with the puritanis heir these two days,’ he wrote afterwards to the violent anti-Puritan and duplicitous crypto-Catholic, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton.

I have pepperid thaime as soundlie, as ye have done the papists … They fledde me so from argument to argument, without ever ansouring me directlie, ut est eorum moris [as is their way], as I was forcid at last to saye unto thaime, that if any of thaime hadde bene in a colledge disputing with thair skollairs, if any of thaire disciples hadde ansourid thaim in that sorte, thay wolde have fetchid him up in place of a replye & so shoulde the rodde have plyed upon the poore boyes buttokis.

Poor, dignified, generous Reynolds and Chaderton stood as if in the stocks, the royal squibs falling around them. Reynolds named the familiar abuses: the ceremony of confirmation, which had no basis in scripture, where adult baptism was the only recognised form of induction into the church; the use of the cross as a kind of magic symbol; the surplice – a papist joke, which clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with Christ, the apostles, or anything discoverable in scripture; kneeling at communion – another piece of superstitious symbolism, as though the bread and wine were indeed the blood and body of Christ, when it was an essential aspect of all Protestant thought that they were merely reminders of what had happened on the cross, not a magical re-enactment of it, and not to be bowed to. To Lancelot Andrewes, always insistent on the value of ceremony, this was absurd. Did Protestants pretend, he asked, that God ‘will have us worship him like elephants, as if we had no joints in our knees?’

James dismissed all the Puritan objections. He was familiar with them all. They were the points which any Scots Presbyterian would have made and which strict English Protestants, dissatisfied with the compromise of the English Church, had been making since the 1550s. Everyone knew the territory; there were no surprises, but the atmosphere was nasty. These were moderate and distinguished men, suggesting moderate changes. But James – and Bancroft who seems to have been in an excitable state at the theatre unfolding around him – was treating them like extreme schismatics from the outer reaches of Anabaptist lunacy. Nothing like this had ever happened under Elizabeth, simply because Elizabeth, a more distant and less engaged monarch, basing her authority on the aura of that very distance, would not have countenanced it. James enjoyed the roughness of theological argument and Bancroft’s eyes must have been wide with delight.

Reynolds, who had never married, said he didn’t like the phrase ‘with my body I thee worship’, which formed part of the marriage service. James couldn’t resist a vulgarity: ‘Many a man speaks of Robin Hood’, he said, ‘who never shot his bow; if you had a good wife yourself, you would think that all the honour and worship you could do her were well bestowed.’ It was said with a leery grin, the paterfamilias taunting the celibate. Reynolds said he didn’t like the sign of the cross. James told him that by making such an objection he was playing into the hands of the papists.

Bancroft, after addressing the king on his knees, was then allowed to abuse the Puritans, calling them ‘schismatic scholars, breakers of your laws; you may know them by their Turkey grograins’, a concentrated insult from the beautifully and correctly dressed bishop. A ‘grograin’ was a gown in grogram, a coarse cloth, part wool, part silk, often worn by merchants. These moderate Puritans, Bancroft was telling the king in his frenzy, were breaking the dress code. What else might they want to break? Was the body of the church safe in their hands? His remarks might be taken as a joke until it is remembered that Bancroft had been closely involved in the pursuit, arrest, interrogation and execution of all those Puritans and Separatists in the past whom he and Whitgift considered a threat to the English Church. It is the kind of joke that is made in totalitarian show-courts.