The Cradle King (35 page)

Barlow presents such a cloyingly rosy Anglican vision of the Hampton Court Conference that it comes as a relief to learn that not everyone was so impressed. Sir John Harington, admittedly never a great admirer of James, had a different take. When the bishops came to the King, he wrote, ‘I was by, and heard much discourse. The King talked much Latin, and disputed with Dr Rainoldes at Hampton,’ he wrote, ‘but he rather used upbraidings than argument; and told the petitioners that they wanted to strip Christ again, and bid them away with their snivelling. Moreover he wished those who would take away the surplice might want linen for their own breeches. The bishops seemed much pleased and said his Majesty spoke by the power of inspiration. I wist [knew] not what they meant, but the spirit was rather foul-mouthed.’
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Such foul-mouthed repartee could hardly expect to find its way into Barlow’s ‘official version’ of events, but the phrases reported by Harington certainly sound like James, and there is evidence that the King’s enjoyment of the conference was not all as highminded as Barlow would have us believe. To the Earl of Northampton James wrote, ‘We have kept such a revel with the Puritans here these two days as was never heard the like, where I have peppered them as soundly, as ye have done the papists there; it were no reason that those that will refuse the airy sign of the cross after baptism should have their purses stuffed with any mo [more] solid and substantial crosses; they fled me so from argument to argument without ever answering me directly … as I was forced at last to say unto them, that if any of them had been in a college disputing with their scholars, if any of their disciples had answered them in that sort, they would have fetched him up in place of a reply, and so should the rod have plyed upon the poor boy’s buttocks.’
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However, in all of Rainoldes’ suggestions, one struck a chord with the King: that there should be a new English translation of the Bible.
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England already had an ‘official’ vernacular version, the so-called Bishops’ Bible, but other renderings also circulated, most notably the Geneva Bible, the Puritans’ choice. Previous translations, Rainoldes alleged, were ‘corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original’.
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Here James had some sympathy. He had never yet seen a Bible well translated into English – although the worst was the Geneva Bible. Indeed, he had moved the case for a new Bible to the Kirk three years earlier at the General Assembly at Burntiswood, when ‘his Majesty did urge it earnestly’, wrote John Spottiswoode, who attended the Assembly, ‘and with many reasons did persuade the undertaking of the work, showing the necessity and the profit of it, and what a glory the performing thereof should bring to this Church. Speaking of the necessity, he did mention sundry escapes in the common translation, and made it seem that he was no less conversant in the Scriptures than they whose profession it was.’
³⁹

Unlike other translations, James added, this new Bible was to have ‘no marginal notes’. In the Geneva translation – which, he suddenly added, rather implausibly, he had only seen ‘in a Bible given him by an English lady’ – he had found ‘some notes very partial, untrue, seditious, and savouring, too much, of dangerous, and traiterous conceits’. For example (and here James was very specific) the note on Exodus 1: 19, where the midwives opposed the King of Egypt, the marginal note actually allowed ‘disobedience to Kings’.
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At 2 Chronicles 15: 16 the note criticised Asa for merely deposing his idolatrous mother Maachah, ‘and not killing her’.
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These two points, disobedience to kings and not murdering your mother, were close to James’s heart.
⁴²
He expressed his wish ‘that some especial pains should be taken in that behalf for one uniform translation … and this to be done by the best learned in both the Universities, after them to be reviewed by the Bishops, and the chief learned of the Church; from them to be presented to the Privy Council; and lastly to be ratified by his royal authority; and so this whole Church to be bound unto it, and none other.’

By June 1604, the translators, fifty-four in total, had been selected. James himself drew up the instructions for the execution of this massive task. When a word had multiple meanings, then the translators should follow the early Church Fathers where possible. The tone should be simple and avoid complex phrasing. The Bishops’ Bible, for all its faults, was established as the base text. Translators were required to follow the established usage of certain words: for the Greek
ecclesia,
for example, ‘church’ was used instead of ‘congregation’, the preferred translation for Puritan-leaning believers. The translators were divided into six ‘companies’, two at Oxford under John Harding, two at Cambridge under Edward Lively, and two at Westminster under Lancelot Andrewes. Puritan scholars were included, among them Rainoldes who worked in the Oxford team until his early death in 1607. The teams worked in isolation, but their work was then subjected to a stringent peer review, and other scholars were encouraged to proffer their comments. A committee of six men, two drawn from each city, met in London to review the work, with the final revisions being done by Bilson and Miles Smith, who later became Bishop of Gloucester.
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The result, proudly published in 1611, has stood the test of time: although the translation has been officially superseded, to many people, the language provided by fifty-four men of varying doctrinal belief and political allegiance working in three separate locations between 1604 and 1611, the ‘King James’ language, still is
the
language of the Church of England.

Although James wanted a new translation and his organisational principles were followed through, there is no evidence that he personally contributed to the translations or revisions – and he may well have realised that his linguistic capabilities were not equal to the task. But he did make a somewhat desultory attempt to flex his poetic muscles on a new metrical version of the Psalms, designed to be sung. Like many Protestant youths, James tried his hand at translating the Psalms early: in the schoolroom he rendered his first Psalm into English verse and in his 1591
Poetical Exercises
wrote that if his verses were well accepted, he would go on to publish as many of the Psalms as he ‘had perfited [perfected]’ and would be encouraged to complete those that remained.
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At the 1601 General Assembly of the Kirk at Burntisland, he urged the importance of such an endeavour, reciting ‘whole verses of the same, showing both the faults of the metre and the discrepance from the text. It was the joy of all that were present to hear it, and bred not little admiration in the whole Assembly.’ At that point the Assembly gave the task of revising the Psalms to Robert Pont, but nothing came of it. John Spottiswoode recalled how, once he came to England, James ‘set the most learned divines of that Church a-work for the translation of the Bible’ while ‘the revising of the Psalms he made his own labour, and at such hours as he might spare from the public cares went through a number of them, commending the rest to a faithful and learned servant, who hath herein answered his Majesty’s expectation’.
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The faithful and learned servant was Sir William Alexander, who during James’s years in England became an occasional poetic foil for the King, whether in debating the merits of metre, or providing an answering sonnet to one of James’s.
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From Alexander’s correspondence it appears that he had a ghostwriting role somewhat similar to Maitland’s in the King’s literary endeavours: Alexander had to execute the translations himself, or persuade others to do them, and then James took whichever he preferred as his own. This work was still going on in 1620 when Alexander wrote to William Drummond of Hawthornden to acknowledge receipt of ‘the psalm you sent, which I think very well done. I had done the same long before it came; but he prefers his own to all else, though, perchance, when you see it, you will think it the worst of the three. No man must meddle with that subject, and therefore I advise you to take no more pains therein.’
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By the time of James’s death, only thirty Psalms were done, but his successor allowed Alexander to finish the sequence and publish it under James’s name. This Alexander did in 1631, and the text was adopted, by royal command, as the official Church translation. However, its quality was so poor that there was an outcry from the Church and the translation soon disappeared: a sad end for a grand project.
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The net effect of the Hampton Court Conference was precisely the opposite of what the Puritans wished: the imposition of a stricter orthodoxy within the Church. The Church of England’s Convocation passed new canons to enforce conformity, with the threat that ministers would lose their livings if they did not conform, with November 1604 set as a deadline. James instructed his bishops to target only those ministers who showed no sign of reformation, but even so up to a hundred ministers were deprived and suspended.
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As the deadline of November 1604 approached, James received what he called ‘the Puritans’ catholic petition’, the Royston Petition which hoped to lobby the King to prevent the eviction of noncomformist clergymen, a move that produced precisely the opposite effect: ‘ye see,’ he wrote to Cecil, ‘I have daily more and more cause to hate and abhor all that sect: enemies to all kings, and to me only because I am a king.’
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When the knights and gentlemen of Northamptonshire joined forces with the local petitioners to argue that thousands would be discontented if ministers were deprived, James felt threatened. The following day he spent eight hours with his Privy Council fuming about the Puritans, pointing out that the revolt in the Low Countries, which was as old as he was and would probably outlive him, began as a petition for matters of religion. So, for that matter, did all the troubles in Scotland. Both he and his mother had been haunted from their cradles by a Puritan devil which he feared would follow him to his grave. Even if he had to hazard his crown, he would suppress those malicious spirits. The Council took the hint, and took action; James expressed himself ‘wonderfully well satisfied with the Council’s proceedings anent [against] the Puritans’, which he characterised as full of ‘mercy and judgement’.
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The bishops were less resolute that the Privy Councillors. The newsletter writer John Chamberlain, a notable barometer of public opinion in Jacobean England, reported that the churchmen were ‘loath to proceed too rigorously in casting out and depriving so many well reputed of for life and learning’. Bishop Montagu urged that the process should be more gradual, a gentle selection ‘rather than all without difference be cut down at once’; moreover, those culled in this way, ‘the poor Puritan ministers, ferreted out in all corners’, might end up being martyrs to a cause. Ultimately, Chamberlain wrote, ‘only the King is constant to have all come to conformity’.
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In seeking conformity, James gave a name and a purpose to nonconformity. Now the Puritans had no choice but to organise elsewhere and turned their attention to the one venue where they were well represented: Parliament.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Two Twins Bred in One Belly

I
N HIS WRITINGS
, speeches, letters and table-talk, James returned again and again to two images of himself as King: the physician and the
nutritius,
the nursing father. These speak volumes for James’s ideas about kingship. Based on a line in Isaiah 49: 23 – ‘kings shall be thy nursing father’ – the nursing father captured James’s belief that he was a teacher-nurturer to his children-subjects, an extreme form of paternalism that even appropriated the maternal.
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In
Basilikon Doron,
James ends his ecclesiastical counsel to Henry by saying ‘cherish no man more than a good pastor, hate no man more than a proud puritan, thinking in one of your fairest styles to be called a loving nourish-father to the Kirk’.
²
The figure of speech did not go unnoticed: in a 1604 sermon Richard Eedes preached that ‘Princes too be nurses of the Church’,
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and in 1619 Sir James Sempill dedicated a book ‘To the Most Noble and truly sacred Prince; Defender of Christ’s Faith, and Nourish-father of his Church James’.
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If the nursing father comforted, the physician administered a harsher medicine. Employing the familiar analogy of the body politic, James saw it as his duty to diagnose the state’s symptoms, and prescribe the right medicine. In 1604, he put this policy into action by publishing a pamphlet attacking the evils of a new vogue:
A Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco.
This diatribe truly blasted ‘the stinking suffumigation’ of smoking tobacco, denying its supposed medicinal values, and pointing instead to its origins in baser cultures, and its tendency to addict its users, bankrupting them (through habits of £300 or £400 per annum), rendering them useless for anything else, and reducing them to ‘imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the wild, godless, and slavish Indians’. This ‘shameful imbecility’, it continued, brought men to a pretty pass: they were ‘not able to ride or walk the journey of a Jew’s Sabbath, but you must have a reeky coal brought you from the next poor house to kindle your tobacco with?’ The practice of smoking, it concluded, ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless’.
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Published anonymously, since it was ‘too mean for a king to interpone his authority’ on ‘so base and contemptible a condition’, its prefatory epistle nevertheless carried, in James’s voice, his views on the country he had just inherited: