Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. Adam Nicolson
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Now I beseech you brethren by the name of our Lord Iesus Christ, that yee all speake the same thing, and that there be no diuisions among you: but that ye be perfectly ioyned together in the same minde, and in the same iudgement.
1 Corinthians 1:10
Christmas at Hampton Court had been draining. Late in December 1603 an already exhausted and clearly distracted Cecil wrote to his friend Lord Shrewsbury: âWe are nowe to feast seven ambassadors; Spayne, France, Poland, Florence and Savoy, besydes maskes and mvch more; during all wch time, I wold with all my hearte I were with that noble Ladie of yours, by her turfe fire.â
By mid-January, the partying and the politicking were over and the king and Council could turn their minds to the conference which would discuss the future of the church. The letters issuing the invitations had gone out from the Privy Council and on the appointed day at nine oâclock in the morning, the great men of the Church of England, a clutch of future Translators (a word that was capitalised at the time) among them, gathered at the palace. It was freezing. The banks of the Thames were encrusted with ice and enormous fires burned in the Renaissance fireplaces which Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII had installed here seventy years before. Old John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was surrounded by the men whose appointments by the Crown he had sponsored and argued for. The bishops around him were all, in some way or other, reliant on him for their status and their well-being. He had been the great manager of the Elizabethan church, the queenâs âhusbandmanâ, who had pursued with equal ruthlessness the papists who wished to return England to the dominion of the pope; Presbyterians, who would be rid of all bishops and archbishops, replacing their authority with local committees; and those Puritan Separatists who believed in no overarching structure for the church beyond their own, naturally fissive local gatherings. Now, with the ecclesiastical magnates of England gathered around his frail and shrinking presence, he was facing the last challenge from a new king, son of a Catholic queen, brought up by Presbyterian divines: an uncertain quantity.
The Lord Bishops of London, Durham, Winchester and Worcester, of St Davidâs in the far west of Wales, of Chichester, Carlisle and Peterborough were fully robed in the uniform the church required and which the Puritans loathed: the tippet (a long rich silk scarf draped around the shoulders); the big-sleeved rochet or episcopal surplice, much loved by the bishops, an ocean of ceremonial cambric; a chimere, a loose over-mantle, which, throughout the Middle Ages and until the early years of Elizabeth, had been of a dazzling scarlet silk, but which, under Calvinist influence was thought âtoo light and gay for the episcopal gravityâ, now had become strict and elegant black satin â it was Whitgiftâs black chimere that led Elizabeth to call him âmy little black husbandâ; and on their heads as they came in, but then removed, the three- or four-cornered caps which were the mark of a divine or of a member of the universities. The mitre, which had been worn before the Reformation, and would return later in the seventeenth century to Miltonâs disgust, was for now banished as a sign of popish ceremony. With the bishops came the next generation of ecclesiastical power-brokers, the Deans of the Chapel Royal, of St Paulâs, of Chester, Windsor and, silent, his famous public serenity intact, Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster. All, in a year or two, would be bishops themselves.
This Tudor Hampton Court, before Christopher Wren transformed it in the 1690s into a massive red-brick slab of power and grandeur, an attempt at an English Versailles, was a fairy palace, full of little towers and toy battlements, weathervanes that caught the light, as romantic and play-chivalric as an illumination in a Book of Hours. Here and there, the Italian craftsmen imported by the cardinal and king had contributed a terracotta medallion or a frieze of satyrs. Plaster ceilings, in which large pendant bosses hung down over the heads of the churchmen, and whose panels were filled with papier mâché roses and sculpted ostrich feathers, were painted light blue and gold. Braziers stood glowing in the rooms.
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 â the kingâs â stood empty a few feet, âa prettie distanceâ, 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 âclokes and Nitecapsâ.
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 wasnât 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 âconstant meetingsâ with him there. Their lives had certainly diverged â Chaderton and Knewstubs both had a radical Presbyterian past behind them, of which Andrewes would certainly have disapproved â 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 âGrammatical Interpretationâ together, âtill at last they went out, like Apollos, eloquent men, and mighty in the Scripturesâ.
This was not an encounter of parties at each otherâs 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 Whitgiftâs 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 Whitgiftâs right-hand man in the 1580s and â90s 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, âhardened the hands of his soul, which was no more than needed for him who was to meddle with nettles and briarsâ. 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