The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
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judgements in the Bible and, Christopher Hill tells us, writers on farming and gardening looked into the Bible. People wallpapered their homes with texts and taverns pasted the Word of God on their bar walls. It was still a time when plagues, famine and disasters in nature were widely thought to be the acts of an angry God. Explanations and solutions for these were sought for and found in the Bible. Magistrates, heads of literate families, teachers were now steeped in the words of the Bible. On her first procession through London in 1558, Queen Elizabeth is said to have ‘pressed the bible to her bosom’. When Charles II landed at Dover in 1660, he asserted that he valued the Bible above all else. In the 1640s, battles were fought in Britain that stained the land with blood and challenged deeply rooted order and the Bible in English was in the thick of it.
As the seventeenth century advanced, there was the sense of a gathering storm. Driving it were two forces which were to prove implacable. On the one side, the King’s Party, gathered around the Bible of James from which the word ‘tyrant’ and the kingbaiting, status-quo-testing comments in the Geneva Bible had been omitted. On the other were the Presbyterians, rooted in Calvin’s idea of the Elect. They had been spurned at Hampton Court but they were too fierce in their faith and too well organised to be dismissed. James I and his son Charles I saw themselves as divinely appointed. The Presbyterians saw themselves as the Chosen People, like the Israelites with whom they identified. It was God versus God.
There was also the Catholic faction, who claimed an ancient monopoly on God. And finally the growing number of moderate Anglicans, frustrated and largely powerless. Presbyterian fervour was to lead to a call for rule by ‘Saints’, chosen from among themselves. The King’s men were well schooled in the Bible and so were the Presbyterians. It was a battle of the book. Within a year or two after the death of James I, a surge of anti-monarchism, which had already expressed itself in the self-exile of the Pilgrim Fathers, began to rise to a tide which was to become a tempest. It began in public sermons quite new in their daring, their number and their learning and ended in a court of law exceptional in that it tried and condemned to death a divinely appointed king.
The arguments were expressed in code and the code was in the Bible. It was taken for granted that the Bible was known thoroughly, often by heart, by a substantial and ever growing percentage of the population. Henry VIII in his last speech to Parliament in 1546 had, with tears in his eyes, railed that the Bible was ‘disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’. A hundred years later it was disputed and jangled even more widely and more jealously and dangerously. The fortressed kingdom of the Scriptures had been breached and there was no repairing it. The accession of Charles I with his Catholic wife and his Catholic intentions unleashed the Protestant Bible’s power.
In the King James Bible you could find defences of the King and his court: ‘the powers that be are ordained by God’ was written in Romans. You could find justification for the massacre of heathens and idolaters. Idolatry was the ‘sin’ of the Catholics most hated by the Presbyterians. You could read ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. Bad kings, like Nebuchadnezzar or Jehoichim and Saul, who deserved no obedience, studded the Old Testament. Good kings were few but they were available. Josiah was a rare model of a good and authorised king. There were comments on society: ‘often they which are despised of men are favoured by God’ (Genesis), and there were the Beatitudes.
It was not new that the Bible played a part in the state. The King James Version had been written with a careful eye on curbing what he saw as rebellious tendencies. But it was the liberating fury of it thirty years on in the middle of the seventeenth century that was new and remarkable both in itself and in its far-reaching consequences.
Charles I, a year after his accession to the throne, married Henrietta Maria, daughter of the King of the second great Catholic power, France. Henrietta Maria was firm in her Catholic faith and determined to haul England back alongside the Roman Catholic mother ship. She was against England’s participation in the exhausting ‘European’ struggle between Catholics and Protestants, which became the Thirty Years War. This provoked an eminent Presbyterian to deliver a sermon quoting from Esther: ‘if thou holdest thy tongue at this time, comfort and deliverance shall appear to the Jews out of another place, but thine and thy father’s house shall perish.’ By ‘Jews’, in the code of the day, he meant the Presbyterians.
And so the gloves came off. Now that Guy Fawkes Day has dwindled to a social gathering, we forget that in 1605 a Roman Catholic group of what we would call terrorists had attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. This, if proof were needed, demonstrated beyond any doubt that the Catholics had not and would not give up their designs on England and needed to be watched, fought and, if necessary, exterminated. It was therefore of no little significance that Thomas Hooker chose Guy Fawkes Day in 1626 to preach a sermon in Essex before a ‘vast congregation’ in which he called on God to ‘set on the heart of the King’. This line comes from the eleventh and twelfth verses of Malachi, which he did not quote but took for granted that this vast congregation would know. They read: ‘an abomination is committed . . . Judah . . . hath married the daughter of a strange god. The Lord will cut off the man that doeth this.’ The daughter was Henrietta Maria. That man was Charles. That last sentence is an early example of the sentences which would now be laid on the King until his final sentence. The Bible had spoken.
This fed into the growing undercurrent that ‘God was leaving England’.
The ill-advised and heedless King decided he could rule without Parliament. Through his archbishop, Laud, he brought back undisguisedly Catholic practices, in particular the reintroduction of graven images: to the Presbyterians this was inflammatory idolatry. This was not what their God wanted. Charles must have known this. The King was unafraid. He attacked through the Scriptures. In a speech he wrote for his trial but was denied the chance to deliver by the court, he declared: ‘the authority of obedience unto kings is clearly warranted and strictly commended in both the Old and the New Testaments. There it is said “where the word of the King is there is power and who may say unto him ‘what dost thou?’ ”
A salient promontory from which attacks on the King were launched was the sermon: most dramatically the Fast Sermons. Fasting became a favoured way of demonstrating religious commitment and sermons associated with these spasms of abstinence appear to have been particularly effective. They were often used to prepare the way for political action. Not only against the King, but also against his ministers. And invariably it would be instances lifted from the Old Testament which would point the finger.
Often these sermons would be calls to encourage the Presbyterian faithful. In 1640, Cornelius Burgess preached a Fast Sermon on a text from Jeremiah: ‘let us join ourselves unto the Lord in an everlasting covenant that shall not be forgotten.’ He substantiated his sermon with quotations referring to Moses, Asa, and the deliverance from the Babylonians.
‘Babylon’ was, to these sermons, the state of Charles I’s Britain: wicked, damned, endangered, losing God. Why, he asked in that sermon, has God ‘not yet given us so full a deliverance from Babylon’?
On the same day in 1640, Stephen Marshall also preached a Fast Sermon, taking lines from Chronicles: ‘The Lord is with you while you be with him . . . but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.’ Again the argument was in place that it was the true God who should be followed and not the King and his God of the Antichrist. The Bible often said put not your trust in princes but always said put your trust in God. Again, the refrain ‘but God may leave England . . . if he goes, all goes’.
The messages grew plainer. Before the outbreak of the Civil Wars, Stephen Marshall, in 1641, preached to the House of Commons on a text from Judges: the inhabitants of Meroz (England) would be cursed by God if they ‘came not to the help of the Lord . . . against the mighty’. Horrible violence was not a bar. Not when ‘Babylon’ was the enemy. Marshall quoted from Psalm 137: ‘happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones’. The ‘little ones’ were the children of Babylon. The Civil Wars were imminent and Marshall uttered a rallying cry from, unusually, the New Testament, and a sentence attributed to Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘He that is not with me is against me.’
The pace quickened. In June 1642, William Sedgewick in his Fast Sermon quoted from the Book of Revelation