God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James BibleHarper Collins, 2003 M04 29 - 280 pages A net of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson and Bacon; of the Gunpowder Plot; the worst outbreak of the plague England had ever seen; Arcadian landscapes; murderous, toxic slums; and, above all, of sometimes overwhelming religious passion. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than it had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between the polarities. This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment “Englishness” and the English language had come into its first passionate maturity. Boisterous, elegant, subtle, majestic, finely nuanced, sonorous and musical, the English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own reach and scope than any before or since. It is a form of the language that drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book. The sponsor and guide of the whole Bible project was the King himself, the brilliant, ugly and profoundly peace-loving James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England. Trained almost from birth to manage the rivalries of political factions at home, James saw in England the chance for a sort of irenic Eden over which the new translation of the Bible was to preside. It was to be a Bible for everyone, and as God's lieutenant on earth, he would use it to unify his kingdom. The dream of Jacobean peace, guaranteed by an elision of royal power and divine glory, lies behind a Bible of extraordinary grace and everlasting literary power. About fifty scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London did the work, drawing on many previous versions, and created a text which, for all its failings, has never been equaled. That is the central question of this book: How did this group of near-anonymous divines, muddled, drunk, self-serving, ambitious, ruthless, obsequious, pedantic and flawed as they were, manage to bring off this astonishing translation? How did such ordinary men make such extraordinary prose? In God's Secretaries, Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the accession and ambition of the first Stuart king; of the scholars who labored for seven years to create his Bible; of the influences that shaped their work and of the beliefs that colored their world, immersing us in an age whose greatest monument is not a painting or a building, but a book. |
From inside the book
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... court lay like a cast - iron lid above it . The queen's motto was still what it always had been : Semper eadem , Always the same . She hadn't moved with the times . So parsimonious had she been in elevating men to the peerage that by ...
... court dandy - just the sort of glamorous and rather sexy man to whom James was instinctively drawn - had ridden night and day on his own behalf to bring the news of Elizabeth's death to Scotland . For decades , Carey had been living ...
... court , and were curious to know how James had taken the news . ' Even , my Lords , ' their reporter , Sir Roger Aston , told them later that week , ' like a poore man wandering about 40 years in a wildernesse and barren soyle , and now ...
... Court , was taken a cut - purse doing the deed ; and being a base pilfering theefe , yet was a Gentle- man - like in the outside . This fellow had good store of coyne found about him ; and upon examination confessed that he had from ...
... court stayed at Hinchinbrooke Abbey outside Huntingdon . It was the house of Sir Oliver Cromwell , MP , himself a loyal monarchist , drainer of the Fens , and subscriber to the planting and cultivating of Virginia . Cromwell put on a ...
Contents
1 | |
He sate among graue learned and reuerend | 42 |
Faire and softly goeth far | 62 |
The danger never dreamt of that is the danger | 105 |
O lett me bosome thee lett me preserve thee | 117 |
We have twice and thrice so much scope | 137 |
When we do luxuriate and grow riotous | 147 |
True Religion is in no way a gargalisme only | 173 |
The grace of the fashion of it | 198 |
Hath God forgotten to be gracious? | 216 |
APPENDICES | 228 |
A The Sixteenthcentury Bible | 247 |
Chronology | 261 |