God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

Front Cover
Harper 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

Contents

A poore man now arrived at the Land
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
Copyright

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Page 21 - And while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague.
Page 118 - For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Page 119 - One day a great feast was held ; and after dinner the representation of Solomon his Temple, and the coming of the Queen of Sheba, was made, or (as I may better say) was meant to have been made, before their Majesties, by device of the Earl of Salisbury and others.
Page 105 - And out of the ground made the Lord GOD to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food. The tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Page 106 - But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief; ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day ; we are not of the night, nor of darkness.

About the author (2003)

Adam Nicols on is the author of Seamanship, God's Secretaries, and Seize the Fire. He has won both the Somerset Maugham and William Heinemann awards, and he lives with his family at Sissinghurst Castle in England.

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