At ten o'clock in the morning on March 24, 1603—just hours after Queen Elizabeth's passing —King James VI of Scotland, heir to the British throne, became King James I of England. Within hours, well-wishers from across the entire religious and political spectrum rushed northward to the Scottish border to greet the new king. Calvinists, Roman Catholics, and middle-of-the-road Anglicans all wanted to be the first to congratulate him—and to ask him for special favors.
And James didn't disappoint his new subjects. As he and his royal entourage moved slowly southward into England, the scene was one of ecstatic celebration. Thrilled with his newly acquired royal office, James loved nothing better than to grant favors. Between Edinburgh and London he con ... ferred more than three hundred knighthoods, handed out hundreds of new appointments, granted countless petitions, and gave away untold sums of money and packets of the Crown's land.
Some of the petitions presented to James, however, were ones that stood no chance of being granted. For instance, the Catholics, who'd been sorely oppressed under Elizabeth, asked the king to allow them to practice their religion freely. And some Puritan radicals appealed to James to remove the bishops in the Anglican Church and to usher in a democratic, Calvinist-style organization. So, actually, only one of the numerous religious petitions James received seemed reasonable to him—the Puritan "Millenary Petition."
THE MILLENARY PETITION
It was probably at Sir Oliver Cromwell's estate in Hinching-brook —where the good knight entertained the king lavishly on his way southward—that three influential Puritan ministers presented James with the Millenary Petition. It had been signed by close to a thousand (millenary means "thousand") highly respectable ministers, and had the backing of Puritan leaders all over the land.
The Millenarists' requests were mild. They simply asked for an ecumenical meeting between the church bishops and the Puritans, so that "things amisse in our Church" could be decided once and for all—with the king acting as judge. They wanted to talk about practices that were of concern to many churchmen, such as using the cross in baptism, the requirement that ministers wear special vestments, the fact that many ministers didn't preach sermons to their congregations (and sometimes never even went near their churches!), and the reading of the Apocrypha in church services.
James was immediately sympathetic with the Millenary Petition and let the Puritans know he'd grant them a "conference." Later, he announced that the meeting would be held at the royal palace at Hampton Court, some ten miles west of London, on January 14, 1604.
But as the meeting date for the Hampton Court Conference drew near, James had to reassure all parties involved. The bishops were afraid the new king would give in to all the Puritan demands—and maybe even abolish the church hierarchy altogether. The Puritans, on the other hand, were afraid James would publicly embarrass them by refusing to grant ... any of their requests. The fact is that no one knew exactly where James would come down on these issues. He was a man of many moods, a man amazingly tolerant of both Puritans and Catholics (in fact, his wife was a Catholic), a man who was at heart a compromiser and a peacemaker.
One thing was for sure. He saw the upcoming conference as an unmissable opportunity to launch a project he felt was crucially important to his success as king—the translation of a new version of the English Bible.
JAMES—BIBLE SCHOLAR AND PEACEMAKER
James's upbringing in Scotland was unusual, to say the least. When he was scarcely a year old, he became king of that country—thanks to the abdication of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. She'd been forced out of office and imprisoned following a scandal that had connected her with her husband's murder. Mary's political enemies had been concerned about something else—the fact that she was a devout Roman Catholic. So they saw to it that the young king was separated from his mother and raised by strict Calvinist guardians, the Earl of Mar and his wife.
The earl hired a team of brilliant and impassioned Calvinist scholars to educate James. Chief among these tutors were George Buchanan and Peter Young, who felt that the better James understood the Bible, the more effective he'd someday be as king. So, from the time he was four years old, they subjected him to a twice-daily routine of linguistic, theological, and scientific studies that included Bible reading in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, and French. By the time he was eight, James could translate any Bible passage from Latin into French, and from French into English, with ease.
When James took the reins of the Scottish government as a teenager in 1582, he had to tread a fine line between the Calvinistic Presbyterians of the powerful Scottish Kirk (Church) and the Catholic nobility He did this by stepping aside from his Calvinist upbringing and becoming a dedicated peacemaker—a promoter of national religious unity—who was careful not to offend any religious group.
The young king leaned heavily, too, on the words of Scripture as his guidebook to kingship. And later, James advised his son, Prince Henry, to study the Bible. 'All my Religion," he told him, "presently professed by me and my kingdome was grounded upon the plaine words of Scripture, without the which all points of Religion are superfluous."
But James wasn't above quoting Scripture to his own political advantage. Matter of fact, he wrote a book called The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, where he cites numerous passages of Scripture to prove that the office of king was "founded by God himself."
James was too politically smart to take sides in the tug of war over Bible versions. He knew that if he endorsed the Calvinist Geneva Bible, he'd offend Catholics, and if he endorsed the Rheims or Bishops' Bibles, he'd offend the Kirk. So he proposed an entirely new translation of Scripture to the General Assembly of the Kirk in 1601. The Assembly ignored his suggestion.
So James could only look forward to the day when he'd be king of England. Perhaps then he'd be able to persuade the Anglican bishops to translate a new Bible—an ecumenical Bible that would unite Protestants and Catholics in Scotland and England. But secretly, James hoped his new Bible would accomplish something more. He hoped it would somehow make him the great peacemaker of Europe and guarantee for warring religious factions everywhere a worldwide reign of "Beautiful Peace."
PARTICIPANTS IN THE HAMPTON COURT CONFERENCE
James handpicked the four Puritan representatives who attended the conference at Hampton Court, inviting only men who would support the Anglican Church. He excluded hotheads who would oppose the kind of compromise needed to unify the Church. And the four Puritans that James invited to the conference were all strong Bible scholars—men who would favor a fresh translation of the English Bible. In fact, two of them—John Rainolds and Laurence Chaderton— later played prominent roles in the King James translation.
The foreman of the Puritan delegation was Rainolds, leader of the Puritan movement at Oxford. He was a renowned university lecturer, writer, and preacher, as well as a master of Greek grammar and rhetoric— known for being "wholly addicted ... to the study of the holy Scriptures."
Chaderton headed up the radical Protestant movement at Cambridge. He was always in trouble with church officials for violating ceremonial traditions at the Puritan Emmanuel College, where he was master. But he was a lovable compromiser who was at heart a mainline Anglican. And Chaderton was a towering Bible scholar who spent countless hours studying Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. He then turned this knowledge into passionate and down-to-earth earth sermons that moved his listeners to tears.
The other two Puritans invited to the conference, John Knewstubb and Thomas Sparke, were also prominent university men. Knewstubb had written a number of Puritan tracts directed against extremist groups like the Roman Catholics and the "Family of Love." Sparke, too, wrote controversial pamphlets against the Catholics. But neither man let his opinions get in the way of his loyalty to the Anglican Church. And both men were ardent students of the Bible.
To counterbalance the Puritan contingent at the Hampton Court Conference, James summoned Arch Bishop of Canterbury John Whitgift, eight bishops, and ten other high-ranking officials of the English Church. Although most of these men were hearty opponents of Puritanism, they were open to correcting "things amisse in the Church."
A number of these church officials were strong Bible scholars, and undoubtedly open to the idea of a new translation of Scripture. Fully seven of them later joined the King James Bible translation team. Archbishop Whitgift had for years wanted a new Bible, though he'd been unable to get Queen Elizabeth's support for the project. Another church official concerned about the future of the English Bible was Bishop Thomas Bilson, who was indignant over what he called "the vaine shew made" by the Roman Catholics in their Rheims New Testament. Bishop John Overall was an internationally known Hebrew scholar and expert on the Babylonian captivity.
Then, of course, there was the great Lancelot Andrewes, dean of Westminster Abbey. Andrewes had been awarded one of the very first scholarships in Greek and Hebrew to be offered at Cambridge, and was famous for also knowing Latin, Chaldean, Syriac, and Arabic—in addition to some fifteen modern languages. Andrewes saw the futility of staying with the Bishops' Bible. So in his stunningly metaphysical sermons, he had long ago abandoned using the Bishops' text in favor of the Geneva version and his own original translations of Scripture.
And perhaps more than anyone else present at the conference, Andrewes would have appreciated the king's dream of an ecumenical Bible. He was at heart as much of a peacemaker as the king. He saw no reason why fellow Christians should fight over doctrine and once wrote: "If conscience were made of that which is out of controversy, of that only which is elemental to Christian salvation, a way of peace then there shall be whereof all parts shall agree, even in the midst of a world of controversies." There was no doubt that Andrewes was King James's favorite preacher. And it was well known that the king usually slept with one of Andrewes's sermons under his pillow.
THE CONFERENCE BEGINS
On the eve of the conference, James held a small reception for all the participants. Some of them had been at Hampton Court for the past month or so, celebrating the Christmas holidays with the king, and filling the palace's 1,200 rooms with Yuletide pageantry and joy. Just a few days earlier, Shakespeare had presented one of his plays to the assembled guests.
The first day of the conference, all the participants met in the royal privy chamber. After brief opening remarks, the king unceremoniously excluded the four Puritan representatives from the whole day's activities. He then took aside the church officials and conferred with them privately about the Puritan "complaints." To everyone's surprise, James argued in favor of most of these complaints and, as Andrewes later said, "wonderfully played the Puritan." He won clear victories for the Puritans on several major points.
The second day of the conference, the Puritans were finally allowed to enter the discussion. They shocked everyone by wearing Turkish robes in place of their scholastic garb. This was an obvious protest against university and church traditions. According to an eyewitness report, James gave them a "pithy and sweet speech" and invited them to present their case.
Immediately, John Rainolds —spokesman for the group— dropped to his knees and pleaded the Puritan cause, summarizing all the points in the Millenary Petition. James was impatient with Rainolds, but gave in to many of the Puritan demands. The king agreed to major modifications in the Book of Common Prayer and the church liturgy. Only three of the Puritans' requests met with out-and-out rejection.
The Anglican response to Rainolds's presentation was sharp. Bishop Bancroft of London attacked Rainolds repeatedly, defending church ceremonies and hierarchy. James, too, insulted Rainolds's group, calling their demands "very idle and frivolous." He did this to impress the bishops, whom he didn't want to offend.
A NEW BIBLE CALLED FOR
Finally, as James talked of the need for unanimity and peacemaking within the Church, Rainolds saw an opportunity to propose a project dear to his own heart—"a newe translation of the Bible." Then he pointed out that such a move would be politically advantageous to James. Rainolds went on to cite several mistranslations in previous English Bibles, showing how each one had encouraged civil disobedience—the thing he knew James feared the most.
One mistranslation Rainolds cited was from Psalms 105:28, where the original meaning of the Greek ("They were not disobedient") praises the Israelites for obeying God even when He inflicted trials on them in Egypt. According to Rainolds, the Bishops' translation actually inverts the correct reading and states that the Jews "were not obedient. " To James, such a mistranslation would have been downright treasonous, implying that a person doesn't have to obey God—and the king as ... God's earthly representative—under certain circumstances.
Bishop Bancroft quickly objected to Rainolds's proposal, grumbling that "if every man's humour should be followed, there would be no ende of translating." But as soon as he saw that the king agreed with Rainolds, he said nothing more on the subject.
For his part, James let everyone know he thought the new Bible was a wonderful idea. He made it clear he didn't like any of the previous English Bibles, though he felt the Geneva text was the "worst of all." Its notes, he said, were "seditious," "daungerous," and "trayterous." And he went on to cite several Geneva notes that encouraged "disobedience to Kings."
Then, not five minutes after Rainolds had suggested a new Bible, the king commanded that "one uniforme translation" be begun at once. And, as if he'd already planned it, he outlined on the spot the precise way his order was to be carried out. "This is to be done," he said, "by the best learned in both the Universities [Oxford and Cambridge], after them to bee reviewed by the Bishops, and the chiefe learned in the Church." He went on to say that the new Bible should next "bee presented to the Privie-Councell; and lastly...bee ratified by his Royall authoritie...
James managed to please almost everyone with this plan for carrying out the translation ... project. The university men, the church officials, and the privy councilors were undoubtedly all happy to be included in the process. And James himself must have been delighted that he'd have the final word in editing the new translation.
Next, the king explained that he expected the new Bible to accomplish two important objectives. First, it would help him unite the badly divided English Church. Second, it would help secure his royal prerogative, his hold on the government of England. With these objectives in mind, he specifically stated that the new Bible and its notes should support the institutions of both kingship and church organization.
As James closed the conference the following day, he talked only of church unity and brotherhood —speaking so movingly that participants on both sides wept. And his words weren't empty of meaning. During the next calendar year he proved just how sincere he was about national religious unity by driving the ambitious Bible project forward with almost incredible speed and energy. Step by step, he followed through on his Hampton Court plans to launch a new Bible. He set both Puritans and Anglicans, liberals and conservatives, university and church leaders to work, shoulder to shoulder, on "one uniforme translation" of the Bible. And in doing so, he kept alive something very special —the ecumenical spirit of Hampton Court.
(This is the first of three articles on the King James Bible.)
To read the previous article in this series click here
To read the next article in this series click here
