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Overview
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
“This scrupulously elegant account of the creation of what four centuries of history has confirmed is the finest English-language work of all time, is entirely true to its subject: Adam Nicolson’s lapidary prose is masterly, his measured account both as readable as the curious demand and as dignified as the story deserves.” — Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa
In God's Secretaries, Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the era of the King James Bible and its translation, immersing us in an age whose greatest monument is not a painting or a building but a book.
A network of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these 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," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060838737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 08/02/2005 |
| Series: | P.S. Series |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 270,698 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d) |
About the Author
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.
Read an Excerpt
God's Secretaries
The Making of the King James BibleBy Adam Nicolson
Harper Collins Publishers
Copyright © 2003 Adam Nicolson All right reserved. ISBN: 0060185163Chapter One
A poore man now arrived at the Land of Promise
And the LORD magnified Solomon exceedingly in the sight of all Israel, and bestowed upon him such royal maiestie as had not bene on any king before him in Israel.
I Chronicles 29:25
Few moments in English history have been more hungry for the future, its mercurial possibilities and its hope of richness, than the spring of 1603. At last the old, hesitant, querulous and increasingly unapproachable Queen Elizabeth was dying. Nowadays, her courtiers and advisers spent their lives tiptoeing around her moods and her unpredictability. Lurching from one unaddressed financial crisis to the next, selling monopolies to favourites, she had begun to lose the affection of the country she had nurtured for so long. Elizabeth, should have died years before. Most of her great men - Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, even the beautiful Earl of Essex, executed after a futile and chaotic rebellion in 1601 - had gone already. She had become a relict of a previous age and her wrinkled, pasteboard virginity now looked more like fruitlessness than purity. Her niggardliness had starved the fountain of patronage on whichthe workings of the country relied and those mechanisms, unoiled by the necessary largesse, were creaking. Her exhausted impatience made the process of government itself a labyrinth of tact and indirection.
The country felt younger and more vital than its queen. Cultural conservatives might have bemoaned the death of old values and the corruption of modern morals (largely from Italy, conceived of as a louche and violent place), but these were not the symptoms of decline. England was full of newness and potential: its population burgeoning, its merchant fleets combing the world, London growing like a hothouse plum, the sons of gentlemen crowding as never before into the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, plants and fruits from all over the world arriving in its gardens and on its tables - but the rigid carapace of the Elizabethan 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 the end of her reign there were no more than sixty peers in the nobility of England. Scarcely a gentleman had been knighted by the queen for years.
That drought of honours was a symptom of a kind of paralysis, an indecisive rigidity. None of the great issues of the country had been resolved. Inflation had transformed the economy but the Crown was still drawing rents from its properties that had been set in the 1560s. The relationship between the House of Commons and the queen, for all her wooing and flattery, had become angry, tetchy, full of recrimination. The old war against Spain, which had achieved its great triumph of defeating the Armada in 1588, had dragged on for decades, haemorrhaging money and enjoying little support from the Englishmen whose taxes were paying for it. The London and Bristol merchants wanted only one outcome: an end to war, so that trade could be resumed. Religious differences had been buried by the Elizabethan regime: both Roman Catholics, who wanted England to return to the fold of the Roman Church, and the more extreme, 'hotter' Protestants, the Puritans, who felt that the Reformation in England had never been properly achieved, had been persecuted by the queen and her church, fined, imprisoned and executed. Any questions of change, tolerance or acceptance had not been addressed. Elizabeth had survived by ignoring problems or suppressing them and as a result England was a cauldron which had not been allowed to boil. Later history - even in the seventeenth century itself - portrayed Elizabeth's death as a dimming of the brilliance, the moment at which England swopped a heroic, gallant, Renaissance freshness for something more degenerate, less clean-cut, less noble, more self-serving, less dignified. But that is almost precisely the opposite of what England felt at the time. Elizabeth was passé, decayed. A new king, with wife, children (Anne was pregnant with their sixth child) an heir for goodness' sake, a passionate huntsman, full of vigour, a poet, an intellectual of European standing, a new king, a new reign and a new way of looking at the world; of course the country longed for that. Elizabeth's death held out the prospect of peace with Spain, a new openness to religious toleration, and a resolution of the differences between the established church and both Catholics and Puritans. More than we can perhaps realise now, a change of monarch in an age of personal rule meant not only a change of government and policy, but a change of culture, attitude and belief. A new king meant a new world.
James Stuart was an unlikely hero: ugly, restless, red-haired, pale-skinned, his tongue, it was said, too big for his mouth, impatient, vulgar, clever, nervous. But his virtues, learned in the brutal world of Scottish politics, were equal to the slurs of his contemporaries. More than anything else he wanted and believed in the possibilities of an encompassing peace. He adopted as his motto the words from the Sermon on the Mount, Beati Pacifici, Blessed are the Peacemakers, a phrase which, in the aftermath of a European century in which the continent had torn itself apart in religious war, would appear over and over again on Jacobean chimneypieces and carved into oak testers and overmantels, crammed in alongside the dreamed of, wish-fulfilment figures of Peace and Plenty, Ceres with her overbrimming harvests and luscious breasts, Pax embracing Concordia. The Bible that is named after James, and whose translation was authorised by him, was central to his claim on that ideal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson
Copyright © 2003 by Adam Nicolson
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface | xi | |
| 1 | A poore man now arrived at the Land of Promise | 1 |
| 2 | The multitudes of people covered the beautie of the fields | 20 |
| 3 | He sate among graue, learned and reuerend men | 42 |
| 4 | Faire and softly goeth far | 62 |
| 5 | I am for the medium in all things | 84 |
| 6 | The danger never dreamt of, that is the danger | 105 |
| 7 | O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart | 117 |
| 8 | We have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination ... | 137 |
| 9 | When we do luxuriate and grow riotous in the gallantnesse of this world | 147 |
| 10 | True Religion is in no way a gargalisme only | 173 |
| 11 | The grace of the fashion of it | 198 |
| 12 | Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut vp his tender mercies? | 216 |
| Appendices | ||
| A | The Sixteenth-century Bible | 247 |
| B | The Six Companies of Translators | 251 |
| C | Chronology | 261 |
| Select Bibliography | 265 | |
| Index | 273 |
Reading Group Guide
Introduction
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 drops 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 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 ambitions 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.
Questions for Discussion
- Why did James dream of national unity in England? How did the political fractiousness of Scotland influence his decision-making as sovereign of England? How would you describe James's interaction with Puritan believers? In what ways did his engagement with religious dissidents differ from that of Elizabeth I?
- What were some of the Puritan objections to the Bishops' Bible of 1568? Why did Puritans prefer the Geneva Bible of 1560? What compromise did James propose in his suggestion of one "uniform translation?"
- How did James's failure to achieve national unity fuel his efforts to bring peace and coherence to the church in the form of a new translation of the Bible? What role did Richard Bancroft play in helping the project to get off the ground?
- Adam Nicolson writes: "Committees thrive on compromise and compromise produces fudge and muddle ... How can a joint enterprise of this sort produce anything valuable?" Do you agree with this statement? To what extent was the King James Bible an example of a "committee producing a work of genius?"
- What did you think of James's rules for the translation of the King James Bible? Were you surprised by his indictment of marginal notes? What about James's concern that the Bible be seen as one, unified text, in which the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament were a foretelling of the New Testament?
- In what way did the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 affect the practical activities of the translators?
- How would you describe the character of King James I? Why did he exclude Separatists and Presbyterians from the committee of translators? In what way does this decision reveal his aims?
- Adam Nicolson argues that the sense of closeness and immediacy and "passionality" available to the translators during the seventeenth century influenced the richness and linguistic excitement of their work. Do you agree? How does this idea play out in the King James translation of the Song of Songs?
- James wrote of chained-up books in the Bodleian Library at Oxford: "Were I not a King, I would be a University-man." To what extent do the intellectual preoccupations of a leader extend to the policies of his/her realm? Do you think that political leaders and rulers today exert the same influence?
About the Author
Adam Nicolson has been both a publisher and a travel writer, and is the author of many award-winning books, including the recent Sea Room, about life on the Shiant Isles. He lives on a farm with his family near Burwash, England.
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