The King behind the Version

Still the most venerable version of the Bible is the one prefaced by a panegyric to a king. And what a king! He appears like “the Sun in his strength,” dispels darkness, brings blessing, peace, and true happiness. He zealously defends the faith, stoutly attacks the Man of Sin, talks religion in the home, goes often to church, encourages teachers of the Word, and is divinely endowed with “many singular and extraordinary graces.” The king was James I of Great Britain and Ireland (James VI in Scotland), who died 350 years ago this month. The occasion was the publication in 1611 of the version of the Bible that bears his name. And the eulogy was largely undeserved. Inerrancy has nothing to do with the dedication prefaced to the KJV, which provides no identifiable description of the very fallible Scot referred to at the French court as “the wisest fool in Christendom.”

His early circumstances make pitiable reading; here was a truly deprived child. Son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her ill-fated second husband Lord Darnley (who was to die violently within the year), James was born in 1566. The Reformation had come to Scotland six years earlier, making precarious the Catholic Mary’s tenure of the throne—a position further jeopardized by fatal character flaws. James had barely begun his second year when he was proclaimed king by Protestant lords who forced his mother to abdicate. She left Scotland in 1568; he was never to see her again. His minority was marked by bitter struggles for possession of the bewildered boy, who was meanwhile educated in the classical manner by George Buchanan and Peter Young and well schooled in the Reformed faith.

James neither forgot nor forgave the strict regime to which he was subjected, and soon decided that monarchy and presbytery were as antithetical as God and the devil. Later he put it more tersely: “No bishop, no king.” In 1584 the Black Acts declared him head of the church as well as of the state, called for crown-appointed bishops in the Kirk, forbade general assemblies without the royal sanction, and banned ministers from discussing public affairs on penalty of treason. The ministers protested but were powerless; the Protestant lords who had helped them achieve the Reformation withdrew their support after James, exercising his “kingcraft,” lavished on them gifts of the pre-Reformation church’s property.

It was James VI’s undoing that he had never known a time when he was not king. Enthusiastically he espoused the theory of divine right. God had made him “a little God to sit on [the] throne, and to rule over other men.” It was blasphemy “to dispute what a King may do in the height of his power.” This suicidal doctrine was to cause the death of his son (Charles I), subject the United Kingdom to some years of military dictatorship (under Cromwell), cost his grandson (James II/VII) the throne, and topple the Stuart dynasty.

James could be unpredictable and conciliatory, seeming to favor Presbyterianism and dismissing Anglican ritual as “an ill-said Mass in English,” but the closing years of the century were dominated by the need to advance his claim, through family descent, to succeed the aging Queen Elizabeth. The throne of England was evidently worth an ill-said Mass or two. It was worth also the life of his mother, whose execution by Elizabeth in 1587 went unprotested. James maintained contact with prominent Englishmen. Indirectly pursuing the same goal, he even had amicable correspondence with the Pope, and had a wild dream of joining forces with him to form one great united church of God.

Meanwhile in Scotland, Andrew Melville, John Knox’s successor, in 1596 seized the royal sleeve, called James “God’s sillie vassal,” and reminded him of the Kingdom of Christ in which he (James) had no exalted status but only ordinary membership. No king by divine right could let that pass. James persisted in promoting episcopacy in the land, and made the general assembly a tool to carry out his demands. By 1599 he was strong enough to scoff at his clerical critics in Basilikon Doron: “What is betwixt the pride of a glorious Nebuchadnezzar and the preposterous humility of our puritan ministers, claiming to their parity, and crying, ‘We are all but vile worms’; and yet will judge and give law to their king, but will be judged nor controlled by none.” Melville was subsequently confined in the Tower of London for four years, then banished for life; some twenty other ministers were deposed or exiled.

In 1603 James became the first king of the United Kingdom of England and Scotland, thus disposing overnight of a troublesome border (though it was not until 1707 that the Act of Union was formalized). Ireland too had been pacified. Spain had been beaten off. The foundation of England’s naval supremacy had been laid. Trade was expanding, wealth increasing. And James immodestly reminded the Commons of their latest bonus: “the blessings which God in my Person hath bestowed upon you all.”

Some share in the blessings was anticipated by English Catholics and Puritans who had suffered much under Elizabeth: Catholics because this was Mary Stuart’s son, Puritans because James had been bred in Calvinist orthodoxy. James was to disappoint them both. After initial concessions to Catholics, a combination of greed and cold feet made him restore fines for recusancy, reviving Catholic discontent and provoking the abortive Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Sporadic interest in Catholicism shown by his wife, Anne of Denmark, irritated rather than influenced the king.

But Puritans fared just as badly. The 1604 Hampton Court Conference, called by James “for the hearing, and for the determining, things pretended to be amiss in the Church,” developed into an occasion of anti-Puritan bullying wherein the king was eagerly abetted by the bishops. The latter had been properly obsequious to the new monarch: James was hailed as “a living library and a walking study,” and Richard Bancroft thanked God for a king unparalleled since the time of Christ (the primacy was his reward in due course). The Puritans succeeded only in gaining some minor alterations to the Book of Common Prayer.

Hampton Court would have been remembered chiefly for the king’s boorishness but for a motion by Oxford scholar and moderate Puritan John Reynolds. Pointing to the deficiencies of versions made in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, he suggested that a new translation of the Bible should be undertaken. Bancroft did some automatic sneering, but James’s imagination was immediately caught. In a moment a decision was taken that was to touch the lives of countless millions all over the world. Conceived amid the otherwise uninspired atmosphere at Hampton Court, the King James Version is still the best-seller of all time. To associate his name rather than any other with it is no mere courtesy: James organized, collaborated with, and encouraged the forty-seven leading biblical scholars who took seven years over the project.

While it was going on, however, James relentlessly pursued his campaign against the Puritans. Three hundred clergymen were expelled from their livings, but James did not stop at deprivation: nonconformists were declared incapable of suing for lawful debts, could be imprisoned for life unless they made satisfaction to the church, and were to be refused Christian burial when they died. Many of the persecuted left for the Low Countries; some were later to join The Mayflower.

James’s cruelty was seen in other ways, too. Three aristocrats who had plotted against him were taken to the scaffold and directed to say farewell to friends and make peace with God. Then as the first one was about to be dispatched the king’s representative ordered a brief postponement. So also with the second and third, until news was finally given the three of the reprieve James had all along intended (Dostoevsky would well know how they must have felt). James shut up Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower for thirteen years, all the time under sentence of death, released him briefly, then, on the instigation of the Spanish ambassador, executed Elizabeth’s erstwhile favorite in 1618.

James may have “known the stomach” of his Scottish subjects, but in his attempt to extend absolute monarchy to England he overreached himself. He clashed with parliament, dissolved it in 1611, called another for two months of 1614 in the vain hope of raising funds, then allowed seven years to pass while he ruled without a parliament. This rift was to prove a deadly legacy for Charles I, during whose reign the whole smoldering question of parliamentary privilege and prerogative was to burst into flames that temporarily destroyed the monarchy.

Reverting to Scotland, James established there a completely episcopal system. In 1616 a new confession of faith, catechism, liturgy, and Book of Canons were forced upon the general assembly. In 1618 the notorious Five Articles of Perth decreed kneeling at communion, private communion in cases of necessity, private baptism in like cases, observance of the great annual festivals of the Church, and confirmation by the bishops. The Scots gagged not so much on the details but on the principle: here was the hand of a despot tearing the crown from the head of Christ, the only king of his

Church. Coupled with the fact that James’s choice of bishops did not always reflect godly piety, the royal policy helped provoke the testimony of the Covenanters and implant a dislike of episcopacy among native Scots that persists to this day.

A “shambling pedant” of unprepossessing appearance, with spindly legs and an overlarge tongue, undignified in speech and behavior, James is a curiously pathetic figure in that he alone of the later Stuarts has found few defenders. And this although Mary was more disreputable, Charles I more bigoted, Charles II godless, James II fickle and bent on bringing England back to Rome. James I was more idiosyncratic and complex than any of them. He had curbed the feudal system in Scotland in a way his successors could not do—and profited by it materially. His reign in England was comparatively free of foreign strife—yet was full of domestic intrigue and violence. He encouraged colonial expansion—sometimes driving religious men out of the country. He was generous to a fault—but the fault was a penchant for young, good-looking favorites who were advanced and gained inordinate influence over him. He appointed “mean men” to high places.

The extent of his personal religion is not clear, though he “knew the language.” Self-interest governed much of his policy-making, and this led inevitably to his avoidance of what Charles Williams calls “the desperate contingencies of the soul.” He did retain, however, a vivid sense of the power and enmity of the devil, and even wrote a book (Daemonologie) on the subject. In Scotland he witnessed the torturing of suspected practitioners of the black arts during the last decades of the sixteenth century, reportedly executed more witches over a period than did the Inquisition, and wondered why the devil should prefer to work through old women rather than young ones. James was also the last British sovereign to burn heretics (two men who had denied the deity of Christ).

On the “filthie noveltie” of smoking he wrote trenchantly in his Counterblaste against Tobacco (1604): it was an abuse which involved “sinning against God, harming … persons and goods, and raking also thereby the markes and notes of vanitie upon you.… A custome lothsome to the Eye, hateful to the Nose, harmefull to the Braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.” On Sunday observance he was more ambivalent: he encouraged people after service to participate in dancing, archery, and athletics—but drew the line at bear-baiting and bowling.

In his last three years he was a pitiable figure in his dotage, fearful of death, convinced that everyone was plotting against him, cheerful only when drunk, seldom going to bed sober, so that the French ambassador could report home about him: “All things end with the goblet.” His Bible version is the improbable monument of his age—a reminder to us, perhaps, of God’s astonishing capacity for writing straight with crooked lines.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.