On the begetting

of the King James Bible:

 Ninety-nine per cent of the Church of England, in other words, thought conformity the better path. Among the one per cent who did not were those who would in time become the leaders of the Pilgrim Fathers. At the same time, Bancroft began to hire the men for the great translation and here it was breadth and inclusiveness which dictated the choice. The first Westminster company, charged with translating the first books of the Bible, had Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, as its director. He was known as 'the Angell in the pulpitt', the man more versed in modern and ancient tongues than any other in England, who could serve, it was thought, as `INTERPRETER-GENERAL' at the Day of Judgement, but he had other skills, and another track record, which confirmed him as a member of the core establish-ment and recommended him to Bancroft and the king. He had been used before in important political work, some fifteen years earlier when Bancroft was working for Whitgift rooting out the Separatist congregations in London. Andrewes, then in his mid-thirties and already recognised as the coming man, and as the cleverest preacher in England, could be relied on to do Bancroft's work for him. Highly detailed accounts survive of what Andrewes did for the ecclesiastical establishment: a representation, in other words, of what Bancroft would have known of him, the grounds on which he chose him as one of the principal Translators. Once again, it is not a dignified picture: his governing qualities are those of a man who knows how to exercise power. Through the second half of the 158os, the more extreme Separatist puritans, who considered each congregation a self-sufficient church of Christ, became the target of a campaign led by Richard Bancroft. They were to be found in private houses all around London, holding private conventicles in which their inspirational preachers were, it was reported to Bancroft, `esteemed as godds'. Bancroft, who in another life would clearly have been an excellent detective, had his spies in place. As a central player in the Crown establishment, he would have had an array of inducements to hand: money, prospects, threats, the persuasive words of a man with access to power. Those tools gave him access to all kinds of secret meetings. 'After the Minister hath saluted everie one, both man and woman, at theire comynge into the Chamber with a kysse', one report of such a Separatist meeting described, shocked at its impropriety, a large Table beinge prepared for the purpose (which holdeth fortie or fiftie persons) he taking the chayre at the end thereof, the rest sitt down everie one in order: . . the Minis-ter hymself having receaved [communion] in both kyndes: the breade and the wyne which is left, passeth downe, and everye man without more a doe is his owne Carver. The state church could not tolerate the freedom or the priest-lessness of such behaviour. Many Separatists — and they were overwhelmingly young, idealistic people, a tiny minority, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred in England as a whole — fled to the Netherlands but others were arrested and, eventually, some fifty-two were held for long periods in the string of hideous London gaols: the Clink, the Gatehouse, the Fleet, Newgate, the Counter Woodstreet, the Counter Poultry, Bridewell and the White Lion, some of the prisoners shut in the 'most noisome and vile dungeons', without `bedds, or so much as strawe to lye upon . . . and all this, without once producing them, to anie Christian triall where they might have place given them, to defend themselves'. One of them, the eighteen-year-old Roger Waters, was kept in irons for more than a year. Their leaders, honest, fierce men, the spiritual forebears of the future Massachusetts colonists, were to be interrogated (or `conversed with' as Bancroft described it; the meetings were known among the Separatists themselves as 'Spanish conferences') by the more brilliant and trustworthy members of the Church of England. Andrewes was at their head. Bancroft instructed him to interrogate Henry Barrow, the leading Separatist who had been arrested in 1587 and kept in the Fleet.
Andrewes visited the gaol accompanied by another divine, Wil-liam Hutchinson. Their descent into the Separatists' hell is a moment of sudden, film-like intensity, when the passionate realities of early modern England come starkly to life. The entire context of the King James Bible is dramatised in these prison meetings: holiness meets power, or at least one version of holi-ness meets another; the relative claims of society and the indi-vidual, and the legitimacy of those claims, clash; the individual conscience grates against the authority structures of an age which senses incipient anarchy at every turn and so is obsessed with order; the candid plays against the cynical, worldliness against a kind of stripped Puritan idealism; and the godly comes face to face with the political. The purpose of the visiting churchmen, Barrow wrote later, was 'to fish from [him] som matter, wheruppon they might accuse them to their holy fathers the bishops'. This was true: a good interrogation would be a good career move. Other Translators were nosing around these ratty dungeons: Hadrian a Saravia, a major propagandist of the Divine Right of Kings, was interrogating a Separatist called Daniel Studley, also in the Fleet. The Thomas Sparkes who had so meekly and dumbly sat at the Hampton Court Conference was to be found at this time trying to convince the young Roger Waters of his sins, as he hung in chains in the worst of the stinking pits of Newgate gaol, known as the Limbo. With Barrow, in March 1590, Hutchinson and Andrewes began kindly. They were sitting in the parlour of the Fleet prison (one of the better of the London prisons, 'fit for gentlemen'). Hutchinson told the Separatist that he wanted 'to confer brotherly with you concerning certain positions that you are said to hold'. It was a gentle beginning and Barrow responded in the same vein. He was keen 'to obtain such conference where the Book of God might peaceably decide all our controversy'. That phrase, innocuous as it might sound, was salt in the eyes for Andrewes. It released a flood of hostile questions. All the issues of order and authority, the great political questions of the day, streamed out over his prisoner-conversant. `Whie,' Andrewes said, 'the booke of God cannot speake, which way should that decide owr controversies?' That was the central ques-tion of the Reformation: did Christians not need a church to interpret God for them? Or could they have access to the god-head without help, with all the immediacy of the inspired? Barrow replied in the spirit of Luther: each soul could converse with God direct, unmediated by any worldly church, his thoughts and actions to be interpreted by the words of scripture itself.
inherited wisdom, treating the word of God, the scriptures, not as a common inheritance, whose significance could be understood only within the tradition that had grown and flowered around it, but as a private guidebook to a personal and selfish salvation. The heart of the Puritan error was that social divisiveness, that failure to join in, its stepping outside the necessity of order, its assumption that the Puritan himself was a member of God's elect, and the rest could look to the hindmost. How could a society be based on that predestinarian arrogance? Increasingly, for churchmen such as Andrewes, it seemed that the true church could only be inclusive, one in which God's grace would descend on believers not through some brutal predestinarian edict but through the sacraments, through the ceremony of the church. Separateness was of course an unacceptable political position. It severed the links on which order relied and carried the seeds of anarchy within it. The fact that the words of Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians sanctioned such separatism was for Andrewes secondary. The Separatists quoted the passage at every turn: 'Come out from among them, and bee yee separate, saieth the Lord, and touch not the vncleane thing, and I will receiue you, And will bee a Father vnto you, and ye shall bee my sonnes and daughters, saith the Lord Almightie.' The response of Andrewes and Bancroft to the emphasis placed on those words, to its implication of God-sanctioned individual freedom, was brief: it was 'libertine', meaning the thought typical of a man `loose in religion, one that thinks he may doe what he listeth', as a 1604 dictionary defined it. Barrow responded sharply. It was not a private spirit but 'the spirit of Christ and his Apostles'. They had been happy to be judged by the word of God and so was Barrow. This, for Andrewes, so crushingly aware of his own sin, was too much. DR ANDREWES: What, are you an apostle? BARROW: No, but I have the spirit of the apostles. DR ANDREWES: What, the spirit of the apostles?
BARROW: Yea, the spirit of the apostles. DR ANDREWES: What, in that measure? BARROW: In that measure that God hath imparted unto me, though not in that measure that the apostles had, by anie comparison, yet the same spirit. There is but one spirit. That was not an unreasonable answer: God had blown his spirit into Adam, and it was acceptable to think that the life of men was a divine gift. But Andrewes, revealing himself here in a way he would rarely do later in life, curiously narrowed and harsh like Bancroft at the conference, clung to his hostility. They argued over the difference between a schism and a sect. Then, in an emblematic moment of the English Reformation, angry, impassioned, pedantic, scholarly, they called for a dictionary. The heretic and his interrogator pored together over the Greek—Latin Lexicon of Joannes Scapula (Basel, 1580) to try and sort out the etymologies of the two words, but they could come to no shared conclusion.