Adam Nicolson - Gods Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

England 16031611

1603

March 24: Queen Elizabeth dies

James accedes to throne of England and begins to promote union of England and Scotland

Catholic Bye and Main Plots to turn England Catholic effectively neutralised by Cecil

Lord Chamberlains Men become Kings Men

Outbreak of plague in England

1604

March: Jamess first parliament

August: Spanish envoys sign peace with England in Somerset House. The peace is sworn on a copy of the Vulgate, St Jeromes Latin Bible

James writes Counterblast against Tobacco

Othello, Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure

The King James Bible and its Translators

1603

April: Millenary petition presented to James requesting reform of church

William Barlow becomes prebendary at Westminster

1604

Hampton Court Conference on future of church

King and Bancroft draw up Rules for Translators

Translators appointed

Bancroft issues new canons for the church and becomes Archbishop of Canterbury

Work begins on the initial phases of translation

Henry Savile knighted (for 1,000 fee)

James Mountague becomes Dean of Worcester

William Dakins becomes Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London

John Overalls wife elopes

1605

Masque of Blackness by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson

November: Gunpowder Plot

Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Volpone, Westward Ho!

Francis Bacons Advancement of Learning

1606

Gunpowder Plotters mutilated and executed at St Pauls

Jesuit Henry Garnet hanged, drawn and quartered

Parliament reassembles; anti-papist legislation; 435,000 voted to the king

Death of Princess Sophia; William Barlow buries her

Christian IV of Denmark and retinue make hay in London

1607

120 colonists leave for Virginia

James swops Theobalds with Robert Cecil for Hatfield

Separatists in Lincolnshire come under pressure

Robert Carr catches the kings eye

Thames freezes over

1608

Brewster and Scrooby Separatists flee to Amsterdam

Robert Cecil becomes Lord Treasurer

1605

Edward Lively dies

Lancelot Andrewes becomes Bishop of Chichester

Andrewes, Barlow and Ravis preach against Gunpowder Plot

Thomas Ravis becomes Bishop of Gloucester

William Barlow becomes Bishop of Rochester

1606

Ralph Hutchinson dies

1607

William Dakins dies

John Reynolds dies; John Spenser becomes President of Corpus Christi

William Barlow becomes Bishop of Lincoln

Thomas Ravis becomes Bishop of London

1608

Lancelot Andrewes involved in controversy with Cardinal Bellarmine

James Mountague becomes Bishop of Bath and Wells

Samuel Ward becomes his chaplain

The king demands that the new translation is completed as soone as may be

1609

James brokers truce between Spain and the United Provinces as part of his programme for universal peace

Robert Cecil sets up Britains Burse on the Strand

1610

Henry IV of France stabbed to death; James turns white at the news

February: Parliament reassembles. Parliament makes grant of 200,000 to king but Cecils attempt to set royal finances on reliable basis (the Great Contract) breaks down

Shakespeare Sonnets published

The Tempest played at Whitehall

Royal debts mount

1611

Chapmans translation of Homer published

Raleigh in the Tower writes the History of the World

William Bedwell gives communion to Henry Hudson before he embarks on exploratory voyage to Cathay via North-West Passage

1609

Andrewes becomes Bishop of Ely and Privy Councillor

George Abbot becomes Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry

Thomas Ravis dies

Roger Fenton becomes prebendary at St Pauls in succession and thanks to Andrewes

Andrew Downes paid 50 by the king to persuade him to attend the Revision Committee

1610

Revision Committee meets in Stationers Hall in London

Samuel Ward becomes Master of Sidney Sussex

George Abbot becomes Bishop of London

Henry Savile begins publication of Chrysostom edition

Richard Bancroft establishes open access library at Lambeth

1611

King James Bible published

Giles Tomson becomes Bishop of Gloucester

F ew 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 menBurleigh, 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 which the 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 tablesbut the rigid carapace of the Elizabethan court lay like a cast-iron lid above it. The queens motto was still what it always had been: Semper eadem , Always the same. She hadnt 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.