The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg

All finally ought to have been ripe for Tyndale. But Miles Coverdale’s version of 1539 was chosen. Tyndale was still the enemy.

      We are told that Thomas Cromwell put out one or two feelers to Antwerp to help Tyndale. We know there were attempts to persuade him to return to England but, wisely, he suspected it to be an invitation to his trial and execution. He refused. But in these encounters we have a glimpse of the man, worn away, indigent, devoted to good works when not at his books. John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, wrote of him: ‘He was a man without any spot or blemish of rancour or violence, full of mercy and compassion, so that no man living was able to reprove him of any sin or crime.’

      Tyndale found what he thought of as safe lodgings in Antwerp and it was there, in 1535, that the assassins finally caught him. One of them, the leader, Henry Phillips, was an Oxford man, which might have helped him into an acquaintanceship in which Tyndale trusted. Phillips led him to ambush, and fingered Tyndale, who was seized by the officers of the Holy Roman Emperor. There was no fight. They ‘pitied to see his simplicity’.

      They took him to Vilvoorde Castle and he was put in a dungeon for seventeen months. English residents in the city tried but failed to secure his release.

      In the first winter, he wrote a letter to the prison governor. He asked that some things could be fetched from his belongings in his lodgings.

      A warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from the cold and have a cough . . . a warmer coat also for what I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too with which to patch my leggings and a woollen shirt . . . for my clothes are all worn out . . . And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening for it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew bible, grammar and dictionary, that I may continue with my work.

      It seems the books at least were brought to Vilvoorde and he continued to work on the Old Testament. He was condemned officially for his belief in justification by faith. He had written that ‘the New Testament is an everlasting covenant made unto the children of God through faith in Christ and upon the deservings of Christ . . . there is an inward justification of a man before God which is by faith alone.’

      He was found guilty of heresy and on 6 October 1536 tied to the stake and strangled by the hangman. His last words were: ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!’ and then he was ‘with fire consumed’.

      There will be space further to discuss his language and its influence. Here enough to say that from his New Testament and his core work on the Old came the building blocks, the character and the beauty of the King James Bible. Out of his dedication and genius came words which still line our speech and writing and thoughts today. In the history of the King James Bible there were others before and after him. But many are like myself and view William Tyndale’s life and work as the founding and empowering sacrifice.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      THE KING JAMES VERSION IS COMMISSIONED

      When Elizabeth I lay on her deathbed in March 1603, she was surrounded by some very apprehensive men. Who was to succeed her? She had been the Pope’s prime official target for assassination; there had been rebellions within her own country; a great fleet, the Spanish Armada, had set out from a Catholic country, Spain, immeasurably more powerful than her own. Its aim was to invade her England and destroy her rule. But it failed. Over the years she had managed to navigate her way through the poisonous domestic conspiracies of Catholics and the resentments of Presbyterians.

      Elizabeth I was probably the best educated person to sit on the throne of England. She had seen the greatest flowering of artistic, entrepreneurial and intellectual genius in her country’s history. And her island realm had begun to call itself an empire.

      She had been a monarch for more than forty years. Now, clearly at the end of her days, she had still not announced her successor. It was a time of murderous politics, when killing was often the preferred option for succession to a crown and paid assassins slunk around Europe like plague rats. These her last days, 22 March and 23 March in 1603, were a dangerous time for her courtiers as they watched the dying of a monarch, married to her country as she had said. But even now it seemed that she would not declare her successor.

      We are told that ‘her face became haggard and her frame shrank almost to a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to change her dresses for a week. A strange melancholy settled down upon her. Gradually her mind gave way . . . food and rest became alike distasteful. She sat day and night propped up with pillows on a stool, her finger on her lips, her eyes fixed on the floor without a word.’ The Privy Council was summoned on 22 March.

      She had lost the power of speech. But when yet again they asked her who should succeed her and brought up the name of the King of Scotland, she did the final service for her country. At the sound of his name she raised her wasted arms above her head and brought the fingers together to form a crown. It was done. The next morning she died ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’.

      The messengers on horses saddled and bridled in anticipation immediately raced the 400 miles north to Edinburgh up what became the Great North Road, along dark tracks, through rivers and forests, buying fresh mounts along the way, riding, bloodied and bruised, day and night to the Scottish capital to tell King James VI of Scotland that he had been proclaimed James I of Scotland and England, Ireland, Wales and France.

      As they rode north, Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, went with trumpeters and heralds to the gates of Whitehall and Cheapside to proclaim that the Queen was dead, long live the King. There were bonfires to celebrate the peaceful transition and to prepare the way for the imperial funeral of Elizabeth I and the majestic journey south of the new King. New to London, he had been King of Scotland for more than thirty years. It was a crown he had inherited when he was a one-year-old child. And he had children of his own! There would be heirs. The throne was doubly assured. This was the man who would commission the Bible known by his name.

      His childhood would have been called traumatic had the word been invented. His mother was Mary Queen of Scots. She was an ardent Catholic and a magnet for conspirators against her cousin, Elizabeth I. Mary’s lover had been slaughtered in front of her; rival groups had kidnapped the child and held him prisoner in grim, cold, isolated Caledonian castles. The country was racked by the clashing and tormented arguments of fanatically stern Presbyterians who demanded the King’s attention and were wholly unafraid to tick him off. He declared himself a lover of Presbyterianism.

      There was then the death and execution of his exiled Roman Catholic mother and a life spent in sifting the signs coming from Elizabeth in London. Out of this, remarkably, he emerged as a man very sure of himself. Perhaps his scholarship grounded him.

      His learning, especially his biblical learning, was on a par with that of the best biblical scholars of the day when such learning dominated the intellectual agenda. Biblical scholarship was then seen as the greatest discipline of the intellect as well as being the golden key to the word of God Himself as delivered in the Scriptures. The child James was taught Latin before he knew Scots.

      At the age of eight, his learning was such that he could call on anyone to open the Bible and whatever the chapter or verses, he would instantly be able to translate it from Latin into French and from French into English. As an adolescent he became obsessed with making metrical translations of the Psalms; he boasted that he had read the Bible in most languages and could argue the case as well as any man. His love of books extended to poetry and philosophy; he wrote poetry and a book about the evils of tobacco. But the Bible was the hub of his learning.

      He walked awkwardly because of a childhood bout of rickets; he wore heavily padded clothes to ward off a dagger thrust; he was unprepossessing in an age when the dandyism of the male was peacocked abroad, particularly in London. This was a man who wrote a book on demonology and – on biblical authority, ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (Exodus) – had ‘witches’ burned to death after questioning them himself at a trial in Edinburgh. This was also a man who wrote the defining book on the Divine Right of Kings and believed that the