THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES VERSION; ITS CHARACTERISTICSEARLY in January, 1604, men were making their way along the poor English highways, by coach and carrier, to the Hampton Court Palace of the new English king.They were coming from the cathedral towns, from the universities, from the larger cities.Many were Church dignitaries, many were scholars, some were Puritans, all were loyal Englishmen, and they were gathering in response to a call for a conference with the king, James I.They were divided in sentiment, these men, and those who hoped most from the conference were doomed to complete disappointment.Not one among them, not the King, had the slightest purpose that the conference should do what proved to be its only real service.Some of the men, grave and earnest, were coming to present their petitions to the King, others were coming to oppose their petitions; the King meant to deny them and to harry the petitioners.And everything came out as it had been planned.Yet the largest service of the conference, the only real service, was in no one's mind, for it was at Hampton Court, on the last day of the conference between James and the churchmen, January 18, 1604, that the first formal step was taken toward the making of the so-called Authorized Version of the English Bible.If there are such things as accidents, this great enterprise began in an accident.But the outcome of the accident, the volume that resulted, is "allowed by all competent authorities to be the first, [that is, the chief] English classic," if our Professor Cook, of Yale, may speak; "is universally accepted as a literary masterpiece, as the noblest and most beautiful Book in the world, which has exercised an incalculable influence upon religion, upon manners, upon literature, and upon character," if the Balliol College scholar Hoare can be trusted; and has "made the English language," if Professor March is right.The purpose of this study is to show how that accident occurred, and what immediately came from it.
With the death of Elizabeth the Tudor line of sovereigns died out.The collateral Stuart line, descending directly from Henry VII., naturallysucceeded to the throne, and James VI.of Scotland made his royal progress to the English capital and became James I.of England.In him appears the first of that Stuart line during whose reign great changes were to occur.Every one in the line held strongly to the dogma of the divine right of kings, yet under that line the English people transferred sovereignty from the king to Parliament.[1] Fortunately for history, and for the progress of popular government, the Stuart line had no forceful figures in it.Macaulay thinks it would have been fatal to English liberty if they had been able kings.It was easier to take so dangerous a weapon as the divine right of kings from weak hands than from strong ones.So it was that though James came out of Scotland to assert his divine and arbitrary right as sovereign, by the time Queen Anne died, closing the Stuart line and giving way to the Hanoverian, the real sovereignty had passed into the hands of Parliament.
[1] Trevelyan, England Under the Stuarts.
But the royal traveler, coming from Edinburgh to London, is interesting on his own account--interesting at this distance.He is thirty- seven years old, and ought to be in the beginning of his prime.He is a little over middle height; loves a good horse, though he is an ungainly rider, and has fallen off his horse three or four times during his royal progress; is a heavy drinker of the liquors of the period, with horribly coarse, even gross manners.Macaulay is very severe with him.He says that "his cowardice, his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person and manners, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision.Even in his virtues and accomplishments there was something eminently unkingly."[1] It seemed too bad that "royalty should be exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at the drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a pedagogue." That is truly not an attractive picture.But there is something on the other side.John Richard Green puts both sides: "His big head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood out in as grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry and Elizabeth as his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity, his buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his contemptible cowardice.Underthis ridiculous exterior, however, lay a man of much natural ability, a ripe scholar with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother wit and ready repartee."[2]
[1] History of England, chap.i.
[2] Short History of the English People, chap.viii, sec.ii.
Some good traits he must have had.He did win some men to him.As some one has said, "You could love him; you could despise him; you could not hate him." He could say some witty and striking things.For example, when he was urging the formal union of Scotland and England, and it was opposed, he said: "But I am the husband, and the whole island is my wife.I hope no one will be so unreasonable as to suppose that I, that am a Christian king under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives."[2] After the conference of which we have been speaking, he wrote to a friend in Scotland: "I have had a revel with the Puritans and have peppered them soundly." As indeed he had.Then, in some sense at least, "James was a born theologian." He had studied the Bible in some form from childhood; one of the first things we hear of his doing is the writing of a paraphrase on the book of the Revelation.In his talk he made easy and free use of Scripture quotations.To be sure, his knowledge, on which he prided himself unconscionably, was shallow and pedantic.HenryIV.of France, one of his contemporaries, said that he was "the wisest fool in Christendom."[2] Trevelyan, England Under the Stuarts, p.107.
