In The Meantime: James I, 1604–11
IN THE MEANTIME: JAMES I, 1604–11
Having sorted out the religious controversies of England to his own satisfaction in January 1604, James turned his attention to other matters he regarded as being of importance. He produced a vigorous critique of one of the habits of the day that he regarded as distasteful, unhealthy, and malodorous. James's A Counterblast to Tobacco drew particular attention to the problems caused by the smell of the demon weed. In a fascinating aside, James suggested that tobacco smoke “would serve for a precious relic, both for the superstitious priests and the insolent Puritans, to cast out devils withal.” The comment perhaps allows us to understand something of James's religious policy in England, which can be seen as steering a middle way between the extremes of Catholicism and Puritanism, using tobacco smoke as an illustration.
James brought to his critique of tobacco the same love of detail and rhetoric he had already mastered for his religious and political discourses. The treatise is fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is that it indicates James's willingness to critique a habit that some of his successors—most notably, Edward VII—found beguiling. Yet it also opens a window into the popular culture of the era, when the smoking of tobacco was justified on two medical grounds. James sets these out as follows:
First, it is thought by you a sure aphorism in the administration of medicine that the brains of all men being naturally cold and wet, all dry and hot things should be good for them of which nature this stinking suffumigation is, and therefore of good use to them….
The second argument grounded on a show of reason is that this filthy smoke, as well through the heat and strength thereof, as by a natural force and quality, is able and fit to purge both the head and stomach of rheums and distillations as experience teaches by the spitting and avoiding phlegm immediately after the taking of it.
James offered a vigorous and forceful rejection of both these arguments, based partly on his own observations. Yet his real objections had to do with taste, rather than personal health. The concluding paragraph of his learned discourse shows James to even have perceived a theological dimension to the matter: smoking offered an anticipation of the delights of hell, for those who so foolishly condemned themselves to its bonds through this vile habit.
Have you not reason then to be ashamed and to forbear this filthy novelty so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming yourselves both in person and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanity upon you by the custom thereof making yourselves to be wondered at by all foreign civil nations and by all strangers that come among you to be scorned and held in contempt; a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
More serious matters, however, lay to hand. The first Parliament of his reign opened in March 1604, and quickly made it clear that there was strong opposition to the exercise of royal authority without full consultation. Elizabeth I had managed to cajole Parliament into granting her wishes; James had yet to master this technique. As a result, from the outset he faced a serious challenge to his authority from a Parliament that clearly believed supreme authority rested with itself The area in which the tension between king and Parliament was most clearly demonstrated concerned financial matters. While James I was entitled to receive the running costs of his royal household, any additional funds had to be sanctioned by Parliament—and Parliament had no great enthusiasm for funding James's requests for additional funds. It is estimated that the royal estate was six hundred thousand pounds in debt in 1604. The precarious situation of the royal finances helps us understand why James I would make no contribution toward the translation and production costs of the new Bible. It would have to support itself
James countered his financial difficulties in a variety of ways. The “Great Contract,” set in place by Robert Cecil, allowed the royal finances to be restructured by a series of measures, including the granting of patents and monopolies to favored individuals. For an appropriately large financial consideration, James was prepared to grant monopolies in such things as the manufacturing of gold thread.
These measures caused outrage in Parliament, and increased the growing resentment against James's style of government. The importance of this point to our narrative cannot be overlooked. Robert Barker's privileged position as royal printer can be attributed to precisely such a favor. The interesting but totally unnecessary illustrations added as part of the front matter to early editions of the King James Version were the direct result of a royal privilege granted by the crown to John Speed in October 1610.
On the diplomatic front, relations with Spain improved considerably. Since the defeat of the Spanish Armada, there had been little enthusiasm in either Spain or England for continuing a state of war, which tied up resources that could be used for more promising ventures—such as colonizing the New World. The peace that James concluded in the summer of 1604 was, however, unpopular. Many favored continuing war against the Spaniards. Was not Spain a Catholic country? And was it not the duty of a Protestant nation, such as England, to counter Catholic expansion? Although James sought to counter this concern by forging alliances with various Protestant European states, his foreign policy did not go down well with a nation that had come to regard hostility toward the Spanish as part of its national identity. These suspicions were reinforced when James failed to provide any substantial support for beleaguered Protestant nations during the last great religious war to be fought in Europe—the Thirty Years War (1618–48). When James announced that he had arranged for his son and heir to the English throne, Charles, to marry the French Roman Catholic princess Henrietta Maria, there was outrage in both Parliament and nation.
If any proof were needed of the importance of the Bible to English culture at this point in history, the reaction to Charles marrying any foreigner provides it. The later books of the Old Testament were totally opposed to Israelites marrying foreign women. After a long period of exile in Babylon, it was imperative that the distinctive religious beliefs and practices of Israel were recovered and reestablished. Marrying foreigners was a sure-fire method of importing all kinds of heretical religious ideas and practices. The post-exilic writings of Ezra and Nehemiah were full of condemnations of the practice. Here, for example, is Ezra 10:2–3 in the Geneva Bible translation:
And Shechaniah the son of Jehiel, [one] of the sons of Elam, answered and said unto Ezra, We have trespassed against our God, and have taken strange wives of the people of the land: yet now there is hope in Israel concerning this thing. Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives, and such as are born of them, according to the counsel of my lord, and of those that tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law.
Even the suggestion that Charles might marry the Spanish Infanta in 1623 had provoked intense criticism: one court preacher was forcibly interrupted when, speaking about Solomon's marriage to an idolater, he announced his intention to “make an application to the present time.” It was all too obvious what the application would be, and silence seemed to all present to be by far the most prudent policy. The actual marriage of Charles to Henrietta Maria provoked outrage in many quarters. Comparing Henrietta Maria unfavorably to Jezebel, the anonymous author of the Sacrae Heplades (1625) gave vent to his hope that “some Jehu” might cause her to be thrown out of her window, and trodden underfoot by some passing horse.
Recent studies have stressed the importance of anti-Catholicism as an element of James's religious policies in England. James appears to have come to the conclusion that the best way of defusing religious controversies within England was to talk up the threat posed to the English Protestant heritage by Roman Catholicism, at home or abroad. Hostility toward Roman Catholicism was the glue that prevented, at least for a while, Puritans and Anglicans from pursuing open warfare with each other. The thought of a more potent religious threat to both was enough to make them wary of letting their disputes get out of hand.
Richard Bancroft had been appointed archbishop of Canterbury in October 1604. He saw himself as a vigorous defender of the Church of England, and identified its two chief enemies as a potentially resurgent Puritanism, and a persistent Catholicism that nearly fifty years of Protestant rule had failed to eradicate. Bancroft took measures to repress both these potential enemies. He issued the Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical in 1604, designed to enforce the authority of bishops and the use of the Prayer Book. However, Bancroft clearly believed that the Hampton Court Conference had, at least temporarily, checked the influence of Puritanism; he was now increasingly concerned with the threat posed by the remnants of Catholicism in England. In 1605, he wrote to all his bishops, setting out the manner in which Catholic recusants were to be found, tried, and punished.
Anti-Catholic sentiment became inflamed in 1605 through the failure of the Gunpowder Plot of that year. The official account of events was that there was a plot to blow up the House of Lords on November 5, when the king was due to be present to open proceedings. Alerted to the plot in advance, the authorities were able to thwart the conspiracy, and arrest its perpetrators. All were prominent Catholics. Eight conspirators were executed in January 1606. Henry Garnet, a Jesuit, was executed outside St. Paul's Cathedral in March 1606, on the grounds that he had knowledge of the plot. This has more than tangential relevance to our narrative. He was urged to recant by John Overall, dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. Having failed to do so, he witnessed Garnet being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Overall was, as we shall see, a member of one of the companies of translators appointed to oversee the production of the King James Version.
James, however, found time to devote to matters other than affairs of state. A series of Shakespeare plays were premiered in 1604. In 1605, James laid on a spectacular performance of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, staged by Inigo Jones, which caused consternation and scandal, partly on account of its extravagance. Further concerns were expressed over the king's increasingly obvious homosexual tendencies, which led to certain royal favorites being granted favors that were the subject of much comment and envy. Robert Carr, some twenty years younger than James, was one such favorite: he became the earl of Somerset in 1613. Although James fondled and kissed his favorites in what was widely regarded as a lecherous manner in public, the court was prepared to believe that his private behavior was somewhat more restrained.
The commissioning of the new translation of the Bible was one of the first positive acts of the new king of England. By the time of its final appearance in 1611, James's popularity had waned substantially. People began to long for the good old days of Queen Elizabeth, with whom James was regularly compared—unfavorably.
There was no doubt what James wanted to achieve during his reign: a unified Protestant England, united around an agreed translation of the Bible. James had every reason to hope that his new translation of the Bible would be a powerful factor in creating a cohesive English national identity, especially over and against Roman Catholicism, which was enjoying a newfound strength and stability on the European mainland. The new Bible would be a rallying point for a Protestant English nation. The production, at the king's initiative, of a new English translation of the Bible would reinforce the image of the king as the political and spiritual leader of his people. The unity of king, Bible, and church would ensure the unity of the English people, and might even stimulate the rebirth of that elusive sense of national identity and pride that had blossomed under Elizabeth. Much, it seemed, would depend on that translation.