The Book of Books Read online

  The Bible was out of its Latin straitjacket. It could be interpreted by anyone who read it. This state of affairs disturbed the establishment profoundly. What had been theirs was now everybody’s and that, they thought, could only cause trouble and they were right. Once released, it was open to comment and challenge and the ‘interpretations’ were multitudinous. Most of all, many often self-educated reform men and women found that in the Bible there was no direct authority for infant baptism, fasting, marrying with a ring, nor most of the paraphernalia and hierarchical practices in the Churches. This began what became a dangerous course of questioning.

  Next they discovered that the Bible could be used to say the unsayable, to change the law, even to kill a king. From being the weapon of the rulers, the Bible in a few years became the weapon of those who for centuries had been ruled over and overruled.

  Its public arrival coincided with the bloody, revolutionary Civil Wars in the middle of the seventeenth century. The words of the biblical prophets, the acts of the Old Testament kings and occasionally one or two phrases of Jesus Christ played an essential role in these wars. The King James Version was instrumental in the execution of King James’s son. His Bible was out in the world now, with an energy of its own and it was sucked into the conflict.

  Christopher Hill, in his magnificent study The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, reminds us of the landscape of the thinking of that time. More than a thousand years of Christian presence in the islands of Britain had instructed most of the people in its ways and caught them in its spells. But the people were silenced. Now it changed: the King James Bible became the book through which the people could speak and act.

  Since 1517, the shot of the Reformation had set fire to the Christian world and in the mid-seventeenth century its fury flamed higher than ever before. There was in Europe a virulent war, Catholics against Protestants, which was to last for thirty years. The Antichrist (the Pope) had to be slaughtered. The godless Protesters had to be slaughtered. God was claimed by both sides. Paranoia and hatred on both sides were pitched to what we might now call hysterical fanaticism. Religion was all in all. It blotted up all their thought systems and blotted out what did not fit.

  It is difficult for many of us now to imagine how binding the Christian faith was in that Civil War conflict. It was in your daily bread, your daily work, it guided your laws, your actions, your words. As if you had been dipped in hot wax and emerged for ever as a candle whose purpose was to be alight for God, the Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Church and hope of eternal life. You could privately, secretly, disagree; you could be disobedient or argumentative or indolent. But in the mid-seventeenth century, in the drama into which the King James Bible was enrolled as a major force, it trapped you as surely as the earth was recently proved to be trapped around the sun.

  The Bible was not a programme. It was not any single lesson. It was a well of adaptable wisdom and a pit of fertile contradictions. In the tormented argument which provoked and helped shape the course of action in Britain between 1625 and 1649 it spoke in conflicting tongues and all of them sought and found authority in the words of God or His prophets. It made the war respectable: it justified slaughter: it aided liberation. It was both a source of truth and a serpents’ nest.

  Henry VIII had appointed himself head of the Church as well as of the state and put religion and politics together in the same box and there they stayed. James I believed that he ruled by Divine Right and was finally answerable only to God. There were grumbles but the strength of English law, Parliament and behind them both Magna Carta, was felt as an effective brake should it be needed. Also James’s shrewd intelligence, overlaid though it was with his unceasing over-excitement and over-indulgence in the lush and louche excesses of those rich and promiscuous Englishmen who swarmed about him, just about saw him through.

  His son, Charles I, who came to the throne in 1625, was not so intelligent, a hardliner on Divine Right, wholly convinced that he was outside and above the law and did not need Parliament. His promiscuity was not with sensuality but with Catholicism and that was not to be tolerated. His wife was Roman Catholic. He wanted their son to make a good Catholic marriage. He refused to support the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War.

  It is proof of how deeply divinity was thought to hedge a king and how tightly the traditional obligations held, that for seventeen years Charles I seemed to get away with playing the tyrant. But during that time the voraciously read and often radically interpreted Bible undermined his position. By the end of the 1630s the King was under attack from a revolutionary force. The Bible was its battering ram. Having been for centuries the book of authority, it became, now that it was available in English, the book of rebellion. It pervaded the nation.

  That greatest of English lawyers, Sir Edward Coke, sought help for his judgements in the Bible and, Christopher Hill tells us, writers on farming and gardening looked into the Bible. People wallpapered their homes with texts and taverns pasted the Word of God on their bar walls. It was still a time when plagues, famine and disasters in nature were widely thought to be the acts of an angry God. Explanations and solutions for these were sought for and found in the Bible. Magistrates, heads of literate families, teachers were now steeped in the words of the Bible. On her first procession through London in 1558, Queen Elizabeth is said to have ‘pressed the bible to her bosom’. When Charles II landed at Dover in 1660, he asserted that he valued the Bible above all else. In the 1640s, battles were fought in Britain that stained the land with blood and challenged deeply rooted order and the Bible in English was in the thick of it.

  As the seventeenth century advanced, there was the sense of a gathering storm. Driving it were two forces which were to prove implacable. On the one side, the King’s Party, gathered around the Bible of James from which the word ‘tyrant’ and the kingbaiting, status-quo-testing comments in the Geneva Bible had been omitted. On the other were the Presbyterians, rooted in Calvin’s idea of the Elect. They had been spurned at Hampton Court but they were too fierce in their faith and too well organised to be dismissed. James I and his son Charles I saw themselves as divinely appointed. The Presbyterians saw themselves as the Chosen People, like the Israelites with whom they identified. It was God versus God.

  There was also the Catholic faction, who claimed an ancient monopoly on God. And finally the growing number of moderate Anglicans, frustrated and largely powerless. Presbyterian fervour was to lead to a call for rule by ‘Saints’, chosen from among themselves. The King’s men were well schooled in the Bible and so were the Presbyterians. It was a battle of the book. Within a year or two after the death of James I, a surge of anti-monarchism, which had already expressed itself in the self-exile of the Pilgrim Fathers, began to rise to a tide which was to become a tempest. It began in public sermons quite new in their daring, their number and their learning and ended in a court of law exceptional in that it tried and condemned to death a divinely appointed king.

  The arguments were expressed in code and the code was in the Bible. It was taken for granted that the Bible was known thoroughly, often by heart, by a substantial and ever growing percentage of the population. Henry VIII in his last speech to Parliament in 1546 had, with tears in his eyes, railed that the Bible was ‘disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’. A hundred years later it was disputed and jangled even more widely and more jealously and dangerously. The fortressed kingdom of the Scriptures had been breached and there was no repairing it. The accession of Charles I with his Catholic wife and his Catholic intentions unleashed the Protestant Bible’s power.

  In the King James Bible you could find defences of the King and his court: ‘the powers that be are ordained by God’ was written in Romans. You could find justification for the massacre of heathens and idolaters. Idolatry was the ‘sin’ of the Catholics most hated by the Presbyterians. You could read ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. Bad kings, like Nebuchadnezzar or Jehoichim and Saul, who de
served no obedience, studded the Old Testament. Good kings were few but they were available. Josiah was a rare model of a good and authorised king. There were comments on society: ‘often they which are despised of men are favoured by God’ (Genesis), and there were the Beatitudes.

  It was not new that the Bible played a part in the state. The King James Version had been written with a careful eye on curbing what he saw as rebellious tendencies. But it was the liberating fury of it thirty years on in the middle of the seventeenth century that was new and remarkable both in itself and in its far-reaching consequences.

  Charles I, a year after his accession to the throne, married Henrietta Maria, daughter of the King of the second great Catholic power, France. Henrietta Maria was firm in her Catholic faith and determined to haul England back alongside the Roman Catholic mother ship. She was against England’s participation in the exhausting ‘European’ struggle between Catholics and Protestants, which became the Thirty Years War. This provoked an eminent Presbyterian to deliver a sermon quoting from Esther: ‘if thou holdest thy tongue at this time, comfort and deliverance shall appear to the Jews out of another place, but thine and thy father’s house shall perish.’ By ‘Jews’, in the code of the day, he meant the Presbyterians.

  And so the gloves came off. Now that Guy Fawkes Day has dwindled to a social gathering, we forget that in 1605 a Roman Catholic group of what we would call terrorists had attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. This, if proof were needed, demonstrated beyond any doubt that the Catholics had not and would not give up their designs on England and needed to be watched, fought and, if necessary, exterminated. It was therefore of no little significance that Thomas Hooker chose Guy Fawkes Day in 1626 to preach a sermon in Essex before a ‘vast congregation’ in which he called on God to ‘set on the heart of the King’. This line comes from the eleventh and twelfth verses of Malachi, which he did not quote but took for granted that this vast congregation would know. They read: ‘an abomination is committed . . . Judah . . . hath married the daughter of a strange god. The Lord will cut off the man that doeth this.’ The daughter was Henrietta Maria. That man was Charles. That last sentence is an early example of the sentences which would now be laid on the King until his final sentence. The Bible had spoken.

  This fed into the growing undercurrent that ‘God was leaving England’.

  The ill-advised and heedless King decided he could rule without Parliament. Through his archbishop, Laud, he brought back undisguisedly Catholic practices, in particular the reintroduction of graven images: to the Presbyterians this was inflammatory idolatry. This was not what their God wanted. Charles must have known this. The King was unafraid. He attacked through the Scriptures. In a speech he wrote for his trial but was denied the chance to deliver by the court, he declared: ‘the authority of obedience unto kings is clearly warranted and strictly commended in both the Old and the New Testaments. There it is said “where the word of the King is there is power and who may say unto him ‘what dost thou?’ ”

  A salient promontory from which attacks on the King were launched was the sermon: most dramatically the Fast Sermons. Fasting became a favoured way of demonstrating religious commitment and sermons associated with these spasms of abstinence appear to have been particularly effective. They were often used to prepare the way for political action. Not only against the King, but also against his ministers. And invariably it would be instances lifted from the Old Testament which would point the finger.

  Often these sermons would be calls to encourage the Presbyterian faithful. In 1640, Cornelius Burgess preached a Fast Sermon on a text from Jeremiah: ‘let us join ourselves unto the Lord in an everlasting covenant that shall not be forgotten.’ He substantiated his sermon with quotations referring to Moses, Asa, and the deliverance from the Babylonians.

  ‘Babylon’ was, to these sermons, the state of Charles I’s Britain: wicked, damned, endangered, losing God. Why, he asked in that sermon, has God ‘not yet given us so full a deliverance from Babylon’?

  On the same day in 1640, Stephen Marshall also preached a Fast Sermon, taking lines from Chronicles: ‘The Lord is with you while you be with him . . . but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.’ Again the argument was in place that it was the true God who should be followed and not the King and his God of the Antichrist. The Bible often said put not your trust in princes but always said put your trust in God. Again, the refrain ‘but God may leave England . . . if he goes, all goes’.

  The messages grew plainer. Before the outbreak of the Civil Wars, Stephen Marshall, in 1641, preached to the House of Commons on a text from Judges: the inhabitants of Meroz (England) would be cursed by God if they ‘came not to the help of the Lord . . . against the mighty’. Horrible violence was not a bar. Not when ‘Babylon’ was the enemy. Marshall quoted from Psalm 137: ‘happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones’. The ‘little ones’ were the children of Babylon. The Civil Wars were imminent and Marshall uttered a rallying cry from, unusually, the New Testament, and a sentence attributed to Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘He that is not with me is against me.’

  The pace quickened. In June 1642, William Sedgewick in his Fast Sermon quoted from the Book of Revelation that ‘Satan shall be bound and cast into the bottomless pit; and with him this Antichrist malignity.’ No one could be in any doubt as to who and what he meant.

  The King’s treatment of Parliament was resented as unconstitutional. Economic forces worked through to reinforce the deepening sense of divisiveness between the luxuriant party of the King and the growing cohesion of the tax-paying party against him. The organisation of the New Model Army – based on the well-named ‘Ironsides’ – was a key factor.

  The New Model Army won the war and the distinction between Cavaliers and Roundheads has been in our language ever since. It is possible to see the Parliamentary army as the outward and visible force of the revolution. It was a religious as much as a political and military force. Many of its soldiers went into battle with a pocket Bible in their breast pocket and myths tell us that this stopped many a bullet. It was an army that marched on its religion. An army of God. In its ranks were men who had been educated through sermons and interpretations of the Bible and their knowledge was said to challenge that of university men. God’s Word was their battle code.

  The preachers began to predict victory against the King’s forces, although yet again they worked carefully through the Bible. The walls of Jericho fell ‘in God’s appointed time’. Christ once again came into the argument: ‘It is not for you to know the times and seasons.’ Job was called up: ‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.’ Which it did at the Battles of Marston Moor and then Naseby in 1645 where the King’s army was smashed and slaughtered. Charles I surrendered a year later and there began three years of debate over what should be done with him.

  The Bible would continue to be crucial in all this. The King used it to claim he was above the law, indeed on earth he was the law. The Parliamentarians, emboldened by victory, their arguments given such a telling voice in the wars, quoted law from the Bible and by law the King was judged. This was a departure from the traditional English method of changing unpopular monarchs – assassination. As such it had a lasting influence on the placing of law in the constitution in Britain and abroad.

  The sermonisers were not squeamish. Edward Staunton invoked Isaiah: ‘pity to me may be cruelty to thousands,’ and he added: ‘Could I lift up my voice as a trumpet, had I the shrill cry of an angel . . . my note should be, execution of judgement, execution of judgement, execution of judgement.’ In April 1645, Thomas Case quoted from God’s instructions to Joshua in Deuteronomy: ‘thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.’ Nicholas Lockyer quoted God’s instructions to Ezekiel: ‘slay utterly old and young.’ In the following year, Christ was quoted, from Luke: ‘those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign o
ver them, bring hither and slay them before me.’

  The country was ripped apart, and the Bible encouraged and even incited that bloody rupture. It was done in the pursuit of a better kingdom to follow, which in some ways it did.

  There was rejoicing by the victors as they turned to the trial of Charles ‘The Man of Blood’. This phrase was frequently used of Charles in the months leading up to the trial. The Book of Numbers was cited: ‘Blood, it defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it,’ and Ezekiel: ‘if thou be but a man that executes judgement and seeks truth, I will pardon you, saith God, I will turn away my wrath.’ The impetus of the war fuelled the Presbyterians’ utter conviction of their righteousness and gave to the Presbyterian-Parliamentary forces, just (it was a close-run thing), the majority in court to declare the King guilty. This trial empowered the Bible to re-shape the constitution.

  His execution in 1649 was thought to open up a time when the new Saints would rule the land, when there would be no more kings and when open debate through the Scriptures would peacefully settle all contentious matters. None of that happened.

  After the execution of the King, the army followed Cromwell as he smashed centres of resistance, especially castles, the length and breadth of the country. As well as soldiers, the army nourished statesmen and scholars. Only the ebbing of its authority in the failure and muddle that followed the death of the ‘Protector’, Cromwell, ended the underpinning of the ‘children of the Covenant and the Saints’ who for a few years claimed that they inherited the earth.

  The gravitational pull of the opposition party was Presbyterianism and its matter was concentrated in the Bible. And that outlasted Oliver Cromwell, the Commonwealth of the 1650s, most dramatically in America.