the crime. âThe Rasor is hired for us,â he told his congregation, Hakluyt and Herbert perhaps among them, âthat sweeps away a great number of haires at once.â Plague was a sign of Godâs wrath provoked by menâs âown inventionsâ, the taste for novelty, for specious newness, which was so widespread in the world. The very word âplagueâ â and there is something unsettling about this pedantic scholarship in the face of catastrophe â came from the Latin plaga meaning âa strokeâ. It was âthe very handy-worke of GODâ. He admitted that there was a natural cause involved in the disease but it was also the work of a destroying angel. âThere is no evill but it is a sparke of Godâs wrath.â Religion, he said, was filled by Puritan preachers with ânew tricks, opinions and fashions, fresh and newly taken up, which their fathers never knew ofâ. The people of England now âthink it a goodly matter to be wittie, and to find out things our selves to make to our selves, to be Authors, and inventors of somewhat, that so we may seem to be as wise as GOD, if not wiserâ. What could be more wicked than the idea of being an Author? Let alone wittie? Newness was the sin and novelty was damnable. âThat Sinn may cease, we must be out of love with our own inventions and not goe awhoring after them ⦠otherwise, his anger will not be turned away, but his hand stretched out still.â
The educated, privileged and powerful churchman preaches his own virtue and ignores his pastoral duties, congratulating himself on his own salvation. The self-serving crudity of this stance did not escape the attentions of the Puritans. If Andrewes sincerely believed that the plague was a punishment for sin and ânoveltyâ, and if he was guiltless on that score, then why had he run away to Chiswick? Surely someone of his purity would have been immune in the city? And if his pastoral duties led him to the stinking death pits of Cripplegate, as they surely did, why was he not there? Did Andrewes, in other words, really believe what he was saying about the omnipotent wrath of the Almighty?
In a way he didnât; and his hovering between a vision of overwhelming divine authority and a more practical understanding of worldly realities, in some ways fudging the boundaries between those two attitudes, reveals the man. Henoch Clapham, the angry pamphleteer, lambasted Andrewes in his Epistle Discoursing upon the Present Pestilence. All Londoners, Andrewes included, should behave as though plague was not contagious. Everybody should attend all the funerals. There was no need to run away. It was a moral disease. If you were innocent you were safe. And not to believe that was itself a sin. How innocent was Andrewes in running to save his own skin? Did the innocent require an elm-tree shade? Clapham was slapped into prison for asking these questions. To suggest that the Dean of Westminster was a self-serving cheat was insubordinate and unacceptable. Andrewes interrogated him there in a tirade of anger and attempted to impose on him a retraction. Clapham had to agree (in the words written by Andrewes):
That howsoever there is no mortality, but by and from a supernatural cause, so yet it is not without concurrence of natural causes also ⦠That a faithful Christian man, whether magistrate or minister, may in such times hide or withdraw himself, as well corporeally as spiritually, and use local flight to a more healthful place (taking sufficient order for the discharge of his function).
Clapham refused to sign this and stayed in prison for eighteen months until he finally came up with a compromise he could accept: there were two sorts of plague running alongside each other. One, infectious, was a worldly contagion, against which you could take precautions. The other, not infectious, was the stroke of the Angelâs hand. A pre-modern understanding of a world in which God and his angels interfered daily, in chaotic and unpredictable ways, was made to sit alongside something else: the modern, scientific idea of an intelligible nature. The boundary between the two, and all the questions of authority, understanding and belief which hang around it, is precisely the line which Andrewes had wanted to fudge.
If this looks like the casuistry of a trimming and worldly churchman, there were of course other sides to him. Down at Chiswick, as throughout his life, the time he spent in private, about five hours every morning, was devoted almost entirely to prayer. He once said that anyone who visited him before noon clearly did not believe in God. The prayers he wrote for himself, first published after his death in 1648 as Preces Privatae, have for High Church Anglicans long been a classic of devotional literature. Andrewes gave the original manuscript to his friend Archbishop Laud. It was âslubbered with his pious hands and watered with his penitential tearsâ. This was no rhetorical exaggeration: those who knew him often witnessed his âabundant tearsâ as he prayed for himself and others. In his portraits he holds, gripped in one hand, a large and absorbent handkerchief. It was a daily habit of self-mortification and ritualised unworthiness in front of an all-powerful God, a frame of mind which nowadays might be thought almost mad, or certainly in need of counselling or therapy. But that was indeed the habit of the chief and guiding Translator of the King James Bible: âFor me, O Lord, sinning and not repenting, and so utterly unworthy, it were more becoming to lie prostrate before Thee and with weeping and groaning to ask pardon for my sins, than with polluted mouth to praise Thee.â
This was the man who was acknowledged as the greatest preacher of the age, who tended in great detail to the school-children in his care, who, endlessly busy as he was, would nevertheless wait in the transepts of Old St Paulâs for any Londoner in need of solace or advice, who was the most brilliant man in the English Church, destined for all but the highest office. There were few Englishmen more powerful. Everybody reported on his serenity, the sense of grace that hovered around him. But alone every day he acknowledged little but his wickedness and his weakness. The man was a library, the repository of sixteen centuries of Christian culture, he could speak fifteen modern languages and six ancient, but the heart and bulk of his existence was his sense of himself as a worm. Against an all-knowing, all-powerful and irresistible God, all he saw was an ignorant, weak and irresolute self:
A Deprecation
O LORD, Thou knowest, and canst, and willest
the good of my soul.
Miserable man am I;
I neither know, nor can, nor, as I ought will it.
How does such humility sit alongside such grandeur? It is a yoking together of opposites which seems nearly impossible to the modern mind. People like Lancelot Andrewes no longer exist. But the presence in one man of what seem to be such divergent qualities is precisely the key to the age. It is because people like Lancelot Andrewes flourished in the first decade of the seventeenth century â and do not now â that the greatest translation of the Bible could be made then, and cannot now. The ageâs lifeblood was the bridging of contradictory qualities. Andrewes embodies it and so does the King James Bible.
By the late summer of 1603, the Privy Council was cancelling Bartholomew Fair, ordering the demolition of slums and starting to clear out âthe great confluence and accesse of excessive numbers of idle, indigent, dissolute and dangerous personsâ. Meanwhile, other movements were afoot which would shape the birth of the King James Bible. Outside the central religious and political establishment, plans were being laid to steer that establishment in a direction which neither Elizabeth nor those around her had ever contemplated nor would ever have allowed.
The Puritan reformists within the Church of England saw the new reign as a chance for a new start. One of their secular leaders, Lewis Pickering, had already buttonholed the king in Edinburgh, and on Jamesâs way south a petition had been presented to him, signed it was said by a thousand ministers, asking for a reformation of the English Church, to rid it of the last vestiges of Roman Catholicism and to bring to a conclusion the long rumbling agony of the English Reformation. âRenaissanceâ was not a word that was known or used in seventeenth-century England, but âReformationâ
