had to establish themselves as politically loyal even while asking for changes to the state religion and the form of the state church. And it was equally critical for the bishops to conflate them. Throughout the summer the bishops maintained that any questioning of the doctrine and articles of the Church of England was politically subversive, dangerous and to be expunged. Anti-Puritan propaganda flooded the country. The Puritans were teetering along a narrow rock ledge and they wrapped their suggestions in swathes of submissive cotton wool. They addressed James, they said, âneither as factious men affecting a popular parity in the Church [no hint of getting rid of the bishops], nor as schismatics aiming at the dissolution of the state ecclesiastical [they wanted to distinguish themselves from the true extremists, who took from the New Testament that each congregation should be independent and free of all worldly authority] but as faithful servants of Christ and loyal subjectsâ. Describing themselves as âMinisters of the Gospell, that desier not a disorderly innovation [nothing was more loathsome to the seventeenth-century mind than the idea of innovation; ânovelistâ was a term of abuse, âprimitivistâ of the highest praise] but a due and godlie reformationâ, they laid on the supplicatory language:
Thus with all dutifull submission, referring our selues to your Maiesties pleasure for your gracious aunswere, as God shall direct you, wee most humblie recommend your Highness to the Devine maiestie, whom wee beseech for Christ, his sake to dispose your royall harte to doe herein what shalbee to his glorie, the good of his Churche, and your endles Comforte.
Things werenât quite so unctuous in private. Both Lewis Pickering and Patrick Galloway, a Presbyterian minister who had come south with James, were making sure that the campaign didnât look like a conspiracy. Galloway wanted âa resident Moyses in euerye parisheâ but there were to be many different petitions each with slightly different wording, and not too many ministers on one petition. Nothing should be done to make it look like a set-up. No one was to ask for the removal of bishops outright. In all the parishes across the country, ministers were to stir up the people to ask for a reformation. They were to pray âagainst the superstitious ceremonies, and tirannie of Prelatesâ. Lawyers were instructed to prepare some draft bills for parliament to bring about the changes they wanted. Scholars were hired to write learned treatises. It was precisely like a modern, single-issue campaign, dragooning the media, whipping up local excitement, lobbying in private, agitating in public.
Petitions and representations streamed into the court. The two sides were gathering for the climax: bishops and the conservative establishment on one side; radical reformists on the other; with the king in between, sympathetic to some of the radical demands but also to the idea of no disturbance, no disruption to good order. Majesty was attentive; a good king was a listening king. The conference between the two sides had been set for 1 November. It was assumed, on past form, that the plague would have ebbed by then, but because the outbreak had been so devastating, the conference was delayed until after Christmas. It would be held in early January.
Meanwhile, at the end of October, and under pressure from the bishops, James issued a proclamation. He faced both ways. An episcopal church was âagreeable to Godâs word, and near to the condition of the primitive churchâ. Nevertheless, there were âsome things used in this church [which] were scandalousâ. The king, who felt that he had in himself âsome sparkles of the Divinityâ, would resolve the agony. He would not countenance âtumult, sedition and violenceâ, he didnât want âopen invectives or indecent speechesâ, but his conference would consider âcorruptions which may deserve a review and amendmentâ. The parties were to meet in the Tudor brick palace of Hampton Court on 12 January. There the idea for a new translation of the Bible would be born.
* That is, The graues of lust
THREE He sate among graue, learned and reuerend men
Now I beseech you brethren by the name of our Lord Iesus Christ, that yee all speake the same thing, and that there be no diuisions among you: but that ye be perfectly ioyned together in the same minde, and in the same iudgement.
1 Corinthians 1:10
Christmas at Hampton Court had been draining. Late in December 1603 an already exhausted and clearly distracted Cecil wrote to his friend Lord Shrewsbury: âWe are nowe to feast seven ambassadors; Spayne, France, Poland, Florence and Savoy, besydes maskes and mvch more; during all wch time, I wold with all my hearte I were with that noble Ladie of yours, by her turfe fire.â
By mid-January, the partying and the politicking were over and the king and Council could turn their minds to the conference which would discuss the future of the church. The letters issuing the invitations had gone out from the Privy Council and on the appointed day at nine oâclock in the morning, the great men of the Church of England, a clutch of future Translators (a word that was capitalised at the time) among them, gathered at the palace. It was freezing. The banks of the Thames were encrusted with ice and enormous fires burned in the Renaissance fireplaces which Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII had installed here seventy years before. Old John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was surrounded by the men whose appointments by the Crown he had sponsored and argued for. The bishops around him were all, in some way or other, reliant on him for their status and their well-being. He had been the great manager of the Elizabethan church, the queenâs âhusbandmanâ, who had pursued with equal ruthlessness the papists who wished to return England to the dominion of the pope; Presbyterians, who would be rid of all bishops and archbishops, replacing their authority with local committees; and those Puritan Separatists who believed in no overarching structure for the church beyond their own, naturally fissive local gatherings. Now, with the ecclesiastical magnates of England gathered around his frail and shrinking presence, he was facing the last challenge from a new king, son of a Catholic queen, brought up by Presbyterian divines: an uncertain quantity.
The Lord Bishops of London, Durham, Winchester and Worcester, of St Davidâs in the far west of Wales, of Chichester, Carlisle and Peterborough were fully robed in the uniform the church required and which the Puritans loathed: the tippet (a long rich silk scarf draped around the shoulders); the big-sleeved rochet or episcopal surplice, much loved by the bishops, an ocean of ceremonial cambric; a chimere, a loose over-mantle, which, throughout the Middle Ages and until the early years of Elizabeth, had been of a dazzling scarlet silk, but which, under Calvinist influence was thought âtoo light and gay for the episcopal gravityâ, now had become strict and elegant black satin â it was Whitgiftâs black chimere that led Elizabeth to call him âmy little black husbandâ; and on their heads as they came in, but then removed, the three- or four-cornered caps which were the mark of a divine or of a member of the universities. The mitre, which had been worn before the Reformation, and would return later in the seventeenth century to Miltonâs disgust, was for now banished as a sign of popish ceremony. With the bishops came the next generation of ecclesiastical power-brokers, the Deans of the Chapel Royal, of St Paulâs, of Chester, Windsor and, silent, his famous public serenity intact, Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster. All, in a year or two, would be bishops themselves.
This Tudor Hampton Court, before Christopher Wren transformed it in the 1690s into a massive red-brick slab of power and grandeur, an attempt at an English Versailles, was a fairy palace, full of little towers and toy battlements, weathervanes that caught the light, as romantic and play-chivalric as an illumination in a Book of Hours. Here and there, the Italian craftsmen imported by the cardinal and king had contributed a terracotta medallion or a frieze of satyrs. Plaster ceilings, in which large pendant bosses hung down over the heads of the churchmen, and whose panels were filled with papier mâché roses and sculpted ostrich feathers, were painted light blue and gold. Braziers stood glowing in the rooms.
