The Book of Books (10 page)

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 over 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.

The Bible, and increasingly the King James Version, had shown its power. It had been used with deadly effect. It was to go on to assume many shapes, one of which was to become the language of the politics and the lawmaking of the day. Though it was in all the churches, in another sense it had left the Church. It was no longer chained to the lectern, it was out in the streets. It was a torch.

 

What has been quoted from the sermons and homilies is just a sliver of what was said and printed at the time. Not only were these messages hammered home in public oratory, they were alehouse talk, campfire talk, domestic conversation. Although the meat of it was scriptural, the disputatious and judgemental nature of it provided opportunities for wider and bolder discussion which
succeeding generations were to build on. Those who learned to read through the Bible – about a million copies were sold in this period – would move on to other literature, wide reading, a shifted horizon of thought.

But the Bible drove the debates and provided the words for thought and the telling images. ‘Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low' – Isaiah. The idea of levelling and raising bit deeply into the arguments. Certain places carried great meaning: Babylon above all which evoked all wickedness and temptation. Egypt a close second, from whose bondage the Chosen had to make their escape. These two place names, like the notion of the levelling of mountains or the image of the wilderness, occur again and again in the literature of militant Presbyterianism. ‘We are all wilderness brats by nature,' wrote John Collinges in 1646.

And the wilderness was contrasted with the garden. ‘God Almighty first planted a garden,' wrote Bacon. ‘It is the greatest refreshment of the spirits of man.' And the notion of a garden recurs, fenced off from the wilderness, cultivated, protected by God, and on into reams of metaphor. ‘True religion and undefiled is to let everyone quietly have earth to manure, that they may live in freedom by their labours,' wrote Gerrard Winstanley, one of the leading thinkers and activists, on what we might call ‘the left'. Winstanley, like others, also used the word ‘hedge'; in his case he saw hedges as enclosures, against the common good, oppressive to the peasantry, like the Norman yoke. And ‘yoke' itself was sought out to be a key word.

These words, like certain names – Moses, Cain, Abel, Abraham, Isaac – drove into the vocabulary of the faith debate and some remain there today. Most have seen their resonance abate in the UK through the secularising of our history, but elsewhere still they carry the meanings drawn from the Bible. America and
Nigeria are prime examples. But they were branded into this nation's discussion with itself which began in earnest in the seventeenth century.

A version of the Bible that had only crept into the public light and stumbled its way to popularity and needed laws to help it gain acceptance, emerged out of the Civil Wars as the dictionary and encyclopaedia of a nation arguing with itself. Its words had aided and abetted massive slaughter. It had nurtured ideas of equality and justice for all. The fact that it was now widely accepted in English made it the nation's book. It assumed a place as the mouth of England's many tongues. It expressed its passion for coherence. It spoke of the country's ancient and cruel divisions, its hopes for a better future, an earthly heaven.

Those Civil Wars and that act of regicide astonished the world. A divinely appointed king had been executed and it had been done through law and the words of the Bible had not only condoned it but urged it on. There was no knowing what might happen next.

THE NEW MAP

H
ell had been unleashed on the battlefield and in the pulpit. Carnage had been sanctified by the vengeful God who through Moses had urged on his first Chosen People, the Israelites, to murder all the women and children of the Midianites but to spare the virgins for the troops. Brother set against brother and father against son were not unfamiliar in the Old Testament. In that book of history, poetry, hope and death, life was harsh, God was cruel, punishment was crushing, mercy was rare; loving kindness was saved for and by the New Testament.

Inside the constitutional tension which a king stretched to breaking point was an educated parliamentary class who claimed their rights from the early Middle Ages and, in trace memory and law, from pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon England. They could and would defend them. Inside an economic and cultured insurrection against the traditionally privileged by the aspiring gentry class, there had grown a religious whirlpool whose force had sucked everything into its violent spiral. For most of the seventeenth century, the temper of the times was deep-dyed in religion. It ate up everything it encountered. And the gravitational force of it was focused on the King James Bible.

Intense, often frenzied, interpretations of its words and the actions of its varied cast of biblical characters real, legendary and mythical licensed new liberties and new excuses. Men called themselves ‘Saints'. Communism was advocated and practised, as was free love, the preaching by women and the virtue of nakedness. Innocents were murdered, property was razed, all institutions were interrogated.

The Bible was the oracle; the Scriptures were the law. But whose? Who owned the Bible? The British Isles were racked with the effort of attempting to measure every seventeenth-century action against ancient and often corrupted texts written more than 2,000 years before their time. Texts which could be scoured for calming wisdom and moral truths but also texts crammed with extremes of behaviour became increasingly attractive the more bitter the battle became between the King and his enemies. The Bible lit the fire and roared on to feed the flames.

It was a time when religion, through the Scriptures translated in the King James Version, drove kings to believe that ‘Kings are called Gods by God Himself because they sit upon God's earthly throne.' James I wrote that sentence. Charles I died for it. It was a time when some Puritans believed that the spirit that spoke within them made them Saints to be counted alongside the Apostles, predestined to rule on earth. It was a time when intellectual rigour went toe to toe with intellectual fanaticism and for many years moderation was the loser. And the soul was on the battlefield more vividly for some than the sword.

After the execution of the King ended the Civil Wars save for a series of vengeful reprisals, the ascent of Oliver Cromwell replaced one make of tyrant with another. But the fight had gone out of the majority. The exiled son of the executed King, a man who claimed no Divine Right, a dandy, a compliant and bankrupt monarch seeking a safe berth, returned to England and landed at Dover.
There he was given a copy of the King James Version, to which instantly he declared allegiance. In London, King Charles II was greeted by cheering multitudes. It appeared that the waters had closed over a riven nation.

 

By 1660 you could say that the Bible had fought itself to a standstill. Inside that Civil War tangle of arguments and the agitated currents and cross-currents of motivation the plot lay in the Bible. But which version was it to be?

The Geneva Bible was considered subversive by James I and by Charles I and his favoured ministers. Its lower cost and its radical notes made it popular, among the Presbyterians, the Parliamentary Party and the Parliamentary Army. In 1644, however, the Royalists managed to cut off the importation of Geneva Bibles and in that year the final edition of the Geneva Bible was published. It withered away.

Archbishop Laud's argument for this repressive action was that the continual mass buying of imported Geneva Bibles would kill the English printing industry. The crown's lucrative stake in Robert Barker's printing monopoly of the Bible was not mentioned. The Geneva Bible was to be banned and it was banned and the sales of the King James Version, already strong, grew rapidly and would soon monopolise the territory. It would go through several revisions but hold fast to the 1611 version until the misguided decision was taken to recast it in ‘modern' English.

Yet the Presbyterians and the Puritans, fed by the conviction that they were the Elect, the Chosen People, would not let go easily. Their Bible emanated from Geneva where Calvin, the source of their rule and discipline, had exercised his form of religious despotism. So versions of the King James Bible began to appear with the Geneva Bible's radical notes. There were at least nine editions produced between 1642 and 1715, most smuggled
in from the Netherlands as Tyndale's New Testament had been many years earlier. But it had been convincingly superseded. Yet Geneva went down fighting.

Archbishop Laud was executed in 1645 and the Puritans went into battle to dislodge the King James Version. As A. McGrath describes in
In The Beginning
, they persuaded the Parliamentary Grand Committee to set up a subcommittee. Their attack on the King James Version was cunningly aimed at the veracity of the translations. To secure their preferred version they knew that, even in the middle of a battle, they needed to present a scholarly case.

But surprisingly their cause did not prosper. There was the difficulty, even the impossibility, in proving that the language and translation in the King James Bible was inferior. There was also the difficult fact that John Field, printer, was handed the monopoly on the King James Version in 1656 by the Presbyterian hero, Oliver Cromwell. Field was a ferocious monopolist. This move was to give the King James Version not only Cromwell's authority but a licence which would be best fattened by the crushing of the opposition from Geneva.

By the time Charles II came to the throne in 1660, the rule of the Saints and the Puritans in the Parliamentary cause was exhausted. The Established Church had found some teeth again. The Geneva Bible was effectively outlawed and with sad rapidity rendered ineffective. The Geneva Bible had had its moment and lost it. The Protestants in New England had thought that Cromwell and the Saints would see them marching hand in hand with Old England. That potentially epoch-changing alliance was thwarted for ever. The Atlantic was no longer a connection but a chasm.