The King James Bible and the World It Made

2 TRANSLATING MAJESTY: The King James Bible, John Milton, and the English Revolution

29 Two TRANSLATING MAJESTY The King James Bible, John Milton, and the English Revolution Laura L. Knoppers On the chilly afternoon of January 31, 1649, King Charles I stood on a recently erected scaffold outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall awaiting execution. The public beheading was a crucial step in a struggle that had begun with paper bullets in parliamentary pamphlets and newsbooks , moved through civil war and parliamentary victory to the king’s trial and condemnation, and would continue even after the king’s death.1 At each stage, Parliament strove to strip away from Charles Stuart both the tangible and ineffable attributes of majesty: crown, kingdom, power over the militia, and the link between earthly monarch and divine. Yet the scene on the scaffold gave evidence not only of Parliament’s victory and its control of the judiciary and military, but also of beliefs that would be more difficult to eradicate. Charles I, having earlier taken communion and said his final prayers with his chaplain, Bishop Juxon, carried out his final act with dignity and determination. He wore extra clothing against the cold, not for comfort but to prevent shivering that might be misconstrued as fear. Having avowed his innocence, the king affirmed his commitment to the established church and to the rights and liberty of the people. And he prepared to die: “I have a good Cause, and a gracious God on my side. . . . I goe from a corruptible, to an incorruptible Crown: where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.”2 Stooping down and laying his neck on the block in preparation for the blow of the axe that would separate head from body, Charles cautioned the disguised executioner to “stay for the sign” (indicating his readiness). The reply of the executioner, presumably the most hardened of characters, 30 Laura L. Knoppers was striking, indeed under the circumstances remarkable: “Yes I will: and it please your Majesty.”3 If the elaborate apparatus of public trial, sentencing, and punishment was meant to transform Charles Stuart into a criminal—a traitor and tyrant—the axe-wielding executioner instinctively and readily acknowledged the king’s majesty. Such majesty was a prominent feature of the Authorized Version of the Bible that had been commissioned by Charles’ father, King James I, and published thirty-eight years earlier.4 In translating the Hebrew, Aramaic , and Greek texts into English, drawing upon and emending earlier English Bibles as well as having at hand such resources as the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, the King James translators highlighted majesty.5 In so doing, they created a text that not only shaped religious faith and practice, but would prove crucial to monarchy in a time of crisis . Before and after the English civil wars, regicide, and the short-lived republic, Charles I and his supporters drew upon the King James Bible to stress the majesty—power, splendor, greatness, and divine right—of monarchy. While considerable scholarly attention has been given to radical uses of the Bible in the English Revolution, this essay considers less well-examined royal and royalist uses, as well as the shifting responses by polemicist and poet, John Milton.6 The majesty of kings and of the divine in the 1611 Bible became crucial not despite but because of the mid-seventeenth-century revolution. The Hampton Court Conference and the Work of Translation While in some ways his personality and uncouth habits might make King James I of England (and VI of Scotland) seem an incongruous figure to oversee a translation of sacred Scripture, James delighted in theological debate, had translated the Psalms, and had written on the divine right of kings.7 Convening the Hampton Court Conference in January 1604, “like a good Physition, to examine & trie the complaints [regarding the church], and fully to remove the occasions thereof . . . or to cure them,”8 King James did more than “pepper” the hapless Puritan divines, outnumbered and outmaneuvered by a phalanx of bishops, clergymen, and professors.9 When Puritan scholar John Reynolds “moved his Majestie , that there might bee a newe translation of the Bible, because, those which were allowed in the raignes of Henrie the eight, and Edward the sixt, were corrupt and not aunswerable to the truth of the Originall,”10 James embraced the idea, but turned it against the translation favored by the godly. The king averred that he Translating Majesty 31 wished, that some...