Discordia Concors

Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 304 pp.

When Macaulay accused James I of constantly "stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at a drawn sword, and taking a style alternately of a buffoon and a pedagogue," he was following in a tradition initiated in the mid-seventeenth century by Anthony Weldon in his The Court and Character of King James.¹ While Weldon, an anti-Scots polemicist, represents Elizabeth I in his book as "the most Glorious Sun that ever shined in our Firmament of England," the front matter promises a "Picture of our Times"—of "secret Crimes/Discover'd," of "Tricks of State," "Greatnesse debauched," and "the People's Hate."² Later generations of historians would tend to echo Weldon's views—without, however, always expressing them so adamantly.³ For T. S. Eliot, James was not so much an object of scorn as Elizabeth was an object of praise. It was Queen Elizabeth who, Eliot wrote in 1926, was the "representative of the finest spirit of England of the time"; and it was the Elizabethan sensibility that created the "spirit of Anglicanism," as well as the "via media" that found the "mean between Papacy and Presbytery." In a barely veiled attack on her Stuart inheritors (both James and his son Charles), Eliot wrote that "other religious impulses, of varying degrees of spiritual value, were to assert themselves with greater vehemence during the next two reigns."⁴ Thirty years later, D. H. Wilson would condemn James for his "weaker nature," dismissing him as (in the latter years of his reign) "a broken, debauched and repulsive old man."⁵

Adam Nicolson diverges radically from this historiographical consensus. In God's Secretaries, Nicolson's recent book, Elizabeth is figured as "old, hesitant, querulous" and, toward the end of her life, "increasingly unapproachable." "She had become a relic," Nicolson remarks, "of a previous age and her wrinkled, pasteboard virginity now looked more like fruitlessness than purity." Although England itself was full of "newness and potential," the "queen's motto was still what it always had been: Semper eadem, Always the same. She hadn't moved with the times." Nicolson summarily concludes: "Elizabeth should have died years before." Against this backdrop, James Stuart emerges—however unlikely—a hero. Later historians, Nicolson observes, wanting to see James as responsible, in some way, for the "catastrophe" of Charles I's reign, have chosen to foreground only the "ridiculous aspects of James." Nicolson, therefore, highlights a side of James that is central not only to his reassessment of the king but also to the Bible that bears his name. The young King James, though enduring a "violent and threatened youth," manifested, in his later years, a "desire for wholeness and consensus, or inclusion and breadth, for a kind of majestic grace, lit by the clarity of a probing intelligence, rich with the love of dependable substance, for a reality that went beyond show." Not in the spirit of Elizabeth, but rather in the ideals of James, would lie the "Arcadian vision of untroubled togetherness," a true via media in which the diverse strands of the nation would come together. James introduced a new coin, a twenty-shilling gold piece, that unified the currencies of England and Scotland. For Nicolson, the "Unitie," with its engraved motto Faciam eos in gentem unam ("I shall make them into one nation"), would become a symbolic manifestation of James's aspirations for a social cohesion in which "all conflicting demands were reconciled and where all factions felt at home."

The promise adumbrated at Hampton Court—integration of Puritans and Anglicans under the auspices of a benevolent crown—would fall victim to other forces (eventually to civil war), leaving, in Nicolson's narrative, a single remnant: the King James Bible. That translation is for Nicolson a "window on that moment of optimism": a testimony to the possibility of synthesis, whereby "the light of understanding and the majesty of God could be united in a text...