Winchester and the Authorised Version

According to Winston Churchill: “The scholars who produced this masterpiece [the Bible] are mostly unknown and unremembered. But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between English-speaking people of the world.” Maybe they were not as unknown as Churchill thought.

This year is the 400th anniversary of the dear old Authorised Version of the Bible, and as there was no actual publication date in 1611 celebrations have continued for the whole year. Nearly all the books that have come out for the occasion, emphasising its importance for the English language, have called it the “King James Bible”, which is an Americanism. While Harry Potter might have sold 44 million, the Bible has sold 2.5 billion, or some say, six billion.

To bring the Bible to life, fifty-four scholars were sifted from the mass of bibliophiles who had accreted in Oxford and Cambridge and around Westminster. Melvyn Bragg described them as: 

A mighty and intellectually dazzling host from a small country to be funnelled into one book. Almost all of them came from the south-east of England, which both characterised and unified the English, which in that period were a quilt of dialects. About 25 per cent of the translators were Puritans, evidence of an impressive fight-back after their humiliation at Hampton Court. 

James I of England (James VI of Scotland) opened the Hampton Court conference in 1604 to religious debate. Some hoped he would have brought his Presbyterianism down intact from Edinburgh. But this was not to be. Instead they got a new translation of the Bible. James, the politician, “realised that a single Bible, ultimately authorised and controlled by the King himself, and a King steeped in Bible scholarship as he was, could play a starring role in bringing and holding his new domain together”.

The scholars worked in six committees, two based in Oxford, two in Cambridge and two in Westminster. The number of Cambridge alumni involved in the project exceeded any other university involved in the project. The Cambridge companies were responsible for translating the Old Testament books from 1 Chronicles to Song of Songs and also the Apocrypha.

The First Westminster Company was led by Dean Launcelot Andrewes, of whom it is said he “might have been interpreter general at Babel”. He entered Cambridge at sixteen, where he met and befriended Edmund Spenser, the author of The Faerie Queene. According to Melvyn Bragg in The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611–2011, it appears Andrewes was studious and “avoided games of ordinary recreation”. This is unlike a fellow translator, Richard Thomson, Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, “who hob-nobbed with the fast set in London (where he rarely went to bed sober) and was notorious for his witty translations of Martial’s most obscene epigrams”. Andrewes climbed rapidly up the clerical ladder until he became Dean of Westminster and one of the twelve chaplains to Elizabeth I.

Winchester College, the school of Lord Wavell (the general), Douglas Jardine (the infamous Test cricket captain), Tim Brooke-Taylor (the comedian), Hugh Gaitskell (nearly a Labour Prime Minister), Willie Whitelaw (a Deputy Prime Minister) and Henry Addington (its only Prime Minister, in 1801) produced five of the translators. The school still flourishes. To accentuate his intellectual prowess, it was chosen as the school of Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister with his First in Classics from Baillie College (sic), Oxford. It could have had six with Thomas James (a scholar in 1596) but Sir Thomas Bodley considered the Oxford University library catalogue more important than another translation of the Bible.

A letter from Thomas Bilson to Thomas Lake names George Ryves as an overseer for the Second Westminster Company, responsible for the Epistles. Ryves was at that time Warden of New College, Oxford, but had been previously Sub-Warden at Winchester.

There is the shadowy “Mr Fairclough”, who was a member of the First Oxford Company, responsible for the Old Testament from Isaiah to Malachi. He is believed to have been Richard Fairclowe, who entered Winchester aged twelve in 1656. He proceeded as scholar and Fellow of New College and was during the translation Rector of Bucknell in Oxfordshire.

Arthur Lake was admitted to the college on Christmas Day, 1581, at twelve. He went up to New College as a scholar and subsequently Fellow (1589–1600). His rise in church and state then was steady: Rector of Havant and then Chilcomb, Archdeacon of Surrey, Fellow of Winchester (admitted June 16, 1600), Warden of New College, Master of St Cross, Dean of Worcester, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Keeper of the Great Seal in 1616. He had the advantage of being the younger brother of James’s Secretary of State, Sir Thomas Lake. Arthur Lake was drafted in to the Second Westminster Company. 

Thomas Bilson was involved with the translation from the start. He was present, together with Archbishop Richard Bancroft and Miles Smith, at the King’s interrogation of leading Puritans on the second day of the Hampton Court conference. Towards the end of the translation, Bilson, with Smith, is said to have put the finishing touches to the text before it was sent to Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, for his fiat. Bilson is thought to have been responsible for the Epistle Dedicatory and for the insertion of chapter headings, though not to have been actively engaged in the translation because he suffered from sciatica, arthritis, vertigo, tinnitus and “many obstructions and extreme windiness”.

Bilson (1546/7–1616) entered Winchester as a scholar and proceeded to New College, becoming a Fellow. He resigned his fellowship in 1572, having taken up a teaching post at Winchester. Following the visitation in 1570–71 of Bishop Robert Horne, designed to eradicate any lingering Roman Catholicism, Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to the Fellows saying that only Bilson’s appointment would “satisfie our expectation”. Bilson resigned as headmaster in 1579 to concentrate on theological study, but was elected Warden in 1581, and was the first married holder of that post (those were the days). In 1596 he was made Bishop of Worcester, and was translated to the see of Winchester the following year.

He assisted Sir Robert Cecil in resolving the delicate problem of persuading Elizabeth I to agree to the appointment of John Harmar as his successor. John Harmar was born of unknown parentage at Newbury in Berkshire and entered Winchester as a scholar in 1569. Three years later he was a scholar at New College, graduating in 1577 and elected a Fellow. Anthony Wood records that he was “always accounted a most solid theologist admirably well read in the fathers and schoolmen, and in his young years a subtle Aristotelian”.

His first published work, an English translation of Calvin’s sermons on the Ten Commandments, appeared in 1579 and was dedicated to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The preface records that Leicester’s patronage had allowed Harmar to study at Winchester and Oxford. Leicester had apparently persuaded Elizabeth to support Harmar’s entry as a Scholar at both of William of Wykeham’s colleges (Wykeham, born in 1320, founded Winchester College and New College, Oxford; pupils of Winchester have always been known as Wykehamists).

Harmar travelled on the continent some time before 1581, where he disputed at Paris with Catholic theologians and stayed some time at Geneva, where he got to know the biblical scholar Theodore Beza. On March 25, 1585, Harmar was appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, a position he held for five years. In 1595 he was responsible for the first Greek book printed at Oxford: an edition of six sermons of John Chrysostom (the eloquent Early Church Father). In 1596 he was elected Warden, a post he held until his death. The election followed an unexpected contest.

When Bilson was made Bishop of Worcester, Elizabeth I saw the opportunity of adding the Winchester wardenship to her list of prerogatives. Claiming that the previous posts of successful candidates to bishoprics became the gifts of the crown, she nominated her chaplain, Henry Cotton. Cotton was ineligible, according to the Statutes, being neither a Scholar nor a Fellow of either of Wykeham’s two foundations. The Winchester Fellows put up an alternative candidate, George Ryves, the Sub-Warden. Elizabeth, irritated by the opposition, issued Letters Patent appointing Cotton and mandated the Bishop of Winchester to induct him. Ryves rather speciously claimed that the outgoing Bilson had not yet resigned as Warden, though he had already been consecrated Bishop of Worcester. When Cotton arrived with the royal mandate, the Fellows simply refused to let him into the college. Eventually Elizabeth agreed to Harmar’s election.

In 1597 Harmar had a study built over the old bakehouse. It is a substantial room with a handsome oriel window, under which Harmar had inset a stone commemorating the extension. In this room, as a member of the Second Oxford Company, responsible for the Gospels, Acts and Revelation, he started work on his major contribution to the religious, literary and cultural life of England.

Harmar cunningly persuaded Old Wykehamists to provide an ideal library for a Translator. When the Bodleian Library opened in 1602 it had about 2000 books—in the late sixteenth century, most college libraries at Cambridge and Oxford had between 250 and 500 books. Under Harmar’s wardenship, the Winchester library, with more than 700 books, became far larger than virtually all Oxford and Cambridge colleges. He died in October 1613, and is buried in the chapel of New College. He left his collection of foreign-language Bibles to Winchester. 

Robert Gordon, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge University, wrote in CAM Magazine this year: 

Soon after the New English Bible New Testament was published in 1961, C.S. Lewis remarked, a little inelegantly, to T.S. Eliot, “Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated!” Nevertheless, the publication of the KJB remains one of the greatest events in world publishing history, with the version eventually becoming the main conduit of the biblical message in English for the next two or three centuries. The influence of the KJB permeates our language, literature, music (Handel’s Messiah, mainly based on the KJB, is perhaps the best-known example), and much more. 

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1953 she swore an oath on the King James Bible. As Melvyn Bragg points out, in America, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President on the King James Bible, as were George Washington, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama: 

This is no mere ceremonial token in the United Kingdom or in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere. The binding ritual signifies and honours a bond of faith and an acknowledgement of the unique reach and power of this book. 

Here is a small selection of the many common idioms which have their origins in the Authorised Version of the Bible: “man of war”, “three score and ten”, “my brother’s keeper”, “put words into someone’s mouth”, “see the writing on the wall”, “a thorn in the flesh”, “a fly in the ointment”, “a man after our own heart”, “the salt of the earth”, “a two-edged sword”, “a rod of iron”, “the skin of his teeth”, “let there be light”, “how are the mighty fallen”, “so help me God”, “new wine in old bottles”, “fight the good fight”, “fell flat on his face”, “ye of little faith”, “sour grapes”, “King of Kings”, “go from strength to strength”, “when the blind lead the blind”, “sick unto death”, “broken hearted”, “clear eyed”, “powers that be”, “And the word was made flesh”, “Song of Songs”, “I am the way, the truth and the light”, and “And the word was with God; And the word was God”.

Christopher Dawson wrote on the late Earl of Harewood in the October issue.