Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. Adam Nicolson

were profoundly conservative institutions, both of which had sent to the king long and high-flown refutations of every point in the Puritans’ Millenary Petition); to be revised by the bishops (the very influence that Reynolds did not want); then given, for goodness’ sake, to the Privy Council, in effect a central censorship committee with which the government would ensure that its stamp was on the text, no deviationism or subversion allowed; and finally to James himself, whose hostility to any whiff of radicalism this afternoon had been clear enough. And this ferociously episcopal and monarchist Bible was to be the only translation that could be read in church: ‘no other’. The treasured Geneva Bible would be forced to retreat into the privacy of people’s homes and could no longer be used for public preaching.

      The deep paradox and lasting value of the King James Bible is its response to both Reynolds’s and James’s instincts. Once the cantankerous and oddly hysterical atmosphere of the conference had faded, the deeper and slower rhythms of Jacobean royal ideology took control. Those were the rhythms of James’s better side. His troubled upbringing had shaped a man with a divided nature. Later history, wanting to see him as a precursor for his son’s catastrophe, has chosen only the ridiculous aspects of James: his extravagance, his vanity, his physical ugliness, his weakness for beautiful boys, his self-inflation, his self-congratulatory argumentativeness. Some of that had been in evidence at Hampton Court. But there was another side to James which breathed dignity and richness: a desire for wholeness and consensus, for 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, that was not duplicitous, that stood outside all the corruption and rot that glimmered around him. These were the elements in James and in Jacobean court culture that came to shape the Bible which bears his name.