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

the Fortune, modelled on the Globe, and the air was thick with stench from the seventy breweries in the parish. This was the London of Grub Street, not yet filled with scribblers for the press, but with the diseased poor. No part of London suffered more horrifyingly in the plague of 1603. ‘Open graves where sundry are buried together’ were dug in the parish, ‘an hundred hungry graves each to be filled with 60 bodies’. The graves, Thomas Dekker, the sardonic, sententious, gossiping newsmonger of plague London, wrote, were ‘like little cellars, piling up forty or fifty in a Pit’. At the beginning of the year, there were about 4,000 people in Lancelot Andrewes’s parish. By December 1603, 2,878 of them had been killed by the disease.

      Andrewes wasn’t there. He had previously attended to the business of the parish, insisting that the altar rails should be retained in the church (which a strict Puritan would have removed), doubling the amount of communion wine that was consumed (for him, Christianity was more than a religion of the word) and composing a Manual for the Sick, a set of religious reassurances, beginning with a quotation from Kings: ‘Set thy house in order, for thou shalt die.’ And he certainly preached at St Giles’s from time to time. But throughout the long months of the plague in 1603, he never once visited his parish.

      It was generally understood that by far the best way to avoid catching the plague was to leave the city. Contemporary medical theory was confused between the idea of a disease spreading by contagion and by people breathing foul air, but the lack of certainty didn’t matter: the solution was the same. Go to the country; fewer people, cleaner air. From late May onwards, James and his followers had been circling London, staying at Hampton Court and Windsor, hunting at Woodstock in Oxfordshire or at Royston in Hertfordshire, staying at Farnham, Basing, Wilton and Winchester. It was, as Cecil described it, ‘a camp volant, which every week dislodgeth’. For the king to absent himself (even though the crowds accompanying his travels took the plague with them, infecting one unfortunate town after another) was only politic. But for the vicar of a parish to do so was another question.

      The mortality had spread to Westminster. In the parish of St Margaret, in which the Abbey and Westminster School both lie, dogs were killed in the street and their bodies burnt, month after month, a total of 502 for the summer. The outbreak was nothing like as bad as in Cripplegate, but Andrewes, who as dean was responsible for both Abbey and school, with its 160 pupils, was not to be found there either. He had ordered the college closed for the duration and had gone down himself to its ‘pleasant retreat at Chiswick, where the elms afforded grateful shade in summer and “a retiring place” from infection’. He might well have walked down there, as he often did, along the breezy Thameside path through Chelsea and Fulham ‘with a brace of young fry, and in that wayfaring leisure had a singular dexterity to fill those narrow vessels with a funnel’. He was lovely to the boys. ‘I never heard him utter so much as a word of austerity among us,’ one of his ex-pupils remembered. The Abbey papers still record the dean’s request in July 1603 for ‘a butler, a cooke, a carrier, a skull and royer’ – these last two oarsmen for the Abbey boat – to be sent down to Chiswick with the boys. Richard Hakluyt, historian of the great Elizabethan mariners, and Hadrian à Saravia, another of the Translators, signed these orders as prebendaries of the Abbey. Here, the smallness of the Jacobean establishment comes suddenly into focus. Among the Westminster boys this summer, just eleven years old, was the future poet and divine George Herbert, the brilliant son of a great aristocratic family, his mother an intimate of John Donne’s. From these first meetings in a brutal year, Herbert would revere and love Andrewes for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, in Cripplegate, the slum houses were boarded up, the poor died and in the streets the fires burned. Every new case of the disease was to be marked by the ringing of a passing bell down the street. Each death and burial was rung out too so that ‘the doleful and almost universal and continual ringing and tolling of bells’ marked the infected parishes. From far out in the fields, you could hear London mourning its dead. In the week of 16 September, the outbreak would peak at 3,037 dead. Proportionately, it was a scale of destruction far worse than anything during the Blitz.

      Was Andrewes’s departure for Chiswick acceptable behaviour? Not entirely. There was the example of the near-saintly Thomas Morton, one of John Donne’s friends and the rector of Long Marston outside York, later a distinguished bishop, who, in the first flush of this plague epidemic as it attacked York in the summer of 1602, had sent all his servants away, to save their lives, and attended himself to the sick and dying in the city pesthouse. Morton slept on a straw bed with the victims, rose at four every morning, was never in bed before ten at night, and travelled to and from the countryside, bringing in the food for the dying on the crupper of his saddle.

      Alongside this, Andrewes’s elm-shaded neglect of the Cripplegate disaster looks shameful. While he was at Chiswick, he preached a sermon on 21 August that compounded the crime. ‘The Rasor is hired for us,’ he told his congregation, Hakluyt and Herbert perhaps among them, ‘that sweeps away a great number of haires at once.’ Plague was a sign of God’s wrath provoked by men’s ‘own inventions’, the taste for novelty, for specious newness, which was so widespread in the world. The very word ‘plague’ – and there is something unsettling about this pedantic scholarship in the face of catastrophe – came from the Latin plaga meaning ‘a stroke’. It was ‘the very handy-worke of GOD’. He admitted that there was a natural cause involved in the disease but it was also the work of a destroying angel. ‘There is no evill but it is a sparke of God’s wrath.’ Religion, he said, was filled by Puritan preachers with ‘new tricks, opinions and fashions, fresh and newly taken up, which their fathers never knew of’. The people of England now ‘think it a goodly matter to be wittie, and to find out things our selves to make to our selves, to be Authors, and inventors of somewhat, that so we may seem to be as wise as GOD, if not wiser’. What could be more wicked than the idea of being an Author? Let alone wittie? Newness was the sin and novelty was damnable. ‘That Sinn may cease, we must be out of love with our own inventions and not goe awhoring after them … otherwise, his anger will not be turned away, but his hand stretched out still.’

      The educated, privileged and powerful churchman preaches his own virtue and ignores his pastoral duties, congratulating himself on his own salvation. The self-serving crudity of this stance did not escape the attentions of the Puritans. If Andrewes sincerely believed that the plague was a punishment for sin and ‘novelty’, and if he was guiltless on that score, then why had he run away to Chiswick? Surely someone of his purity would have been immune in the city? And if his pastoral duties led him to the stinking death pits of Cripplegate, as they surely did, why was he not there? Did Andrewes, in other words, really believe what he was saying about the omnipotent wrath of the Almighty?

      In a way he didn’t; and his hovering between a vision of overwhelming divine authority and a more practical understanding of worldly realities, in some ways fudging the boundaries between those two attitudes, reveals the man. Henoch Clapham, the angry pamphleteer, lambasted Andrewes in his Epistle Discoursing upon the Present Pestilence. All Londoners, Andrewes included, should behave as though plague was not contagious. Everybody should attend all the funerals. There was no need to run away. It was a moral disease. If you were innocent you were safe. And not to believe that was itself a sin. How innocent was Andrewes in running to save his own skin? Did the innocent require an elm-tree shade? Clapham was slapped into prison for asking these questions. To suggest that the Dean of Westminster was a self-serving cheat was insubordinate and unacceptable. Andrewes interrogated him there in a tirade of anger and attempted to impose on him a retraction. Clapham had to agree (in the words written by Andrewes):

      That howsoever there is no mortality, but by and from a supernatural cause, so yet it is not without concurrence of natural causes also … That a faithful Christian man, whether magistrate or minister, may in such times hide or withdraw himself, as well corporeally as spiritually, and use local flight to a more healthful place (taking sufficient order for the discharge of his function).

      Clapham refused to sign this and stayed in prison for eighteen months until he finally came up with a compromise he could accept: there were two sorts