The Elizabeth Settlement of 1559 was no such thing. It was the Elizabethan Truce, and a truce which became increasingly out of date over the course of her long reign. The enemy at the beginning of her reign was, as we have seen, the papalists: those who wanted to bring England back into communion with Rome. By the 1590s it was the Puritans: those more radical Christians who wanted to take the examples of reformation to be found in Zurich and Geneva and apply them to England.

There was another example of a thoroughly reformed church, closer to home. The Church of Scotland, by law established, was presbyterian in governance and doctrine, “one of the best reformed churches”¹. Perhaps when the King of Scotland became King of England as well he might bring some of his presbyterian ethos with him. Elizabeth died in 1603, and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. Even while he was travelling south the Puritans of England approached him. They presented him with the Millenary Petition, so-called because it was supposed to have been signed by a thousand ministers. The Petition was, as these things go, moderate and peaceful. The petitioners wanted a number of catholic hangovers from the Elizabethan Settlement to be finally removed from Church of England worship:

• the sign of the cross at baptism
• forbidding the administration of women at baptism (ie in emergencies)
• making the cap and surplice optional
• abolition of the ring in the marriage service
• restrictions on the use of music in worship
• forbidding kneeling at the name of Jesus

There were some other, godly, proposals. The Puritans wanted ministers to hold one living only, and not many parishes in plurality; that people should not be excommunicated for “trifles and twelve-penny matters”, and that only learned men, “able and sufficient”, should be admitted to ministry.

The Puritans didn’t know two things about James. First, he loved a good debate. Second, he had no intention of allowing any reforms which questioned, even remotely, the status of the monarch. To the consternation of the Bishops, he said that the Petition deserved a good discussion. Some Puritans took this as a sign of the King’s favour and began petitioning for more radical reforms. This had the expected effect on the Church: reaction. All Puritan agitating was condemned, and Archbishop Whitgift undertook a survey of all dissenters and sectaries within the province of Canterbury: know where your enemies might be.

The Conference met at Hampton Court Palace, the home of Wolsey and Henry VIII, in January 1604. The English Bishops were represented by Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Puritans by John Rainolds, fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, Dean of Lincoln, tutor to Richard Hooker and former Roman Catholic. The conference was run amicably, although it soon became apparent to the Puritans that James was more interested in arguments than outcomes. The king agreed to act against ministers not being resident in their parishes, and to improve the quality of preaching (OffPreach?), but he had no intention of budging on church discipline and ceremonies. Rainolds made a tactical error when he recommended the king set up a synod of bishops and presbyters to determine contested issues in the church. This so infuriated James that he walked out of the room, snapping ‘No bishop, no king’ as he went.

Various bits and pieces were agreed upon; commissions were to be set up to tinker with certain small reforms, only one of which was every achieved; an agreement to produce one uniform translation of the Bible led directly to the Authorised Version of 1611: the so-called “King James Bible”, which is so much a defining possession of the English speaking world.

Two different, ideologically determined translations were in use in the Church of England at the time: the Geneva Bible (with its biased explanatory notes in the margins) and the Bishop’s Bible (1568). James entrusted the task to Bancroft, who formed a network of committees to produce the new translation: six committees of fifty-four scholars in all, meeting in Oxford, Cambridge, and the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. They took as their starting point the earliest English translations of William Tyndale and was completed in five years.

Looking at the way the AV has been worshipped subsequently, it is interesting to see how little loved it was when it first appeared. It was said to be filled with ‘uncouth and obsolete expressions’, and to have ‘all the disadvantages of an old prose translation’. It wasn’t until 1760 that it had completely superceded the Bishop’s Bible or the Geneva Bible as the standard English translation (which is why Book of Common Prayer of 1662 uses Coverdale’s Great Bible translation of the psalter). Curiously, it was never “Authorized”.

1. Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The Churches in England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II: 1558-1688 v. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1996), p. 94 [↩]