The Crown and the Bible: Transcript

Includes Steven Galbraith, co-curator of the Folger Manifold Greatness exhibition and Andrew W. Mellon curator of books at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Hannibal Hamlin, co-curator of the Folger Manifold Greatness exhibition and associate professor of English at The Ohio State University; Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church, St Cross College, University of Oxford, and Julian Reid, archivist of Corpus Christi and Merton Colleges, University of Oxford, among the curators of the Bodleian Library Manifold Greatness exhibition; and Georgianna Ziegler, Louis B. Thalheimer head of reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

HANNIBAL HAMLIN: English monarchs had a complex influence on Bible translation, but it was sometimes positive and sometimes negative.

STEVEN GALBRAITH: The first monarch to actually allow an English translation was King Henry VIII, authorizing the Great Bible in 1539. It’s not until England breaks away from the Catholic Church that we’re going to have an English king or queen endorsing an English Bible.

DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: Edward VI, the little boy king in the middle of the Tudors, was really quite significant in the Reformation because he was a huge enthusiastic young Protestant.

GEORGIANNA ZIEGLER: What Edward is known for is producing the English Book of Common Prayer and that was very, very important. That was almost as important as the Bible in setting up the form of worship for the early English church.

MACCULLOCH: Queen Mary Tudor, trying to change everything back, changed the church back to its old Catholic ways, which meant that all the Protestant leaders were under threat. Many of them fled abroad, and some of the most radical among those leaders decided that one thing they would do with their exile, their twiddling their thumbs in Geneva, was to create a new translation. So, Geneva is a real new approach to biblical translation and, in a curious way, you could say that Queen Mary was responsible for that.

HAMLIN: England probably had the craziest Reformation of any country in Europe, a very indecisive shift from Catholicism to Protestantism. The religion of the country was the religion of the monarch, and because there was a rapid succession of monarchs over a relatively short time in England, and because each of these monarchs, coincidentally, had a different faith than the previous one, it was a hard time.

ZIEGLER: Elizabeth came to the throne as a much heralded Protestant queen succeeding her Catholic sister, Mary.

JULIAN REID: Hence, there was a new urgency in getting an official Protestant translation of the Bible, so we find that the bishops are commissioned to revise the Bible, to publish something that was authorized by the English crown.

ZIEGLER: This became known as the Bishops' Bible. She didn’t really go along with all of the Protestant commentary, which was rather heavy-handed, that was in the Geneva Bible.

The Folger Library has the actual copy of the Bishops' Bible, as it was called, which was presented to Queen Elizabeth by the translator. It’s bound in red velvet. It’s a huge, very heavy book that would have been used in her chapel.

But I think it was very hard for people, because as I said, it was almost like you woke up the next morning and suddenly it was Catholic and it used to be Protestant, and then suddenly it was Protestant again. And I think that that’s why, when Elizabeth first came to the throne, she said she didn’t want windows into men’s souls, that is, she didn’t want to pry too deeply. As long as people were quiet about what they were doing, and went about their business, and showed up at the official Church of England, they could do what they wanted on the side.

GALBRAITH: When King James comes to the throne in 1603, some of the Puritan leaders are asking for further reforms.

HELEN MOORE: At the Hampton Court conference in 1604, when the idea of a new translation of the Bible was proposed, James I reportedly said that any translation of the Bible would be better than the Geneva translation. And the Geneva translation has had a very mixed reception. There are those who think it is the finest English translation and that it is a great tragedy that the King James Bible was based on the Bishops' Bible, not the Geneva Bible.

MACCULLOCH: I think if I was at Hampton Court reporting at the time, I’d have said, there were two sides here. There are the bishops on one side and there are the Puritans on the other, and the Puritans are very angry and the bishops are very defensive. What’s going to happen?

REID: I think it would have been a very interesting experience to have witnessed the conference at Hampton Court in 1604, partly because everything was unknown and everything was to play for.

MACCULLOCH: Well, the result is the bishops win hands down, because the king is a sort of referee and the king lets the bishops win again and again and again. But he gives one goal, if you like, to the Puritans, and that is there will be a new translation of the English Bible.