I

In a celebrated moment on Monday 16 January 1604, the second full day of the Hampton Court conference, James i readily agreed to John Rainolds's request for a new translation of the Bible. Rainolds's proposal was unexpected, as it had not featured in Puritan petitions prior to the conference, and may have been intended to please James and to taunt the establishment bishops. The king reacted enthusiastically since, as Rainolds surely knew, he was much invested in biblical translation. Just three years earlier, at the General Assembly in Burntisland, James had ‘earnestly’ advocated a new translation for the Scottish Church, and later undertook to translate the Psalms, which (with assistance) posthumously appeared under his name in 1631.Footnote ⁵ From this we might reasonably presume that James i took an active supervisory role in the new English translation. Initially, this was clearly the case. The king formally appointed the translators, contributed to the fifteen rules that they were to follow, required that they receive financial support from bishops and cathedral chapters, and ordered that prebends and parsonages to the value of £20 or more be earmarked for them.Footnote ⁶ His assistant in all this was Bishop Richard Bancroft of London, soon to be promoted to the vacant see of Canterbury. In July 1604 Bancroft informed the Heads of Houses at Cambridge that ‘you will scarcely conceive how earnest his Majesty is to have this work begun’ and noted that James ‘rejoyceth more’ about the new translation than the peace treaty recently concluded with Spain. But thereafter the trail goes cold.Footnote ⁷ The only other piece of evidence of James i’s involvement in the translation is a letter of December 1608 when William Eyre informed James Ussher that the king had ordered, via Archbishop Bancroft, that the translation ‘shalbe finished and printed’.Footnote ⁸

Fresh evidence helps to fill out our knowledge of the translation's progress, chiefly two letters to John Harmar, dated 20 June 1606 and 12 June 1607.Footnote ⁹ John Harmar was Warden of Winchester College, and a member of the 2nd Oxford company, one of the six translation teams. The group included Sir Henry Savile, and it was responsible for translating the Gospels, Acts and Revelation. The first letter was written by Archbishop Bancroft, the second by Henry Airay, vice-chancellor of Oxford, and both letters were urgent appeals for the 2nd Company to move on faster. The prompt for the letter from Bancroft was an exchange between the king and the House of Commons in May 1606. MPs had presented a number of religious grievances, first raised at the Hampton Court conference, with the request that he restore the more temperate of the ministers deprived for nonconformity in 1604–5; in response, James reminded MPs that he had listened to the Puritan case at the conference, and those who had been subsequently ejected had defied its decisions on discipline.Footnote ¹⁰ He may have been mindful that the fulfillment of another decision at the conference, to provide a new translation of the Bible, would strengthen his position to resist re-opening the religious settlement agreed there. The second letter, almost exactly a year later, was an attempt by Vice-Chancellor Airay to arrange a meeting in Oxford between Harmar and Savile, both of whom resided elsewhere. Any further delays, Airay warned, might bring ‘great displeasure from both his majestie and from my lord grace of Canterbury’. The slow pace of the project led Sir Thomas Ridley, chancellor of Winchester diocese, to predict in November 1608 that the translation ‘wil never come out’ or at least not for many years.Footnote ¹¹ If this view was gaining currency then it may not have been a coincidence that just a few weeks later the king ordered that the translation should be now finished. This instruction appears to have been decisive.

Hitherto it has never been clear when the panel of revisers convened in London to review the drafts of the six teams of translators, nor for how long.Footnote ¹² The answer seems to be between 1609 and very early 1611. A London newsletter of 23 November 1609 reported that ‘the blessed worke of the translating of the Bible is still going happily forward’; the Old Testament was now finished ‘and the translators going nowe in hand with the newe’.Footnote ¹³ The Apocrypha portion of the Old Testament, in fact, was still being revised as late as December 1610 or very early 1611, and the translation must have been sent to press shortly thereafter.Footnote ¹⁴ That James i’s own interest in biblical translation itself remained undiminished is captured in an entry in Isaac Casaubon's diary for January 1611. On one Sunday afternoon at Whitehall James went through the marginal notes of the Catholic Douai English translation of the Old Testament, very recently published and an obvious rival to the forthcoming Jacobean translation. Bishop Montagu read out extracts, which the king censured, with responses from Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Neile, Casaubon and others. Such a display of theological acumen by the king had Casaubon almost swooning.Footnote ¹⁵ Does all this mean that we should swallow the claim, in the dedicatory epistle of the new translation, that James i ‘did never desist, to urge and to excite those to whom it was commended, that the worke might be hastened, and that the businesse might be expedited in so decent a maner, as a matter of such importance might iustly require’?Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, this is highly questionable.

While too much should not be built on negative evidence, it is striking how the new translation slipped into the public domain in 1611 without any comment in newsletters or ambassadorial reports. No one has been able to establish its actual date of publication, although we can now propose the summer of 1611, since Worcester Cathedral purchased a copy at some point between September and November, while James Ussher requested a copy in a letter of 4 October 1611.Footnote ¹⁷ It seems likely that James i’s attention had switched to other, more pressing matters: first the Oath of Allegiance campaign from 1607 onwards, with the king writing two books, orchestrating a team of divines to support his position, and in May 1609 personally laying the foundation stone of Chelsea College, set up in order to rebut Roman error; and secondly, for a year from August 1611, a likely date of the Bible's publication, opposing Conrad Vorstius’ appointment at Leiden, so that when Casaubon visited him in September 1611, James could talk about nothing else.Footnote ¹⁸ It is curious too that, despite royal condemnation of the Geneva Bible at the Hampton Court conference, it continued to be published by the royal printing house until 1616: did James not know, or know and not care? The absence of a general injunction requiring the purchase of the new translation in the parishes is also significant, since the likelihood of an order had been trailed since the conference itself. There, according to William Barlow, James i stated that the whole Church would be ‘bound’ to the new translation ‘and none other’. Barlow's recollection on this point is endorsed by Patrick Galloway's account, written just days after the conference and double-checked by the king, and by Thomas Sparke, a Puritan delegate at the conference, who in an semi-official tract of 1607 referred to the forthcoming translation as ‘the onely authenticall translation to be used in our churches’.Footnote ¹⁹ In short, it seems likely that by 1611 James i had become semi-detached from the translation project. This is not to say that he ignored the Bible when it finally appeared. The king used it (and other translations) in his later scriptural writings;Footnote ²⁰ Prince Henry possessed a magnificent folio of 1611, bound in red gold-tooled morocco leather, while Princess Elizabeth evidently owned a first quarto of 1612, both perhaps presents from their father.Footnote ²¹ Instead there is a case for seeing Archbishop Bancroft as taking a much more major role in directing the translation than we have hitherto allowed; and that his death in 1610 may account for the absence of an official requirement that parishes buy the Bible.

That Bancroft was centrally involved in setting up the teams of translators, and circulating the rules of engagement, is well-known; as he wrote to the vice-chancellor of Cambridge on 30 August 1604, ‘I have written so many letters about this matter of translation, as keeping no copies of them I do confound my self, forgetting what and to whom I have written.’Footnote ²² He also intervened three times in 1606–8 on the behalf of James to urge on the project: in 1606, indeed, writing to all members of the 2nd company.Footnote ²³ Yet was Bancroft here anything more than being a dutiful royal secretary? He had, after all, initially opposed the project both at the conference and afterwards in private, fearing that it would undermine the reputation of the Bishops’ Bible, which James had implicitly criticised at the conference, and play into the hands of Catholics, who would satirise the Church of England for its inconstancy. His change of heart may be a result of the notable decision, by July 1604, which was perhaps his doing, not to produce a brand new translation so much as a revision of the Bishops’ Bible which, as the instruction read, was to be ‘as little altered as the truth of the original will permit’.Footnote ²⁴ It seems that over time the king's enthusiasm waned and Bancroft came to take the chief role in driving forward the project. In his letter to Harmar of 1607, Airay stated that it was Bancroft (rather than James and Bancroft) ‘who is very earnest for the finishinge of that worke’.Footnote ²⁵ Bishops Bilson and Smith were entrusted with a final review of the new translation, but there is a tradition dating from the mid-century that Bancroft was the last to approve it and made fourteen alterations in the New Testament before it was printed.Footnote ²⁶ We also know that James had given Bancroft the right to print the new translation, which he sold to Robert Barker for £4,000. Bancroft's importance was acknowledged by Miles Smith in the preface to the King James Bible, who commended him as ‘the chiefe overseer and ἐργοδίώκτηϛ [task-master] under his Maiestie, to whom not onely we, but also our whole Church was much bound’.Footnote ²⁷

Bancroft died in November 1610, before the new translation was published. In the last years of his life, he had become alarmed at the threat from Roman Catholicism while remaining ever vigilant towards nonconformity. He was responsible in 1608–9 for the decision to collect together the works of John Jewel, the champion of the Elizabethan settlement against Rome, and hired Daniel Featley to produce an abbreviated version of Laurence Humphrey's life of Jewel to preface the collection; Featley's life emphasised Jewel's pastoral work as bishop as well as his scholarship, a model of preaching prelacy against the detractors of the episcopal order. In July 1610 Bancroft instructed the bishops to see the Works of Jewel purchased by every parish across the country; and over the next five years, most parishes were to acquire a copy.Footnote ²⁸ Since Bancroft was concerned about furnishing churches with key texts to buttress English Protestantism, he might very well have used exactly the same command structure, had he lived, with the new translation of that most central of texts, the Bible, in 1611.

In the event, his successor was a translator, George Abbot, in such high standing with James i in 1611–13 that, had he requested such a general injunction, the king would have endorsed it. Why he chose not to do so is a mystery. Was he mindful of the high price of folios, at between 37s. and 56s., which was twice the cost of Jewel's Works?Footnote ²⁹ If so, it did not deter two of his closest allies, Bishop King of London and Bishop Smith of Gloucester, from requiring its purchase by all parishes in their jurisdiction.Footnote ³⁰ More persuasive is the suggestion that Abbot was anxious to maintain harmonious Anglo-Scottish relations.Footnote ³¹

In 1610 Andros Hart, the king's printer in Edinburgh, had published a folio edition of the Geneva-Tomson-Junius Bible for the first time since the original printing of the Geneva Bible in Scotland in 1579, a sign perhaps that the projected Scottish translation of 1601 had already been abandoned. This edition of 1610 appears to have been published with the consent of the Scottish Kirk, and quite possibly at its instigation. Thus in the autumn of 1610 the Lothian synod ordered the purchase of Hart's Bible, and in April 1611 the synod of Fife followed suit, under pain of a £6 penalty, which was enforced by Archbishop Gledstaines of St Andrews over the next few months.Footnote ³² It is hard not to regard the timing of this reprint as a pre-emptive strike, just as the King James Bible, intended to supersede its rival the Geneva Bible, was about to appear. Whatever the English were to do with their new translation, the Scottish would stick with their own preferred version. Archbishop Abbot, we should recall, was deeply committed to improving relations between the two Churches of Scotland and England. In 1608 he had travelled to Scotland as James i’s emissary to help persuade Presbyterians to accept the re-introduction of diocesan episcopacy, and won admiration for his diplomacy, from Presbyterians as well as the king; and he owed his rapid promotion to the episcopate in 1609 and thence to Canterbury in 1611 largely to the success of this mission and to the backing of James's Scottish favourites, the earl of Dunbar and Robert Carr.Footnote ³³ So it may well be that in 1611 Abbot, with his close ties with the leaders of the Scottish Church, was keen to avoid the embarrassment of both Churches imposing rival translations, the English version a conscious repudiation of that re-adopted in Scotland. If the theory works, Abbot may have been content with the gradual introduction of the King James Bible into English parishes, leaving the timing to the decision of individual bishops.Footnote ³⁴

But what of the ambiguous status of the King James Bible? It has often been argued that the King James Bible was never formally authorised since there was no proclamation requiring its use nor any royal instruction to parishes for its purchase; moreover its title page read ‘appointed to be read in churches’, meaning ‘provided’ or ‘assigned’, which, it has been claimed, was weaker than the Bishops’ Bible, which carried the words (from 1584, at least) ‘authorised and appointed to be read in churches’.Footnote ³⁵ Perhaps too much has been invested in these fine distinctions; more telling is the frontispiece to the new translation. Whereas the Great Bible (1539) and the Bishops’ Bible (1568) had carried royal portraits of Henry viii and Elizabeth i on their frontispieces, as visual representations of royal authorisation, that of the King James Bible depicted the Holy Trinity, Moses and Aaron, and the four Evangelists. James i was conspicuous by his absence.Footnote ³⁶ Contrariety, there is plenty of evidence that some contemporaries did see the new translation as ‘authorised’, given James i’s widely-reported sponsoring of it at Hampton Court, and his public undertaking there that, once the text was finalised, it would be ratified by royal authority.Footnote ³⁷ Certainly the king's commissioning of the project and its publication with the title page stating that it was ‘newly translated’ by ‘his maiesties speciall commandement’ was evidently regarded as sufficient authorisation by many bishops, divines and parish officials. A number of ecclesiastical ordinaries, like Bishop Smith of Gloucester, referred in their visitation articles to the ‘new translation lately set forth by his maiesties authority’ (and Smith's voice carries weight, as a translator and author of the preface to the Bible);Footnote ³⁸ Smith's phrase was also used by John White in an anti-Catholic tract of 1614, while in the same year, in a diocesan mandate, Archbishop Matthew of York simply called it ‘the kings Bible’.Footnote ³⁹ Churchwardens’ presentments in several dioceses sometimes referred to the new Bible as ‘the king's translation’, or ‘lately set forth by his maiesties authoritie’ or else ‘allowed and commanded by his majesty’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This took visual form at St Mary's Lancaster, with a pulpit erected in 1619, two years after James i’s visit on his return from Scotland. The tester or sounding-board of the pulpit, recently reconstructed along the original lines, carries a carved copy of a Bible surmounted by the crown, a tribute to James i as supreme governor and surely a monument to the new translation as authorised by the king.Footnote ⁴¹ This widespread belief that the new translation was authorised matters to us, since it provided the legality for bishops to require its purchase and replace a serviceable older translation, and it explains why no churchwarden challenged their right to do so.Footnote ⁴² It is true that the ‘authorised version’ as a phrase only dates from the 1820s, but its meaning was familiar to many Jacobeans.

II

In the absence of a royal injunction for parishes to buy the new translation, how rapidly did folio versions of the King James Bible reach parish lecterns and become part of regular worship? Diocesan and parochial evidence indicates that the acquisition of folio or ‘church’ Bibles was often quite protracted and stretched, in some dioceses, well into the 1630s.Footnote ⁴³ There are three principal sources for this investigation: visitation articles, church court records and churchwardens’ accounts, and they need to be read together and against each other. Of the three, only visitation articles have been much consulted.Footnote ⁴⁴ These articles of enquiry, issued by bishops and other ecclesiastical ordinaries, suggest that there was little concern to see parishes purchase the new translation: merely 35 per cent mentioned it in 1612–24, rising to 50 per cent for 1625–41.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such bald figures are somewhat misleading, since these articles were often formulaic, and sometimes adopted wholesale from earlier visitations, and so do not necessarily disclose the priorities of the visitor, which might be read out or circulated in a ‘charge’ at meetings during the visitation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Articles of enquiry need supplementing by churchwardens' presentments recorded in consistory court and visitation books, and by surveys of church furnishings which took place in some jurisdictions. These court records, in turn, are complemented by evidence of the purchase and selling of Bibles in churchwardens' accounts, even though these survive for only about 8 per cent of English parishes.Footnote ⁴⁷

Some parishes bought the new translation at once, without prompting from higher authority. A good example, albeit in a highly unusual parish, is the university church of St Mary the Great in Cambridge, which bought its copy very shortly after publication, a thoroughly appropriate acquisition given the university's immense contribution to the translation project.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, given the costs involved, most waited to be prodded. The bishops themselves moved at very different speeds. Bishop John King of London, not a translator but an intimate of Archbishop Abbot, was the first to require purchase by the parishes at his primary visitation of September 1612, and large numbers of parishes duly complied.Footnote ⁴⁹ Bishop Smith of Gloucester, a translator and author of the preface, did likewise at his primary visitation in 1613: some 260 Gloucestershire parishes, about 95 per cent of the total, were ordered to acquire a copy of the new translation within a month or two, with Smith himself often presiding in court. Churchwardens who would not comply were threatened with punitive fines of 20s.; many returns were submitted certifying the purchase of the book, and almost all the surviving churchwardens’ accounts for the diocese record expenditure on a new Bible in the years 1613–15.Footnote ⁵⁰ More common was the gradualist approach adopted in dioceses such as Bath and Wells, Exeter and Norwich, where individual parishes were pushed to buy the new translation over more than a decade from 1612 to the mid-1620s, usually on the basis of churchwardens’ presentments but also, in the archdeaconry of Norwich, through annual inspections of church fabric and furnishings.Footnote ⁵¹ At Bath and Wells, and elsewhere, parishes which pleaded that their Bible was in good condition, though not of the new translation, or else that they were too poor to afford the new translation, were sometimes excused.Footnote ⁵² The first unequivocal sign that Archbishop Abbot himself was instructing parishes to buy the new translation was not until 1616, in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield during a vacancy, which was then followed up by the in-coming bishop, John Overall.Footnote ⁵³

Elsewhere, the approach was slower still. In Peterborough diocese there is little sign of pressure on the parishes to acquire the new translation until 1619, a campaign which continued intermittently into the mid-1630s.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is not an isolated example. In the early 1630s parishes in Durham diocese were acquiring the new Bible or else being presented for not possessing it including, somewhat surprisingly, John Cosin's church of Brancepeth, in about 1634.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 1632–3 a run of parishes in Leicester archdeaconry still lacked the new translation, while in 1636 14 per cent of parishes in Chichester archdeaconry were ordered to buy a copy of the King James Bible.Footnote ⁵⁶ St Stephen's Norwich, which had been repeatedly instructed to acquire a copy, finally succumbed in 1638–9.Footnote ⁵⁷ All this suggests that the completion of a fitful Jacobean drive to install the King James Bible in parish churches is a neglected, albeit fairly minor, element in Laud's reformation of the English Church in the 1630s. The Laudian project, of course, extended across the British churches. The Scottish Church had continued to use the Geneva Bible throughout James vi’s reign, and this may have also been the case in Ireland. In the Irish canons (1635) and Scottish canons (1636) every parish church was required to possess a copy of the King James Bible. The latter had been printed at Edinburgh for the first time in 1633, to coincide with Charles i's coronation, with subsequent editions in 1634 and 1637–8, and the Scottish prayer book of 1637 incorporated its translation for its readings of the Gospels, Epistles and Psalms. However there is little sign that the King James Bible was much used before the Covenanter revolution of 1638–9 swept away Laudianism and with it the new canons and prayer book.Footnote ⁵⁸

The slow purchase of church Bibles by the parishes provides a fresh view of its publishing history before 1640. Five folio versions of the King James Bible were printed between 1611 and 1617, and then there was a gap of twelve years before the next, followed by a further seven further editions and reprints, printed in London and Cambridge, between 1629 and 1640.Footnote ⁵⁹ Folio Bibles were purchased by a range of institutions, including the chapel royal, cathedral and collegiate churches, and by individuals such as the scholar and bibliophile Philip Bisse, but the single largest market was the English parishes.Footnote ⁶⁰ The relatively slow uptake in acquiring church Bibles in the 1610s implies that the twelve-year secession in printing them was not because the potential market was sated, as has been suggested, but rather because there was still stock available as increasing numbers of parishes between 1617 and 1629 adopted the new translation. By the late 1620s, however, demand had overtaken supply. Here the subsequent Laudian drive to ensure that all parishes owned a King James Bible is one explanation for the numerous folio editions from 1629 onwards, though London's attempt to undercut their rivals at Cambridge may be another significant driver.Footnote ⁶¹

III

Church court records and churchwardens' accounts throw some light on attitudes towards the King James Bible in the parishes. A few wealthy parishioners stepped forward to buy a copy for their parish,Footnote ⁶² but more common was a reluctance by churchwardens to purchase the new Bible. Some had to be cited repeatedly before they would comply;Footnote ⁶³ others claimed that they had an adequate edition, even though it was not the King James version, or else pleaded poverty.Footnote ⁶⁴ No doubt the price was a major deterrent. Churchwardens’ accounts allow us, for the first time, to establish some firm data on typical prices for the two types of bound folio volume, one large and the other smaller and cheaper. They ranged from 56s. down to 37s., with slight regional variations, the average representing twice the cost of Jewel's Works of 1609; the real cost was lower than this, since many parishes sold off their old Bible, perhaps to local clergy, for about 10s.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, buying a church Bible could generate friction since it often required a special parish rate to be levied, which might lead to disputes over individual contributions, and to presentments in the church courts.Footnote ⁶⁶ For these reasons, it is no surprise that some churchwardens sat on their hands and awaited direct orders to purchase the new translation. This opposition seems to be practical rather than ideological. Indeed, on the rare occasions that we learn which translation these laggard parishes had been using, it seems that it was a mix: in the diocese of Peterborough, with a sizeable Puritan presence, there was a preference for the Geneva Bible, but a number of other churches used the Henrician Great Bible or the Bishops' Bible.Footnote ⁶⁷

The fear of hostility to the new translation was articulated in the preface to the King James Bible: ‘Many mens mouths have been open a good while (and yet are not stopped) with speeches about the translation so long in hand, or rather perusals of translations made before: and aske what may be the reason, what the necessitie of the employment: Hath the Church bene deceived, say they, all this while?’ Perhaps this is why its author, Miles Smith, gave his flock in Gloucestershire no choice but to purchase the new translation. Yet Smith went on, inadvertently, to justify this reluctance to acquire the new Bible with the famous statement that the aim of the translators was not ‘to make of a bad one a good one’ but to make ‘a good one better’; in other words, if the Bishops’ Bible was ‘a good’ translation, why not retain it, at least until the volume wore out and needed replacing?Footnote ⁶⁸ Thomas Fuller, writing in the 1650s, suggested that ‘some of the brethren’ (in other words, Puritans) disliked the King James Bible ‘suspecting it would abate the repute of that of Geneva’, and reported that others regretted the loss of the marginal notes, complaining ‘that they could not see into the sense of the scripture for lack of the spectacles of those Geneva annotations’.Footnote ⁶⁹ One answer came in 1642–9, when enterprising Dutch printers published the King James Bible with Genevan notes; the fact that the chosen text was the new translation acknowledged its broad acceptability.Footnote ⁷⁰

Fuller's observations about the Geneva notes were less pertinent to church Bibles than to personal Bibles, usually in quarto, which was the most popular format for the Geneva Bible.Footnote ⁷¹ They must be counterbalanced by the extraordinary number of editions of the King James Bible, in smaller and cheaper sizes other than folio (chiefly quartos, octavos, duodecimos), in different packages (the whole Bible, the New Testament and the ‘third part’ of the Bible) and often bound with the prayer book, for scholarly, devotional and household use. This demand started very early on, while the Geneva Bible was still being printed. Between 1612 and 1615, for example, there were ten editions in quarto and seven in octavo; while we do not know the print runs, which may have been initially small to test the market, the sheer number of editions indicates strong demand to own a copy, not necessarily to replace the Geneva or Bishops’ Bible, which presumably many had, but to add to them. There were about 140 editions of the King James Bible in 1611–40, as many as all other versions since 1535, and nearly all these 140 editions were non-folio.Footnote ⁷² Many of the smaller formats have no indications of ownership before 1640, but there are valuable exceptions which give us some insight into their various uses. In 1631 John Fisher, a yeoman of Burton on the Wolds in Leicestershire, bought a quarto published in 1630 and it became the family Bible, listing members of the family until the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷³ An octavo of 1627 was owned by a scholar, since it contained numerous annotations in Latin and Hebrew and with references to the patristics, while the owner of another octavo of 1639 may have been a lay person, who quoted contemporary writers in English such as Daniel Featley, Jeremy Taylor and John Boys.Footnote ⁷⁴ Justinian Isham, the future royalist, owned a duodecimo 1626 The third part of the Bible (the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon) and inscribed in it that ‘This was the only booke I carried in my pockett when I travelld beyond the seas the 22^d year of my Age’, 1633, ‘and many yeares after’; of the five books, he was particularly drawn to the Psalms.Footnote ⁷⁵

If we put the rapid sale of the smaller formats of the King James Bible against the slow and uneven dissemination of folio or church Bibles, then it may well be that for many the new translation became familiar in the home before it was heard in church, and that its broad acceptance by 1640 owed as much to personal use as it did to hearing it in public worship. Part of its appeal must be linked to its non-partisan nature: the six teams represented the full spectrum of English Protestant churchmanship and two of the four Puritan delegates at Hampton Court, Rainolds and Chaderton, were translators. So much so that John Waters, a parishioner of Yapton, Sussex and a scoffer of the godly, could claim in 1623 that ‘a company of Puritans had translated the Bible falsly and had gott the king to put his hand thereunto’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although modern scholars are quick to observe that the iconic status of the King James Bible was a creation of later generations, some contemporaries, both conformists and Puritans, did admire the new translation. Were Joseph Hall and John Day reflecting or creating opinion when in 1620 they called the translation an ‘exquisite edition’?Footnote ⁷⁷ Clearly, though, the success of the King James Bible owed most to its monopoly among Bibles printed in England after 1616–19. First, the king's printers ceased printing the Geneva Bible in 1616. Though second-hand copies could be purchased or new editions imported from abroad, the Geneva Bible was no longer as freely available as once it had been. Then, three years later, in 1619, the last edition of New Testament portion of the Bishops’ Bible was printed.Footnote ⁷⁸

So why did the royal printing house cease producing the Geneva Bible in 1616? It is sometimes suggested that James i, rather belatedly, ordered its suppression.Footnote ⁷⁹ But there is no proof of this and indeed there is evidence against the idea. At Archbishop Laud's trial in 1644, the prosecution stated that commercial not political reasons explained the demise of the Geneva Bible under James i; thereafter, copies were imported from the Low Countries, a trade which only became controversial in the 1630s, as Laud tried to eliminate it. Laud himself gave two reasons for the crackdown: first, that imported Bibles, among them the Geneva version, were better produced and cheaper than their King James equivalents, and therefore threatened to undercut the king's printers; and secondly, that Laud felt that the marginal notes were ‘more commonly used to ill purposes than formerly’, which was why High Commission was stricter than it had once been against those who imported Geneva Bibles.Footnote ⁸⁰

It appears that both the Geneva Bible, and the New Testament section of the Bishops’ Bible, were abandoned in 1616–19 for the hard-headed reason that greater profit could be made from the market with the King James Bible which, as we have already noted, was buoyant and receptive to new formats. It was a commercial decision probably taken by the new partnership running the king's printing house after 1615, with the Barkers making an unhappy alliance with John Norton and John Bill. The latter two quickly made their mark with what Rees and Wakely call ‘product innovation’, experimenting with the packages, formats and fonts of the King James Bible. Thus they launched a range of formats for its New Testament from 1615, introduced The third part of the Bible in 1616, reduced the production of the more expensive quartos in favour of a duodecimo in 1617, printed six more duodecimo editions over the next eight years, and suspended the production of the King James Bible in 1617 in folio until demand picked up. This relentless search for profit also saw both the Geneva Bible and the New Testament portion of the Bishops' Bible dropped for good.Footnote ⁸¹

IV

James i was better at initiating biblical projects than seeing them through. His sponsorship of a new Scottish translation in 1601 came to nothing, while his own translation of the Psalms was substantially the work of a collaborator and published after his death. So, too, in 1604, he sponsored a new English translation of the Bible, but then allowed Archbishop Richard Bancroft to become its effective overseer as his attention moved on to more immediate issues. Bancroft's death in November 1610, less than a year before the new translation was published, is probably why it was neither formally authorised nor required to be purchased in the parishes, for his successor, the translator George Abbot, was not prepared to damage Anglo-Scottish relations and therefore left individual bishops to determine if and when the new translation should reach the parish lecterns. It took a good thirty years for this to be accomplished across the country. In March 1642 Charles i visited the chapel of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire and was pleased to note that the Bible was the translation sponsored by his father: even by that date, the use of the King James Bible in worship could not be taken for granted.Footnote ⁸² Yet this slow dissemination of church Bibles sits uneasily with the growing acceptability of the King James version by the 1640s, when attempts either to re-introduce the Geneva Bible or to undertake a fresh translation failed. The explanation appears to be the sustained demand, in smaller formats, for the King James Bible from the 1610s, coaxed by some enterprising ‘product innovations’ by Barker, Norton and Bill. This challenges any sharp distinction between the ‘official’ King James Bible and ‘the people's’ Geneva Bible.Footnote ⁸³ The widespread ownership and use of the King James Bible in household and private study, as well its gradual appearance into public worship, meant that it would survive when episcopacy and the prayer book were abolished in the 1640s in England. Within thirty years of its publication, the English people's Bible was fast becoming the King James version.