Power and Glory

Adam Nicolson is the grandson of writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and son of author and publisher Nigel Nicolson, so it is hardly surprising he too turned to writing. He has written some personal memoirs, biographies and history books. He is the author of one of the best history books I have ever read! Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible was published in 2004. Its American title was God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible.

I am not religious, but whether you believe its contents or not, the King James Bible contains superb prose and really beautiful language and memorable phrases. And yet, astonishingly, it was a book created by a committee. Adam Nicolson gives the reader the background of the Jacobean age – with the Gunpowder Plot, the plague, split by religious factions, murderous and intense – and shows how the age explains the book.

The sponsor and guide of the whole Bible project was the King – King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England. Intelligent, peace-loving, ugly and charmless, he saw a new translation of the Bible as a way of unifying his kingdom. The work of translation was done by about 50 scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and London. Some were clergymen, some were often drunk or muddled, others were ruthlessly ambitious and self-serving. They worked for 7 years to complete the project, and Nicolson shows us their personalities, ambitions, problems and beliefs. Somehow it all came together into a great work of prose.

Nicolson is also scathing about the modern translations that are used in most churches today. “The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness … is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority.” He says of the modern translators, “Wanting timelessness, they achieved the language of the memo.” I agree!

I love a good history book and this is one of the very best. It brings the era alive, makes you know the people involved, and keeps you gripped from the first page to the last. I lent my copy to so many friends after I read it and somehow it has never come back to me. I think it’s time I ordered another one. I hope you enjoy it too.