The Book of Books by Melvyn Bragg Page B

a tempest. It began in public sermons quite new in their daring, their number and their learning and ended in a court of law exceptional in that it tried and condemned to death a divinely appointed king.
    The arguments were expressed in code and the code was in the Bible. It was taken for granted that the Bible was known thoroughly, often by heart, by a substantial and ever growing percentage of the population. Henry VIII in his last speech to Parliament in 1546 had, with tears in his eyes, railed that the Bible was ‘disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’. A hundred years later it was disputed and jangled even more widely and more jealously and dangerously. The fortressed kingdom of the Scriptures had been breached and there was no repairing it. The accession of Charles I with his Catholic wife and his Catholic intentions unleashed the Protestant Bible’s power.
    In the King James Bible you could find defences of the King and his court: ‘the powers that be are ordained by God’ was written in Romans. You could find justification for the massacre of heathens and idolaters. Idolatry was the ‘sin’ of the Catholics most
hated by the Presbyterians. You could read ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. Bad kings, like Nebuchadnezzar or Jehoichim and Saul, who deserved no obedience, studded the Old Testament. Good kings were few but they were available. Josiah was a rare model of a good and authorised king. There were comments on society: ‘often they which are despised of men are favoured by God’ (Genesis), and there were the Beatitudes.
    It was not new that the Bible played a part in the state. The King James Version had been written with a careful eye on curbing what he saw as rebellious tendencies. But it was the liberating fury of it thirty years on in the middle of the seventeenth century that was new and remarkable both in itself and in its far-reaching consequences.
    Charles I, a year after his accession to the throne, married Henrietta Maria, daughter of the King of the second great Catholic power, France. Henrietta Maria was firm in her Catholic faith and determined to haul England back alongside the Roman Catholic mother ship. She was against England’s participation in the exhausting ‘European’ struggle between Catholics and Protestants, which became the Thirty Years War. This provoked an eminent Presbyterian to deliver a sermon quoting from Esther: ‘if thou holdest thy tongue at this time, comfort and deliverance shall appear to the Jews out of another place, but thine and thy father’s house shall perish.’ By ‘Jews’, in the code of the day, he meant the Presbyterians.
    And so the gloves came off. Now that Guy Fawkes Day has dwindled to a social gathering, we forget that in 1605 a Roman Catholic group of what we would call terrorists had attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. This, if proof were needed, demonstrated beyond any doubt that the Catholics had not and would not give up their designs on England and needed to be watched, fought and, if necessary, exterminated. It was therefore
of no little significance that Thomas Hooker chose Guy Fawkes Day in 1626 to preach a sermon in Essex before a ‘vast congregation’ in which he called on God to ‘set on the heart of the King’. This line comes from the eleventh and twelfth verses of Malachi, which he did not quote but took for granted that this vast congregation would know. They read: ‘an abomination is committed . . . Judah . . . hath married the daughter of a strange god. The Lord will cut off the man that doeth this.’ The daughter was Henrietta Maria. That man was Charles. That last sentence is an early example of the sentences which would now be laid on the King until his final sentence. The Bible had spoken.
    This fed into the growing undercurrent that ‘God was leaving England’.
    The ill-advised and