Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson

A 'creation by committee', the new king's Bible broke all the literary rules. Yet, as Kevin Sharpe shows, its language defined an era and shaped our speech

The King James Bible is heralded as the greatest literary legacy of the English past to the present. Later editions, whatever their claims to greater accuracy, have by their blandness only enhanced its status. But while the King James Bible has been read through four centuries of history, it is too often detached from its moment, and from the monarch who gave it his name. Adam Nicolson's Power and Glory focuses on the seven years from the commissioning of the Bible in 1604 to its printing in 1611, and on the circumstances – theological, political and cultural – which drove and shaped it.

The Bible was an accidental by-product of a conference at Hampton Court which the new Stuart king had called to discuss the grievances of the Puritans, who had petitioned him as he made his way from Scotland to his English throne. James's willingness to listen and to debate signalled a dramatic change and hopes rose for the resolution of quarrels within the church (perhaps even within Christendom) that had raged for half a century.

At Hampton Court, the Puritans' desire for further reform was frustrated; but their call for a new Bible found royal favour.

James VI and I had his own reasons for ordering a new translation of scripture. The widely used Geneva Bible bore printed marginal notes (about tyranny and resistance) that he thought "seditious". But the king's motives for sponsoring a new Bible were neither simply personal nor entirely partisan. The new "Rex Pacificus" dreamed of religious peace and settlement, and believed that an authoritative text of scripture might serve that cause by incorporating ambiguity and difference – much as the Church of England had.

The team James set to work was carefully organised and given clear, firm rules. Six committees of nine men, each under a "director", were to proceed and review each others' work, before a final board checked the whole. The team included moderate Puritans, even figures who had dabbled with presbyterianism, as well as conservative bishops, and colourful characters as well as austere clerics.

As they set to work, the Gunpowder Plot shattered hopes of wider ecumenical settlement, but James, never wavering in his hopes for peace, drove the translation on. Manuscript drafts of St Paul's epistles and an annotated copy of the Bishops' Bible offer a few revealing insights into the committees' methods and progress. By 1608 the first stage was ready and the drafts were gathered for the review. As notes taken by the Cambridge scholar John Bois disclose, the drafts were read aloud, extensively debated and amended. The final text broke all the rules for the best writing – it was creation by committee – and was printed by Robert Barker, the king's printer, in 1611.

For all that it was "authorised" and authoritative, the King James Bible did not fulfil royal hopes. For a start it appeared with myriad misprints and variations; nor did it, at least initially, eclipse the Geneva Bible, which remained the more popular edition. But by the end of the century – for reasons that would require another book – it acquired the reverence it has enjoyed to this day, as the language of scripture in English.

Adam Nicolson writes to celebrate that Bible and to return it to its Jacobean circumstance. As he rightly argues, this was a "deeply political book", and a text produced at a moment when the last hopes for a reunion of Christendom were raised and championed by a new king who believed passionately in reconciliation. Nicolson offers salutary reminders – especially welcome amid our quatercentenary commemorations of the last Tudor – that England had begun to tire of Elizabeth and gave an ecstatic welcome to a new dynasty that seemed to herald a new age: of peace, of empire, of optimism.

Nicolson is excellent on the possibilities presented by the conference at Hampton Court – "not an encounter of parties at each others' throats" but a debate, often heated, among men who were friends as well as theological disputants. For all their differences, men like Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and the puritan Laurence Chaderton managed to work together on a translation that bore some mark of them all, as well as traces of all the earlier English Bibles.

Nicolson argues, at times brilliantly, that the desire for the reconciliation of differences was a broad characteristic of Jacobean culture: its negotiations between simplicity and lush display, between mystery and rationalism, between the sacred and erotic. His reading of Hatfield House, with its variegation of tastes and styles, as a companion text to the Bible wonderfully evokes a world we too often fragment into our categories of literature, art and politics.

Power and Glory raises questions and problems that it fails to explore: the importance of the new Baconian spirit of scientific enquiry, the reasons for the Jacobean fondness for ceremony. Given James's motives for commissioning a new Bible, his failure to proscribe the Geneva version as his own emerged is curiously not explained.

Disappointingly, Nicolson never discusses the king's own extensive writings, especially his theological polemics, exegeses of scriptural books and translations of the Psalms, which cast invaluable light on the Bible project. Similarly, he pays little attention to the echoes between James' collected works and the Bible – or to the material forms of these books, with their engraved frontispieces, prefaces, heads and typography. The useful appendix describing earlier English Bibles would have better served to set the scene in an introduction. And surely many readers, not just scholars, will regret – a trend to be resisted – the absence of notes identifying quotations and sources.

But if, like the King James Bible, Power and Glory does not fulfil all its promise, it pays that Bible eloquent tribute, not least in its passionate homage to the power of language as, and in, history. "The translators," Nicolson puts it pithily, "made a ceremony of the word." His own words give us not only the rich history but a moving commemoration of the Bible that has so much shaped our utterances and lives.

Kevin Sharpe is professor of Renaissance Studies at Warwick University