Bible and Sword (12 page)

Banishment was a frequent reason for going off to the Holy Wars. The doughty Fulk Fitzwarin so angered Prince John in a chess game that John hit him over the head with the chessboard, whereupon Fulk retaliated with a blow that almost killed the bad-tempered prince. Promptly banished from court, he set off for Palestine, but was driven
by storms to the Barbary coast, where he too was taken prisoner by the Saracens. His captivity appears to have been a pleasant one, for he is reputed to have enjoyed the love of “a noble lady caullid Idonie” during his stay in the Sultan’s domain. Eventually he made his way east to join Richard’s army at the siege of Acre. In that noble company also was William de Pratelles, famous for saving Richard from capture during a hunting party surprised by an enemy raid. William shouted, “I am the king!” and was carried off a prisoner, but fortunately one of the last things Richard did in Palestine was to exchange ten Turks for his gallant friend.

Even the wicked John, when he was King after Richard’s death, took the cross; in the faded ink of Magna Carta it can be read how he promised to adjust all property claims made on him “before we undertook the crusade.” But the stern barons, not trusting his intentions, also forced him to promise to make good their claims right away “if perchance we tarry at home and do not make our pilgrimage.”

John, of course, did tarry, but his younger son Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was as determined to go as his namesake Richard I had been. As the only responsible man at court, where a pack of French favorites was making a shambles of the government under the complacent eye of his incompetent brother Henry III, Earl Richard felt unable to depart as long as he was heir apparent. But as soon as a son was born to the King he set out for Palestine. Everyone tried to dissuade him, including the Pope, who urged him to buy a remission of his vow. The papal solicitude was no doubt influenced by the fact that Richard, who owned the tin and lead mines of Cornwall and vast timberlands, was reputed the richest prince in Europe. But the Earl would not sell his vow; instead he sold his woods to raise the necessary funds. When he took his leave, says William of Tyre, the people wept, for he was a person wholly minding the public welfare; whereon he told them that even if he had
not made his vow he would sooner go than witness the miseries that were coming on the realm. With him went the valiant William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, later killed in the Crusade in Egypt, seven barons, some fifty or sixty knights, and the usual company of bow- and lance-men. When, however, they landed at Acre in October 1240 they found a truce prevailing between Franks and Moslems, the latter embroiled in the usual war between the Caliphates of Egypt and Syria. As the terms of the truce had not been fulfilled Earl Richard, in the footsteps of his late uncle, marched for Jaffa, but was met by a peace offer from the hard-pressed Sultan of Egypt. A stiff man to deal with, the Earl emerged after long negotiations with the best terms ever won by the Crusaders in treaty: Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem, and most of the Holy Land were left to the Christians. Earl Richard returned to be hailed on every hand as the deliverer of the Sepulcher.

He had been joined in Palestine by Simon de Montfort, whose recent marriage to the King’s sister had raised such a storm that he found it prudent to leave home for Palestine. Simon, who was to be called a second Joshua in battle, had recently, with the Crusader’s consistent animus against the Jews, expelled the descendants of Joshua from his borough of Leicester. He had not yet emerged as the great opponent of royal tyranny, perhaps the only man to fight for principle in all the bloody feuds between kings and nobles from the Conquest to the Tudors. Though he left no mark on events in Palestine, his powerful personality and abilities must have been recognized by the local Franks, for they offered him the regency of the Latin kingdom during the minority of its boy ruler. But Simon felt greater longings in him and went home to make himself master of England before his ultimate defeat and brutal death.

The end of the crusading era was now drawing near. Palestine had become a battleground for new Islamic hordes. Kharezmians and Kurds were pushed down from
the north by the advancing Mongols and were followed soon by the Tartar Khans themselves. Within two years of the Earl of Cornwall’s treaty victories, Jerusalem was again lost. Tyre and Acre remained the last toeholds of the Franks in Palestine. Subsequent Crusades were directed at Egypt and the Barbary coast, where the Mameluke dynasty ruled. The last organized efforts of the West were the two fruitless expeditions led by St. Louis of France, that “drum filled with wind” as the Moslem poet called him.

In the second of these, 1269–72, he was joined by Prince Edward of England, who undertook the Crusade in fulfillment of a vow made when he accomplished the overthrow of Simon de Montfort. On his arrival at Tunis with four earls, four barons, and about a thousand men Edward was disgusted to find that Louis and the other princes had signed a treaty with the Sultan. Edward promptly sailed for Acre with his own men, where he raised an army of about seven thousand from the local Franks; but he accomplished nothing more than the conquest of Nazareth in revenge for the Saracens’ destruction of Christian shrines in that place. Struck down by an assassin’s poisoned dagger, the Prince was near death for months. Finally he too signed a truce, to last for ten years, ten months, and ten days, after which he departed for home, where he found himself king on arrival. He was the last prince of the West to fight in Palestine.

A letter reached Edward in 1281 from Sir Joseph de Cancy, a knight of the Hospital of St. John whom the King had commissioned to keep him informed of “news of events as they befell in the Holy Land.” It tells of a battle Sir Joseph witnessed between the Saracens and the Mongol Tartars and goes on to lament: “Never in our remembrance was the Holy Land in such poor estate as it is at this day, wasted by lack of rain, divers pestilences and the paynim.… Never have we seen so few soldiers [of the Franks] or so little good counsel in it.” He is sure that with able generals and adequate supplies the infidel could be
driven out, and he concludes by urging Edward to come back and complete the conquest.

But now the time had run out. Edward was engaged in conquering a nearer kingdom over the border, and he never returned to the East. The later popes had fouled their own cause by the unction with which they persuaded Crusaders to buy back their vows with gold for the Vatican coffers. When the Grand Master of the Templars came to Europe to beg for help against the resurgent Mamelukes he was able to round up no more than a few hundred Italian mercenaries. Palestine was a lost cause. Exactly one hundred years after Richard the Lion-Heart broke the walls of Acre two hundred thousand Mamelukes marched against the Crusaders’ last city. In 1291 Acre fell; the same year that Edward expelled the Jews from England the last Christians were driven from Palestine.

In the year 1538 Henry VIII issued a proclamation ordering “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English” to be placed in every church in England. The proclamation further ordered the clergy to place the Bible “in some convenient place … whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it”; also “that you shall discourage no man from reading or hearing of the said Bible but you shall expressly stir, provoke and. exhort every person to read the same.”

With the translation of the Bible into English and its adoption as the highest authority for an autonomous English Church, the history, traditions, and moral law of the Hebrew nation became part of the English culture; became for a period of three centuries the most powerful single influence on that culture. It linked, to repeat Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “the genius and history of us English to the genius and history of the Hebrew people.” This is far from saying that it made England a Judaeophil nation, but without the background of the English Bible it is doubtful that the Balfour Declaration would ever have been issued in the name of the British government or the Mandate for Palestine undertaken, even given the strategic factors that later came into play.

Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority. The Palestinian origins of Christianity were stressed more and more in order to reduce the pretensions of Rome. Where the papal bull had ruled earlier the word of God as revealed in the
Hebrew testaments to Abraham and Moses, to Isaiah, Elijah, and Daniel, to Jesus and Paul now governed instead.

“Consider the great historical fact,” said Thomas Huxley, “that this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history, that it has become the national epic of Britain.” Here is the curious fact of the family history of one nation becoming the national epic of another. After the publication of the King James version in 1611 the adoption was complete. The Bible was as much England’s own as Good Queen Bess or Queen Victoria. Writers on the English Bible habitually use phrases like “this national Bible,” “this greatest of English classics”; and one, H. W. Hoare in his
Evolution of the English Bible
, even goes so far as to call it “the most venerable of the national heirlooms,” which shows how far enthusiasm can betray a scholar. For the English Bible is not venerable as compared to, for example, Chaucer, nor is it an heirloom except in translation. Its content was and remains a record of the origins, the beliefs, the laws and customs and the history of the Jewish people of Palestine, most of it set down before anyone in England could read or write. And yet no other book penetrated so deeply the bone and the spirit of English life. When the dying Walter Scott asked Lockhart to read aloud to him and Lockhart asked what book, Scott replied: “There is but one.”

Whether the innate content of the Bible or the beauty of the King James version was the more responsible for its influences on the English people is a matter of opinion. A library could be assembled of works dealing only with the effect of the Authorized Version on the speech and literature of England. But it is not the literary aspect that concerns us so much as the effect of the Bible in familiarizing, in associating, the English with the Hebraic tradition of Palestine.

Why did this collection of Jewish family history become
the
book in English culture? Why did Milton, setting out to compose an epic of England’s beginnings, find himself
turning instead to Biblical themes for
Paradise Lost
and
Samson Agonistes
? Why did Bunyan go to the same source for
Pilgrim’s Progress
, which was to become like a second Bible in most households? Why, asks the Welsh writer John Cowper Powys, have the English a “mania” for the Old Testament, and why is it that “our Anglo-Celtic race has come to find its
individual religion
in Jewish emotion and Jewish imagination as nowhere else?” He suggests that “perhaps in the ancient aboriginals of these islands there was a pre-Celtic strain that was not Aryan at all and that is stirred in its atavistic depths by this Semitic book?” The average Englishman would sniff at this Celtic explanation (although it might appeal to the enthusiasts of the Anglo-Israel movement, who by a tortured interpretation of stray passages from the Bible have convinced themselves that the English are the true descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel). But one need not go so far back as the atavistic depths of the aboriginal Britons to understand the appeal of the Old Testament. Basically its appeal was in the two ideas that made it different from any other corpus of mythico-religious literature: the idea of the oneness of God and the ideal of an orderly society based on rules of social behavior between man and man and between man and God. The case is put in the solemn tones of Mr. Gladstone, the archetype of Bible-bred Englishman, who himself rather resembled one of the ancient prophets. Christianity owes to the Hebrews, he wrote, the conception of the Unity of God, and when we ask how this idea, “so prevailingly denied in ancient times has been kept alive in the world during the long period of universal darkness and safely handed down to us, the reply is that it was upheld and upheld exclusively, as a living article of religious obligation, in one small country, among one small and generally disparaged people and that the country and the people were those who received this precious truth and preserved it in and by the Scripture of the Old Testament.”

A single God and a chosen people who are the transmitters
of His message and who try, however imperfectly, to live by it—in these terms generation after generation of English came to know the Book. Everyone knew it. In many homes it was the only book in the house and, being so, was read over and over until its words and images and characters and stories became as familiar as bread. Children learned long chapters by heart and usually knew the geography of Palestine before they knew their own. Lloyd George recalled how in his first meeting with Chaim Weizmann in December 1914, place names kept coming into the conversation that were “more familiar to me than those of the Western front.” Lord Balfour’s biographer says that his interest in Zionism stemmed from his boyhood training in the Old Testament under the guidance of his mother. Could it have been as rigorous, one wonders, as that of Ruskin, who tells on the first page of his autobiography how at the bidding of his mother he had to read the entire Bible “every syllable through, hard names and all, aloud, from Genesis to Apocalypse, about once a year … and began again at Genesis the next day”? Probably he was not aware that he was doing what is done in Jewish synagogues every year (though without the New Testament), but he remembered it as “the most precious and on the whole the one
essential
part of my education.”

One cannot fix upon the exact date when England changed, became Anglican, so to speak; when the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob became the English God; when the heroes of the Old Testament replaced the Catholic saints. All Europe was changing in the decades before and after 1500, when the Middle Ages were giving way to the Reformation and the Renaissance or to what men of that time called the New Learning. Some historians date the end of the Middle Ages from the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, others from the invention of printing by movable type in 1454, or from Columbus’ discovery of the New World in 1492, or from the revolt against Rome signaled by Luther’s nailing his theses to the church door
in 1517. Not any one of these events, but the combination and interaction of all within roughly fifty years, brought about the new era. In England it took the whole of the turbulent sixteenth century to establish the Reformation, with every decade marked by the roll of a severed head upon the scaffold and the flames of a heretic’s death at the stake. Among those whose blood was spilled were Tyndale, the Bible’s translator, Thomas Cromwell, the King’s minister, Sir Thomas More of the old faith, and Archbishop Cranmer of the new. Still the work of translating the Bible went steadily forward, until in the opening years of the new century it reached its highest point in the King James version. It had been achieved at a terrible cost, but, as the Persian poet said, the rose blooms reddest where some buried Caesar bled.