A history of the Geneva Bible, the book that taught England what a Bible looks like

Made by refugees in a church they had three days a week, printed with no translator’s name anywhere in it, authorized by nobody — and banned by nobody either, whatever you have been told.

A history in 13 parts · about 60 minutes · 1553 – today

1555–1560 · The register of the English church at Geneva

A Book of Blank Pages

In the state archive at Geneva there is a register that is almost entirely empty. It is a stout small folio, thirty-nine centimeters by twenty, carefully bound in parchment with overlapping flaps, and the city’s own scribes wrote the title on the cover in French: Livre des Anglois, the book of the English. Inside are a hundred and forty-nine numbered pages divided into five parts, for members, elections, baptisms, marriages and burials. Twelve of them carry writing. Pages seven to forty-eight are blank. So are fifty-one to seventy-two, seventy-five to a hundred and four, and a hundred and six to a hundred and twenty-eight.

It was ruled and bound for a congregation that expected to go on. What it actually records is four and a half years. Charles Martin, who worked through the manuscript for a study published in 1915, counted a hundred and thirteen names comprising a hundred and eighty-six people, nineteen baptisms, nine marriages and eighteen burials, seven of the burials being small children. You will more often see the church given as two hundred and thirty-three members in something like a hundred and forty households, a figure that comes from modern secondary work rather than from the book; Thomas Bodley, who was actually there as a boy, remembered it decades later as “some hundred members” and hedged even that with as far as I remember. Three counts, three numbers, and the only one taken from the manuscript is the middle one.

On 30 May 1560 William Whittingham went before the Geneva council on behalf of himself and his companions. He thanked the city for its treatment of them, said that to serve the church of their own country they now had to go, asked to be kept as its humble servants, and requested a certificate of the life and conversation they had kept there. And he handed the register across the counter, the council’s minute says, pour perpétuelle mémoire — for perpetual memory. The council granted an honorable discharge and a testimonial of its satisfaction with them, and asked two things in return: that they pray for Geneva, and that they treat strangers as they themselves had been treated. Then they went home, and after 1560 the English stop appearing in the city’s records altogether. Not one family seems to have stayed. The letters between Calvin and Knox, Goodman and Whittingham afterward carry greetings to no Englishman at all, and Calvin’s replies mention none.

Seven weeks before that counter, the book those people had stayed behind to finish came off Rowland Hall’s press in the same city. And it does not say who made it. The title page names the printer and the place. No translator is named on it, in the dedication to Elizabeth, in the address to the reader, or anywhere in the fourteen leaves of tables at the back. There is not even a colophon: Christopher Anderson, who examined a copy for his history of 1845, wrote the flat sentence “There is no Colophon,” and the standard bibliographical collation records none either. What the book does carry is a date. Both prefatory epistles end “From Geneua, 10. April. 1560.” You will constantly see that given as the day the last sheet went to press, which is not something the book says; it is Anderson’s own gloss on the date, and it has been repeated ever since as though it were printed there.

So the names had to come from somewhere else, and where they came from is worth knowing before you trust any of them. The list you will find in most places gives nine men: Whittingham, Gilby, Sampson, Coverdale, Goodman, Cole, Knox, Bodley and Pullain. It is a nineteenth-century compilation, assembled out of Le Long, Anthony Wood, Todd, Newcome, Townley and Boothroyd, and every one of those descends from a single anonymous manuscript life of Whittingham written around 1603, which names six men and then says, in so many words, and who else I cannot relate. Anderson took the list apart on departure dates alone. Knox left Geneva for the last time in January 1559 and landed at Leith on 2 May; he had begun learning Hebrew in 1555, at nearly fifty, and no contemporary source puts him in the work at all. Coverdale can be traced at Geneva only from about the autumn of 1558 to 14 August 1559 — roughly ten months, arriving after the work had begun, aged seventy, and with no Hebrew. Goodman was pastor there until the end of August 1559 and reached Edinburgh on 20 September. Cole, Pullain and Bodley all went home in 1559.

Thomas Sampson is the interesting failure, because he is in every account and he cannot have been there. He is entered in the register in 1556, and then between 1556 and 1558 he writes to Bullinger and to Peter Martyr from Strasbourg, from Frankfurt and from Lausanne, and not one surviving letter of his is dated from Geneva. On 15 December 1558 he told Peter Martyr, from Strasbourg, that he was about to cross to England; on 10 January 1560 he wrote that he had by then been in England a year. The men who can actually be placed in Geneva into 1560 are Whittingham, Anthony Gilby, Rowland Hall the printer, apparently the Scot William Kethe, and John Baron, who was still there that March. Westcott, Pollard and the standard catalogue all end up at Whittingham and Gilby, with Pollard adding the honest words and perhaps others.

That is the book this page is about, and it is worth saying at the start what makes it worth a page. The Geneva Bible is the one that taught English readers what a Bible looks like. Open one and you are looking at something recognizably modern: verses numbered and set on their own lines, roman type, italics for the words the translators had to supply, maps, cross references, a summary before every book, and a note in the margin whenever the text is hard. Almost none of that was its invention, and it did not claim otherwise. What it did was bring the whole apparatus into English at once, in a book a household could afford, on the assumption that the person holding it would be alone. For about eighty years it was the Bible of England and Scotland, across every party in both. It was never authorized for use in any English church by anybody. And nearly everything you have heard about it — the ban, Calvin’s brother-in-law, the Pilgrims, the verses divided on horseback, the first study Bible, the margins full of sedition — is either wrong or is a guess that has hardened into a fact.

1553–1555 · The exile, and the quarrel at Frankfurt

The Church They Were Asked to Leave

Mary Tudor came to the throne in July 1553, and a few hundred English Protestants left the country. How many is a question with a famous answer and a shaky one. The standard census is Christina Garrett’s, published in 1938, and Cambridge University Press’s own description of the reissue says it gives details of almost eight hundred individuals while conceding that some of Garrett’s hypotheses are now outdated. The hypothesis that has been discarded is her central one, that the flight was an organized political conspiracy and that the exiles afterward manufactured a legend of persecution about themselves. The census is the part that survives, and it is a list of the traceable rather than a list of the exiles: of roughly five hundred whose occupation is recorded, a hundred and sixty-six are gentry, a hundred and nineteen are theological students and sixty-seven are clergy, against thirty-two artisans and three yeomen. That is not the profile of a persecuted trade. It is the profile of the people who left paper behind them.

They scattered — Strasbourg, Zurich, Basel, Emden, Wesel, Aarau, Padua, Venice, Worms — and the largest and loudest colony settled at Frankfurt. The magistrates there gave them the use of a disused church already granted to Valérand Poullain’s French-speaking congregation, and they gave it on one condition, recorded in the exiles’ own account: that the English should not differ from the Frenchmen in doctrine or ceremonies. They were required to sign the French confession of faith then going to press, and on 1 September 1554 four English names, Whittingham’s among them, went onto a French Reformed document on behalf of their whole church. Permission to use the building is dated 14 July 1554 and the first service was on the twenty-ninth.

That condition is the hinge of everything that followed, because it made the English Prayer Book a problem rather than a preference. The congregation split between a party that wanted the second Prayer Book of Edward VI kept as it stood and a party that wanted it cut back. When they deadlocked, Knox and Whittingham sent Calvin a Latin outline of the book and asked what he thought. His reply, in the English of the account the losing side published twenty years later, was that the English liturgy contained many tolerable foolish things and that there was not that purity which was to be desired. It is one of the most quoted judgments in the history of English worship, and it was reached on the basis of a digest that Knox and Whittingham had themselves prepared — a digest which, as even Knox’s defenders concede, did not present the book in a favorable light.

There was one attempt at a middle way, and it vanished for three centuries. After Anthony Gilby begged the congregation on his knees not to separate, both sides drafted a shortened Prayer Book: responses abolished, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed said by the congregation only once a service, the litany optional and said by the minister alone, private baptism gone, the signing with the cross gone, confirmation gone, and in the marriage service the giving-away of the bride and the ring and its prayer removed. Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Whitsun and the saints’ days are not so much as mentioned in it. The manuscript disappeared, was rediscovered around 1870, ended up in the British Museum, and was finally printed in 1905. It is called the Liturgy of Compromise, and nobody used it.

What finally moved Knox out of Frankfurt was not the liturgy at all, and this is the point at which the ordinary retelling goes wrong. On 15 March 1555 a group of Englishmen went to the Frankfurt magistrates with nine extracts from a pamphlet Knox had printed the previous July, and accused him of treason against the Emperor, the Emperor’s son and the queen. One of the extracts had him saying that Charles V was no less an enemy to Christ than Nero was. A document in Christopher Goodman’s letter book records the accusation, the date and the accusers by name, and adds that on the eighteenth the same men went back to hear the answer, whereupon the magistrates sent for Whittingham and Williams and commanded that Knox depart the city. He was not tried, sentenced or formally banished. He was told to go. He preached what the losing side’s account calls a most comfortable sermon the night before and left on 26 March, and by 1 May he was writing from Geneva and signing himself Your brother with trubled hart.

Calvin’s view of that arrived on 31 May, in a letter to Richard Cox delayed, he explains, because the roads were blocked by highwaymen. He had urged his own side to restraint and was displeased that Cox’s side reciprocated nothing; he called lamps, crosses and such nonsense the residue of superstition; he warned that the Frankfurt magistrates’ goodwill could be forfeited by abuse of it; and he said that if secret accusations had procured Knox’s removal it was neither pious nor brotherly. By then he had already done something more practical. On 10 June 1555, before a single one of the Frankfurt English had arrived, Calvin stood up in the Geneva council and asked for a church for them: certain Englishmen, the minute records him saying, would be desirous of withdrawing here for the word of God. The council resolved to look for a suitable place.

1555–1559 · The English congregation in Geneva

Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Whittingham wrote to Calvin on 21 September 1555 that their furniture had gone on ahead and that they would follow by the longest day-marches they could manage. He left Frankfurt the next day. The party reached Geneva on 13 October, and there were twenty-seven of them counting the women and the children. The register names every one: William Williams and his wife Jane; Thomas Wood, his wife Anne and their daughter Debora; Anthony Gilby, his wife Elizabeth and their son Goddred; William Jackson, his wife Parnel, two sons and two daughters; and so down to the single men at the end, Whittingham among them.

Calvin went back to the council for them on 24 October and made an argument that has aged well: in other times, he said, the English received other nations and gave them a church, and now it has pleased God to afflict them. Three councillors were appointed to look into it. The English did not wait for the answer. On 1 November 1555 the newcomers and a small group of English already living in the city constituted themselves a church, and their register records the fact in seven words — that the Churche was erected the first of Novemb. 1555 — and notes that Christopher Goodman and Anthony Gilby were appointed to preach and minister the sacraments in the absence of John Knox.

The building they were given was Notre-Dame-la-Neuve, beside St Pierre on the Place de la Taconnerie: a fifteenth-century Gothic rebuilding on a much older site, which appears as Marie la Nove in the council’s French and Nostre Dame la Neufve in their own book. You will see it called Calvin’s Auditoire, and that name belongs to its later career as a lecture hall, from the weekday expositions held there at seven in the morning from about 1557 and the founding of the Academy in the same room in 1559. What a visitor sees inside it today is a restoration finished in 1959.

They did not have it to themselves. From 25 November 1555 the council regulated the sharing between the English and the Italian refugees: the Italians on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at their accustomed hour, the English on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with their preaching set at nine o’clock. At their own request the council gave them a bell to ring for their services, named in the minute as de la Temousaz, and had the church fitted with a pulpit and benches. On 29 November Goodman and Gilby took an oath in the magistrates’ hands before they were allowed to serve. Every year afterward, on 16 December, the congregation elected its officers, and all four annual lists fit onto two pages of the register.

The membership was not a company of scholars. Weavers and tailors predominate among the recorded trades; there was a tanner who settled at St-Gervais on the quai du Seujet, presumably to work there, and the city’s residence register names four labourers or farmers. Martin found in the Geneva notaries’ minutes the apprenticeship contracts of two young Englishmen of the congregation, one bound to a locksmith and one to the printer Jean Crespin. Some merchants were described to the council in 1557 as great merchants, but the registers do not say which. Unlike the English colonies at Glastonbury and Frankfurt, Geneva got no whole industry out of them.

The paperwork is untidy in a way that is worth pausing on, because it is the reason no count of this church can be exact. Fifty of the hundred and eighty-six people in the church register do not appear in Geneva’s own Registre des Habitants, despite the city’s severity about registration; and twenty-six English who did obtain rights of residence never appear in the church book at all. Then on one day, 14 October 1557, the city seems to have gone looking for everybody who had been living there without a civil standing and admitted the lot: forty-four English received in a single batch, fifty-five people with their families. Rowland Hall, whose name would be on the title page of the Bible, was one of them. Miles Coverdale, the most famous Englishman in the city, is not in the membership list anywhere; he shows up only twice, as an elder elected on 16 December 1558 and as a witness at the baptism of John Knox’s son Eleazer.

They married each other, or they married into the other refugee colonies, and in five years not one marriage was made between an Englishman and a Genevan woman or the other way about. Whittingham married Katheryne Jaquemayne of Orléans on 15 November 1556; Jane Stafford married the Italian congregation’s preacher; John Dawes of Tunbridge married a woman of Dieppe. It is an argument from a register that only records its own marriages, so it should not be pressed hard, but Martin’s reading of it is reasonable: the refugee colonies were closer to each other than to the city, some of whose people saw the influx as an invasion.

And the city was closer to them than any of that suggests. On 4 January 1556 Sir William Stafford brought his son to be baptized, the first baptism in the new church, and got Calvin to stand godfather. Stafford was buried at Geneva on 5 May the same year, leaving a widow and four small children, and when Lady Dorothy Stafford proposed to take them away Calvin appeared before the council. He could not stop her going; but he had promised as godfather to bring the boy up in the Gospel, and he required that the child be neither carried off nor taken into popery. The council found for him. Her brother-in-law argued the mother’s rights and threatened to have the English government take similar measures against Genevan merchants in England. Martin adds the detail that finishes it: Stafford had so loved Calvin that he wanted to name the child Calvin, and Calvin refused, for nothing in the world.

1557 · The New Testament, three years before the Bible

Whittingham’s Small Book

The exiles did not begin with a Bible. They began with a New Testament, and it came off Conrad Badius’s press at Geneva on a day the book itself names: the colophon on the last numbered leaf reads “Printed by Conrad Badivs M.D.LVII. this x. of Ivne.” It is an octavo, a hundred and twenty-eight millimeters by eighty-five, which David Daniell compares to the size of a prayer book in a church pew — a book for the hand or the pocket, set in a small and beautifully clear roman, thirty-seven lines to a full page. The address to the reader carries no date, no signature and no initials. As with everything else these people printed, the name has to come from somewhere else.

The name is Whittingham’s, and the reason scholars are confident about it is grammatical. The address speaks in the first person singular throughout: I have divided the text into verses and sections, I have sometimes interpreted them, I have set it in such letters. That is a man describing his own work rather than a committee minute, and it is why the standard catalogue calls the 1557 a distinct work due to one translator. The anonymous life written around 1603 has a group of learned men at Geneva meeting to peruse the existing English versions, and how much they contributed is, in Daniell’s word, unclear. The book names nobody, which by now you will recognize as the house style.

Look at the title page before opening it, because there is a joke on it. The woodcut shows Time, winged and carrying a scythe, leading Truth up out of a cave, with a legend running above and below: God by tyme restoreth truth and maketh her victoriovs. Mary Tudor’s own personal motto, taken at her accession in 1553, was Veritas Temporis Filia — truth, the daughter of time. In the fourth year of her reign her exiles printed her device on an illegal English New Testament. Nobody at the time is recorded saying that was deliberate, and the emblem was a common enough Renaissance figure, so it stops just short of being provable. What is documented is what happened eighteen months later. On 14 January 1559, the day before her coronation, Elizabeth came through Cheapside and met a pageant at the Little Conduit: two artificial hills, one barren and one green, a cave between them, and an old man with artificial wings and a scythe leading out his daughter Truth in white silk, labeled Temporis filia, carrying a book. Truth gave the queen the book, and the queen kissed it, held it up, and laid it upon her breast with great thanks to the city, saying she would often read over that book. The book was an English New Testament, and printing one in England had been impossible for five years.

Badius is worth a paragraph for who he was married into. He was a son of the Paris scholar-printer Josse Bade; one of his sisters married Robert Estienne and another married Michel Vascosan. So the man who first put Estienne’s verse numbers into English was Estienne’s brother-in-law. His entire recorded output in English is four items: three settings of Lily’s Latin grammar, one of them dated 1 March 1557, and this New Testament in June. He printed the exiles’ schoolbook in the spring and their scripture in the summer. He was also a satirical playwright, and in 1559 he went to prison in Geneva for printing a pamphlet before the council had finished deciding whether he could.

What the book is famous for is the numbering, and the claim needs trimming in three places. It is the first English New Testament with numbered verses, which is true and is not the same as the first Bible with them: Robert Estienne’s Greek New Testament of 1551 has them, his French Bible of 1553 has them, and his Latin Bible of 1555 was the first whole Bible to set the numbers into the text rather than the margin. Sante Pagnini had numbered a complete Latin Bible at Lyon in 1527. It is the first standalone English New Testament in roman type, which is also true and also narrower than it sounds, since English Bible text had been set in roman before and roman had been the ordinary book face on the continent for two generations. And Whittingham did not invent the italic convention: the quarto Great Bible of April 1540 already marked words not found in the original by setting them in roman inside black letter, seventeen years earlier. What he did was turn it round, italic inside roman, and it is his form the King James Bible inherited. He never calls it italic. He writes that where a word was lacking and the sentence obscure he put the word in, “but haue set it in such letters as may easely be discerned from the commun text.”

The genuinely new thing is smaller and stranger than any of that. In the 1557 every verse begins a fresh line with its own number, whether or not a new sentence starts there. Daniell says that had not been done before outside Latin and Greek. It is the layout decision that produced the Bible page everyone in the English-speaking world now pictures, and it has been criticized ever since for chopping continuous prose into a list.

There is a lovely piece of evidence in the margins that the man doing it had not yet absorbed his own invention. All eight hundred-odd of Whittingham’s marginal cross-references cite chapter and letter in the old medieval way — Gene. 46. b., Ruth. 4. d., Deut. 6. c. — including references to New Testament books whose verse numbers are printed three inches away on the same page. The index at the back is where the two systems finally meet. It explains that it notes not only the chapter and letter but also the very verse, so that an entry reads Mat. 24 b 15: chapter twenty-four, section b, verse fifteen. The change is happening inside one book, and you can watch it.

Since we are here, the horseback. Everyone repeats that Estienne divided the New Testament into verses while riding from Paris to Lyon, which is why the divisions fall in silly places. The whole basis is one sentence in his son Henri’s preface of 1594, where the operative words are inter equitandum, and where Henri says a great part of it rather than all of it. Bruce Metzger and Caspar René Gregory both read the phrase as covering the journey rather than the saddle, and infer the work was done resting at inns; against them stands ordinary Latin usage, in which inter with a gerund does normally mean while doing the thing. The Württembergische Landesbibliothek, which owns the books, labels the story die Legende, and the version it reports adds the detail that gives the game away: he is supposed to have been bored. Nobody in the sixteenth century blamed a horse for a verse division. Two things in Henri’s preface are better than the anecdote and never get quoted. The first is that his father did not want them called verses at all; the name was other people’s, and Robert preferred to call them little sections. The second is that nearly everyone told him the project was useless and would earn no praise but be laughed at — after which, Henri notes, editions that failed to adopt the numbering were as good as stripped of their authority.

Two last things about the small book. Its errata leaf lists twenty-two corrections, and one of the corrections is itself wrong: at Matthew 16:10 the text reads five thousand where it should read four thousand, and the errata instructs the reader to substitute four hundred. And in the whole reign of Mary Tudor, exactly one edition of the English scriptures appeared anywhere in the world, which is this one. Under Edward VI there had been some forty editions of the Bible or the New Testament in English in six years. Then nothing for five years, except a pocket octavo made by a refugee in a city on a lake. Whittingham’s text did not survive its own success. Francis Fry, who examined the Geneva Bibles and Testaments from 1560 to 1644, reported that he found the 1557 text reprinted in none of them.

1558–1560 · Making the Bible

Two Years and More, Day and Night

The phrase everybody quotes about how long the Geneva Bible took is real, and it sits inside a parenthesis that is doing the opposite of boasting. The translators are explaining that they claim nothing above the least of their brethren, and the parenthesis reads: “for God knoweth with what feare and trembling we haue bene now, for the space of two yeres and more day and night occupied herein.” The book’s own last page answers it. After the chronological tables and the words The End comes a single verse set as a closing device, Joshua 1:8, which tells the reader to meditate in the book of the Law day and night. They printed for everyone else the instruction they had given themselves.

The press was a private venture by two members of the congregation. In December 1558 John Bodley and William Williams set up a printing house at Geneva and put Rowland Hall in charge of it, and the council register for private affairs records the arrangement. Hall was an Englishman who had come in the batch of forty-four received as inhabitants on 14 October 1557. He was an original member of the Stationers’ Company whose name is not on its charter, and the likeliest reason is that he was in Geneva when it passed. He printed in the city until 1560, went back to London, kept shop at the Three Arrows in Golding Lane and then at the Half-Eagle and Key in Gutter Lane, and was buried at St Vedast, Foster Lane, on 18 September 1563. In 1562 he took as his printer’s device the Geneva arms, the half-eagle and key, with the motto Post tenebras lux. He carried the city home as a trademark.

Say his name carefully, because there is a persistent confusion about it. The 1560 title page reads “At Geneua. Printed by Rouland Hall,” and Rowland Hall the exile printer is not Sir Rowland Hill of Soulton, a London mercer and former Lord Mayor who died in 1561. The Bible is nonetheless attributed to Hill, as publisher or protector or financier, in places including the current Wikipedia article. No specialist authority makes that connection — not Duff, not McKerrow, not Pollard, not Anderson, not the standard catalogue — the claim is promoted from a Shropshire heritage estate and rests on nineteenth-century devotional compilations, and the two men have different surnames.

Where the money came from is answered in the preface, in a clause most people skip. The translators were encouraged, they write, by the ready wills of such whose hearts God likewise touched, not to spare any charges for the furtherance of such a benefit, though the time then was most dangerous and the persecution sharp and furious. Anderson glosses that as meaning there was no application to their native country and no solicitation of one farthing from without; Pollard reads the same clause as leaving it open that funds came out from friends in England. The one official acknowledgment of who paid is a letter of 9 March 1566 in which Archbishop Parker and Bishop Grindal ask Cecil to extend John Bodley’s printing privilege “in consideracion of the charges by him and his associates in the first impression, and the reviewe sithens susteyned.” The most concrete surviving detail of where the money went is Pollard’s: the funds let the translators borrow or buy woodcut blocks from Antoine Rebul, publisher of the French Bible printed at Geneva that same year. The pictures in the Geneva Bible are secondhand, and Pollard gives no source for knowing it.

The timing very nearly went wrong. Mary Tudor died on 17 November 1558, the news reached Geneva by way of Zurich, and the translators wanted to lay their work before the new queen as an accession gift — except that they had barely reached the middle of it. So they rushed a piece of it into print on its own: the Book of Psalms, newly translated into prose with marginal notes and two tables, printed by Rowland Hall in 1559, with a dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth dated 10 February. It is a stopgap, and it is the reason a Geneva Psalter of 1559 exists at all.

Everyone else went home. Before they did, the church sent a peace embassy round the other exile congregations, carrying a letter dated 15 December 1558 to Aarau, Basel, Strasbourg, Worms and Frankfurt, forgiving, asking forgiveness, and asking that brethren stop quarreling over useless ceremonies. The man they sent was William Kethe, who is remembered now for something else entirely: he turned Psalm 100 into the meter in which it is still sung as the Old Hundredth. Frankfurt’s reply of 3 January 1559 is awkward and honest, noting that of those who had fought in 1555 all had gone except four, only one of them an educated man. Then, on 24 January 1559, the council register records the English asking leave to go, thanking the city, and promising to remain forever obliged to it. Martin calls that an emigration of nearly two hundred people.

The departure was public enough to end up in a schoolbook. Mathurin Cordier, who had been Calvin’s own schoolmaster, wrote Latin colloquies for the boys of the Geneva college, and one of them stages two citizens talking about a father four months gone on business. Perhaps he has gone to England to trade, says the second, for there is now very great liberty there. Liberty of what? Of the Gospel, which is heard there very freely. And his proof is that the greater part of the English who had withdrawn to this city for the sake of the Gospel have been going home for more than a fortnight now. It is a schoolroom fiction rather than a report, which is exactly what makes it useful: it fixes what an ordinary Genevan was assumed to know in the spring of 1559.

What was left behind was a handful of men and an unfinished Old Testament. Anthony Wood’s one sentence on the subject — Whittingham with one or two more did tarry at Geneva a year and a half after Queen Elizabeth came to the crown, being resolved to go through with the work — is almost the whole of the contemporary evidence, and the arithmetic fits: Elizabeth acceded on 17 November 1558, a year and a half lands in the middle of May 1560, and Whittingham took his leave of the council on the thirtieth. Goodman stayed as pastor until the end of August 1559. Coverdale took leave on 14 August. Bodley followed in September with his family. John Baron did not go until March 1560, and before he went he made sure of two things: his rights as a burgess, and the renewal for three more years of his privilege to print Knox’s book on predestination.

1560 · The page, and everything on it that is not scripture

The Machine in the Margin

The 1560 is a quarto, six hundred and fourteen leaves, sixty-three lines to a full page in double columns, the scripture in roman, the chapter summaries in italic and the marginal notes in a very small roman. It is foliated by leaf rather than paginated, and the New Testament starts its own foliation over again at leaf two, which is a detail with a consequence: the sheets were designed to come apart, which is why Geneva New Testaments circulate as separate books to this day. The title woodcut is the Israelites at the Red Sea, ringed by three texts, two from Exodus 14 and one from Psalm 34. Fear ye not, stand still, and behold the salvation of the Lord. The Lord shall fight for you: therefore hold you your peace. Great are the troubles of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth them out of all. It is not a neutral choice of picture for a book made by refugees.

What is genuinely unusual about the book is that its preface is a specification. Most Bibles tell you why they exist; this one tells you how to operate it, mark by mark. A double angle in the margin flags an alternative reading that may also seem agreeable to the mind of the Holy Ghost and proper for our language. A single angle flags a place where the Hebrew idiom would not go into English, so the smoother phrase stands in the text and the Hebrew is kept in the margin. A star keys a cross reference. A pilcrow marks the principal matters. Lower-case letters a, b, c key the explanatory notes. Words the translators had to supply are set in another kind of letter, that it may easily be discerned from the common letter. Every page carries a running head of some notable word or sentence, which may greatly further as well for memory, as for the chief point of the page. There are arguments before each book and each chapter, verse numbers throughout, certain maps of cosmography, and two tables at the back.

Notice what the italic rule actually says. It is a contrast of founts, not a specification of italic, and that is why it survived intact into the black-letter editions, where the contrasting letter could not possibly be the same one. The people who wrote that sentence were thinking about how a printing house works.

The chapter summaries are the part a modern reader would recognize fastest, because they are miniature indexes rather than descriptions. Genesis 2 opens: 2 God resteth the seventh day, and sanctifieth it. 15 He setteth man in the garden. 22 He createth the woman. 24 Marriage is ordained. The number is the verse where the thing happens. Before you have read a word of the chapter you can go straight to the part you came for. That is a reference book’s habit of mind applied to scripture, and it is the clearest single sign of who the book thought its reader was.

That last point is worth separating out, because the pointing hand has become a stock illustration of the Geneva Bible and it is usually miscredited. Printed sign-post marks in an English Bible margin belong to the Great Bible, where Coverdale used them to indicate notes the Privy Council never let him print, and they were withdrawn after three editions. In Geneva Bibles the pointing hands are overwhelmingly manuscript. The annotation catalogue of the de Vere copy at the Folger lists drawn hands alongside underlining in black and in red, drawn flowers, crosses and pencil marks; Edward Seager’s copy of 1598 carries hundreds of manicules, and they point at the printed notes rather than at the scripture. Readers were indexing the commentary.

The pictures need three corrections. They are woodcuts, not engravings, whatever the dealers’ catalogues say; the one plate in the tradition credibly described as a copperplate engraving is an Adam and Eve that turns up in the pulpit folio of 1583, twenty-three years later, and even that is called a woodcut in some later settings. The count depends on what you are counting: David Daniell gives twenty-six in one place and thirty-three in another within the same article, and the likeliest reconciliation is twenty-six in-text figures plus five maps plus the two title-page cuts, though he does not say so. And they were not drawn for this book. The blocks came from Antoine Rebul, and at least the tabernacle furniture appears to have been designed originally for Robert Estienne’s Latin Bible of 1540 — which would mean the same Paris house supplied the Geneva Bible both its verse numbers and its pictures.

Even the scholars disagree about which five things are the five maps, and the disagreement is instructive because nobody has miscounted. One list gives Eden, the Exodus, Canaan, the Holy Land and the travels of Paul. Another puts them at Numbers 33, Joshua 15, the end of Ezekiel, before Matthew and at the end of Acts, counting the Ezekiel temple plate as a map and demoting Eden to one of the in-text figures. They are describing the same book and differing about whether an architectural plan is a map. The Eden map is the one to look at: it is not a plate bound in at the front but a picture that interrupts Genesis 2 where it belongs, with an extended geographical note at the foot of the page arguing about the four rivers of verse 10.

Two things people credit to the 1560 are not in it. The first is a concordance. It has two tables, one interpreting the Hebrew names and one indexing the chief and principal matters, and the second is a subject index rather than a concordance. The real concordance arrives eighteen years later from a man who signed himself Robart F. Herrey and dated his preface 22 December 1578; Christopher Barker printed it, and from about 1580 it is generally found bound into Geneva Bibles with its own title page and its own colophon, which in one 1602 quarto is dated independently of the Bible it sits in. In later copies it is labeled simply Two Tables, which is how it comes to be mistaken for the original back matter. The second is John Speed’s genealogies, which everyone associates with the King James. Speed’s patent of 1610 covered a separately printed unit that a binder could insert into whatever Bible was in hand, and they were bound into Geneva Bibles too: a Geneva folio of 1611 to 1612 carries them with their own 1611 title page.

And the type. The Geneva is remembered as the roman-type Bible, and the first seven complete editions were roman, but that is not the book most English readers actually held. Naseeb Shaheen counted ninety complete Geneva Bibles printed to 1616 and found forty-six of them in black letter against forty-four in roman; in the first twenty years of English printing the black-letter editions outnumbered the roman twenty-four to nineteen. The first English black-letter Geneva, a large folio, appeared in 1578, and the last English edition of all, the folio of 1616, is black letter too. English buyers wanted the face they were used to. Shaheen’s conclusion is the useful one: roman type was clearly not the reason for the Geneva’s popularity. What makes those editions worth picturing is the compromise the printers reached inside them. In a black-letter Geneva the scripture is in black letter and the notes are in roman. The margin looked modern and the text looked old, on the same page, at the same time.

1560 · What the translation is actually made of

Eighty-Three Percent Tyndale

Read the two title pages in order and the method is on them. The 1557 New Testament says conferred diligently with the Greek and best approved translations. Conferred, not translated. The 1560 upgrades the claim to translated according to the Hebrew and Greek, and then immediately concedes the second half of it: and conferred with the best translations in divers languages. The preface goes further than either. Earlier English versions, it says, required greatly to be perused and reformed — gone over and corrected. This is a revision announcing itself as a revision, and it is worth saying plainly because the claim you will see everywhere is that the Geneva was the first English Bible translated wholly from the original tongues, which is not what its makers said about it.

The standard scholarly formulation has been stable for over a century and it comes in two halves. The Old Testament is the Great Bible thoroughly revised against the Hebrew; the New Testament is Tyndale’s last text revised in line with Beza. The cribs at their elbow are named in the older reference works with dates: the Latin of Pagninus, of Sebastian Münster, of Leo Jud, and Olivétan’s French. The Hebrew would have been the standard text of the age, Jacob ben Hayyim’s second rabbinic Bible printed by Daniel Bomberg at Venice in 1524 and 1525, though no document ties this particular team to a particular copy. Pagninus is the interesting one: his Latin was the first complete version made from Hebrew and Greek since Jerome, and it was useful precisely because it is almost unreadably literal — so literal that contemporary rabbis preferred it.

The Greek needs one correction that matters, because it is repeated constantly. The Geneva New Testament of 1557 and 1560 is not translated from Beza’s Greek. It rests on Robert Estienne’s Greek, the 1550 Editio Regia for the text and the 1551 Geneva printing for the verse numbers, and what Beza supplied was a Latin translation with a commentary. A crib and a gloss are not a text. Beza’s Greek entered the English Geneva line only with Laurence Tomson’s revision of 1576, which is one reason a reader quoting the Geneva Bible from a modern reprint is usually quoting Tomson without knowing it. There is a pleasing accident in the bibliography here. Estienne’s Latin Bible of 1556, printed in Geneva while the exiles were living there, carried Pagninus’s Old Testament and the first appearance of Beza’s Latin New Testament between the same two boards. Both of the translators’ principal Latin tools came out of one new folio printed a few streets away. No scholar has stated that they worked from that volume, so it stays an inference, but it is a tidy one.

How much of it is Tyndale? The only published word count gives eighty-three point four percent across the sampled chapters, which is higher than the same scholar’s figure for the King James. That is one study and it should be quoted as one study. But the direction it points is not in doubt, and it produces the flat irony this page and its two companions keep arriving at: the Calvinist revision of a Lutheran-influenced translation by a man burned in 1536 is the book King James I would set out to replace, and roughly four sentences in five of its New Testament are still that man’s.

On the four words Thomas More had gone to war with Tyndale over, the Geneva splits three to one. It surrendered congregation and printed Church — at Matthew 16:18, at Acts 14:23, at Acts 20:28 — and it kept love, elder and repent. This is worth holding onto, because the King James translators’ famous rule that church was not to be translated congregation is routinely described as a shot at the Geneva Bible, and the Geneva Bible had already said Church. Rule 3 was aimed at Tyndale, at Matthew’s Bible and at the Great Bible, all of which read congregation.

Where is it better, and where worse? Better at Psalm 8:5, where the Geneva has a little lower than God and the King James softened it to the angels. Better at Acts 12:4, where the Geneva reads Passover and the King James prints the anachronistic Easter. Better at Revelation 16:5, where the Geneva keeps the Holy that the manuscripts have and the King James prints Beza’s conjecture, and shalt be. Worse at Genesis 1:2, where the Geneva drops the face of the deep and the face of the waters that the Great Bible had and the King James restored. Worse at John 1:3, where All things were made by it is a pronoun the King James improved on. The trade is not the clean one people describe, in which the Geneva has the accuracy and the King James has the beauty. Both books are revisions of the same older English, and each is better in places.

The Apocrypha is there, occupying about a seventh of the volume, with an argument of its own explaining that the books were not received by a common consent to be read and expounded publicly in the church. Every English translation printed in the sixteenth century included them. A claim you will meet is that a Geneva edition of 1599 was the first English Bible printed without the Apocrypha, and it needs handling carefully for a reason that will matter later: a great many books dated 1599 were not printed in 1599, and in a great many surviving copies the section was cut out afterward by a Puritan owner or a binder rather than never printed at all.

The nickname is the last thing to deal with, because it is the one fact about this book that everyone knows and it is wrong in three ways at once. The Geneva did not invent breeches at Genesis 3:7. Both Wycliffite versions have it about a hundred and seventy years earlier, the Early Version reading maden hem brechis and the Later Version maden brechis to hem silf, and Caxton’s Golden Legend has the fig leaves sewn together in the manner of breeches. The Geneva translators are unlikely to have copied any of them, since no Wycliffite Bible was printed until 1731. They and Wycliffe were independently rendering a garment that girds, and the Geneva says so in its own margin: Hebrew, things to gird about them. Then there is the timing. Nobody called it the Breeches Bible while anyone was reading it; the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest recorded use is 1835, and the dismissive usage seems to start in the eighteenth century. The name comes from collectors, not from readers, and it is at least a century and a half younger than the book. The standard bibliography calls it a somewhat absurd title, generally misleading, and Daniell’s complaint is sharper: it reduced a serious piece of Renaissance scholarship to a joke.

1560–1599 · The notes, and what they actually say

Sixteen Thousand Notes, and Thirteen About the Pope

The Geneva Bible has more than sixteen thousand marginal notes, and its reputation rests on about fifty of them. Outside the book of Revelation, thirteen notes in the entire Bible name the Pope, Papists or Antichrist. The words purgatory and the mass do not appear anywhere in the annotations at all. One of the thirteen, at Daniel 7:8, explicitly declines to identify the little horn with the Pope. The concentration is almost all in Revelation, where forty-seven notes carry that vocabulary across about eight thousand words — which is a genuinely polemical book of annotation sitting at the end of a mostly explanatory one.

Counts of the rest run the same way. Charles Martin went through the two hundred and fifty notes on Romans in the 1560 and found six or seven with any dogmatic bearing. Daniell puts about three quarters of the Old Testament notes and about half of the New Testament notes down to plain definition. The notes are also far sparser in the Apocrypha than elsewhere, which tells you something about how seriously the annotators took it. What the address to the reader says the notes are for is domestic: to give readers in England, Scotland and Ireland the explanation their parish clergy were mostly not able to give them. Read the margin of a Geneva Bible at random and what you get is a gloss on a Hebrew idiom, a geographical note, a cross reference, or somebody telling you which king this is.

The two notes that changed English history are the two King James named at Hampton Court in January 1604, and both are about kings rather than popes. That conference belongs to the King James page and is told there; what belongs here is what the notes say. At Exodus 1:19, where the Hebrew midwives lie to Pharaoh, the whole note is nine words: “Their disobedience herein was lawful, but their dissembling euil.” It licenses the defiance and condemns the lie, in one breath, and you have to read both clauses to see it doing both. What Barlow reports the king saying is that the marginal note alloweth disobedience to Kings, which is the first half of the sense with the second half removed, and nearly every retelling since has repeated the king’s edit rather than the note. At 2 Chronicles 15:16 the note faults King Asa not for deposing his idolatrous mother but for stopping there, since he should have executed her. That one has a detail that deserves to be better known: the note in the Bishops’ Bible, the official Bible of the Church of England, says very nearly the same thing in very nearly the same words.

None of this was ever formally condemned. The notes were complained of, restricted and boycotted, and they were never censured by statute, canon or court. The nearest approaches are Parker’s instruction to his own translators in 1568 to avoid bitter notes, the proviso in Bodley’s patent of 1561 letting two bishops edit the edition, Rule 6 of 1604 forbidding notes in the new translation, and a set of Oxford homilies against glossers. All the while the Queen’s Printer and then the King’s Printer published those notes in England, licensed, for forty years.

The last thing to say about the margin is that there is no such thing as the Geneva margin. The apparatus existed in several unstable forms across the life of the translation, and a reader in 1580 and a reader in 1600 were holding different books. Laurence Tomson revised the New Testament in 1576 along Beza’s lines with a new set of notes, and from 1587 his Testament was substituted into most Geneva Bibles. From 1599 the Revelation notes of Franciscus Junius replaced the originals. And the typography of the keying varies by edition: a reader of a 1583 folio had three visually distinct classes of note, a reader of a 1579 quarto had one undifferentiated letter doing all the jobs, and a reader of a 1586 Beza-Tomson octavo had a three-tier interlocking system with a printed key to explain it. Same translation, four different books.

The Junius notes are usually described as the shrill ones, and the arithmetic does not support that. They are more than twice as long as what they replaced, but per thousand words they name the Pope about five times less often. The difference is in kind. The 1560 notes repeat an epithet; Junius builds a case, dating the papal ascendancy from 1073, naming Gregory VII a most wretched necromancer and Boniface VIII this bloody butcher. It is not louder. It is more forensic, and a great deal harder to answer, which is presumably why it lasted.

1561–1575 · The patent that printed nothing

Fifteen Years, Not One Copy

Elizabeth’s first official act touching the English scriptures was to give the Geneva Bible a monopoly. On 8 January 1561 John Bodley and his assigns received an exclusive seven-year privilege to print it, with a forfeit of forty shillings for every Bible printed against it. The patent survives in full on the Patent Roll, and so does the clause that killed it, which sits at the end like a trapdoor: provided that the Bible to be imprinted may be so ordered in the edition thereof as may be seem expedient by the advice of the bishops of Canterbury and London. Pollard’s judgment on that is careful and, in the absence of any other explanation, hard to improve: the failure of Bodley to make any use of his own licence seems reasonably attributable to that clause. In seven years of exclusive right, he printed nothing.

The bishops in question were Matthew Parker and Edmund Grindal, and there is a letter of theirs that ought to be better known, because it says two opposite things in the space of one paragraph. Writing to Cecil from Lambeth on 9 March 1566, they recommend extending Bodley’s privilege by twelve years. Though we mean to set forth one other special Bible for the churches, they write, when convenient time and leisure hereafter will permit, yet shall it nothing hinder but rather do much good to have diversity of translations and readings. That sentence is quoted constantly and on its own it reads like generosity. Read on. And if his licence hereafter to be made go simply forth without proviso of our oversight, as we think it may so pass well enough, yet shall we take such order in writing with the party, that no impression shall pass but by our direction, consent, and advice. They are telling Cecil that the proviso can be dropped from the document because they will get the same result by private agreement.

No Geneva Bible was printed in England in Parker’s lifetime. He died on 17 May 1575, and English printing of it began that same year. Pollard’s conclusion is that Parker used his control of the Stationers’ Company to keep it out, and the timing is not subtle. It is worth saying the consequence plainly, because it cuts against the shape of the story everyone tells: the best-documented suppression of the Geneva Bible in England is Elizabethan, not Jacobean, and it was carried out by an archbishop rather than a king.

That gap is also why the Geneva Bible was not, at first, the runaway success it is remembered as. Between 1560 and 1575 exactly three editions of the complete Bible appeared anywhere in the world, all of them printed abroad, against eight Great Bibles and seven Bishops’ Bibles printed in England. Naseeb Shaheen’s summary is blunt: it actually got off to a slow start. The exiles noticed. The 1575 account of the Frankfurt troubles complains about it in print, fifteen years after publication: if that Bible be such as no enemy of God could justly find fault with, then may men marvel that such a work, being so profitable, should find so small favour as not to be printed again.

When it finally came, the first English printing was not quite the event it is usually recorded as either. In 1575 the quarto and octavo Genevas and two editions of Whittingham’s New Testament were all printed by Thomas Vautrollier for Christopher Barker. Barker published them; Vautrollier printed them. Barker did not appear as an actual printer until 1576, and six years before that he had been neither a member of the Stationers’ Company nor the owner of a press. He was a draper.

1568–1611 · The Bishops’ Bible, and why it lost

The Bishops Would Not Sell a Small Bible

The official answer to Geneva was the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, and Parker ran it as a project with written rules. He sent five of them to Cecil: follow the common English translation used in the churches and do not recede from it except where it manifestly varies from the original; follow Pagninus and Münster for the sections; make no bitter notes upon any text, nor set down any determination in places of controversy; mark with a stroke the genealogies and other places not edifying, so the reader may avoid them in public reading; and replace any word in the old translation that sounds to any offence of lightness or obscenity. Rule three is the Geneva Bible in a negative.

Rule four produced something you can still see in the book. The 1568 folio carries a note explaining that passages marked with inverted commas may be left unread in the public reading to the people. It is an official Bible that tells the man at the lectern which parts to skip.

Parker’s scheme of having each reviser initial his own section is usually described as a courtesy, and he says himself it was nothing of the kind. I here send you a note to signify who first travelled in the diverse books, he wrote to Cecil, and the letters of their names be partly affixed in the end of their books, which I thought a policy to show them, to make them more diligent, as answerable for their doings. It is an accountability measure. It also did not work evenly: one man who did substantial work on the New Testament has his initials nowhere in the book, and the Psalter was taken away from the bishop it was first given to, whose version seems never to have been used at all.

Physically it is the grandest English Bible printed to that date: a folio of eight hundred and eighteen leaves, fifty-seven lines in double columns, close to four hundred millimeters tall, with a hundred and twenty-four woodblocks and an engraved title carrying the queen’s portrait. Two things about it are worth keeping. The first is a sentence at the foot of Parker’s memorandum about the printer: he hath bestowed his thickest paper in the New Testament because it shall be most occupied. The second is that at the head of the Psalter stands an engraved portrait of William Cecil holding a large letter B, which is at once the initial of Blessed is the man and the initial of Burghley; when the plate was reused in the folio of 1572 the B had been cut out of it. And for all the state apparatus, the maps in the official Bible are closely copied from the ones in the Geneva.

It has no dedication, which both its rivals had. Parker was too ill to present it himself and sent one bound copy to the queen by proxy, with a letter attacking the Geneva without naming it: in certain places, he wrote, be publicly used some translations which have not been laboured in your realm, having interspersed diverse prejudicial notes which might have been also well spared. There is no evidence that Elizabeth ever answered his request for a licence. The words set forth by authority appear on Bishops’ Bible title pages from 1578 and the fuller authorised and appointed to be read in churches from 1585, and Pollard’s note on that is that no Order in Council is known which would justify either. The only formal instrument behind the book is a Latin canon of Convocation in 1571 requiring every archbishop and bishop to keep a copy at home, in the hall or the great dining chamber so that it may be of use to their servants and to visitors; churchwardens were told to see that every church had one, with the proviso si commode fieri possit — if it can conveniently be done. Thirty years earlier the Great Bible had been imposed by royal proclamation with a fine of four times the book’s cost for every month of delay.

Which brings us to why the Bishops’ Bible lost, because the usual answer is that it was a bad translation and that is only half of it. It was certainly uneven; Parker appointed no supervising editor, and Daniell’s verdict is that most of the original work is incompetent. But Pollard’s explanation is structural and much more interesting. Parker provided big church folios and quartos and almost no small editions for private reading, while using his influence to keep the Geneva out of English presses. So the small-book market simply stood empty, and when the Geneva finally got in it filled that space with octavos and duodecimos. Pollard’s sentence is the one to remember: he did not trust the people with cheap editions of the Bible, and his lack of confidence sealed the fate of the Bishops’ Bible.

The numbers follow. Of the roughly fifty Bishops’ items printed, only about twenty are complete Bibles; Westcott’s count of those is thirteen folios, six quartos and a single octavo. Of twenty-seven complete Bibles published in England between 1576 and 1585, twenty were Geneva. The 1572 revision of the Bishops’ printed the Psalms in parallel columns, Great Bible beside Bishops’, because congregations would not give up the psalter they already knew — a confession of failure bound into the book.

Price is the other half of it, and it needs stating carefully because the figures get mangled. Christopher Barker’s circular of 1578 offers the folio Geneva at twenty-four shillings bound and twenty unbound, and says thirty would barely have covered his costs; at the day-wages usual in the 1570s that is roughly a month’s work for a London labourer. A Bible was never cheap. What was cheap was a Testament, and Barker explains the economics of those in his own words: Testaments alone are not greatly commodious, by reason the prices are so small as will scarcely bear the charges. The claim that a Geneva Bible cost less than a week’s wages describes the pocket New Testament, not the Bible.

One last thing about authorization, since the word does so much work in this story. None of the three books has a traceable instrument of it. Elizabeth is not recorded as answering Parker. The King James title page says appointed to be read in churches and no appointment survives. And Christopher Barker’s own advertising broadside described the Geneva Bible — the unofficial one, the one with the notes — as authorized by the Lords and others of her Highness’s privy council, confirmed and allowed by the Lord Archbishop’s grace of Canterbury.

1576–1640s · Who actually read it

Everybody’s Bible, Nobody’s Party

The Geneva Bible is remembered as the Puritan Bible, and the evidence for that is thin to the point of being backwards. Lancelot Andrewes, who translated for the King James, almost always preached from the Geneva. So did Whitgift, so did Hooker, so did George Abbot, so did John King and Gervase Babington — and so did William Laud, as late as 1624. Of more than fifty printed sermons preached by bishops between 1611 and 1630, twenty-seven take their text from the Geneva and five from the Bishops’. Even the scripture quoted in the King James translators’ own preface is Geneva. Shaheen’s conclusion is the one to keep: use of the Geneva is by no means an indication of one’s religious convictions. Between 1576 and 1611 an English Bible printed in England was overwhelmingly likely to be a Geneva whoever bought it, which is a fact about the book trade rather than about anybody’s theology.

Shakespeare is the name always attached to it, and the honest version is more interesting than the slogan. He used at least three books, and one of them is not a Bible. The Geneva is demonstrable and so is the Bishops’: Mowbray’s blotted from the book of life in Richard II follows the Bishops’ wording. Most of his psalm-language comes from Coverdale’s psalter as printed in the Book of Common Prayer, which he would have heard in church rather than read at home. Hannibal Hamlin’s formulation is the accurate one: Shakespeare’s Bible is a network of translations, not a book.

Milton is usually claimed too, and his family Bible survives. It is a King James, now in the British Library, and he wrote the household’s births and deaths into it in his own hand until blindness stopped him in 1652. Bunyan is claimed on the strength of being a Puritan, and the identifiable quotations in Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding come out decisively King James: he writes righteous at 1 John 2:1 where the Geneva has just, and at one point quotes a marginal note that exists only in the King James. His Victorian editor allowed only that he sometimes quotes the Genevan.

Then the Pilgrims, which is the claim with the most weight resting on it and the least underneath it. What is certain is that William Bradford owned a Geneva Bible dated 1592 and that it is at Pilgrim Hall Museum today. What is also certain is that John Alden, who was on the same ship, owned a King James printed in 1619 or 1620, and that it is in the same museum. No manifest of the Mayflower’s contents survives, and the museum’s own position is that there is no absolute proof that any Bible was aboard. Meanwhile the evidence that does survive points the other way: John Robinson, the Leiden congregation’s pastor, was quoting the King James by 1615 and went on doing it until he died in 1625, and Robert Cushman’s Plymouth sermon of 1621, the oldest surviving sermon preached in North America, uses the King James text. Most Pilgrim households probably owned a Geneva. The Pilgrims brought the Geneva Bible, stated flatly, is not something anybody can show.

The soldiers are worse. The Souldiers Pocket Bible of 1643 is not a Bible and was not issued by Cromwell to the New Model Army, which did not exist until 1645. It is a sixteen-page pamphlet of about a hundred and fifty verses arranged under sixteen headings, all but four of them from the Old Testament, with no gospel narrative in it at all. Edmund Calamy did not compile it; the words Imprimatur Edm. Calamy on the original are a licenser’s mark approving a text for the press, and the compiler attribution appears on the title page of an 1895 facsimile and has been copied ever since. What the pamphlet does prove is the reach of the translation, because its verses are Geneva. And it prints not one of the notes.

Scotland is where the Geneva Bible genuinely was the national book, by law, which is the fact that gets left out of the English story. The Bassandyne Bible of 1579, the first Bible printed in Scotland, is a Geneva. The General Assembly ordered a copy for every parish kirk and called it the Common Book of the Kirk. And on 10 November 1579 the Scottish Parliament made private ownership compulsory for householders of substance, with a ten-pound penalty for not having one. The price fixed for it was four pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence, and that figure is in Scots money, worth something like a fifth or a sixth of sterling at the time and a twelfth after 1600 — which is why quoting it as pounds sterling, as people do, inflates the price several times over.

It was not confined to one sort of household either. A Geneva Bible of 1582 in the British Library belonged to Grace Howard of Burston in Norfolk, of a family plausibly recusant. Femke Molekamp’s work on women’s reading turns up Geneva Bibles annotated by their owners across the confessional spectrum, and her note on the point is that the book was not confined to reformist circles as is sometimes mistakenly assumed. For eighty years it was simply what an English or Scottish household had on the shelf.

1611–1644 · The end of it

No Order Was Ever Given

The last Geneva Bible printed in England is the folio of 1616. It came from the press of Robert Barker, the King’s Printer, and it carries James’s own initials in the title border. The last English quarto had appeared the year before. After that, nothing — and the explanation everybody gives for the nothing is a royal ban that no one has ever produced.

There is no proclamation. There is no statute, no Privy Council order and no Stationers’ Company minute. A. W. Pollard, who assembled the standard documentary collection of English Bible records in 1911, prints no such document and chose his words with care: the king’s printers were encouraged to print no more Geneva Bibles. What happened, he says, was a silent boycott, and he reaches it by inference from an absence of editions rather than from any paper.

The two best witnesses are hostile to each other and agree. At his trial in 1644 Laud said that Geneva Bibles were tolerated indeed both in Queen Elizabeth’s and King James his time, but allowed by authority in neither. William Prynne, prosecuting him, said that the King’s Printers had stopped for their private lucre, not by virtue of any public restraint, and added that Genevas were afterwards usually imported from beyond the seas and publicly sold without any inhibition or punishment, until this archbishop’s time. The prosecution and the defence, in a trial with everything to gain from saying otherwise, both testify that there was no ban. Kenneth Fincham’s work of 2020 supplies the motive: the new partnership of Barker, Norton and Bill could make more money on King James formats.

The clearest sign that no document is being cited is that the sources cannot agree who is supposed to have signed it. Some say James, some say Archbishop Abbot, some say Laud. The Laud attribution is impossible on its own terms, because in 1616 he was Dean of Gloucester and did not reach Canterbury until 1633. There is a real prohibition in this story, and it is his: printing and importation were restrained in the 1630s, the Star Chamber decree on printing came in 1637, Bibles were seized from Stationers, and a customs Searcher named Egerton lost his place and was fined forty pounds for letting Genevas through. That is twenty-one years after 1616, by an archbishop rather than a king, and Laud’s own stated reason was that Dutch imports were undercutting English printers.

Meanwhile the trade got inventive, and this is where the famous 1599 Bibles come from. A great many books whose title pages read Imprinted at London by the Deputies of Christopher Barker … 1599 were not printed in London and were not printed in 1599. They were printed in Amsterdam, Dordrecht and Delft, roughly between 1616 and 1644, under a false London imprint, in order to get past English customs. The Glasgow copy in its embroidered binding came off Jan Fredericksz Stam’s press at Amsterdam in 1633 and says Barker 1599 on its title page; another gives Amsterdam 1633 in its own colophon at the back. Henry Cotton had noticed the problem by 1852, warning that of the quarto Geneva dated 1599 there are at least eight distinct editions; A. S. Herbert’s verdict in the standard catalogue is that the date is probably untrue in almost every case. The point of the fake was to disguise a Dutch book as an English one, which is the opposite of the story usually told, in which Barker secretly kept printing at home and hid it behind a false date.

The Dutch went further and printed the combination James had specifically wanted separated: the King James text with the Geneva notes. That was not a matter of binding one into the other. They were printed together, deliberately, and advertised as a feature — an Amsterdam folio of 1642 announces most profitable annotations which have never before been set forth with this new translation, but are now placed in due order with great care and industry. A quarto was printed openly in London by the Company of Stationers in 1649, made to look like a Geneva. The line runs on through 1672, 1683, 1708 and 1715. None of them carries the Apocrypha.

What actually happened to the Geneva Bible is that it was outsold, faster than the legend allows. Six complete Geneva editions were printed in England after 1611 against twenty-one King James; between 1617 and 1644 there were a hundred and thirty-five King James editions printed in England against ten or eleven Genevas printed in Holland. King James dominance dates from about 1620 and was irreversible by 1630, which is seven years before the Star Chamber decree that is usually blamed for it. Even the figure of over sixty Geneva editions after 1611, which comes from Lloyd Berry and is repeated everywhere, has never been itemized; a recount from the standard catalogue finds no more than seventeen complete Bibles between 1612 and 1644, plus four New Testaments.

The last one of all is the folio of 1644, and it gives itself away. It was printed at Amsterdam by Thomas Stafford, and bound at the back are two leaves carrying the Synod of Dort’s admonition on the Apocrypha, which was ordered to be attached to the Dutch Bible. The final Geneva Bible has a Dutch appendix in it.

1579–today · What became of them, and what is sold as a Geneva Bible now

A Gravestone That Gets It Wrong

Whittingham came home and was made Dean of Durham, collated on 19 July 1563, and Elizabeth granted it against her own inclination. Leicester wrote to Warwick five days later to say so: the queen would not have done it at his suit nor at the secretary’s, and Warwick was to be thanked for it next to her majesty. What Whittingham did with the deanery is recorded in his own hand. First, in the morning at six of the clock, the grammar school and song school with all the servants of the house resort to prayers into the church; and because we lack an able schoolmaster, I bestow daily three or four hours in teaching the youth. He sent to the Queen’s Chapel for the best songs and anthems that could be got, and he ran a cathedral as a school. He also, by his own admission to the York commissioners in 1566, went about in a round cap and no surplice and had not administered the communion for three years.

The rest of Durham is harder to like, and the record of it is a hostile one that has never been refuted. The Rites of Durham, written in 1593 by someone who loathed him, says he pulled down and defaced the tombstones of the priors, broke up any that had a picture or a chalice cut on them, carried the rest away and built a washing house out of them for the women launderers, so that it cannot be discerned at this present that ever any hath been buried in the said centorie garth. Two marble holy-water stones went into his kitchen, where they were used for steeping beef and salting fish, having a conveyance in their bottoms for letting forth the water exactly as they had when they were in the church; the foot of the larger one ended up set in the earth in a blacksmith’s shop at Framwellgate bridge end. When the commission finally came for him in 1578 the charge that stuck alongside the ordination question was dilapidation, and the note of proofs against him has the word Proved written in the margin beside it. The same note has Proved beside drunkenness, and Partly proved beside a charge of adultery framed as common report; the DNB’s judgment is that both are too vague to deserve acceptance.

The commission was dated 14 May 1578 and sat four days at Durham. More than fifty articles had been prepared against him, and after four days’ sifting all but two were left as idle and vain: that he was only a Master of Arts where the statutes required a Bachelor of Divinity, and that he had not been made a minister after the order of the Church of England. He had been ordained at Geneva, by the congregation, and he produced a certificate to prove it. Then he produced a second certificate, and the wording had moved. The first said he was chosen by lot and election of the whole English congregation; the second, sworn before a notary in London on 15 November, had turned lot and election into suffrages. Archbishop Sandys had seized on the first phrase, arguing that no reformed church in Europe used lot. The prosecutor seized on the change: the selfsame men, of the one and selfsame thing, to depose after one manner in July and after another in November following, are to be suspected as too affectioned to the cause.

It never came to a sentence. The Earl of Huntingdon, Lord President of the North, refused to concur in depriving a man for imperfect ordination, on a ground that has outlived everything else in the case: it will be ill taken by all the godly and learned, both at home and abroad, that we should allow of the popish massing priests in our ministry, and disallow of ministers made in a reformed church. The commission adjourned. Sandys certified the council that Whittingham was keeping his bed pretending sickness; Walsingham wrote to him on 1 June 1579 to say the council had concluded from his letter that his weakness was no matter feigned but a truth, and wished him as perfect a recovery as he desired. He died nine days later, on 10 June 1579, with the case unresolved and never deprived. His will left to his former coadjutors, Mr Goodman and Mr Gilby, an old ryal each.

His tomb was destroyed by the Scots in 1640, but the inscription had been copied down first, and it is the reason for one of the most durable errors in the history of the English Bible. It called him the husband of Catherine, sister of John Calvin the theologian. Calvin is not known to have had a sister called Catherine. Neither man alludes to any such relationship anywhere in his surviving writings. The chronology makes it nearly impossible, since Whittingham’s wife was probably born no earlier than 1535. And the fallback version, that she was the sister of Calvin’s wife, fails too, because Calvin married Idelette de Bures, a Strasbourg widow, in 1540, while Catherine was the daughter of Louis Jaqueman of Orléans. The claim travelled from the stone into Anthony Wood, into Browne Willis, into Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology, into the DNB’s own article on William Cole, into the standard bibliography in 1903, into a Princeton library handlist as recently as 2004, and it is on Wikipedia and on Find a Grave today. The one monument that named a maker of the Geneva Bible got him wrong, and the mistake has outlived the monument by nearly four hundred years.

Which is a fair description of what has happened to the book. The Geneva Bible you can buy today is sold as the 1599, and almost every word of that description needs unpicking. It is a modern-spelling resetting of a facsimile of a copy dated 1599, and Herbert’s judgment on that date is the one already quoted: probably untrue in almost every case. Its New Testament notes are Laurence Tomson’s, from Beza. Its Revelation notes are Franciscus Junius’s, translated out of Latin. Neither set is what the exiles wrote. The modern edition drops the Apocrypha, the metrical Psalms, the arguments before the books, some of the chapter summaries, the index and the illustrations; it respells every proper name to match the New King James Version and adds possessive apostrophes. The other book people buy as an original, the Hendrickson 1560, is honest about itself in its own cataloguing: it is a reprint of a facsimile published by the University of Wisconsin in 1969, made mostly from the Scheide Library copy at Princeton with pages supplied from the Chapin Library at Williams College.

The Geneva Bible was also reprinted in English twice more, in 1776 and 1778, long after everyone had stopped reading it, and both of those read aprons at Genesis 3:7 — so neither of them is a Breeches Bible. The 1778 folio opens with Archbishop Parker’s preface to the Bishops’ Bible, which is presumably why at least one surviving copy has been rebacked with a spine label reading Bishop’s Bible. Even the newest claims made for the book run the same way. The story that Benjamin Franklin based his design for the Great Seal on the Geneva Bible’s title page — he did propose Moses and Pharaoh at the Red Sea in August 1776, and the 1560 title page does show it — appears to originate in 2024 marketing material from an English heritage property, and has since been added to Wikipedia. No eighteenth-century evidence for it has been produced.

A complete 1560 in acceptable condition made eight and a half thousand pounds at a provincial English auction in 2016. Later editions go for very much less: a black-letter Barker of 1582 fetched eighteen hundred dollars, and a 1580 has been appraised at around four hundred. Condition dominates, and a missing title page guts the price — which is a small final irony for a book whose title page never named anybody in the first place.

1382 – today

The whole thing, in order

1. c. 1382–95Both Wycliffite versions already have breeches at Genesis 3:7, about a hundred and seventy years early.
2. 1524–25Bomberg prints ben Hayyim’s rabbinic Bible at Venice: the standard Hebrew text for four centuries.
3. 1528Pagninus numbers a whole Latin Bible at Lyon, on a system unlike the modern one.
4. 1534Tyndale’s last New Testament, which supplies four sentences in five of the Geneva’s.
5. 1540The quarto Great Bible marks supplied words by setting them in roman inside black letter.
6. 1551Estienne’s Greek New Testament, printed at Geneva, fixes the verse divisions still in use.
7. July 1553Mary Tudor accedes, and printing of English scripture stops for five years.
8. 1554Frankfurt gives the English a church on condition they do not differ from the French.
9. 15 March 1555Knox is accused of treason before the Frankfurt magistrates and told on the eighteenth to go.
10. 10 June 1555Calvin asks the Geneva council for a church for Englishmen who have not yet arrived.
11. 13 October 1555Twenty-seven people reach Geneva from Frankfurt, women and children included.
12. 1 November 1555The church is constituted, and the register records it in seven words.
13. 25 November 1555The council divides the week: the Italians Thursday to Saturday, the English Monday to Wednesday.
14. 10 June 1557The New Testament is finished by Conrad Badius, with an errata list that miscorrects itself.
15. 17 November 1558Mary dies. The Bible is barely half done.
16. December 1558Bodley and Williams set up a press and put Rowland Hall in charge of it.
17. 24 January 1559Nearly two hundred English take formal leave of Geneva and go home.
18. 10 February 1559The Psalms alone, rushed into print as an accession gift for Elizabeth.
19. 10 April 1560The Bible: both epistles dated, no colophon, and no translator named anywhere in it.
20. 30 May 1560Whittingham hands the register across the council’s counter for perpetual memory.
21. 8 January 1561Bodley gets seven years’ exclusive right to print it, and prints nothing.
22. 9 March 1566Parker and Grindal recommend diversity of translations, and privately promise to control it.
23. 1568The Bishops’ Bible. Rule three forbids bitter notes; rule four marks the passages to skip aloud.
24. 1575Parker dies in May, and English printing of the Geneva begins the same year.
25. 1576Laurence Tomson revises the New Testament from Beza, and is substituted in from 1587.
26. 10 November 1579The Scottish Parliament makes ownership compulsory for householders of substance.
27. 10 June 1579Whittingham dies at Durham with the case against his ordination unresolved.
28. 1599Junius’s notes replace the originals on Revelation, and are longer and colder.
29. January 1604James names two Geneva notes at Hampton Court. Both are about kings, not popes.
30. 1611The King James appears, and a Geneva folio and quarto are printed in England the same year.
31. 1616The last Geneva printed in England, by the King’s Printer, with the king’s initials in the border.
32. 1637Laud’s Star Chamber decree. A customs officer is fined forty pounds for letting Genevas through.
33. 1640Whittingham’s tomb at Durham is destroyed, after the inscription has been copied down.
34. 1644The last Geneva Bible of all, printed at Amsterdam with a Dutch appendix bound at the back.
35. 1835The first recorded use of the nickname Breeches Bible, a century and a half after anyone read one.

Who says so

A note on sources

This is a secondhand history, assembled from the books named below, and where they disagree the disagreement has been left standing in the prose rather than tidied out of it.

A great deal of it rests on one man. Almost everything here about the congregation itself — the register and its blank pages, the shared church, the bell, the counts of members and baptisms, the apprenticeships, the departure — comes from Charles Martin’s study of 1915, which is the only work that goes through the manuscript and the Geneva council registers side by side. Where a figure of his conflicts with the numbers in circulation, both are given here, because the conflict is the useful part.

Several other things stand on a single witness, and those witnesses are named in the sentences on purpose. The list of translators descends from one anonymous manuscript that admits it is incomplete. Anthony Wood supplies the one-and-a-half-years. The Rites of Durham is the sole source for the gravestones and the holy-water stones, and it was written by somebody who detested Whittingham. Henri Estienne is the only authority for how his father divided the verses. Barlow is the only detailed account of Hampton Court, which is why that room belongs to another page.

And some numbers here are estimates wearing the clothes of counts. Nobody agrees how many editions of this Bible were printed: one hundred and forty, over one hundred and fifty, one hundred and eighty and over two hundred are all in print, and the spread is a disagreement about what counts as an edition rather than a rounding error. Copy totals are worse and no source that gives one states a method. The eighty-three percent is one scholar’s sample, not a word-by-word tally of the whole book.

Further reading

• Charles Martin, Les Protestants anglais réfugiés à Genève au temps de Calvin, 1555-1560 (1915) — The book behind most of this page. Works from the congregation’s own register and the Geneva council minutes, and is the reason any of the domestic detail can be given at all. In French, and freely available.
• Christopher Anderson, The Annals of the English Bible (1845) — Old, opinionated and still the place where the traditional list of nine translators was taken apart on the evidence of who was actually in the city.
• A. W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible (1911) — The documents themselves, printed in full: Bodley’s patent, Parker’s rules and letters, the licences. Anyone arguing about bans or authorizations should read this before arguing.
• A. S. Herbert, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525-1961 (1968) — The standard bibliography, revising Darlow and Moule, and the source of the verdict that the date 1599 is probably untrue in almost every case.
• T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture (1903) — The earlier catalogue, and still the fullest physical description of the 1557 and the 1560, down to the errata leaf and the miscorrected number.
• Lloyd E. Berry, introduction to the facsimile of the 1560 Geneva Bible (1969) — The standard modern account of the book, and the source of several figures this page hedges rather than repeats.
• David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (2003) — The best single volume for seeing where any one English version sits in the line, and warmly partisan for this one; his two different totals for the pictures are on facing arguments in the same essay.
• Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (1999) — Does the counting nobody else does: black letter against roman, edition against edition, and which preacher used which Bible. The correction to the Puritan-Bible story is his.
• Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (2013) — Replaces the single-Bible question with a better one, and is the reason this page says network of translations rather than naming a book.
• Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (2013) — On the people who actually owned these books and wrote in their margins, including the readers a confessional account of the Geneva Bible leaves out.
• Maurice S. Betteridge, The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations (1983) — The article that counted the notes instead of characterizing them, and concluded the margin was hardly the badge of any narrow party loyalty.
• Brooke Foss Westcott, A General View of the History of the English Bible (1905) — The third edition, revised by Aldis Wright. Dry, exact, and the source for the scholar’s-instinct observation about the accented Hebrew names.