On this day 405 years ago, King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth I as monarch of England. Two years later he was the one of the subjects of a famous assassination plot known as the Gunpowder Plot, which is commemorated each year on 5 November as Guy Fawkes Day. The reign of King James coincided with the “Golden Age” of Elizabethan literature, with writers such as William Shakespeare, John Donne and Sir Francis Bacon.
In January 1604, King James convened the Hampton Court Conference to address various concerns which had been raised by Puritans. This led to the royal commissioning of a new translation of the Bible, which was published in 1611 as the Authorised Version, now commonly known as the King James Version, although he was not personally one of the translators. The King James Version is considered one of the greatest literary achievements of the period.
King James died in 1625, but the Bible translation which he had commissioned lived on to become the most widely published book in history, with over one billion copies in print. The King James Version was translated primarily from the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts which were available at the time. Newer translations such as the New International Version are based partly on ancient manuscripts which are considered to be more reliable, although the differences in wording are quite minor.