12. William Whittingham
It is not positively known by whom this good work was done; but there is no doubt but that the person was William Whittingham. He was a native of Lanchester, near Durham, born in 1524. He was of a good family, a Fellow of one of the Colleges at Oxford; and had spent three years in foreign travel, and at the Universities in France. When Mary mounted the throne, he betook himself first to Frankfort in Germany. A year later, in 1555, he removed to Geneva, where he was ordained as minister of the English Congregation, of some hundred members, and where he married Catharine Chauvin, the sister of John Calvin.* Having issued the New Testament of the Geneva version, he was aided to some extent by two of his learned fellow-exiles in revising the entire Scriptures, on which
* Calcians is the Latin, form of the French name Chauvin.
they were engaged night and day in 1558, the year that hapless Mary died of a broken heart.* They continued their labors till April, 1560, when the whole work was finished. The expense was defrayed by the wealthier members of the English Congregation at Geneva. Of this revision, numerous editions were printed in the course of the next eighty years. It was several times reprinted even after King James's translation was published, as it was very popular with the Puritans on account of the numerous very brief marginal annotations. As soon as the first edition had passed the press at Geneva, the editors returned to England.
Whittingham, soon after, went to France as chaplain to the British ambassador, the Earl of Bedford. On his return, he acted in the same capacity for the Earl of Warwick. Through the influence of that excellent nobleman, he was appointed to the deanery of Durham, in 1563, notwithstanding his sturdy opposition to the popish
* One of the old Protestant ministers preached a funeral sermon for her, on the text,—"Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king's daughter." 2 Ki. ix. 34. When he was called in question for it, it was decided that the text was the most objectionable part of the sermon!
ceremonies retained in the Church of England. His abilities were so highly esteemed, that when the Secretary Cecil became, by promotion, Lord Treasurer Burleigh, the vacant secretaryship might have been taken by Mr. Whittingham, had he desired it. He was repeatedly impleaded in the ecclesiastical courts for his non-conformity, and for his presbyterial ordination at Geneva; and he was once excommunicated by the Archbishop of York. On appeal to Queen Elizabeth, she appointed Henry, Earl of Huntington, who was Lord President of the Council of the North, and Dr. Hutton, Dean of York, as a commission to examine and decide the case. The Commission boldly declared, "that Mr. Whittingham was ordained in a better sort than even the Archbishop himself." Another attempt on the part of that dignitary succeeded no better. Before these prosecutions were ended, Mr. Whittingham died in possession of his benefice, in 1579, and in the sixty-fifth year of his age. He was buried in the cathedral at Durham. He was an eminently pious and powerful preacher, and an ornament to religion and learning, to which he greatly contributed by his publications, and chiefly by his agency in the revision of the English Bible. He was the author of several of those metrical versions of the Psalms, which are still sung in the Episcopal Churches of England and America, even as Tyndale's prose translations of the Psalms are still printed and read in the Book of Common Prayer.