“Coming events cast their shadows before”, wrote Thomas Campbell, Scottish poet and chancellor of Glasgow University. H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel Things to Come and the frightening and prescient 1936 film based upon it also emphasised the monitory importance of looking ahead.

William Bothwell While the future is never really predictable, as we enter the last third of the year some upcoming celebrations of notable past events merit advance notice. That is especially so of those that fall within the next several years. Plans for them are now under way.

The most immediate of them is next year’s 400th anniversary of the King Kames Version of the Bible. In what is for many people still inspired language from the golden age of Early Modern English, the KJV was the only positive result of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference called by King James I of England (James VI of Scotland) in an effort to reconcile ‘non-conformists’ to the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church of England. Scholars from Oxford and Cambridge produced a new translation from Hebrew and Greek sources. Vetted by the bishops, it was proclaimed by the king in 1611 as the only version authorised to be read in churches.

It was foreseen in the Preface that it would be ‘traduced’ by “Popish persons” and other “selfconceited brethren who run their own ways and give liking unto nothing but what is framed by themselves and hammered on their anvils”. Some Puritans clung to the older Wyclif and Tyndale translations while ‘recusant’ scholars at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands produced a 1609 English translation from St Jerome’s Latin. Until the 1943 encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (Inspired by the Divine Spirit) Roman Catholic scholars were required to use that version rather than the earlier Hebrew and Greek sources.

On 7 February, 1952, I had been working all morning in New York’s Columbia University library. At noon, I headed downtown on the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) to the Bank of Montreal where in pre-Visa days I had a line of credit. Emerging from the underground, I saw flags at half mast. I asked a passerby, “Who has died”? He answered, “The king”. Since Elvis’s claim to royalty was still in the future, knew that ‘the king’ must be George VI. I reflected also on the continuing regard for the monarchy in the Empire State.

Thus began what Winston Churchill called ‘the Second Elizabethan Age’. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on the throne will be celebrated in 2012. The actual Coronation ceremony was on 2 June, 1953. It is interesting to look through the souvenir programme of that day and the illustrated booklet presented “with the compliments of George Weston Ltd. in order that the Canadian people may vividly visualise this magnificent and sacred event”.

October 13, 2012 will be the 200th anniversary of the death of Sir Isaac Brock, hero and defender of Upper Canada during the War of 1812. The way it is observed will be a measure of how this nation remembers and respects its history. Six months after the Battle of Queenston Heights a hostile fleet of 14 vessels carrying 1600 armed men landed just west of York (now Toronto). On April 27 a column advanced on the town, looted and burned parts of it. The following year a British force landed and torched a section of Washington in reprisal. People down there in D.C. forget why.

An event that descendants of loyalists and revolutionaries can mark in common will be the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta on 15 June, 2015. Somewhat symbolically, the story occupies 15 pages at mid-point in the first volume of Churchill’s History of the English-speaking Peoples. He says that our democracy owes more to the vices of King John than to the virtues of many other people.

An alliance of John’s opponents forced him to sign the document that is the foundation of our rights and freedoms. “The Charter became an enduring witness that the power of the Crown was not absolute”.

The foreshadowing of events also takes us just over five years forward to the year 2016. For some of us that may be, as the poet Thomas Gray put it, “beyond the bounds of place and time”. The living and literate of the world will then mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare on 23 April, 1616. His wisdom is patent. “What a piece of work is man!”. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreampt of in your philosophy”. “Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither; ripeness (i.e. readiness) is all”. As with the KJV, people keep quoting him, often without realising it.

In 1597, a year after the death of his 11 year old son Hamnet, the Bard bought New Place, the second largest house in Stratfordupon Avon.

In due course he retired there, known locally chiefly as a successful business man and landowner. In 1616 he died at age 52. Everyone knows he is buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford but the place does not bear his name. A profitable industry produces repeated speculation that he did not write the plays attributed to him. When I am asked my opinion, I say, “I think they might have been written by another Stratford man of the same name who likely had a staff of London research assistants”.

The year 2017 will bring the quincentenary of Professor Martin Luther’s 1517 publishing at Wittenberg University of 95 theses concerning needed reforms in the Western (Roman) part of the Catholic Church. Some think that, like other reformers, he protested too vehemently. Like all who refuse to admit their mistakes, even worthier pontiffs than Giovanni de Medici, Leo X (made a cardinal at age 16 and ordained priest a week after his election as pope) have opposed necessary reform.

The next few years will bring as yet unforeseen crises – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to coin a phrase. The commemorations cited above will remind us how much of the past is with us still.