James arrived in England in 1603 to find a church settlement that satisfied nobody. Puritan clergy presented him with the Millenary Petition asking for further reform of ceremony and discipline, and he called a conference at Hampton Court in January 1604 to hear both sides. He gave the Puritans almost nothing on ceremony, and when presbyterian church government was raised he answered that no bishop meant no king, since a church without a hierarchy would not long tolerate a monarchy either. One request he did grant, almost in passing, was for a new translation of the Bible.
The scheme he approved was unusually well organized. Roughly fifty scholars worked in six companies at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, each taking a portion, and each company's draft was reviewed by the others before a final committee harmonized the whole. The rules of procedure required them to follow the Bishops' Bible where the original allowed, to keep familiar ecclesiastical words rather than replacing them, and to add no marginal notes except for cross references and difficulties of translation. That last rule was pointed. James disliked the Geneva Bible, then the most widely read English version, because its marginal notes told readers when a king might rightly be disobeyed.
The version appeared in 1611. It was not an immediate success and took decades to displace the Geneva Bible in private reading, but by the eighteenth century it was simply the Bible in English, and its cadences entered the language so completely that phrases from it are used daily by people who have never opened it. Its influence on English prose, hymnody and public oratory is broader than that of any other book, and its authorization was the incidental outcome of a conference called to settle something else.