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Just WHY did King James 'authorize' the Bible anyway? To get it INTO the hands of the people and not to have them relying on what the 'leaders' of the churches were telling them.

Well, not exactly. The Authorized is a wonderfully accurate translation with very few mistranslated words but does contain some unusual and archaic words. King James was actually wanting to publish a sound English Bible that had no footnotes or commentary in the margins. The reason he wanted this so badly was to battle the influence of the Geneva Bible, then the dominant translation. The Geneva (from Calvin's Geneva) contained a great deal of anti-monarchical footnotes. These footnotes were especially opposed to church-state collusion (King James and the Church of England) and were generally republican, not monarchical.

The good king produced an excellent Bible, still the best English bible available. But his motives were political. However, Calvin's Geneva Bible and its seditious footnotes were not stamped out in time to prevent the American Revolution. Calvin's ideas about republican government and the separation of church from state had taken hold in America very strongly. Particularly among Presbyterians, a very fiery bunch in those days. To a lesser degree, the same held true among Calvinists in other denominations as well.

Without Calvin and his seditious footnoted Bible, there might not have even been a Revolution. Even though the King James Version had overtaken the Geneva Bible by the time of the Revolution, Calvin's ideas had entered into the maketplace of ideas in the Enlightenment period. And, of course, there were many American congregations who preserved the memory of their persecution at the hands of church-state alliances in Europe. The Puritan influence, also strongly rooted in the church-state conflict, also contributed to the church-based revolutionary tendency.