James VI and I

• 1. Introduction

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  James VI and I was born on the 19th of June 1566 inside Edinburgh Castle, the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. By the time he was thirteen months old, he was already a king. His mother had been forced to abdicate, his father had been murdered, and four regents would take turns governing Scotland before James could truly call himself ruler. The infant boy was anointed at the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling, with the sermon preached by John Knox himself.

  He would go on to reign in Scotland for 57 years and 246 days, the longest of any Scottish monarch. Then, in 1603, he inherited England and Ireland too, becoming the first Stuart king to sit on the English throne. He sponsored the translation of the Bible that still bears his name. He survived the Gunpowder Plot. He wrote treatises on kingship, poetry, and witchcraft. And he was called, by his own contemporaries, "the wisest fool in Christendom".

  Who was this man who governed three kingdoms for more than two decades, yet kept returning to one central question: could Scotland and England ever become a single nation?

• 2. A Childhood in Danger

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  Five days after James was born, the English diplomat Henry Killigrew visited the queen and observed the baby "sucking at his nurse" and described him as "well proportioned and like to prove a goodly prince". The world around that infant was far less tranquil. His father, Lord Darnley, had conspired in the murder of Mary's private secretary, David Rizzio, just three months before the birth. Then, on the 10th of February 1567, Darnley himself was murdered at Kirk o' Field in Edinburgh.

  Mary's marriage three months later to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who was widely suspected of killing Darnley, made her position untenable. Protestant rebels arrested her and imprisoned her in Lochleven Castle. She never saw her son again. James was entrusted to the Earl and Countess of Mar, to be raised in the security of Stirling Castle.

  His senior tutor, George Buchanan, subjected the young king to regular beatings but also planted in him a lifelong passion for literature and learning. Buchanan wanted James to become a God-fearing Protestant monarch who accepted the limits of royal power, and he set out those ideas in his treatise De Jure Regni apud Scotos. The regencies were dangerous years. Moray was assassinated. James's paternal grandfather, the Earl of Lennox, was carried fatally wounded into Stirling Castle after a raid by Mary's supporters. The next regent, the Earl of Mar, died after a banquet at Dalkeith Palace. James Douglas, Earl of Morton, the most capable regent, was eventually executed in 1581, charged belatedly with complicity in Darnley's murder.

  James had been proclaimed an adult ruler in a ceremony of Entry to Edinburgh on the 19th of October 1579, but real power was still held by others. It was not until he escaped from Falkland on the 27th of June 1583 that he began to assume genuine control of his kingdom.

• 3. King and Favourites

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  Esmé Stewart, Sieur d'Aubigny, arrived in Scotland as a first cousin of James's murdered father and quickly became the first of the king's powerful favourites. James made him the only duke in Scotland on the 8th of August 1581. Scottish Calvinists distrusted the relationship and alleged that Lennox "went about to draw the King to carnal lust". In August 1582, Protestant earls lured James into Ruthven Castle, imprisoned him, and forced Lennox to leave Scotland.

  Throughout his life, James had close relationships with male courtiers that historians have debated ever since. Some biographers conclude that Esmé Stewart, Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, were his lovers. John Oglander observed that James had never seen "any fond husband make so much or so great dalliance over his beautiful spouse" as the king showed toward his favourites. A modern restoration of Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire, undertaken from 2004 to 2008, revealed a previously unknown passage linking what were the bedchambers of James and Villiers.

  Other biographers argue the relationships were not sexual. James's own Basilikon Doron lists sodomy among crimes a king is "bound in conscience never to forgive". Contemporary Huguenot poet Théophile de Viau wrote bluntly that the king of England slept with Buckingham. Buckingham himself wrote to James recalling the night at Farnham "where the bed's head could not be found between the master and his dog". Whether those words describe a sexual relationship or the intimacies of 17th-century court life remains genuinely ambiguous.

  The consequences of James's dependence on favourites were less ambiguous. When Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, fell from favour, it emerged in summer 1615 that his friend Thomas Overbury had been poisoned in the Tower of London in September 1613. Both Carr and his wife Frances Howard were convicted. James pardoned the Countess and commuted the Earl's death sentence, eventually pardoning him in 1624. The scandal irreparably tarnished the court with an image of corruption.

• 4. Witchcraft and Writing

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  James attended the North Berwick witch trials, the first major persecution of witches in Scotland under the Witchcraft Act 1563. Several people were convicted of using witchcraft to send storms against the king's ship during his voyage to bring Anne of Denmark to Scotland. The most notable was Agnes Sampson. James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches and wrote Daemonologie in 1597, a tract that opposed the practice of witchcraft and provided background material for Shakespeare's Macbeth.

  After 1599, his views became more sceptical. In a later letter to his son Henry, James congratulated the prince on discovering "yon little counterfeit wench" and prayed that Henry might be his heir in such discoveries, noting that "most miracles now-a-days prove but illusions".

  Writing was never separate from his politics. In 1584, at the age of 18, James published a treatise on Scottish prosody, applying Renaissance principles to his native language of Scots. He was both patron and practising member of the Castalian Band, a circle of Scottish court poets and musicians that included William Fowler and Alexander Montgomerie, a particular favourite of the king. In 1597-98, he wrote The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron, arguing the theological basis for monarchy. Basilikon Doron was addressed to his four-year-old son Henry and is considered perhaps the best example of James's prose.

  The most enduring product of his literary patronage was the King James Version of the Bible, commissioned at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 to resolve discrepancies among different translations then in use. It was completed in 1611 and is considered a masterpiece of Jacobean prose. It remains in widespread use today.

• 5. Marriage and Diplomacy

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  Anne of Denmark was fourteen years old when the choice of her as James's bride was made, as the younger daughter of the Protestant Danish king Frederick II. After a proxy marriage in Copenhagen in August 1589, storms forced her ship to the coast of Norway. On hearing that the crossing had been abandoned, James sailed from Leith with a retinue of 300 to fetch her personally, in what historian David Harris Willson called "the one romantic episode of his life". They were married formally at the Bishop's Palace in Oslo on the 23rd of November. James received a dowry of 75,000 Danish dalers, plus a gift of 10,000 dalers from his mother-in-law, Sophie of Mecklenburg-Gustrow. The journey home included a meeting with the astronomer Tycho Brahe.

  By all accounts James was at first infatuated with Anne. They attended courtier weddings together and danced in masque costume. Anne gave birth to seven live children, three of whom survived to adulthood: Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died of typhoid fever in 1612 aged 18; Elizabeth, later queen of Bohemia; and Charles, who became king after James.

  Anne suffered recurrent sickness and was seriously ill from 1617. James visited her only three times during her last illness. She died in March 1619, before her husband.

  On the diplomatic front, James brought the long Anglo-Spanish War to an end. A peace treaty was signed in August 1604, thanks in particular to the skilled diplomacy of Robert Cecil and Henry Howard, now Earl of Northampton. James celebrated with a great banquet. Maintaining that peace while refusing to abandon his Protestant son-in-law Frederick V, Elector Palatine, proved an impossible balance. Spanish troops invaded Frederick's Rhineland territory in 1620 at the same moment Ferdinand II expelled him from Bohemia, forcing James into an impossible position between Parliament's appetite for war and his own commitment to peace.

• 6. Three Kingdoms, One Crown

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  Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I's chief minister, maintained a secret correspondence with James in the last years of Elizabeth's life to prepare for a smooth succession. Elizabeth died in the early hours of the 24th of March 1603, and James was proclaimed king in London later that same day. He left Edinburgh on the 5th of April, promising to return every three years, a promise he did not keep. He arrived in London on the 7th of May, nine days after Elizabeth's funeral, and was mobbed by a crowd of spectators.

  The debt James inherited was substantial. The government carried debts of £400,000, inflated by the costs of war in Ireland. James's own court added to the problem. In February 1610, his minister Salisbury proposed the Great Contract, by which Parliament would grant a lump sum of £600,000 to clear the king's debts in exchange for ten royal concessions. The negotiations became so protracted that James dismissed Parliament on the 31st of December 1610, telling Salisbury, "Your greatest error hath been that ye ever expected to draw honey out of gall". He then ruled without Parliament until 1621, selling baronetcies as an alternative source of income.

  James was ambitious for a genuine political union between England and Scotland, telling the English Parliament, "Hath He not made us all in one island, compassed with one sea and of itself by nature indivisible?" In April 1604, the Commons refused his request to be titled King of Great Britain on legal grounds. He assumed the title anyway in October 1604, using it on proclamations, coinage, letters, and treaties, though Francis Bacon told him it could not appear in any legal proceeding.

  The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was the most dramatic test of his reign in England. A dissident Catholic, Guy Fawkes, was discovered in the cellars of the Parliament buildings on the night of the 4th to the 5th of November, guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder. James described the intended destruction as aimed not only at himself and his wife and children but at "the whole body of the State in general". Fawkes and others implicated in the conspiracy were executed, and the Earl of Salisbury used the national mood of relief to extract unusually high subsidies from the subsequent Parliament.

• 7. Legacy and Reputation

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  James died at Theobalds House in Hertfordshire on the 27th of March 1625, aged 58, during a violent attack of dysentery, with Buckingham at his bedside. In his later years he had suffered increasingly from arthritis, gout, and kidney stones, and lost his teeth, and drank heavily. He described his urine to physician Théodore de Mayerne as being the "dark red colour of Alicante wine", prompting later speculation that he suffered from porphyria, though many experts dismiss this because kidney stones can themselves cause blood in the urine.

  His funeral on the 7th of May was preached by Bishop John Williams of Lincoln, who observed that King Solomon died in peace having lived about sixty years "and so you know did King James". The sermon was later printed as Great Britain's Salomon.

  The founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and Cuper's Cove, Newfoundland, in 1610 both took place under James, as did the Plantation of Ulster by English and Scots Protestants. The religious division in Ireland that followed has lasted, in the source's own reckoning, for 400 years.

  For generations, James's reputation rested largely on hostile accounts written in the 1650s by men he had sacked or defeated: Anthony Weldon, Edward Peyton, Arthur Wilson, and Francis Osborne. David Harris Willson's 1956 biography, in the words of historian Jenny Wormald, was "an astonishing spectacle of a work whose every page proclaimed its author's increasing hatred for his subject". Since the latter half of the 20th century, historians have largely revised that verdict. Pauline Croft's 2003 biography credits James with good intentions in matters of Anglo-Scottish union, openness to different points of view, and a foreign policy aimed at peace within his kingdoms' financial means. The King James Bible, still in widespread use, stands as the most durable evidence that he was, whatever else, a man who took the written word seriously.