Chapter Ten

James’s Reputation, 1625–2005

Ralph Houlbrooke

‘Calumny and flattery, satyre and panegyric’: 1625–1750

On 27 March 1625 death carried off James VI and I, unsurpassed among British
rulers in his eagerness to communicate his vision of his powers, his duties and
his ambitions by speech, pen, and print. The daunting task of projecting to a large
audience the first ‘lively image and representation’ of a deceased king so active in
self-presentation fell to John Williams, bishop of Lincoln and lord keeper of the
great seal, preacher at James’s funeral on 7 May. Williams, who had attended James
on his deathbed, was exceptionally well qualified to portray the king in the manner
that best reflected his own aspirations and self-image. His sermon, Great Britaines
SALOMON, presents a sustained comparison between James and the wise king of
Israel, suggested by 1 Kings 11: 41–3. James, like Solomon, had been happy in his
life, reign, and end. Divine providence had made James the means of uniting a great
empire as the first king to reign over the whole of Britain.1
His eloquence, deeds, and wisdom had resembled Solomon’s. His speeches
in parliament, Star Chamber, at the Council table, and on other public occasions,
proved him the most powerful speaker among English kings. He had been a ‘King
of Writers’. Death had interrupted his new translation of the Psalms, intended for
dedication to ‘the onely Saint of his Deuotion, the Church of Great Britaine, and that
of Ireland’.2
James had been the most steadfast of all royal patrons of churches and churchmen
in doctrine, discipline, and maintenance. There had never lived ‘a more constant,
resolute, and settled Protestant in point of Doctrine’. His new translation of the
Bible had been directed against the papists. A defender of true doctrine throughout
his life, James had not shown ‘the least Conniuence’ towards the person of a papist,
even for strong reasons of state or the necessities of Christendom, save when guided
by Queen Elizabeth’s actions.
Scotland’s new discipline had given the young James an object lesson in how
the Church should not be governed. He had restored episcopal government, the only

1 John Williams, Great Britaines Salomon. A Sermon Preached at the Magnificent

Funerall, of the most high and mighty King, Iames (1625), pp. 1–5, 43–5, 63–4.
2 Ibid., pp. 40–42, 59, 61.
170 James VI and I
discipline compatible with the fundamental laws of any Christian monarchy. His
commitment to right discipline in England had been shown ‘by the Conference at
Hampton Court, against the Nouellists’. The king had refused to exploit episcopal
vacancies for royal profit, curbed the leasing of church lands to the Crown, and
spent the greater part of his revenues in Ireland and Scotland on endowment of the
Church.3
James’s administration of justice had been exemplary. He had shown daring and
resolution in riding against Scottish rebels. A greater achievement had however been
to hold the balance of Europe and preserve its peace. The fruits of peace had included
the enhancement of learning, the invention of manufactures, the improvement of
the navy, the peaceable government of the borders of Scotland, the religious (i.e.
Protestant) plantation of northern Ireland, the establishment of colonies in North
America, a great expansion of English trade, and its extension to all the ports of the
known world.4
James, like Solomon, had died well. Called by sickness some years before his
death to set his house in order, he had given his son Charles excellent paternal
counsel. Before receiving the Blessed Sacrament to his ‘unimaginable comfort’
during his final sickness he had re-affirmed his faith, given or sought forgiveness of
all offences received or caused, and humbly desired absolution.5
Williams’s eulogy, if sometimes exuberant and overblown, nevertheless
emphasizes themes of lasting importance: the union of the crowns, and the king’s
church policy. It also does eloquent justice to those things that made James unique
among monarchs: his learning, his communication of his ideas, and his commitment
to peace. In his own appraisal of James, another churchman, William Laud, would
later agree with Williams, despite the two men’s bitter antagonism under Charles
I. Besides James’s preservation of peace at home and efforts to secure the unity
of Christendom, Laud praised his patience, clemency, moderation, justice, bounty,
and almost unparalleled sweetness of nature. He had been the greatest patron to
the Church in many ages, the most learned prince England had ever known for
matters of religion, and completely consistent in his religious integrity, soundness,
and orthodoxy. His deathbed conduct, and his approval of the Church of England’s
‘moderate reformation’, especially its retention of the comforting absolution that he
himself received, had been (Laud implied) exemplary.6
James’s rule was subjected to more critical appraisal during the 1640s. Thomas
May, a secretary to the Long Parliament, included a brief account in his officially
commissioned History of the Parliament of England (1647). Wise and learned,

3 Ibid., pp. 46–52.

4 Ibid., pp. 39, 53–7, 60.
5 Ibid., pp. 67–73.
6 William Prynne, A Breviate of the Life of William Laud, Arch-bishop of Canterbury
(1644), p. 5; on the antagonism between Williams and Laud, see C.S. Knighton, ‘The Lord of
Jerusalem: John Williams as Dean of Westminster’, in C.S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer
(eds), Westminster Abbey Reformed, 1540–1640 (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 232–258.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 171
merciful and gracious, ‘excellently grounded in that Religion which he professed’,
James had nevertheless made the great mistake of temporising with Rome, whether
out of fear, or his desire for peace and religious reconciliation. There had followed
the relaxation of penal laws, the increase of ceremonies and prelatical pomp, growing
favour towards papists, and the project of the Spanish match. Spain and the papacy
had taken advantage of James, who had been brought to oppose his own interests.
The king, ‘being loath perchance that the whole people should take notice of those
waies in which he trod, grew extremely dis-affected to Parliaments’, calling them
only for supply, dissolving them when they began to meddle with state affairs, and
imprisoning members. The king had then turned to illegal projects as a substitute
for parliamentary supply, and finally put the business of government and patronage
in church and state into Buckingham’s hands. May, despite his respectful opening
remarks, implicitly traced the roots of some of the policies so bitterly criticized in
the 1641 Grand Remonstrance back to James’s reign.7
The fall of the monarchy encouraged the publication of memoirs that purported to
uncover James’s personal weaknesses and the more unsavoury aspects of his regime.
Published in 1650 and 1658 respectively, the accounts attributed to Sir Anthony
Weldon (c. 1583–1648) and written by Francis Osborne (1593–1659) shared a dry,
ironic, cynical, tone that would have a lasting influence on subsequent histories
of James’s reign. These authors relied heavily on court gossip and rumours. They
emphasized James’s timidity, his extravagance, and his male favourites. Most of the
narrative attributed to Weldon, a former clerk of the green cloth and the kitchen under
James, was devoted to the schemes of favourites and ‘managers of state’. According
to this narrative, the peaceable and merciful James had been manoeuvred into the
destruction of Raleigh, his reign’s only mark of tyranny. ‘Weldon’ also suggested that
Prince Henry had been poisoned and that James had feared the revelation of some
guilty secret at Robert Carr’s trial. He gave fresh currency to the preposterous charge
that Buckingham had had James murdered after gaining ascendancy over Prince
Charles. His description of the ‘character’ of James in the last few pages of his book
includes a cruelly unforgettable picture of a fearful, physically unprepossessing king
with a tongue too large for his mouth, weak legs and tendency to walk in circles, who
was forever fiddling with his codpiece. ‘He was so crafty and cunning in petty things,
as the circumventing any great man, the change of a Favourite, &c, insomuch as a
very wise man was wont to say, he beleeved him the wisest foole in Christendome,
meaning him wise in small things, but a foole in weighty affaires.’ James had been
‘infinitely inclined to peace, but more out of fear then conscience’.8

7 Thomas May, The History of the Parliament of England, which began November
the Third, MDXL ... (1647), pp. 4–6; J.P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution: Documents and
Commentary (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 228–240.
8 Sir A. W., The Court and Character of King James (London, 1650), pp. 27–9, 50–1,
57–8, 61–3, 82–5, 118–21, 173–5, 177–89; Joseph Marshall and Sean Kelsey in ODNB, 57,
pp. 981–2, strongly doubt whether Weldon really wrote a vicious satire on the Scots for which
he was supposedly dismissed by James, and regard the evidence for his authorship of The
172 James VI and I
Francis Osborne was more overtly hostile than ‘Weldon’. He prided himself on
writing a history of the reign, but it was one full of prejudice and inaccuracy. Osborne
was sharply critical of the king’s bounty to Scots courtiers and his desire for closer
union with Scotland. Because he had ‘never looked upon the English as friends’,
he had promoted ‘Excess, by which he hoped to ruine Nobility and Gentry’. A host
of exactions had been introduced, and James’s ‘profuse prodigality’ had compelled
Charles in turn to resort to illegal taxation. James had thus been instrumental in
bringing about the mid-century crisis. His pusillanimity and desire for ease and
pleasure had made him neglect soldiers and the royal ships. Despite his delighting
in the role of ‘Umpire of all Christian differences’, James had, by marrying his
daughter to the Elector Palatine, raised widespread hopes of an effective Protestant
alliance that were to be doomed to humiliating disappointment. At home he had
worsened Protestant divisions by picking a needless quarrel with the puritans while
indulging the papists, supposedly through fear.9
Arthur Wilson (1595–1652) achieved a more balanced and substantial treatment
of the king’s rule in his History of Great Britain (1653). Quoting James’s speeches
at length, Wilson frequently commended his wisdom and foresight. He was
nevertheless critical of the king’s extravagance, his excessive grants of honours,
his indulgence of his favourites, his attempts to advance his prerogative, and his
supposed subordination of religious considerations to political advantage. ‘It was a
hard Quaestion, whether his Wisdom, and knowledge exceeded his Choler and Fear’
The adulteration of reason by passion had resulted in the guidance of his actions by
(implicitly short-sighted) political cunning.10
The struggle between prerogative and liberty, and the betrayal of the Protestant
cause, became the grand themes of Wilson’s narrative. Apprehension that the ‘hidden
mysteries’ of the prerogative ‘made many dark steps into the Peoples Liberties’ was
already apparent by 1610. In 1614 and 1621 members of parliament reasonably
expected that James’s requests for money should be matched by a readiness on his
part to explain his policy and remedy misgovernment. James, however, seemed to
imply that the ‘Mysteries of King-craft’ were beyond their understanding. In 1621
the king’s party, especially strong in the Lords, were countered by the ‘Pilots of the
Commonwealth’ and ‘some gallant Spirits that aimed at the publick Liberty more
then their own interest’.11
Puritan supporters of ‘more clear Reformation’ had been defeated at Hampton
Court because the bishops convinced the king that the puritan programme represented
a threat to his authority as well as theirs. During the 1620s the papists were thought

Court and Character as inconclusive. Their own characterization of ‘Weldon’s’ James as a

‘perverted, hypocritical, slobbering villain’ is however exaggerated.
9 Francis Osborne, Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, and King
James (1658), consulted in The Works of Francis Osborne... (1673), pp. 468–70, 487–9, 490–
5, 498–9, 509, 517–24, 534–5, 538–43.
10 Arthur Wilson, The History of Great Britain, being the Life and Reign of King James
the First (1653), pp. 6, 13–25, 26, 34, 45, 51, 54, 99, 119, 125, 143, 289.
11 Ibid., pp. 52, 77–8, 161, 167, 184.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 173
to have fomented the king’s animosity towards the puritans and sown the seeds of
division between him and his people, while those well affected to religion strove to
warm James’s ‘cold temper’, showing the tyranny of the encroaching Habsburgs.
Wilson’s views were strongly influenced by his experiences in the service of the third
earl of Essex, especially the 1620 expedition for the defence of the Palatinate.12
The most hostile estimate of James was written by Lucy Hutchinson, widow
of the regicide John Hutchinson (d. 1664), in the life of her husband that she
composed for her children. It remained unpublished until the nineteenth century. Mrs
Hutchinson, like Thomas May, saw James as the originator of policies that had later
led to civil war, and like him emphasized the role of religion and James’s breaking
of parliaments, but also depicted James as purposefully malignant. He had secretly
sought revenge upon the godly of both England and Scotland for the treatment
of his mother, and had cunningly set about undermining the true religion, closely
linked with the people’s liberty. He had wasted England’s riches on poor Scots. She
presented James as a cowardly and foolish yet wicked and vindictive king.13
One of James’s critics, Peter Heylyn, wrote not from a parliamentarian point of
view, but as the self-appointed defender of Laudian high churchmanship. His brief
comments were made among his extensive Observations on a history of Charles
I’s reign by Hamon L’Estrange. Far from being ‘Great Britain’s Solomon’, James
had been outwitted and manipulated in international negotiations and many private
discussions in council. Neglecting affairs of state for his own enjoyment, he had
let loose ‘the Golden reines of Discipline’ tightly held by his predecessors and
thus ‘opened the first gap unto those confusions, of which we have since found
the miserable and wofull consequences’. Heylyn was especially critical of what he
regarded as James’s mistaken attacks on the Arminians, due to his own Calvinist
upbringing, and to the influence of Bishop Montague, dean of his chapel royal,
but above all to reason of state, fearing that the religious controversy inspired by
Arminian ideas would divide and weaken the Netherlands.14
James’s foremost defender during the interregnum was Sir William Sanderson
(1586–1676), who published his Aulicus coquinariae (1650) in rebuttal of ‘Weldon’,
and his Compleat History (1656) in response to Wilson. In Aulicus coquinariae
Sanderson refused to engage with ‘Weldon’s’ scurrilous and superficial portrait of
James. He concentrated instead on the King’s admirable inner qualities. His love
of peace had enriched his subjects, increased his own revenue, and enhanced his
reputation abroad.15

12 Ibid., pp. 7–8, 201–3, 269; ODNB, 59, p. 489.

13 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, with the fragment of an
autobiography of Mrs Hutchinson, ed. J. Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), pp. 41–7.
14 Peter Heylyn, Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles published by
H.L. Esq. (1656), pp. 13–25.
15 William Sanderson, Aulicus Coquinariae: or a Vindication in Answer to a Pamphlet,
entitvled The Court and Character of King James (1650), pp. 200–205.
174 James VI and I
The Compleat History aimed to be a truly ‘British’ history of major events in
both England and Scotland, unlike Wilson’s work. Alas, Sanderson in his narrative
of English events allowed Wilson to set the agenda, challenging the factual accuracy
of Wilson’s account point by point. He quoted or paraphrased many of the same
documents, but produced no compelling overall interpretation of his own. True,
he was able to rebut many of Wilson’s far-fetched suggestions convincingly. He
also included a noteworthy discussion of the king’s finances. James’s expenditure
on his family had been unavoidable and substantial. His grants to Scots had been
judiciously designed to unite them more effectually with England. Almost all his
financial expedients had English precedents or foreign parallels.16
Unfortunately for James, according to Sanderson, the English people had
become more critical and insubordinate than they had been under Elizabeth, when
they had been ‘ingenuous, and un-inquisitive, wrapped in innocence and humble
obedience’. After writing relatively little about causes of dissension in James’s first
parliament, Sanderson concentrated his fire on Wilson’s account of 1621. The people
‘grown high fed, with plenty and peace, and pretending their zeal for regaining the
Palatinate, were wilde for a War, with any body for any thing’. Wilson’s friends
of Liberty became ‘the factious party’, and ‘captious pates’. Such hypocrites used
the king’s suspected unwillingness to fight as an excuse for failing to assist him
effectively during the crisis of the Protestant cause. In short, ‘The consequence of all
our sequel Miseries he derives from the King, which truly then and after came from
the Houses of Parliament.’ The same spirit of captious insubordination animated
the puritans. Having worked for so long with patience and forbearance to curb
Presbyterian excesses in Scotland, James naturally chose to make a firm stand at
Hampton Court. Sanderson’s James appears as a wise, eloquent, and far-sighted
king, albeit ‘by nature more reserved than popular’.17
Two other defences of James remained unpublished long after they were written.
John Hacket (1592–1670), protégé of John Williams and later bishop of Lichfield,
countered in his biography of his patron both Weldon’s and Heylyn’s aspersions
upon James. Notable for its eloquent celebration of the prosperity England had
enjoyed during the Jacobean peace and the benefits of his rule in Ireland and
Scotland, Hacket’s tribute included a telling rebuttal of Heylyn’s claim that James
had neglected business in his rural retreats. In some respects Hacket’s eulogy
echoed Williams’s own sermon. Hacket conceded, however, that James had been
extravagantly bountiful and that his Spanish marriage project had been ‘foiled ... by
the Crossness of his own Ministers’.18

16 William Sanderson, A Compleat History of the Lives and Reigns of Mary Queen of
Scotland, And of Her Son and Successor James ... (1656), pp. 377, 402–12, 459–63, 534,
562.
17 Ibid., pp. 104–5, 171, 194–208, 312–3, (recte 412–3), 362, 488, 507, 509–10, 513.
18 John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: A Memorial Offer’d to the Great Deservings of John
Williams, D.D. (2 Parts, 1693), Pt 1, pp. 223–8.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 175
In his detailed rebuttal of ‘Weldon’ (unpublished till 1839) Godfrey Goodman,
bishop of Gloucester (1583–1656), praised the character and abilities of James
and his leading servants. James had been unique in Goodman’s experience for his
understanding, affection, justice, freedom from cruelty and pride, and love of the
Church. He had been ‘a great writer, an excellent speaker, and a man of eminent
judgment’. His peaceful policy had made England wealthy and respected. Yet
Goodman recognized that James had had his failings. He had been passionate, much
given to swearing, and insufficiently circumspect in his behaviour. Open-hearted,
he had made little use of kingcraft. Prodigal, he ‘had not the power to deny a suit’.
There had been jealousy between him and parliament throughout his reign, and
the royal prerogative had been diminished. Goodman thought James had been ill
advised to engage in religious controversy, a judgement probably influenced by his
own leanings towards Roman Catholicism.19
Controversy over James’s rule in Scotland had deeper roots than these English
disagreements, and was conducted quite independently. His church policy was
recounted from sharply opposed points of view by John Spottiswoode (1565–
1639), archbishop of St Andrews from 1615, and David Calderwood (c. 1575–
1650), steadfast opponent of episcopacy. Though not published till 1655 and 1678
respectively, both Spottiswoode’s and Calderwood’s histories of the Church of
Scotland had been in gestation for a long time before their deaths. Both were founded
on voluminous collections of documents, many of which they printed in full.
Spottiswoode’s work originated in an invitation by James himself. He aimed
to show that episcopacy had been an element of the Kirk’s government since the
Reformation. James VI had had to reform the confused consistorial discipline later
imported from Geneva because of the troubles it had caused in church and state.
He had the best interests of the Kirk at heart in his long-term aim of re-establishing
episcopacy. Spottiswoode’s James was a patient, wise, conscientious king. He
valued the help kirkmen could give him, for example in curbing feuds. Always
ready to engage in reasonable dialogue to explain, reassure, or consult, he addressed
representatives of the Kirk at length in person and in writing. He knew when to make
necessary concessions.
In 1596, however, he allowed the return of the Catholic earls. He believed that
he could reclaim them for the Kirk, and explained that having so many nobles in
exile might weaken him if he needed to overcome any opposition to his claim to
the English crown after Elizabeth’s death. James, who had often suffered snubs and
censures, received on this occasion outrageous rebuffs and criticism. The ensuing
disturbances in Edinburgh gave him a decisive and skilfully exploited advantage that
strengthened his authority in church matters so much that ‘he received little or no
opposition thereafter’. He ‘longed to see a decent order established in the Church,
such as agreed with the Word of God, the allowable custome of the primitive times,
and with the Laws of the Countrey’. He worked steadily and successfully towards

19 Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James the First, ed. John S. Brewer (2 vols,
1839), vol. 1, pp. 10, 33, 37, 91–2, 173, 181, 199–200, 214–5, 249–50.
176 James VI and I
this goal both before and after 1603. The increasingly irascible and peremptory tone
of James’s responses and directives from England is nevertheless apparent from
texts included by Spottiswoode, and the evidence set out undermines the notion that
James met ‘little or no opposition’ after 1603.20
From Calderwood’s very different perspective, the Church’s history under
the adult James VI was largely a ‘Relation of the Trials and Troubles, which
the Church did meet with from Enemies to the purity of her Doctrine, Worship,
Discipline and Government’, especially ‘Erastianisme and Prelacy’. The Preface
‘To the Reader’, though not by Calderwood, represents fairly the main themes of
what was from Calderwood’s viewpoint this colossal tragedy. James as a young
king had acknowledged the purity of the Kirk and pledged himself to defend it.
He had seen how perfectly designed its government had been as a defence against
heresy. Yet afterwards he had set himself to overthrow its discipline, because he was
piqued by ministers’ outspoken criticisms, because he was disposed to assume an
undue supremacy over the Church, and in order to facilitate his succession to the
English crown. (Calderwood’s narrative abundantly documents kirkmen’s criticisms
of James’s perceived shortcomings and failure to tackle the Catholic earls, and
describes Andrew Melville’s memorable reminder that he was ‘Gods sillie vassal’.)
In Calderwood’s estimation, James had been encouraged by ministers ambitious
of becoming bishops, by great men ‘greedily gaping and grasping’ after church
revenues, and by ‘some wicked, corrupt and Popishly affected Courtiers’. He had
gradually introduced his own supremacy. His establishment of a High Commission
in 1610 gave James a long-sought absolute power over the bodies and goods of
his subjects without form or process of common law. ‘So our Bishops were fit
Instruments to overthrow the Liberties, both of Kirk, and Countrey.’ Yet Calderwood
recorded that even John Spottiswoode, for him ‘Profane Spotswood’, a notorious
Sabbath-breaker, claimed that the Five Articles had been proposed against his will.
No wonder, for Calderwood, that the people of Edinburgh felt no grief on James’s
death.21
By 1660, two sharply opposed views of James had been established. In the eyes of
his admirers, he was a wise, far-sighted, eloquent, open-hearted king who had given
his realms and their churches peace and stability. His English critics saw him as a
monarch whose mistaken policies towards Roman Catholicism at home and abroad
had contributed to his quarrels with his parliaments, along with his extravagance, his
elevation of his undeserving favourites and his attempted stretching of the crown’s
prerogatives. All the writers so far considered fit readily into the broad categories of

20 John Spottiswoode, The History of the Church of Scotland (1655), Dedication and
pp. 347, 382, 388, 416–53, 465, 468–9, 486–514, 528–34; Maurice Lee Jr., ‘Archbishop
Spottiswoode as Historian’, JBS, 13/1 (1973): 138–50.
21 David Calderwood, The True History of the Church of Scotland, From the beginning
of the Reformation, unto the end of the Reigne of King James VI … (Edinburgh?, 1678), Title
page, preface ‘To the Reader’, and pp. 256–7, 265, 318, 328–337, 351–429, 468–9, 487,
532–57, 573, 618–9, 674–6, 689–705, 814–5.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 177
critics of the king or defenders of his reputation. (This is not to deny that some of
James’s critics recognized that he possessed good qualities, while Godfrey Goodman
was by no means uncritical in his defence of James.)
The pattern of strongly partisan history writing established by Wilson and
Sanderson in the 1650s continued well into the eighteenth century in the works of
such Whig historians as John Oldmixon (1673–1742) and such royalists or Tories
as the earl of Clarendon (1609–1674) and Laurence Echard (1672–1730). The civil
wars and their causes were live and deeply divisive issues throughout this period,
though historians naturally held different opinions of the extent to which the events
of James’s reign fitted into the story: Clarendon famously held that the origins of the
civil war need be traced no further back than Charles I’s accession.22

The 1750s to the 1950s: ‘impartial’ or ‘Whig’ views of James?

During the 1750s, the two foremost historians of the Scottish Enlightenment presented
their own more dispassionate views of James’s reign. David Hume’s History of
Great Britain (1754–6), covering the years 1603–1688, was partly designed to
remedy the deficiencies of the Impartial History of England, by the Huguenot
émigré Paul de Rapin Thoyras (1661–1725), which, despite the claim embodied in
its title, manifested a strongly Whig bias. Hume’s ‘philosophical’ history sought to
show how the progress of civilisation was dependent on the fruitful interaction of
authority and liberty and the maintenance of a balance between them. James VI and I
‘had established within his own mind a speculative system of absolute government’,
thinking all legal power centred in his own person ‘by an hereditary and a divine
right’. His convictions had been encouraged by Scottish opposition, which had
‘made way either for the ravages of a barbarous nobility, or to the more intolerable
insolence of seditious preachers’.
In England, however, says Hume, the decline of baronial power and the growing
wealth of the commons had helped promote ‘a more regular plan of liberty’.
Encountering a rising spirit of freedom, James trusted divine right ‘without making
the smallest provision either of force or politics, in order to support it’. Admittedly,
he distinguished between an abstract king who had all power, and a concrete king
bound to observe the laws of his country. ‘But, how bound? ... This he thought not
fit to explain.’ Price inflation due to the influx of precious metals from America had
impoverished the crown while stimulating the economy. James’s extravagance and
miscalculated generosity forced him to seek parliamentary assistance, but he found
the Commons disinclined to help him, partly because of the numerous grievances
caused by the Crown’s prerogatives. The Commons’ ‘natural appetite for rule’ was
not bridled by effective parliamentary management.23

22 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England,
ed. W.D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), vol. 1, p. 3.
23 R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (1988), p. 49;
David Hume, The History of Great Britain. The Reigns of James I and Charles I, ed. Duncan
178 James VI and I
In Hume’s view Catholic ‘superstition’ and Protestant ‘fanaticism’ exercised
a malign influence over politics, though puritan bigotry’s perceived promotion of
liberty somewhat moderated his antipathy towards it. James appeared to him in an
attractive light for his show of moderation and magnanimity after the Gunpowder
Plot, even though this was ‘no way agreeable to his subjects’. But he lacked the
nice judgement essential in handling religious questions. ‘By entering zealously into
frivolous disputes, James gave them an air of importance and dignity, which they
could not otherwise have acquired’; his allowing differences to be aired at Hampton
Court was a mistake. His accession to the English throne encouraged him to assert
his supreme jurisdiction over the Scottish Church. He was also intent on trying
to ‘mellow’ the gloomy disposition induced by Scottish fanaticism by infusing ‘a
small tincture of superstition into the national worship’. In the event, imitation of
English practice deeply affronted Scottish feeling. James showed ‘ill-timed zeal for
insignificant ceremonies’.24
James’s ‘timidity and indolence’ resulted in a ‘very prudent inattention to foreign
affairs’. His daughter Elizabeth’s marriage, however, had disastrous consequences. It
encouraged his son-in-law in ‘enterprizes beyond his strength’, while James’s failure
to support Frederick cost him ‘what remained of the affections and esteem of his own
subjects’. Trusting too much to Habsburg respect for his own justice and moderation,
he was reduced to ineffectual measures, and was finally completely overborne by
Charles and Buckingham. Meanwhile his ‘rash and indiscreet’ handling of the 1621
Commons’ Protestation had ‘torn off that sacred veil, which hitherto covered the
English constitution, and which threw an obscurity upon it, so advantageous to royal
prerogative’. In Hume’s final judgment, James commanded neither fear nor respect.
He had considerable intellectual capacity and just intentions, but lacked political
ability or courage.25
Hume deprecated James’s perceived ineptitude. Despite his rather superficial
treatment of religious questions and foreign policy, he nevertheless showed
sympathethic insight into the king’s aims and difficulties,. His History’s urbanity,
broad scope, shrewd and pithy judgements, and integration of social and economic
developments into a highly readable political narrative, helped give it wide and
lasting appeal.
William Robertson, in his History of Scotland (1759), presented as the mainspring
of James’s policy before 1603 his goal of succeeding to the English throne. According
to Robertson, James believed that to achieve this aim he must remain unswervingly
loyal to Protestantism while however also showing lenity towards his own Catholic
magnates so as to avoid antagonising Catholics in England or Catholic powers
abroad. In order to please both sides, ‘James often aimed at an excessive refinement,
mingled with dissimulation, in which he imagined the perfection of government
and of king-craft to consist’. His repeated refusal to crush the obstreperous Catholic

Forbes (1970), pp. 7–18, 83, 100–11, 114n.

24 Ibid., pp. 71–6, 96, 146, 149–153, 172–3.
25 Ibid., pp. 115, 125, 168, 172, 177–200, 208, 216–17.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 179
earls angered the ministers of the Kirk. James had to appease kirkmen, notably by
consenting to the ‘Golden Act’ of 1592.
Robertson’s account of the way James had pressed home his advantage after 1596
broadly resembles Spottiswoode’s. He had persuaded chastened general assemblies
of the Kirk to make concessions, by which they voluntarily submitted ‘to a yoke more
intolerable than any James would have ventured to impose by force’. Robertson’s
James was capable of both adroit opportunism and resolute action, but was also
extravagant, ‘a stranger to oeconomy’, and far too ready to yield to his servants’
demands. The union of the crowns was crucially important in James’s Scottish reign.
It immensely increased his wealth and power in relation to his native country, ‘and
the hope of his favour concurred with the dread of his power’ in taming the spirits of
the Scots nobility. The nobility nevertheless retained considerable power over their
own vassals. Seventeenth-century Scotland was an unhappy country. ‘Its kings were
despots; its nobles were slaves and tyrants; and the people groaned under the rigorous
domination of both.’ His hopes of a closer union of civil governments thwarted,
James nevertheless ‘resolved to bring both churches to an exact conformity with
each other’, and made some progress towards this goal.26
Hume’s efforts to be impartial earned him sharp attacks from Whig historians,27
especially T.B. Macaulay, who wrote his own unashamedly partisan account of
James’s reign as part of his introduction to The History of England (1848). Its
leading theme was a titanic struggle against arbitrary government by the defenders
of constitutional liberty in the House of Commons. Opposition had been gathering
for forty years before its first great battle, over monopolies, in Elizabeth’s 1601
parliament. It was fortunate that James had lacked the ability and courage to
strengthen the monarchy through successful military leadership of the Protestant
cause. ‘He came to the throne at a critical moment. The time was fast approaching
when either the King must become absolute, or the Parliament must control the
whole executive administration.’28
In Macaulay’s view, James advanced claims to divinely sanctioned absolute
royal power undreamt of by his predecessors, but completely neglected the means of
enforcing them. His claims provoked his parliaments. ‘Yet he quailed before them,
abandoned minister after minister to their vengeance, and suffered them to tease him
into acts directly opposed to his strongest inclinations.’ His ‘fondness for worthless
minions’ fomented discontent. ‘His cowardice, his childishness, his pedantry, his
ungainly person and manners, his provincial accent made him an object of derision.’
Within the Church of England hard-line puritans opposed the dogmatic upholders

26 William Robertson, The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of
King James VI. Till his Accession to the Crown of England (18th edn., 3 vols, 1809), vol. 3,
pp. 76–7, 88–90, 97–100, 117–35, 138–41, 187–8, 193.
27 On Hume’s ‘impartiality’ and Whig hostility, see Duncan Forbes’s ‘Introduction’,
ibid., pp. 43–54, and Richardson, Debate on the English Revolution Revisited, 50–55, 66–
72.
28 Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II, introd. Douglas
Jerrold (4 vols., 1906), vol. 1, pp. 47, 52.
180 James VI and I
of episcopacy and the adherents of an increasingly fashionable Arminianism, which
became ‘the best title to preferment’. The ‘Prelatists’ were zealous for prerogative,
the puritans for the privileges of parliament.29
James looked an utterly different king from the Scottish perspective of Patrick
Fraser Tytler, writing shortly before Macaulay. Tytler’s young king was indeed
naturally indolent, timid, extravagant, pleasure-loving and vain. Yet never did
he show more vigour, courage, and resourcefulness than when faced with the
challenges of the early 1590s. Tytler’s narrative vividly describes the violent
disorders caused by complicated noble feuds, the ‘tumultuous bodies of retainers
and feudal banditti’, and a factious court. Elizabeth, unscrupulous and hypocritical,
deliberately fomented Scotland’s divisions to keep it weak, connived at Bothwell’s
destabilizing intrigues, and failed to pay in full the subsidies she had promised. In
the face of her fickleness, James could not afford to take decisive action against
his Catholic earls. To maintain his own freedom of manoeuvre he had to balance
Protestant and Catholic. In the longer term he was determined to reduce the power
of the greater nobility, enhance that of the crown, and raise up the middle classes and
lesser barons. By 1597, Bothwell had been crushed, the Catholic earls chastened,
the Kirk’s pretensions curbed. James could at last turn his attentions to the English
succession, the restoration of episcopacy, and the improvement of law and order.30
S.R. Gardiner, the foremost Victorian historian of Stuart England, strongly
deprecated what he took to be Macaulay’s approach to the seventeenth century via
the political struggles of his own day.31 In his own History of England under the
early Stuarts (1863–1882) he scrupulously sought to examine the conduct of leading
political actors in the light of their own recorded beliefs and aims. Yet his own view
of James, though certainly more considered than Macaulay’s, was not much more
flattering. Soon after James’s English accession, there became apparent between him
and the Commons,

the most fruitful source of strife – a complete lack of sympathy. The Commons could not
enter into James’s eagerness to bring about a union with Scotland, or his desire to tolerate
the Catholics, and James could not enter into their eagerness to relieve themselves from
ill-adjusted financial burdens, or to relax the obligations of conformity. James, unhappily,
lived apart from his people.32

His inability to sympathise with his subjects made him unable to undertake necessary
reforms. James was also incurably extravagant, ‘anxious to retrench’, but not
sufficiently strong-willed to dismiss an ‘importunate petitioner’. By 1611 a damaging
rift had opened between Crown and Commons over the issues of impositions and

29 Ibid., pp. 53–62.

30 P. F. Tytler, History of Scotland (3rd edn, 7 vols, Edinburgh, 1845), vol. 7, pp. 182–
291, 311–68.
31 Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak
of the Civil War 1603–1642 (4th edn., 10 vols, 1895–6), vol. 10, pp. vi–ix.
32 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 193.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 181
the church settlement. His indolence and ‘inability to control those whom he trusted
with blind confidence’ made his court ‘a hotbed of corruption’ whose attendant evils
were popularly believed to be even worse than they really were.33
In Gardiner’s view, James also proved quite unequal to the fresh challenge posed
by his son-in-law’s acceptance of the Bohemian throne and the subsequent outbreak
of war in Germany. Irresolute, James shifted his ground from day to day, yet proved
over-confident of his ability to act as a peacemaker. He could not appreciate the
complexities of the international situation, and his efforts to end hostilities in Germany
exposed him to ridicule. Despite his laudable love of peace and justice, and desire to
prevent religious conflict, he ‘sowed the seeds of revolution and disaster’.34
P. Hume Brown, whose account of James’s rule in Scotland appeared in 1905,
thirty years after the completion of Gardiner’s survey of the king’s English reign,
was, among Scottish historians, one of the harshest in his assessment of James’s
character. He was ‘false and cruel and vindictive’, deeply duplicitous in his
determined pursuit of his two main aims: enhanced royal power and the English
crown. Both these goals induced him to hold the balance between the two religions
in Scotland as evenly as he could, with such adroitness that neither Protestants nor
Catholics could be sure of his religious allegiance until he had secured the English
throne. Inheriting a strictly limited monarchy, ‘he left it all but a pure despotism’.
His ‘buzzing assiduity’ in his absentee government of Scotland was nevertheless
largely beneficial, even if self-interested. ‘In no previous reign had so much been
done for the commercial development of the country.’ His imposition of episcopacy
was, however, unwise. It had no stable basis of support. Hume Brown’s final verdict
echoed Gardiner’s: against James’s claim to be considered a beneficent ruler had
to be set his inauguration and transmission of ‘a policy in Church and State which
could issue only in revolution and disaster’.35
Gardiner’s great work long remained the chief point of reference for subsequent
accounts of James’s English reign. In his volume of the Oxford History of England,
published in 1937, Godfrey Davies wrote that even after fifty years it was ‘difficult
to add substantially to, or to make more than minor corrections of’ Gardiner’s
narrative. His own interpretation of the period was straightforward. ‘The keynote
of the seventeenth century was revolt against authority.’ The middle classes were
increasingly impatient with paternalistic government and intended to take an active
part in determining policy. They were represented in parliaments that ‘tended to be in
chronic opposition to the Crown’. A constitutional transformation was ‘preordained’,
but James, politically out of touch, was incapable of playing a useful part in the
inevitable transition.36

33 Ibid., vol 1, p. 194; vol. 2, pp. 14, 228; DNB, 29, pp. 177, 180.
34 Ibid., p. 176; Gardiner, History, vol. 5, pp. 159, 315–6.
35 P. Hume Brown, History of Scotland (3 vols., Cambridge, 1900–1909), vol. 2, pp.
186, 191–3, 217, 235, 240–271, 274–83.
36 Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1937), pp. xix–xxi, 14–15,
22–8, 415.
182 James VI and I
The then recent works to which Davies referred in his synthesis, particularly those
of Wallace Notestein and Notestein’s pupil David Harris Willson, on the ‘winning
of the initiative’ by the House of Commons and the inadequacy of the crown’s
parliamentary management, fitted well into the dominant Whig view.37 Willson
published in 1956 a substantial and influential biography of James. He found much
to admire in the young James, who could act with ‘firmness and restraint’, tackled
the government of Scotland ‘with great energy’, and wrote ‘sensible, pertinent and
wise’ advice in his Basilikon Doron, in a ‘fresh, natural and spontaneous’ style. James
made a very favourable impression on most observers in 1603. Up to that point, his
political skills had been constantly exercised by challenges to his authority at home
and by possible obstacles to the English succession. But once warmly welcomed
into his promised land, he relaxed and enjoyed himself. Always vain, he was spoilt
by the flattery of deferential English ecclesiastics and courtiers. The obstruction
he encountered in the House of Commons was therefore doubly disappointing. He
‘never fathomed the sources of its strength, the growing effectiveness of its procedure
and leadership, or the inevitability of its advance to power’.38
Until 1612, according to Willson, Salisbury’s guiding hand generally prevented
serious mistakes. James’s foreign policy was broadly successful, if partly through
good luck, and by 1613 his position as the leader of Protestant Europe had been
strengthened. But his subsequent cardinal error was to think he might retain that
position while pursuing friendship with Spain. The allure of a Spanish match was
enormously enhanced by his financial difficulties, especially after the bruising failure
of the Addled Parliament in 1614. Meanwhile, James was undergoing physical and
moral decline, the latter manifested especially in his relations with his favourites. He
was more frequently ill. In his weakened state he was utterly incapable of coping
with the crisis of his reign. James’s portraits in his last years, wrote Willson in his
now most notorious judgement, ‘are those of a broken, debauched and repulsive old
man’.39
For Willson James’s churchmanship was less important than his handling
of parliaments. He believed that James remained a Calvinist throughout his life,
but nevertheless took to English liturgy after 1603, partly because it exalted royal
authority. He did great harm by first encouraging moderate puritans, then, influenced
by his episcopal henchmen, humiliating them at Hampton Court. (Willson’s
appraisal drew on elements of the judgements of two major previous historians of
the Conference. S.R.Gardiner had seen the conference as an opportunity tragically
wasted through the failure to make concessions to puritans while R.G. Usher had

37 Ibid., p. 15; Wallace Notestein, ‘The Winning of the Initiative by the House of
Commons’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 11 (1924–5): 125–75; the cited article by
Willson was a forerunner of his The Privy Councillors in the House of Commons, 1604–1629
(Minneapolis, MN, 1940).
38 David Harris Willson, King James VI & I (1956), pp. 118, 123–5, 133, 166–8, 170–4,
182–4, 243–70 (esp. 244).
39 Ibid., pp. 273, 276–80, 287, 333, 337–8, 347–8, 358–68, 378–89, 408–425.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 183
thought that their hopes should never have been encouraged in the first place.) James
was drawn in some respects to the ‘Anglo-Catholics’, but in others favoured the
hard-line Protestants. ‘In appointments and policy he balanced one group against the
other, he straddled the doctrinal points at issue, and thereby created divided counsels
in the Church as well as in the State.’40
Between the 1750s and the 1950s, a huge quantity of fresh source evidence
bearing on James’s reigns came to light, and there were major advances in detailed
understanding and knowledge of their events. Yet from Hume and Robertson onwards,
certain elements of the master narrative of James’s reigns changed remarkably little.
James had been more effective in asserting his authority in Scotland than in England.
He had failed to grasp the growing power and importance of the English parliament,
underpinned by social and political developments which had advanced further than
in Scotland. He also failed to understand the strength of puritan feeling, to conciliate
it, or to harness it to his government. (Puritanism’s chief importance in the story
lay in its close association with the struggle for political and intellectual liberty, to
which it helped give discipline and focus.) Implicit in most of these narratives was a
belief in political and social progress. A large part of the reason for James’s success
in Scotland was that there he acted as a necessary agent of progress in a relatively
backward polity. In England, on the other hand, he proved unable to fulfil such a
role.

Revisionism and its limits since c. 1960

Re-appraisal of James and his reign since 1960 has arguably been more comprehensive
and far-reaching than during the previous three hundred years. Long entrenched
assumptions have been attacked. New discoveries and interpretations have generated
controversy in their turn. The paragraphs that follow offer a very brief and highly
selective guide to these developments.
Marc L. Schwarz perceived a turning of the tide in the King’s favour in an oft-
cited re-appraisal of James published in 1974. He focused on four main aspects of
James’s rule: churchmanship, diplomacy, constitutional principles, and government
of Scotland.41 Mark H. Curtis had argued in 1961 that James listened to the puritan
representatives at Hampton Court with considerable sympathy. He had accepted
some of their proposals, and though these had borne small fruit, James had continued
a policy of ‘conciliation and comprehension’. James’s influence, Schwarz suggested,
had been largely responsible for the moderation of Archbishop Bancroft’s subsequent
campaign to enforce uniformity, which was documented by Stuart Babbage. The King
had reassured puritan opinion through his appointment of many soundly Calvinist
bishops and his approval of the proceedings of the synod of Dort. Arminian prelates

40 Ibid., pp. 197–216, esp. 199; Gardiner, History, vol 1, pp. 146–7, 157–8; R.G. Usher,
The Reconstruction of the English Church (2 vols, New York, 1910), vol. 1, pp. 310–33.
41 Marc L. Schwarz, ‘James I and the Historians: Toward a Reconsideration’, JBS, 13/2
(1974): 114–134.
184 James VI and I
learned to keep their opinions to themselves, and James never approved of divine
right episcopacy.42 His foreign policy, as presented in Charles H. Carter’s work on
Habsburg diplomacy, appeared more rational, more consistent, and above all more
independent, than some earlier historians had suggested.43
Recent re-appraisals had suggested that James’s political principles were also
more conventional, sensible, and realistic than his critics had allowed. The divine
right theory of monarchy ‘had a long and respectable history’ as Margaret Judson
and W.H. Greenleaf had shown, and, as Francis Wormuth had argued, James’s
articulation of his theories of kingship had been intended to counter dangerous
challenges to his authority. He had been a ruler concerned to work through the
law, and far more moderate than the Tudors. J.P. Kenyon had recently reinforced
these conclusions: James had never imprisoned anyone without trial, levied money
without legal authority or (whatever his theoretical beliefs) promulgated law
independently.44 Detailed studies of each of James’s parliaments had produced little
evidence that the Commons had ‘attempted to grasp sovereignty or diminish the
royal prerogative’, save in the Protestation of 1621, though impositions had raised
justifiable fears of an extension of the prerogative.45 In Scotland James’s rule as
described by Gordon Donaldson had been conscientious, able, wise and firm. He had
brought peace in church and state. His combination of episcopal and presbyterian
elements in ecclesiastical government had been especially successful.46
Much work published since 1974 has strengthened the positive elements
discerned in Schwarz’s survey. The importance of the ideal of a preaching ministry
in the Jacobean Church has been emphasized by Patrick Collinson and Kenneth
Fincham. James’s personal appetite for eloquent and learned sermons has been
demonstrated by Peter McCullough. A cogent and influential analysis by Kenneth
Fincham and Peter Lake found the key to James’s church policy in the aim of
separating moderates from extremists among both puritans and Catholics. Moderate
puritans could be accommodated within the Church; moderate Catholics prepared

42 Mark H. Curtis, ‘The Hampton Court Conference and its Aftermath’, History, 46
(1961): 1–16; Schwarz, ‘James I and the Historians’, 120–25; S. Babbage, Puritanism and
Richard Bancroft (1962), pp. 147–219.
43 Schwarz, ‘James I and the Historians’, pp. 126–8; C.H. Carter, The Secret Diplomacy
of the Habsburgs, 1598–1625 (New York, 1964); C.H. Carter, ‘Gondomar: Ambassador to
James I’, HJ, 7/2 (1964): 189–208.
44 Margaret Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution (New Brunswick, 1949), pp. 17–
34, 44; W.H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics (Oxford, 1964), pp. 58–67; Francis
Wormuth, The Royal Prerogative 1603–1649 (Ithaca, NY, 1939), pp. 85–6, 92–3; Kenyon,
Stuart Constitution, p. 8.
45 W. Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604–1610 (New Haven, 1971); T.L. Moir,
The Addled Parliament of 1614 (Oxford, 1958); R. Zaller, The Parliament of 1621 (Berkeley
& Los Angeles, 1971); for the Protestation see ibid. pp. 177–84; Robert Ruigh, The Parliament
of 1624 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); Judson, Crisis, pp. 235–7.
46 G. Donaldson, Scotland James V to James VII (Edinburgh, 1965), pp. 206–7, 211,
214–5, 237.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 185
to renounce dangerous papal claims could be treated leniently even if not granted
formal toleration. James’s choice of bishops, each of whom could support one of
these policies, accounted for his carefully balanced episcopal bench.47
James’s desire for the re-union of Christendom has been appraised positively and
thoroughly for the first time in a sympathetic and eloquent study by W.B. Patterson.
James was more consistent than his critics allowed. Paradoxically, the contest with
the papacy over the deposing power not only ‘helped to forge a Protestant and
anti-papal consensus in England, but also provided a spur to the development of a
conciliar theology which ... reserved a significant place for the pope in the reforming
and reuniting of the universal Church’. In his tireless search for international peace,
James never lost his grip, nor was he overborne by Charles and Buckingham in
1624. His hopes of avoiding hostilities were frustrated by the actions of foreign
powers, but he continued to the end to insist on strictly limited war aims while
working for peace.48
The leading role in the demolition of the Whig version of early Stuart
parliamentary history fell, ironically, to a scion of one of England’s foremost Whig
dynasties. Conrad Russell argued that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of
Parliament. The English state suffered serious structural and financial difficulties, but
the House of Commons, allergic as it was to fiscal reform, was unable to help remedy
them, or to offer the crown a convincing alternative to impositions. The Commons
reacted to royal initiatives and perceived grievances, but had no desire to control the
making of policy. There was no consistent opposition, and previous accounts had
overemphasized conflict at the expense of constructive action. The Lords, in many
ways the more important house, had been left out of the picture. Whig historians had
greatly exaggerated most members’ concern with matters of constitutional principle
and (in the 1620s) their appetite for war. They had also underrated James’s good
sense, moderation and patience in his handling the parliaments of 1621 and 1624
(save during the second session of 1621).49
James’s government of Scotland has been judged a considerable success by
Jenny Wormald. Her work emphasizes James’s energy, informality and accessibility,
his efforts to enlist the co-operation of the nobility in central and local government,

47 Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–
1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 48–51, 87–8, 92–5, 175–6; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor:
the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), pp. 11–12, 83–91; Peter E. McCullough, Sermons
at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998),
pp. 101–141; Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’,
JBS, 24/2 (1985): 169–207.
48 W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge,
1997), esp. 123, 339–353.
49 Conrad Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604–1629’, History, 61
(1976): 1–27; Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979),
pp. 85–203; see also Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament (Oxford, 1978), esp. his own
essay therein, ‘Introduction: Parliamentary History 1603–1629: In or out of Perspective?’pp.
1–42.
186 James VI and I
his skilful management of parliaments, and his readiness to debate with kirkmen.
Maurice Lee Jr has given greater prominence than Wormald to James’s able servants,
and to his forceful ‘bridling’ of earls and Kirk, but for him too the reign was one of
outstanding achievement for which James deserved much of the credit. Did James’s
experience of ruling Scotland help him in the different task of governing England?
Several previous historians had thought not, but Jenny Wormald has insisted that
it did. Implicitly this is Diana Newton’s answer too: despite some early mistakes,
James swiftly emerged ‘as energetic, vigorous, intelligent and flexible’, managing
his new kingdom ‘shrewdly, effectively, and even innovatively’.50
The results of James’s heartfelt commitment to the ideal of a united Britain
have also been re-explored. Bruce Galloway’s detailed study of James’s attempt to
achieve closer union by prerogative action, legislation, and judicial decision shows
him to have been remarkably calm and patient in face of xenophobic English fears,
whose importance in different contexts has been emphasized by Conrad Russell and
Jenny Wormald. English resentment of James’s bounty had some cause in that a
disproportionate share notoriously went to Scottish courtiers. Neil Cuddy’s study
of James’s bedchamber reveals just how determined James was to create a truly
Anglo-Scottish court, an institution which had its own importance in the absentee
government of Scotland. Some contemporaries believed that James’s establishment
of episcopal government in the Kirk, followed by the Five Articles, were part of
a design to unite the churches. Not so, John Morrill has insisted: James aimed for
‘congruity’ between them, but not the assimilation of the Scottish Church to the
English.51
Waning belief in the inevitability of parliament’s ‘advance to power’ helped to
revive interest in the court and council. Roger Lockyer’s biography of Buckingham
presents the other side of the patronage-engrossing favourite: a man of vigour and
energy who got things done. Northampton, hitherto pictured as a seedy, disreputable
intriguer, emerges from Linda Levy Peck’s study of his career as a conscientious,

50 Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (1981), pp. 143–
59; Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I’, ODNB, 29, pp. 628–57; Maurice Lee Jr, Government by
Pen: Scotland under James VI and I (Urbana, 1980); Maurice Lee Jr, Great Britain’s Solomon:
James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana, 1990), esp pp. 63–89; Jenny Wormald,
‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’, History, 68 (1983): 187–209; Diana Newton, The
Making of the Jacobean Regime: James VI and I and the Government of England, 1603–1605
(Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 141–6.
51 Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh, 1986);
Wormald, ‘Two Kings or One?’, 204–207; Conrad Russell, ‘English Parliaments, 1593–1606:
One Epoch or Two?’, in D.M. Dean and N.L. Jones (eds), The Parliaments of Elizabethan
England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 191–213; Neil Cuddy, ‘The Revival of the Entourage: The
Bedchamber of James I, 1603–1625’, in David Starkey (ed.), The English Court: From the
Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (1987), pp. 173–225; Neil Cuddy, ‘Anglo-Scottish Union
and the Court of James I 1603–1625’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser.,
39 (1989): 107–24; J.S. Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context
(Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 7–11.
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 187
versatile administrator and eloquent royal spokesman. A collection of essays edited
52

by Peck vividly portrays the richness and variety of Jacobean court culture.53
James’s achievements cannot be assessed effectively without reference to
his own vision of his kingly powers and responsibilities. The Scottish context of
Basilikon Doron and Trew Law of Free Monarchies has been discussed by Jenny
Wormald. For Paul Christianson and Glenn Burgess, James was the eloquent
exponent of ‘constitutional monarchy created by kings’ and self-limitation by oath
and conscience in the sight of God. John Cramsie has discussed the philosophical
underpinnings of James’s bounty and his involvement in the intensive discussions
about the improvement of royal finances that continued through his reign and
exercised the minds of his ablest servants.54
Most biographers of James have paid some attention to his more ‘literary’ as
well as his obviously ‘polemical’ or ‘political’ writings. Recent years have however
seen closer engagement with the entire body of the King’s work. A landmark in this
respect was the publication in 2002 of a volume of essays on James’s writings edited
by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, the first to address most aspects of his oeuvre.
This collection emphasizes both the outstanding variety and influence of James’s
work, and his sense that writing was central to his exercise of rule. All he wrote was
in some way ‘political’.55
Taking James seriously has not however entailed an unqualified approval of
his record. Alan G.R. Smith introduced, in 1973, from a similar vantage point to
Schwarz’s, a distinguished collection of essays on James’s reigns. Yet he firmly

52 Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First
Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (1981); Linda Levy Peck, Northampton: Patronage and
Policy at the Court of James I (1982). See also Menna Prestwich, Cranfield: Politics and
Profit under the Early Stuarts (Oxford, 1966), and Pauline Croft, ‘Cecil Robert, first earl of
Salisbury’, ODNB, 10, pp. 746–759.
53 Peck, Mental World. See also Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost
Renaissance (1986).
54 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI & I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free
Monarchies: the Scottish Context and the English Translation’, and Paul Christianson, ‘Royal
and Parliamentary Voices on the Ancient Constitution, c. 1604–1621’, in Peck, Mental World,
pp. 36–54 and 71–95; Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New
Haven, 1996); John Cramsie, Kingship and Crown Finance under James VI and I 1603–1625
(Woodbridge, 2002).
55 Fischlin & Fortier, Royal Subjects. In ‘Reading James Writing: The Subjects of
Royal Writings in Jacobean Britain’, ibid., pp. 15–19, Kevin Sharpe cogently argues both
the importance of James’s writings for literary scholars and their political character. See also
his earlier essays ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern
England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England
(Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 117–138, and ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of
James VI and I’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private
Conscience in Seventeenth–Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 77–100. The most useful
and representative selection of James’s writings for historians and literary scholars is James,
Selected Writings.
188 James VI and I
concluded, ‘Overall, James’s conduct of government was clearly unsuccessful ...’
His extravagance and laziness had been largely to blame. His foreign policy had
more to be said for it than once had been allowed, but not as much as those whom
Smith already called ‘the revisionists’ would have us believe. Roger Lockyer,
Christopher Durston and Pauline Croft, authors of three good concise accounts of
James published since 1990, have all combined critical appraisal with sympathetic
insight. James, according to Croft, deeply divided English and Scots opinion and
aroused abiding grievances in each of his kingdoms. Even Jenny Wormald, James’s
most steadfast admirer, describes his extravagance and his Scottish liturgical
innovations as disastrous.56
In addition, some major contributions to a more positive assessment of James
contained important caveats. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, for example,
described his church policy as inherently unstable, endangered by militant Protestant
criticism of James’s policies during the 1620s and the king’s consequent increasing
reliance on anti-Calvinist divines. Lori Anne Ferrell has further argued that despite
the moderation of the Jacobean establishment in handling most individual puritans,
the anti-puritan rhetoric that the king encouraged was dangerously divisive.57
Johann P. Sommerville has insisted upon the absolute divine right that remained
the bedrock of the king’s political theory. Important elements of Conrad Russell’s
revisionist view of James’s later parliaments were soon challenged by Theodore
Rabb and Derek Hirst in a cogent re-statement of the importance of continued,
principled, and coherent opposition to perceived encroachments of prerogative.
James, in his bitter disappointment with his first parliament, sought after 1610
to avoid convening another one until it became absolutely necessary. He was
exceptional among pre-1625 monarchs in that three of his four parliaments were
dissolved abruptly and acrimoniously. Conrad Russell himself confessed that he had
reached ‘the Limits of Revision’ in his study of the Addled Parliament. Brennan
Pursell believes that James, in accordance with promises made to Gondomar,
deliberately and duplicitously sabotaged the parliament of 1621, though Glyn
Redworth has convincingly challenged this interpretation of Gondomar’s testimony.
Despite James’s personal interest in financial reform, he resembled Mr Toad in his
repeated breaking of good resolutions and his petulant disappointment in face of
renewed financial embarrassment. Buckingham, in some respects a champion of
administrative reform, was in others a fundamental obstacle to it.58

56 Alan G.R. Smith, ‘Introduction’ to The Reign of James VI and I (1973), pp. 14, 17;
Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (Harlow, 1998), pp. 199–209; Christopher Durston, James I
(1993), pp. 64–6; Pauline Croft, King James (Basingstoke, 2003), 182–7; Wormald, ‘James
VI and I’, pp. 652, 656
57 Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policy’, 191, 196, 198–202, 206–7; Lori Anne
Ferrell, Government by Polemic (Stanford, 1998), pp. 9, 176.
58 J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Harlow, 1986);
J.P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental
Theory’, in Peck (ed.), Mental World, pp. 55–70; James, Political Writings, pp. xv, xix, xxviii;
T.K. Rabb, ‘The Role of the Commons’, and D. Hirst, ‘The Place of Principle’, under joint title
 James’s Reputation, 1625–2005 189
The essays edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier certainly inspire respect
for James as a writing king, but also bring out the problems inherent in his resort
to authorship. ‘This collection’, Kevin Sharpe remarked in his foreword, ‘identifies
potentially self-subverting contradiction across all the genres of James’s writings.’
Real or ostensible inconsistencies in and between James’s words and deeds gave good
grounds for his anxiety that what he said might be misinterpreted or misappropriated
by his hearers or readers.59
James’s government of Scotland has often been considered his most solid
achievement. Julian Goodare, Keith Brown and Michael Lynch have, however,
underlined shortcomings of his rule in his native land. More active central
government, a splendid royal court, and pensions for favoured nobles: these
required major increases in taxation and continuation of the ruinous expedient of
debasement during a time of economic and social crisis. Before 1603, James’s rule
had ‘degenerated into an embarrassing struggle to make ends meet’. His English
accession hugely improved the Scottish crown’s financial situation. Yet it was after
1603 that a king increasingly out of touch with Scottish opinion made his most
serious mistakes, especially in the Kirk, where, Alan MacDonald has insisted, the
tightening of crown control through bishops, constant moderators of synods, and the
courts of High Commission, together with the ending of regular general assemblies,
had already made the king’s policy deeply unpopular well before 1617.
Faced with widespread resistance to his disastrous Five Articles, James was not
flexible, and did not desist from ill-advised efforts to enforce them: ‘Whatever the
failures of Charles I ...’, is MacDonald’s damning verdict, ‘his father’s ecclesiastical
legacy was the worst start he could have been given.’ Meanwhile, important strands
of opinion in Scotland were no longer represented at court, and some of James’s
courtiers were either insensitive to their compatriots’ feelings or unpopular in their
own localities. Divisions developed not only between Presbyterians and episcopalians
but also between court and country, and opposition began to emerge below the level
of the gentry. The 1621 parliament saw a ‘titanic struggle’ over taxation and the Five
Articles.60

‘Revisionism revised: Two Perspectives on Early Stuart Parliamentary History’, in Past and
Present, 92 (1981): 55–78, 79–99; Thomas Cogswell, ‘A Low Road to Extinction? Supply and
Redress of Grievances in the Parliaments of the 1620s’, HJ, 33/2 (1990): 283–303; Andrew
Thrush, ‘The Personal Rule of James I, 1611–1620’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and
Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour
of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 84–102; Conrad Russell, The Addled Parliament
of 1614: The Limits of Revision (Reading, 1992); Brennan C. Pursell, ‘James I, Gondomar
and the Dissolution of the Parliament of 1621’, History, 85 (2000): 428–445, Glyn Redworth,
The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven, 2003),
p. 29; Cramsie, Kingship and Crown Finance,esp. p. 121; Gerald Aylmer, ‘Buckingham as an
administrative reformer?’, English Historical Review, 105 (1990): 355–62
59 Fischlin & Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 22–3.
60 Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch, ‘James VI: Universal King?’, and Julian Goodare,
‘Scottish Politics in the Reign of James VI’ in Goodare & Lynch, James VI, pp. 2–3, 7–10,
190 James VI and I
The ideal of a truly integrated history of Britain, or even of the British archipelago
(including Ireland) has attracted many historians since the 1980s and has fruitfully
influenced early modern ‘revisionist’ thinking. In a history of the archipelago,
James’s reign is of outstanding importance, not just on account of the regal union of
1603, but because it saw the first ‘British’ colonizing venture, largely carried out by
Scots in territory subject to the English crown.
The plantation of Ulster met with the wholehearted approval of many of those
who wrote about James’s reign from John Williams onwards. Hume Brown remarked
for example that ‘the condition of Ulster to-day, with its material prosperity and its
leaven of Scottish blood, is in large degree its direct and notable result’. James’s
personal commitment to the project was strong: it was a grander version of the
earlier attempt to plant Lewis. The change in perspective brought about by twentieth-
century events, and especially the onset of the Troubles, has understandably resulted
in rather more critical assessments of the Ulster enterprise, now seen to have had
deeply damaging long-term consequences. Despite James’s enthusiasm for them, the
northern Irish plantations fell far short of his hopes. The fact remains nevertheless
that they were the most successful of all such schemes, and the ones that wrought the
most fundamental and lasting changes in Ireland.61
The intensive research on James’s reigns conducted during the last forty years
has had a paradoxical outcome. On the one hand we are probably better placed now
than at any time during the 380 years since the king’s death to share John Williams’s
enthusiasm for the outstanding personal virtues, intellectual versatility, and nobler
ambitions of his royal master. On the other hand, doubts about the scale and solidity
of James’s achievements have proved stubbornly resistant to revisionist re-appraisal.
Such doubts are fed, above all, by the effects of the protracted crisis that followed
Frederick’s acceptance of the Bohemian crown.62 This crisis cruelly exposed the
limitations of James’s rule. It frustrated his hopes of international harmony, destroyed
his prospects of solvency, upset the balance of his ecclesiastical policy, and above
all underlined his lack of kingly authority over the men closest to him. The difficult
situation Charles inherited was certainly not of James’s deliberate making, but its
seriousness was largely due to the flaws in his policies.

15–16, 42–50; MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 171–86; Keith M. Brown, Kingdom or Province?
Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 86–99; Michael Lynch,
Scotland: A New History (1991), pp. 239–244.
61 Hume Brown, History, vol. 2, p. 265; Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, pp. 196–232;
Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 165–242.
62 Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War,
1621–24 (Cambridge, 1989); Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta.