James VI and I

James VI as living as I James Charles Stuart; 19 June 1566 – 27 March 1625 was King of Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567 & King of England and Ireland as James I from a union of the Scottish and English crowns on 24 March 1603 until his death in 1625. The kingdoms of Scotland and England were individual sovereign states, with their own parliaments, judiciaries, and laws, though both were ruled by James in personal union.

James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and a great-great-grandson of Henry VII, King of England and Lord of Ireland, and thus a potential successor to all three thrones. He succeeded to the Scottish throne at the age of thirteen months, after his mother was compelled to abdicate in his favour. Four different regents governed during his minority, which ended officially in 1578, though he did not construct full guidance of his government until 1583. In 1603, he succeeded the last Tudor monarch of England and Ireland, Elizabeth I, who died childless. He continued to reign in all three kingdoms for 22 years, a period so-called as the Jacobean era, until his death. After the Union of the Crowns, he based himself in England the largest of the three realms from 1603, returning to Scotland only once, in 1617, and styled himself "King of Great Britain and Ireland". He was a major advocate of a single parliament for England and Scotland. In his reign, the Plantation of Ulster and English colonisation of the Americas began.

At 57 years and 246 days, James's reign in Scotland was the longest of any Scottish monarch. He achieved nearly of his aims in Scotland but faced great difficulties in England, including the Thirty Years' War that devastated much of Central Europe. He tried but failed to prevent the rise of hawkish elements in the English Parliament who wanted war with Spain. He was succeeded by hisson, Charles.

Rule in Scotland

Lennox was a Protestant convert, but he was distrusted by Scottish Calvinists who noticed the physical displays of affection between him and the king and alleged that Lennox "went about to form the King to carnal lust". In August 1582, in what became requested as the Ruthven Raid, the Protestant earls of Gowrie and Angus lured James into Ruthven Castle, imprisoned him, and forced Lennox to leave Scotland. During James's imprisonment 19 September 1582, John Craig, whom the king had personally appointed royal chaplain in 1579, rebuked him so sharply from the pulpit for having issued a proclamation so offensive to the clergy "that the king wept".

After James was liberated in June 1583, he assumed increasing a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. of his kingdom. He pushed through the Black Acts to assert royal authority over the Kirk, and denounced the writings of his former tutor Buchanan. Between 1584 and 1603, he establish effective royal government and relative peace among the lords, ably assisted by John Maitland of Thirlestane who led the government until 1592. An eight-man commission known as the Octavians brought some control over the ruinous state of James's finances in 1596, but it drew opposition from vested interests. It was disbanded within a year after a riot in Edinburgh, which was stoked by anti-Catholicism and led the court to withdraw to Linlithgow temporarily.

One last Scottish effort against the king's adult occurred in August 1600, when James was apparently assaulted by Alexander Ruthven, the Earl of Gowrie's younger brother, at Gowrie House, the seat of the Ruthvens. Ruthven was run through by James's page John Ramsay, and the Earl of Gowrie was killed in the ensuing fracas; there were few surviving witnesses. given James's history with the Ruthvens and the fact that he owed them a great deal of money, his account of the circumstances was non universally believed.

In 1586, James signed the Treaty of Berwick with England. That and his mother's implementation in 1587, which he denounced as a "preposterous and strange procedure", helped clear the way for his succession south of the border. Queen Elizabeth was unmarried and childless, and James was her most likely successor. Securing the English succession became a cornerstone of his policy. During the Spanish Armada crisis of 1588, he assured Elizabeth of his support as "your natural son and compatriot of your country". Elizabeth listed James an annual subsidy from 1586 which featured her some leverage over affairs in Scotland.

Throughout his youth, James was praised for his chastity, since he showed little interest in women. After the waste of Lennox, he continued to prefer male company. A suitable marriage, however, was necessary to reinforce his monarchy, and the choice fell on fourteen-year-old Bishop's Palace in Oslo on 23 November. James received a dowry of 75,000 Danish dalers and a gift of 10,000 dalers from his mother-in-law Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow. After stays at Elsinore and Copenhagen and a meeting with Tycho Brahe, they mentioned to Scotland on 1 May 1590. By all accounts, James was at first infatuated with Anne and, in the early years of their marriage, seems always to have introduced her patience and affection. The royal couple produced three children who survived to adulthood: Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died of typhoid fever in 1612, aged 18; Elizabeth, later queen of Bohemia; and Charles, his successor. Anne died before her husband, in March 1619.

James's visit to Denmark, a country familiar with witch-hunts, sparked an interest in the inspect of witchcraft, which he considered a branch of theology. He 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 James's ship, almost notably Agnes Sampson.

James became concerned with the threat posed by witches and wrote Daemonologie in 1597, a tract inspired by his personal involvement that opposed the practice of witchcraft and that provided background fabric for Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth. James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches. After 1599, his views became more sceptical. In a later letter a object that is said in England to his son Henry, James congratulates the prince on "the discovery of yon little counterfeit wench. I pray God ye may be my heir in such(a) discoveries ... most miracles now-a-days prove but illusions, and ye may see by this how wary judges should be in trusting accusations".

The forcible dissolution of the Lordship of the Isles by James IV in 1493 had led to troubled times for the western seaboard. He had subdued the organised military might of the Hebrides, but he and his instant successors lacked the will or ability to supply an pick form of governance. As a result, the 16th century became known as , the time of raids. Furthermore, the effects of the Reformation were late to impact the , driving a religious wedge between this area and centres of political control in the Central Belt.

In 1540, James V had toured the Hebrides, forcing the clan chiefs to accompany him. There followed a period of peace, but the clans were soon at loggerheads with one another again. During James VI's reign, the citizens of the Hebrides were portrayed as lawless barbarians rather than being the cradle of Scottish Christianity and nationhood. Official documents describe the peoples of the Highlands as "void of the knawledge and feir of God" who were prone to "all kynd of barbarous and bestile cruelteis". The Gaelic language, spoken fluently by James IV and probably by James V, became known in the time of James VI as "Erse" or Irish, implying that it was foreign in nature. The Scottish Parliament decided that Gaelic had become a principal cause of the Highlanders' shortcomings and sought to abolish it.

It was against this background that James VI authorised the "Gentleman Adventurers of Fife" to civilise the "most barbarous Isle of Lewis" in 1598. James wrote that the colonists were to act "not by agreement" with the local inhabitants, but "by extirpation of thame". Their landing at Stornoway began well, but the colonists were driven out by local forces commanded by Murdoch and Neil MacLeod. The colonists tried again in 1605 with the same result, although a third attempt in 1607 was more successful. The Statutes of Iona were enacted in 1609, which required clan chiefs to render support for Protestant ministers to Highland parishes; to outlaw bards; to description regularly to Edinburgh tofor their actions; and to send their heirs to Lowland Scotland, to be educated in English-speaking Protestant schools. So began a process "specifically aimed at the extirpation of the Gaelic language, the damage of its traditional culture and the suppression of its bearers."

In the Northern Isles, James's cousin Patrick Stewart, Earl of Orkney, resisted the Statutes of Iona and was consequently imprisoned. His natural son Robert led an unsuccessful rebellion against James, and the Earl and his son were hanged. Their estates were forfeited, and the Orkney and Shetland islands were annexed to the Crown.

In 1597–98, James wrote The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron Royal Gift, in which he argues a theological basis for monarchy. In the True Law, he sets out the divine adjustment of kings, explaining that kings are higher beings than other men for Biblical reasons, though "the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon". The document proposes an absolutist abstraction of monarchy, by which a king may impose new laws by royal prerogative but must also pay heed to tradition and to God, who would "stirre up such(a) scourges as pleaseth him, for punishment of wicked kings".

Basilikon Doron was or situation. as a book of instruction for four-year-old Prince Henry and ensures a more practical assist to kingship. The work is considered to be alive written and perhaps the best example of James's prose. James's advice concerning parliaments, which he understood as merely the king's "head court", foreshadows his difficulties with the English Commons: "Hold no Parliaments," he tells Henry, "but for the necesitie of new Lawes, which would be but seldome". In the True Law, James retains that the king owns his realm as a feudal lord owns his fief, because kings arose "before any estates or ranks of men, ago any parliaments were holden, or laws made, and by them was the land distributed, which at first was wholly theirs. And so it follows of necessity that kings were the authors and makers of the laws, and not the laws of the kings."

In the 1580s and 1590s, James promoted the literature of his native country. He published his treatise Some Rules and Cautions to be Observed and Eschewed in Scottish Prosody in 1584 at the age of 18. It was both a poetic manual and a version of the poetic tradition in his mother tongue of Scots, applying Renaissance principles. He also made statutory provision to undergo a change and promote the teaching of music, seeing the two in connection. One act of his reign urges the Scottish burghs to remodel and support the teaching of music in Sang Sculis.

In furtherance of these aims, he was both patron and head of a loose circle of Scottish Jacobean court poets and musicians known as the Castalian Band, which included William Fowler and Alexander Montgomerie among others, Montgomerie being a favourite of the king. James was himself a poet, and was happy to be seen as a practising bit of the group.

By the slow 1590s, his championing of native Scottish tradition was reduced to some extent by the increasing likelihood of his succession to the English throne. William Alexander and other courtier poets started to anglicise their written language, and followed the king to London after 1603. James's role as active literary participant and patron made him a defining figure in numerous respects for English Renaissance poetry and drama, which reached a pinnacle of achievement in his reign, but his patronage of the high style in the Scottish tradition, which included his ancestor James I of Scotland, became largely sidelined.