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James I (1603-1625)

James VI, King of Scotland & James I, King of England (“the wisest fool in Christendom” so-called by Henry IV of France) was the first monarch to unite Scotland, England and Ireland into Great Britain (as he liked to call it). He commanded the translation of the Authorized Version of 1611 of the Bible. It is also known as the Authorized King James Bible. King James gave his subjects (and ultimately the world) the greatest gift possible--the Bible--so that they could be saved and fed from the Word of God.

Seven kings of Scotland, of whom the two last wore also the crown of England, have borne the name James. James Charles Stuart was born on 19 June 1566 at Edinburg Castle in Scotland. His father, Lord Darnley, was murdered in early 1567 before young James was 1 year old. His mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was soon afterwards forced to abdicate the Scottish throne due to her suspected involvement in the murder. Little James was crowned King James VI of Scotland at the tender age of 13 months. Reformation leader John Knox preached the sermon at his coronation.

On the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, James obtained the crown of England. He concluded a peace with Spain, and a marriage between his eldest son Henry and a Spanish princess was at one time in contemplation. This match was broken off, and the prince died in the 19th year of his age. James had several other children by his queen, Anne of Denmark, one of whom, the princess Elizabeth, was married to Frederick V, the elector-palatine. The discovery of the plot of Guy Fawkes, and the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, were among the remarkable events of his reign.

The period of time from the union of the crowns to the union of the kingdoms, was characterized by civil wars and national revolutions. James, at the age of thirty-seven, ascended the throne of England, amidst the acclamations of his subjects, both Scots and English. An unusual calm ensued within his ancient kingdom. The spirit of the nobles seems to have been somewhat broken, or was perbaps turned to more distant views of ambition, and other objects of pursuit. There were seven Scottish parliaments called by James, after his accession, wherein he presided, by a commissioner. This was a new officer in the state which a new situation of things required. A law was passed in 1606, for the restitution of the estate of bishops, which the king declared he had never intended to suppress. This restoration was followed by a great variety of laws, for giving proper effect to the general principle. The estate of the bishops was not, however, restored to the people's confidence. There were many laws enacted for promoting domestic economy.

He was a sickly man who had physical handicaps in his legs and a tongue that was too large for his mouth. As a result of his unsteady gait, the king had numerous falls, accidents and injuries. He suffered from crippling arthritis, abdominal colic, gout, inability to sleep, weak/spasmic limbs, nausea, frequent diarrhea, and kidney pain. Some believe that he may have had congenital diseases of the nervous system. Sometimes the pain was so great that the king became delirious. To add to his ill-health, the king suffered from depression from the loss of his beloved wife Queen Anne in 1619. She was preceded in death by their eldest son, Prince Henry in 1612. The King was no stranger to pain and sorrow.

The achievement of complete national independence under the Tudors did not in the least involve any solution of the question of popular self-government. Still, that achievement had been largely the work of the nation itself, and a nation which had braved the spiritual thunders of the papacy and the temporal arms of Philip II would not be naturally submissive under domestic tyranny. Perhaps the fact that James I was an alien hastened the admonition, which parliament addressed to him in the first session of the reign, to the effect that it was not prepared to tolerate in him many things which, on account of her age and sex, it had overlooked in Elizabeth.

Parliament began the constitutional conflict thus foreshadowed with no clear constitutional theory; and its views only crystallized under pressure of James I's pretensions. James possessed an aptitude for political speculation, which was rendered all the more dangerous by the facilities he enjoyed for putting his theories into practice. He tried to reduce monarchy to a logical system, and to enforce that system as practical politics. He had succeeded to the English throne in spite of Henry VIII's will, which had been given the force of a parliamentary statute, and in spite of the common law which disabled an alien from inheriting English land. His only claim was by heredity, which had never been legally recognized to the exclusion of other principles of succession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to such mundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and the obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous.

Hence his theory of divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divine right which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which was not necessarily hereditary, but might be varied by the God of battles, as at Bosworth. It must also be distinguished from the Catholic theory, which gave the church a voice in the election and deposition of kings. According to James's view, Providence had not merely ordained the king de facto, but had pre-ordained the kings that were to be, by selecting heredity as the principle by which the succession was to be determined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyond the power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justice or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant.

From this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was absolute; the king could do no wrongTor which his subjects could call him to account; he was responsible to God but not to man—a doctrine which the Reformation had encouraged by proclaiming the Royal Supremacy over the church. He might, if he chose, make concessions to his people, and a wise sovereign like himself would respect the concessions of his predecessors. But parliamentary and popular privileges existed by royal grace; they could not be claimed as rights.

Historically, there was much more to be said for the contention that parliament existed by grace of the monarchy than for the counterclaim that the monarchy existed by grace of parliament; and for the plea that parliament only possessed such powers as the crown had granted, than for the counter-assertion that the crown only enjoyed such rights as parliament had conceded. Few of James's arbitrary acts could not be justified by precedent, and not a little of his unpopularity was due to his efforts to exact from local gentry the performance of duties which had been imposed upon them by earlier parliaments.

The main cause of dissatisfaction was the growing popular conviction that constitutional weapons, used by the Tudors for national purposes, were now being used by the Stuarts in the interests of the monarchy against those of the nation; and as the breach widened, the more the Stuarts were led to rely on these weapons and on their theory of the divine right of kings, and the more parliament was driven to insist upon its privileges and upon an alternative theory to that of James I.

The control of parliament over the national purse was the decisive factor in the situation. The Stuarts, indeed, were held in a cleft stick. Their revenue was steadily decreasing because the direct taxes, instead of growing with the nation's income, had remained fixed amounts since the fourteenth century, and the real value of those amounts declined rapidly with the influx of precious metals from the New World. Yet the expense of government automatically and inevitably increased, and disputes over foreign policy, over the treatment of Roman Catholics, over episcopal jurisdiction, over parliamentary privileges, and a host of minor matters made the Commons more and more reluctant to fill the empty Treasury. The blunt truth is that people will not pay for what they do not consider their concern; and Stuart government grew less and less a popular affair. The more the Stuarts demanded, the greater the obstacles they encountered in securing compliance.

The close of the life of James was marked by violent contests with his parliament, the preliminary skirmishing of religious and political parties, which became civil war in the following reign.

James died on the 27th March, 1625, after governing Scotland with more authority and success during two and twenty years' absence, than when he was personally present in the country. James was succeeded by his son, Charles I., in the twenty-fifth year of his age.

Although James I had received a careful education, prided himself on being a patron of literature, and even wrote many works both in prose and vorse, he was not merely destitute of the vigor and ability and wisdom of a great sovereign, but had neither the intellectual nor moral qualities which go to the making of a noble man. Feebleness, indolence, vulgarity in tastes and pursuits, vanity, pedantry, these are the prominent features of his character.