King James I

1566 – 1625 · Generation XXV · King of Scots (r. 1567), of England and Ireland (r. 1603–1625) · House of Stuart

James VI of Scotland and I of England was the first monarch to rule both kingdoms, uniting the two crowns in his own person in 1603. He was born in Edinburgh Castle on 19 June 1566, the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Through both parents he descended from Henry VII of England. His father was murdered before his first birthday, and in July 1567 his mother was forced to abdicate. James was crowned at Stirling at thirteen months old and never saw her again.

He grew up as a prize fought over by the Scottish nobility. Four regents governed in turn, beginning with his mother’s half-brother the Earl of Moray, and the first two were killed in office. His chief tutor, the humanist George Buchanan, beat him, tried to turn him against his mother and gave him a lifelong love of learning. In August 1582 a group of Protestant earls seized the sixteen-year-old king in the Ruthven Raid and held him prisoner. Once free he set about mastering the factions, and he did it so well that he has been called the most effective ruler Scotland ever had. He defended bishops against Presbyterian critics with the maxim “No bishop, no king”, signed the Treaty of Berwick with England in 1586, and made only a formal protest when Elizabeth I executed his mother the following year. The English succession mattered more.

In August 1589 he married Anne of Denmark by proxy. When storms drove her ship onto the Norwegian coast he sailed from Leith to fetch her himself, and the two were married in person at Oslo on 23 November, with a further ceremony at Kronborg in Denmark in January 1590. Three of their children lived to adulthood: Henry Frederick, who died in 1612 at eighteen, Elizabeth, who married the Elector Palatine, and the future Charles I. James was also a writer. Daemonologie (1597) grew out of his interest in witchcraft after the North Berwick trials, and The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron set out his belief that kings hold their authority from God.

Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603 and James, already in secret correspondence with her minister Robert Cecil, succeeded smoothly. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey with Anne on 25 July. He wanted a full union of his kingdoms and styled himself King of Great Britain, but the English Parliament would not have it, and Scotland kept its own parliament, church and law. He went back north only once, in 1617. His first years in England brought peace with Spain, signed in London in 1604, and the Hampton Court Conference of the same year, from which came the new translation of the Bible completed in 1611 and known ever since by his name. In November 1605 Catholic conspirators tried to blow up king and Parliament together. The failure of the Gunpowder Plot was followed by harsher laws against Catholics.

Money soured his relations with Parliament. A proposed Great Contract of 1610, which would have given the crown a regular income, collapsed, and the Addled Parliament of 1614 was dissolved after about two months without granting anything. Court favourites, above all George Villiers, whom he raised to be Duke of Buckingham, controlled access to the king in his last decade. Abroad he tried to act as peacemaker. When his son-in-law Frederick lost Bohemia and the Palatinate at the start of the Thirty Years’ War, James sought a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles instead of fighting, and when the Commons protested in 1621 he dissolved Parliament. The match failed in 1623. Meanwhile his reign saw the plantation of Ulster by English and Scottish Protestants and the founding of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607.

James died at Theobalds in Hertfordshire on 27 March 1625, aged 58, and was buried in Westminster Abbey in the vault of Henry VII. He had reigned in Scotland for more than 57 years, longer than any other Scottish monarch. The gibe that he was “the wisest fool in Christendom” has clung to him ever since. It is most often credited to Henry IV of France, though it may have been coined by the courtier Anthony Weldon, who reported it.

Place in the family

• King James I was a great-great-nephew of King Henry VIII.
• The archive records 106 of his descendants, across 15 generations.

Images

• James as a boy king, in a copy after a portrait of about 1574 by Arnold Bronckorst (Attributed to Rowland Lockey, after Arnold Bronckorst, public domain)
• James VI of Scotland aged twenty, 1586 (Unknown artist (attributed to Adrian Vanson or the school of Alonso Sánchez Coello), public domain)
• James in state robes, about 1620, with Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House at Whitehall in the background (Paul van Somer, public domain)
• A Scottish gold unite of James VI, from the coinage struck between 1609 and 1625 (Classical Numismatic Group (CNG), CC BY-SA 3.0)

One of 17 people of House of Stuart (from 1371) in this archive. Scotland’s royal house for three centuries before James VI inherited England and wore both crowns.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

• Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (1546 – 1567)
• Mary Queen of Scots (1542 – 1587)

Partners

• Married Anne of Denmark (1574 – 1619) in 1589 — 3 children together

Children

• Henry Frederick Stuart (1594 – 1612)
• Elizabeth Stuart (1596 – 1662)
• King Charles I (1600 – 1649)

Life

• 1566 — Born
• 1589 — Married Anne of Denmark
• 1603 — James VI of Scotland becomes King James I of England, Scotland, and Ireland after the death of Elizabeth I uniting the thrones of Scotland and England.
• 1603 — The Millenary Petition is presented to James I. It expresses Puritan desires for reforms to the Church of England.
• 1603 — Plot against James to set his cousin Arabella Stuart on the throne. Sir Walter Raleigh is implicated and imprisoned.
• 1604 — James proclaims that smoking is harmful to the lungs and imposes a tax on tobacco
• 1607 — Common citizenship of English and Scottish persons is granted to those born after the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne.
• 1611 — The King James Authorized Version of the Bible is published.
• 1611 — Dissolution of the first Parliament of James I.
• 1611 — Arabella Stuart secretly marries William Seymour. When James finds out Seymour is imprisoned but escapes with Arabella. They are captured on the way to France and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Arabella starves herself to death there in 1615.
• 1613 — James' daughter Elizabeth marries Frederick V, Elector of Palatine. Their descendants in House of Hanover will eventually inherit the British Throne.
• 1614 — Second Parliament of James I meets.
• 1615 — George Villiers becomes James’s favourite.
• 1625 — Died
• 1625 — Death of James I, aged 58.

Sources

1. James VI and I · Wikipedia
2. James VI and I (r. 1567–1625) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
3. James I (r. 1603–1625) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
4. James I and Anne of Denmark · Westminster Abbey
5. James I of England · World History Encyclopedia