Come by good right to claim my seat and throne,
My kingdoms severed to join in one,
To mend what is amiss in everything.
King James I, whose deliverance at the hands of the Gunpowder Treason plotters we celebrate each year on 5 November, has had a bad press ever since he died 375 years ago. The English folk memory of Good Queen Bess, their legendary Virgin Queen, who died on 24 March, 1603, has of course been a hard act to follow. We contrast the evergreen myth of Elizabeth Tudor's regal majesty and the gung- ho years of her martial glory against the Spanish with the drooling, ill-made and weak-kneed King James, his dirty habits, sometimes charm less pomposity and ill-chosen favourites. No stirring clarions of war are sounded, no Great Armada defeated during the reign of the James I.
Elizabeth bequeathed England to the impoverished 36 year old King James VI of Scotland, son of her cousin the hapless Mary Queen of Scots, whom she had imprisoned and later beheaded in 1587. In doing so she had left him a crown that was deeply in debt, a turbulent Parliament eager to test its growing legislative muscle at the expense of the royal prerogative, and a dangerous politico-religious turmoil stirred by intractable Protestant factions of Puritans, Episcopalian Anglicans, and disenfranchised Catholics. Although James fancied himself as a new Solomon, such a worm-filled Tudor legacy required a degree of energy, charm, sensitivity and tact that would have taxed the great Solomon himself and was certainly lacking in the new King.
Despite his assertion that: 'I am ever for the medium in everything. Between foolish rashness and extreme length, there is a middle way.', King James's relations with his English Parliament and hopes for debt relief foundered on the then unresolved controversial issues of his divinely bestowed royal prerogative as 'the fount of all law' and Parliament's assertion of its right of free speech. A Parliament that was now evolving fundamental new theories of parliamentary sovereignty and asserting its lawmaking powers cannot have taken kindly to King James's much read book Basilikon Doron. In it he articulated his concept of the Divine Right of Kings, describing them as 'God's Lieutenants', 'the breathing images of God ', and 'little Gods'. It was to take a civil war and the loss of his son's head to the axeman in 1649 to resolve this issue.
