James VI and I

Ideas, Authority, and Government

Ralph Houlbrooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754654100
• eBook ISBN: 9781351925723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

James VI and I was the first king to rule both England and Scotland. He was unique among British monarchs in his determination to communicate his ideas by means of print, pen, and spoken word. James's own work as an author is one of the themes of this volume. One essay also sheds new light on his role as a patron and protector of plays and players. A second theme is the king's response to the problems posed by religious divisions in the British Isles and Europe as a whole. Various contributors to this collection elucidate James's own religious beliefs and their expression, his efforts before 1603 to counter a potential Catholic claim to the English throne, his attempted appropriation of scripture in support of his own authority, and his distinctive vision of imperial kingship in Britain. Some different reactions to the king, to his expression of his ideas and to the implementation of his policies form this book's third theme. They include the vigorous resistance to his attempt to change Scottish religious practice, and the sharply contrasting assessments of his life and reign written after James's death.

Chapter One
The Battle of Lepanto: the Introduction of James VI of Scotland to the Dutch

Astrid J. Stilma

In the late sixteenth century, the Dutch took a keen interest in what was happening in Scotland. Always in search of support for their revolt against Spain, they regarded Scotland as an important potential source of Protestant support, especially since the Scottish Kirk was confessionally quite close to the Dutch Reformed Church. When King James VI began to present himself, as Jenny Wormald has put it, as ‘the most Protestant king in Europe’, he gave the Dutch every reason to keep a hopeful eye on him.¹ Since the king was also an author, their interest naturally extended itself to his writings. James made his Dutch literary debut with the epic poem The Battle of Lepanto, first published in 1591 in his second volume of poetry, His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres, but probably written some five years earlier.² In effect, the Lepanto was James’s European breakthrough as a poet. It was immediately translated as a compliment to the king by the immensely popular French Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur du Bartas, which undoubtedly contributed to its subsequent international fame. In 1593, a Zeeland minister called Abraham van der Myl produced a Dutch translation of the Lepanto, thus making James’s literary work available to a Dutch-speaking audience for the first time. This paper will explore the impression the Dutch were given of James through this text and especially its paratext, both in terms of his skills as a poet and his religio-political position as a king.

The reception of The Battle of Lepanto in Scotland had been mixed. Many readers of the manuscript that had been in circulation at court before the inclusion of the Lepanto in the Poeticall Exercises welcomed the poem with adulation. Du Bartas, whom James greatly admired, claimed that by its ‘grave sweetness’ and ‘vivid descriptions’ the king’s work had delighted him into breaking his vow never to attempt translation.³ Later readers of the printed Lepanto agreed with this judgement, likening its royal author to Homer and calling his work, among other things, ‘fitt for a Dauids harpe’ and ‘the garland of a soueraine crowne’.⁴ The fame of the Lepanto continued into James’s English reign; with its new edition in 1603 it was the only one of James’s poems to be separately reprinted during his lifetime, and one of the pageants presented at the king’s triumphal entry into London in 1604 referred to it by showing the image of Apollo, ‘his right hand with a golden wand in it, pointing to the battle of Lepanto fought by the Turks (of which His Majesty hath written a poem)’.⁵

In terms of its politics, however, this ‘garland of a soueraine crowne’ was not so universally well received. In fact, it met with such smarting criticism that James felt compelled to confront his critics in an introduction added to the printed version of the poem in 1591. The main objection was to the king’s choice of subject matter: the naval battle fought in the Gulf of Lepanto on 7 October 1571 between the combined forces of the so-called ‘Holy League’ – including troops sent by Venice, Genoa, the Vatican and Spain – and the Ottoman fleet. This great Christian victory, the king’s critics pointed out, was actually a Catholic victory, since the Christian forces were all Catholics under the command of Don John of Austria, the illegitimate half-brother of Philip II of Spain. In a sense, a poem about Lepanto ought not to have caused such controversy. Reactions to Don John’s triumph had initially been jubilant across Europe, in Catholic and Protestant countries alike. According to Holinshed’s Chronicles, when the news of the victory reached London in 1571 a sermon was preached at St Paul’s, and ‘in the euening there were bonefiers made through the citie, with banketting and great reioicing, as good cause there was, for a victorie of so great importance vnto the whole state of the christian common-wealth’; the point being that the Turks had been defeated, not that the victors happened to be Catholics. After all, this was a victory ‘gainst that common enimie of vs all, who regardeth neither protestant not catholike’.⁶ Even Protestants could admire Don John, or at least envy him for ‘doing what Christian noblemen were traditionally supposed to do – defend the faith in battle against infidels’.⁷ This crusading spirit undoubtedly appealed to James, who was for a time fascinated by the Crusades and liked to consider himself a Christian warrior; he even made a public appearance dressed as a Knight of Malta in a costumed tilting match on the occasion of the baptism of Prince Henry in 1594.⁸ However, the fact remained that Don John was a specifically Catholic crusader – a fact at least one English Catholic exile remarked upon when he expressed the hope that after his victory at Lepanto, the Spanish general’s ‘next enterprise shall be to subdue the English Turks’.⁹ In Scotland, where emotions tended to run high on the subject of religion, the fact that the Protestant King James had chosen to write a poem about a Catholic hero did not go unnoticed. Since James himself can hardly have been unaware of his subjects’ sensitivities in this area, one might well wonder – as many critics have done – about his intentions in choosing his theme.

James’s own explanation canbe found in the introduction he wrote to the Lepanto, added to the print of 1591 in spite of the author’s belief that such an explanation was rather insulting to ‘the skilfull learnedness of the Reader, as if his braines could not haue conceaued so vncurious a worke, without some maner of Commentarie’.¹⁰ However, the manuscript of the poem had apparently circulated more widely than the king had initially planned – James himself mentions ‘a great sort of stoln Copies’, for which there is unfortunately no corroborating evidence – and certain readers had interpreted its meaning ‘cleane contrarie to the intent of the Authour’. The king was particularly stung by the criticism that he ‘should seem, far contrary to my degree and Religion, like a Mercenary Poet, to penne a worke, ex professo, in praise of a forraine Papist bastard’. This, according to James, had certainly never been his intention. Instead, he had meant to celebrate the glory of God by portraying a great Christian victory. Any praise for the Spanish general in the course of the poem is incidental, ‘onely as of a particular man, when hee falles in my way, to speake the truth of him’ ; of course a king should not write anyone’s praise Tike an hireling’, but neither should he be deterred from giving credit where it is due. In any event, James continues, the Catholicism of the main character does not come into the matter. After all, the invocation at the beginning of the Lepanto is ‘to the true God only’, not to the saints ‘for whose vaine honors, DON-IOAN fought in all his wars’. Furthermore, in the ‘exhortation to the persecuted in the hinmost eight lines’, it becomes perfectly clear that far from being Catholic, the message of the poem is actually explicitly Protestant. In fact, the king explains, he only used the story of Lepanto as an example of God-given victory; the poem shows by way of ‘a Poetike comparison’ that the victory of Don John over the Turks is only a foreshadowing of the final victory of Protestant Europe over Catholicism. We will return to the Protestant message of the Lepanto in due course. However, whether or not one is persuaded by James’s claims, it is clear that it was crucial to him when he published his poem that it should be seen as a Protestant statement.

The introduction to the Lepanto is indicative of the king’s volatile relationship with some of his more fanatically Calvinist subjects. Certain ministers of the Kirk consistently scrutinized James’s words and actions, and condemned any insufficiently Calvinist expressions as evidence of Catholic sympathies. It was most likely some of these radical ministers who complained about the heroic portrayal of Don John; some years later their disapproval would cause James (under similar circumstances) to add an explanatory introduction to his kingship manual Basilikon Doron as well. Although James had had a solidly Protestant education, the Kirk retained a persistent suspicion of the king, who was after all the son of their former adversary, Mary, Queen of Scots. James’s ideas about church and state did not improve the situation: his firm belief that kings should have control over the church led to a power struggle which was present under the surface throughout his reign, erupting into open conflict at regular intervals. To make matters worse, James openly tended to favour Catholic noblemen. Although for James himself this may have been a matter of personal loyalty rather than religion, the Kirk and the ultra-Protestant faction among the nobility saw things differently. They chafed at the influence James allowed Catholic favourites such as Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’Aubigny (later Earl and then Duke of Lennox), and George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. It was to a large extent the king’s unrestrained affection for these men that led to the development of ‘the persistent belief that James was a Catholic at heart and could be converted’ – a belief which the king was to make use of on more than one occasion.¹¹ Of course, for James there was potentially much more at stake than diplomatic advantage. As Pauline Croft has pointed out, he was understandably ‘anxious to avoid the papal excommunication which had made Elizabeth so vulnerable to catholic assassination attempts’.¹²

Around the time he published the Lepanto, however, such public speculation about his religious sympathies did not suit James at all. In the late 1580s, he had started making conciliatory noises in the direction of the Kirk. Following the publication of his religious meditations of 1588 and 1589 – militantly anti-Catholic reactions to the Armada crisis, encouraged by James’s new favourite minister Patrick Galloway – he had succeeded in creating a brief period of harmony between himself and his Calvinist subjects. At the general assembly of June 1590, he even described the Scottish presbyterian church as ‘the sincerest kirk in the world’ and disparaged Anglicanism as little better than papistry, ‘wanting nothing but the liftings’ – a speech which prompted the ministers to pray loudly for the king ‘for a quarter of an houre’.¹³ James’s new strategy of presenting himself as an exemplary Protestant had an international dimension as well. After the fall of the Earl of Arran in 1585 and the execution of Mary Stewart in 1587, his policies had increasingly become directed towards Elizabeth and the English succession. If he wanted to safeguard the budding negotiations about the English throne, the last thing James needed in 1591 was for people to comment on the hero of his poem as being both ‘forraine’ and ‘Papist’. The criticisms the Lepanto encountered clearly rankled not only because James felt they were unfair, but also because they tainted the Protestant reputation he was in the process of building. In Scotland, this reputation did indeed prove rather fragile. When the affair of the Spanish Blanks came to light in 1593, the same ministers who had cheered for the king in 1590 were quite ready to believe that this plot supporting a Spanish invasion of England via Scotland had James’s ‘expresse or tacite consent’, or at least that the conspirators had ‘perceaved him inclynned that way, wherupon they have presumed’.¹⁴ On the Continent, however, the image of himself that James wished to promote tended to be accepted eagerly by those who had their hopes pinned on him as the Protestant heir to Queen Elizabeth. One example of the effect of James’s strategy of self-representation on a European audience is the Dutch translation of the Lepanto, to which we shall now turn.

The man who brought the Lepanto to the Netherlands is an interesting figure. Although a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in Vlissingen, Abraham van der Myl was hardly a hard-line Calvinist; in fact, he could be described as something of a ‘society minister’. In addition to some translations and a Latin treatise on the origins of the Dutch language, van der Myl mainly wrote original poetry. Some of these poems have religious themes, but mostly they reflect the literary circles in which he moved: he wrote, for instance, poetic exchanges with other poets and liminary verses in praise of some of the pioneers of Dutch Renaissance literature, such as the eminent painter, poet and translator Karel van Mander. The extent of van der Myl’s network cannot now be adequately reconstructed, but it is certain that he was personally acquainted with some well-known poets and statesmen. He also liked to present himself as a fairly high-profile citizen of Vlissingen: in 1600, for instance, he published an account of his joining the lieutenant of the English governor of the town on a visit to the Spanish Admiral Francisco de Mendoza. As we shall see, van der Myl adopted a similar approach in his translatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Battle of Lepanto: The Introduction of James VI of Scotland to the Dutch
• 2. James VI and the English Succession
• 3. The Philosophy of Imperial Kingship and the Interpretation of James VI and I
• 4. King James and the Hampton Court Conference
• 5. The Business of Playing and the Patronage of Players at the Jacobean Courts
• 6. Presenting James VI and I to the Public: Preaching on Political Anniversaries at Paul’s Cross
• 7. James I and Protestant Heresy
• 8. The Word of God and the Word of the King: the Scriptural Exegeses of James VI and I and the King James Bible
• 9. ‘Brothers in Treuth’: Propaganda, Public Opinion and the Perth Articles Debate in Scotland
• 10. James’s Reputation, 1625–2005
• Index