James I

Christopher Durston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134900022
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

James I has traditionally been portrayed as a foolish and unpleasant man. However, the last two decades have seen a rehabilitation of James I by historians, who have begun to appreciate that in some areas, in particular foreign policy and religion, he pursued sensible policies and achieved a considerable degree of success. Christopher Durston deals with the personality and political ability of the monarch, the court, finance, parliament, foreign policy and religion, including his record in Scotland and the legacies of Elizabeth I. The arguments of the revisionist historians concerning James's relations with his parliaments are examined in detail, as well as the recent `postrevisionist' backlash.

1

James I: the man

James I succeeded his cousin in 1603 as a result partly of his own lobbying and partly of the principle of hereditary right. Whether he would have been so successful if he had been forced to make a formal application for the post of English monarch is a debatable point. Any hypothetical appointments panel would probably have been impressed with his previous record in Scotland, and he might also have done rather well if asked to give a short presentation on the theory and practice of kingship. On the other hand, the imaginary English selectors might have been put off by his failure to observe the formalities normal on such occasions, and perhaps also by his alien accent and somewhat dishevelled appearance. They would very likely have become rather bored by his tendency to lecture them at length when answering their questions, and, had the selection process involved observing the candidates over dinner, James’s lack of refined table manners and over-indulgence in alcohol might have raised disapproving eyebrows. A safer rival – one who more resembled the last English monarch – might well have won the day. The English were, of course, given no such opportunity to vet their new king in 1603, but were obliged to accept James as their ruler along with all his strengths and weaknesses. These would only become apparent to them over the next few years as he faced up to the pressing problems which beset the English crown.

James was 37 years old in 1603, of medium height, with brown hair, a thin beard, and pale blue eyes; he spoke in a thick Scottish accent which many of his new subjects found difficult to decipher. Like all men and women, he possessed a unique and complex personality shaped over many years by a multitude of genetic and environmental influences. Faced with such complexity, historians have too often indulged in crude dissections of James, labelling his qualities as either admirable or discreditable on the basis of their personal moral systems or the accepted values of their day. Those who study the past cannot escape the important but hazardous business of long-distance personality assessment, but they remain on safer and more instructive ground when they avoid moral judgements and confine themselves to classifying personal characteristics according to whether they were an asset or a disadvantage to their possessors in the performance of their public careers. ‘Bad’ traits after all are often an advantage to those in power, and ‘good’ ones can prove extremely unhelpful.

An example of the latter case is provided by James’s broad-minded intellectual outlook. James appears to have been a man remarkably free from the pull of prejudice and hidebound thinking. By 1603 he had constructed his own idiosyncratic portfolio of beliefs and opinions, some of which were extremely advanced for their time. The ringing denunciation of tobacco smoking in his 1604 Counterblast to Tobacco, for example, would win plaudits from the modern medical profession. In later life he expressed grave doubts about the existence of witchcraft – a phenomenon most of his contemporaries accepted without question – and he regarded the English royal custom of touching those suffering from scrofula, or ‘the king’s evil’, as rather ridiculous. Unfortunately, his less independently-minded subjects, who relied upon more conventionally packaged views, often found his ideas puzzling, inconsistent, and contradictory. It was difficult for them to understand how James could be a firm believer in the theory of the divine right of kings and yet very informal in his practical exercising of kingship; how he could oppose Arminian theories on salvation and yet promote Arminians to the episcopal bench; and above all, how, as a staunch doctrinal Calvinist, he could fail to share in the hatred and suspicion of Roman Catholicism and the papacy which were the hallmarks of seventeenth-century Calvinism. As a result, although James’s immunity from some of the prejudices which were commonplace amongst his contemporaries may now appear praiseworthy, during his reign it was responsible for creating some considerable misunderstanding and suspicion.

James was not without some personal attributes which were a clear advantage to him in the exercise of his office. Some of these he had inherited; others had been acquired during his long ‘apprenticeship’ in Scotland. Contemporaries and historians are agreed that, having received an excellent formal education as a child, he was a clever and well-read man, with a deep and genuine interest in intellectual matters, particularly in the areas of kingship and theology. Even Weldon had to concede that James was a wise fool, and Maurice Lee (1990) has recently gone so far as to describe him as ‘one of the most learned and intellectually curious men ever to sit on any throne’. Furthermore, James was well aware that he was clever and had considerable confidence in his own mental capacities.

Intellectuals do not generally make good politicians, but on numerous occasions both before and after 1603 James’s actions revealed that, when he set his mind to it, he was capable of displaying great skill as a political operator. He possessed the flexibility, caution, and patience needed by all successful politicians, but his greatest political asset was his ability to make quick and accurate judgements of individuals and situations. Perhaps because of his aversion to cant and hypocrisy, he was extremely adept at weighing up those with whom he had dealings, and at discerning their underlying drives and motivations. His assessment of William Laud as a man who ‘hath a restless spirit and cannot see when things are well, but loves to toss and change and bring things to a pitch of reformation in his own brain’, was an especially incisive verdict on a cleric who was to do so much damage during Charles’s reign. He was also a discerning political commentator. His remark to Prince Charles and Buckingham in 1624, that by courting popularity in parliament they were making ‘a rod with which you will be scourged yourself’, soon proved correct. Similarly, his famous ‘No bishop, no king’ statement made during the Hampton Court conference has too frequently been dismissed as an example of ill-judged petulance by historians who have overlooked the fact that the events of the late 1640s would reveal it to be an all-too-accurate prophecy.

Equally clearly, however, James possessed other qualities which did not help him as a ruler. He was not an industrious person, and he too often left the detail of policy-making to his servants while he himself indulged in his private leisure pursuits. The chief of these was hunting, which took up an enormous amount of his time and often kept him away from London for weeks on end. In 1610, for example, he was absent from the capital, hunting, for much of the time that parliament was debating Salisbury’s important fiscal initiative of the Great Contract. This neglect of government was not the result of his indolence alone; it was also a product of his belief that he had worked hard enough in Scotland before 1603 and now deserved to enjoy himself, and of his sometimes misplaced confidence in his ability to stay abreast of complex political developments even when he was otherwise engaged.

While James was reported to have been a courageous, even reckless, horseman, he was extremely afraid of all forms of violence and very uneasy when in the presence of knives or other drawn weapons. He also lived in constant fear of assassination, wearing especially thick clothes to protect himself from knife attacks, and on occasion piling furniture up against the door of his bedchamber before sleeping. The thought of going to war filled him with alarm, and amongst the advice he gave his son in his book Basilikon Doron was the suggestion that if he were ever forced to lead troops into battle he should wear light armour to make it easier to run away. The fact that he found funerals disturbing suggests that he may also have had a morbid fear of death. Historians can only speculate about the roots of these anxieties, but, as his mother’s envoy pointed out in 1584, he had certainly been ‘nurtured in fear’. During his childhood in Scotland he had been subjected to frequent plots and kidnappings, and these ‘ruffles’ must have left their psychological mark, as perhaps did his knowledge of the dramatic blowing-up of his father, Henry Lord Darnley, in 1567. It is also interesting to note that Mary Queen of Scots was heavily pregnant with James when her confidant and secretary, David Riccio, was knifed to death in her presence. Historians have generally expressed doubts about whether this incident could have caused some pre-natal shock which had a lasting impact upon James, but modern psychology would not dismiss such a possibility, and, if there was no connection, his later aversion to knives remains an extreme coincidence. While James was in a somewhat safer environment in England, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and his awareness of the persistent rumours of a conspiracy to massacre his hated Scottish entourage could have done little for his peace of mind. Whatever the reasons behind them, these neurotic fears left James wide open to accusations of cowardice, a quality considered highly inappropriate in the chief defender of the state.

Another, and probably more damaging, facet of James’s personality was his large appetite for love and affection combined with a deep self-doubt about his capacity to elicit these emotions. Although he possessed a high opinion of his intellectual abilities, he seems to have harboured real misgivings about his ability to inspire genuine love and affection in those around him. This lack of confidence, which may have been the product of a childhood spent without the normal sources of affection and intimacy, had several regrettable consequences. Because it led James to try to buy affection and made him reluctant to refuse any requests for favour, it was a major contributory factor in his lavish expenditure on gifts and pensions. It also left him extremely vulnerable to the charms of attractive individuals like Esme Stuart and George Villiers who appeared to care for him, and highly susceptible to flattery. This last trait was especially unfortunate as during the course of Elizabeth’s reign sycophantic displays of devotion to their monarch had become something of a speciality of the English people. One of the Scottish courtiers who witnessed some early examples of this when accompanying James south in 1603 had warned of the danger that ‘this people will spoil a good king’. Jenny Wormald (1983) has also recently argued that James ‘enjoyed and had his head turned’ by the ‘cult of adoration’ which he inherited from his predecessor.

James’s eagerness to amass evidence of his popularity was also to blame for a number of misunderstandings that developed between himself and his subjects. The earliest of these occurred at the very beginning of the reign. As he journeyed south to London in 1603 his progress was marked by a number of spontaneous outbursts of celebration. Those who took part in these were in the main giving expression to their intense relief that the succession had passed off without serious upheaval. James, however, was much affected by what he interpreted as evidence of his new subjects’ great warmth and affection for him. A year later he declared to his first House of Commons:

Shall it ever be blotted out of my mind how at my first entry into this kingdom, the people of all sorts rid and ran, nay rather flew to meet me; their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection, their mouths and tongues uttering nothing but sounds of joy, their hands, feet and all the rest of their members in their gestures discovering a passionate longing and earnestness to meet and embrace their new sovereign.

Such a misreading of events by one who was normally very perceptive was caused not, as Alan Smith (1973) has argued, by James’s ‘incurable self-conceit’, but rather by a self-deceit arising from deep insecurity and an abiding need for reassurance.

Another of James’s attributes which proved disadvantageous to him as king was his apparent homosexuality. There is no doubt that James felt a strong physical and emotional attraction towards good-looking men, or that he was eager to surround himself with handsome male courtiers, some of whom he fell deeply in love with. This created problems not only because numbers of his subjects found his public displays of affection towards these men distasteful, but also because, unlike a mistress who would have been prevented by her gender from assuming an inordinate prominence at court, James’s famous male lover, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, was able to use his hold over James to acquire enormous power in the last years of the reign. The exact nature of any sexual relations between James and his male favourites is, perhaps not surprisingly, difficult to establish. Villiers’ biographer, Roger Lockyer (1981), has uncovered evidence which he contends proves that some form of sexual relationship existed between the king and Buckingham. In one of his letters to James, Villiers reminded the king about a visit they had made to Farnham in Surrey during which ‘the bed’s head could not be found between master and dog’. Despite the evidence of this letter, Maurice Lee (1990) remains doubtful about whether a sexual relationship existed, claiming that James was not particularly interested in physical sex. This latter argument may in turn be rather difficult to square with James’s habit of conducting prurient interrogations of newly-wed couples the morning after their wedding night. The facts may never be fully established and are anyway of less relevance to James’s performance as a ruler than the sexual image he projected in public.

James’s neglect of his image in fact stretched far beyond the sexual sphere and should probably be seen as his most serious fault. Elizabeth I had always fully appreciated the importance of image projection and had taken great care throughout her reign to display herself in the best possible light in order to retain her subjects’ affections. James, however, did not accept that kingship was, as Conrad Russell (1992) has suggested, ‘a thespian profession’, and he therefore saw no need to continue her work. This might not have mattered quite so much had he not been so singularly lacking in personal dignity and charisma. While, as we have seen, some contemporary descriptions were guilty of exaggerating his distasteful mannerisms, James was certainly not an imposing man and he possessed little of the quality of ‘majesty’ which Elizabeth had placed at the core of the English monarchical style. This had not been a problem in Scotland for, as Jenny Wormald (1983) has shown, success there had depended upon much more informal personal interventions, and James had ‘stepped down from his throne and joined in as one of the protagonists in the hurly-burly of debate’. It was, however, a serious drawback in England where the head of state was required to stand aloof and act as the chief player in a series of ritualized theatrical performances.

Although James cannot be blamed for his personality or for the fact that different styles of kingship operated in Edinburgh and London, he should perhaps be criticized for failing to make any attempt to fabricate an attractive image of his monarchy or to present himself as an admirable symbol to which his English subjects could relate. His failure in this area was noted by the ambassador from Venice who reported in 1607 that James did not ‘caress the people, nor make them that good cheer the late Queen did, whereby she won their loves’. It was also noted by another contemporary commentator who remarked th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chronological table
• Introduction: ‘a bad king’?
• 1 James I: the man
• 2 The court, favourites, and patronage
• 3 Financial problems
• 4 James I and his parliaments
• 5 Foreign policy
• 6 James I and the English church
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography