CHAPTER SIX James VI and I

King James the Sixth of Scotland (1567-1625) and the First of England and Ireland (1603-1625) was to his contemporaries an object of considerable derision. Henri IV of France, his necessary ally in European politics, was reputed to have called James the “wisest fool in Christendom.” Henri cer­tainly managed the cruelest taunt when he said he accepted that James was indeed the “Scottish Solomon,” because he was the son of David—a nasty allusion to the vicious rumor that his father was not Lord Darnley but Da­vid Riccio, the Italian secretary of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots.

For although I confess the greatness of that trust and privacy betwixt us will very well allow unto you an infinitely great liberty and freedom of speech unto me, yea even to rebuke me more sharply and bitterly than ever my [school] master durst do, yet to invent a new art of railing upon me, nay to borrow the tongue of the devil... is but a gentle admonition, that cannot come within the compass of any liberty of friendship.¹

The most contemptuous words ever offered to James were offered to him face-to-face by Andrew Melville, a Scots presbyter of the tough-as-leather sort, who informed the king directly that he was no more than “God's sil- lie vassall.”² It is hardly surprising that at Hampton Court in 1604, sitting among the English bishops and Puritan clergymen who were airing views on how the Church of England might be further “reformed,” James thanked God “for bringing him into the promised land, where Religion was purely professed; where he sat among grave, learned and reverend men; not, as be­fore, elsewhere, a King without state, without honor, without order; where beardless boys would brave him to his face.”³

Though Andrew Melville was almost three-score years and bearded, he can be counted among those whom James was glad to have escaped.

The least uncharitable and possibly most acute observation of James was that of the Comte de Tillieres, the French ambassador to his court. He noted that when James wanted to play the king he sounded like a despot, and when he stooped to conquer, he was simply vulgar. The first part of that proposition will demand most of our attention below. The last part is relevant to the more general disparagement of James, both during his lifetime and posthumously.

Even in an age when the term “gentility” referred to social status de­noted by the right to a coat of arms and not to any refinement of manner, James's salacity and fondness for the scatological were often remarked upon. Negligent of popularity with the masses (unlike his predecessor, Elizabeth, who radiated an aloof graciousness), James seldom showed himself to the crowd, and once when urged to do so, snapped back, “God's wounds I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse.”⁴ At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 when the priggish bachelor president of Cor­pus Christi College, Oxford, the Reverend John Reynolds, objected to the Prayer Book wedding service's vivid “With my body I thee worship,” James quipped, “Many a man speaks of Robin Hood who never shot in his bow,” scandalizing worldly bishops and puritanical parsons alike.⁵ James was more direct with Scots presbyters, reacting to their homiletic extravagances with a lusty “I give not a turd for your preaching.”⁶ His vigor of expression seemed more absurd than compelling, and often the reaction to it was the kind sought by burlesque house comedians: derision.

James's ghost suffered ridicule no less than his person. Not immediate­ly. At the time of his death in March 1625, while some spoke ill of the dead others found virtues in him. William Laud, Bishop of St. David's, whom James had denied major preferment because he thought his rigor against Puritanism disruptive (St. David's was about as far away from Whitehall as a bishop could be), had little reason to be grateful to him.

The drumbeat of posthumous condemnation began only after the hor­rendous events of 1640 to 1660 that took the life of James's son, Charles I. Sir Hammond LeStrange, writing from the perspective of 1655, was cat­egorical:

And though those dismal calamities which befel his Son, were doubtless am- pliated by a superfetation of Causes; yet was their first and main existency de­rivative from those seminalities. Let Court-Pens extol the calmness of his Hal- cyonian Reign with all artifice of Rhetorick, yet can they never deny but that admired Serenity had its set in Cloud; and that he left to his Successor, both an empty Purse, and a Crown of Thorns.⁸

LeStrange echoed the old derision of the king's lifetime and gave it explica­tive force in the light of subsequent events. Arthur Wilson, writing in 1653, saw the seeds of Charles's destruction in James's failures growing in great part from his “remiss comportment,” a clear allusion not only to errors in governance and a noticeable want of regal bearing in the king but also to his excessive, perhaps felonious, intimacy with his comely young favorites:

And the Tongues at those times more fluent than my Pen, made every little miscarriage (being not able to discover their true operations, like small seeds hid in earthy darkness) grow up and spread into such exuberant Branches that evil report did often pearch upon them.

The posthumous scandalization of James's conduct, particularly his re­lationship with his last and greatest favorite, George Villiers, Duke of Buck­ingham, occurred shortly after James's death in 1625, because Buckingham's already overweening power actually increased with Charles's accession. Allusions to Buckingham's homosexual intimacy with the old king was the vehicle for the attack, and the absence of any suggestion that the deep friendship between the new king and the old favorite was tainted by homo­sexuality spared the living crown while tarring the dead one. In Michaelmas Term 1627, a troupe of itinerant minstrels were heavily sentenced in Star Chamber for a slander on Buckingham which they had sung around Lon­don. Among its stanzas:

What other goodnes could ever arise

Come love me whereas I lay

From a master [James I] that was soe sincere and wise

The cleane contrary waye.

Whoe if he could now from his grave ascend

Come love me whereas I lay

He surely would the truth of his service commend

The cleane contrary waye.

Although common people his glory would stayne

Come love me whereas I lay

Heele live yett to gett their prayse againe

The cleane contrary waye.¹⁰

In our sexually explicit age “the cleane contrary waye” demands no clarifi­cation; the other refrain is clearer when rendered as “Come love me where ass I lay.” These stanzas reflected the rumor that Buckingham had poisoned James in order to accelerate Charles's accession. (Some went so far as to suggest Charles's complicity.) Sir Anthony Weldon, whose career in James's household had ended when he finally said too many nasty things about Scots courtiers, was still traducing Buckingham in 1650, in the process giv­ing a degree of indelibility to the unprovable but certainly plausible scandal that James's relationship with Buckingham was carnally homosexual.¹¹ To the present day, those historians most unsparing in their judgment of James and his reign have been those most convinced of his active homosexual- ity.¹²

George Villiers's meteoric rise from a minor gentleman to Duke of Buckingham cannot be explained by mere deviancy.

Considered dispassionately, and considered separate from the disasters into which he guided the realm during the reign of Charles, Buckingham's services to James were considerable. He worked the destruction of the Howard clan in James's counsels and government, facilitated by the fall of Somerset who was the stalking horse of that enduring, corrupt, and jobbing gang. If the disastrous collapse of the Howards afforded Buck­ingham personal satisfaction, it also enabled him to promote better and more competent people to take their places. He was more discerning than James in his understanding of the domestic political and the foreign dip­lomatic obstacles to the marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta of Spain (the “infamous” Spanish Match, which made perfect dynastic sense given James's inherent pacifism). Buckingham was also more perspicacious in re­alizing when it was time to abandon these negotiations. Where Bucking­ham failed was as strategist. Taking England to war against Spain in 1624 was built upon the strategic miscalculation that he could win quickly and the political myopia of not realizing that if he did not win quickly he could not sustain enough popular support to furnish the revenues necessary for a long conflict. Buckingham's ignorance of the art of war and his arrogance in believing he was a warrior led directly to defeat on land and sea, both for his forces and his cause, and to his own death in 1628, at the hand of a disgruntled officer.¹⁴ The crises amid which the Duke died became the first failures of the young king's reign.

Buckingham's presence as vicegerent (and incidentally as tutor-com­panion to the heir apparent) relieved James of a great deal of responsibility for political routine. It made possible, even if not advisable, the marked decline in James's assiduity in affairs of state that set in about 1616—the year that James published his political works — and continued with gathering momentum until the king's death in March 1625. That decline was certainly marked by increasing illness, especially after 1618, with bouts of severe ar­thritic pain, feebleness, and something akin to neuropathy, possibly from a genetic metabolic disorder, acute intermittent porphyria.¹⁵ James's passion for hunting, dancing, and the sybaritic good things of court life increased with age (as the author's old teacher at Harvard, W K Jordan, said, “James liked to watch the boys and girls play”). The king spent more time with his books and scholarly interests, in long and rambling discussions with bright and accommodating clerics, not least the dean of St. Paul's, whom he had called from the long robe to the cloth. To James, John Donne as theologian was more acceptable than John Donne as poet: the king is supposed to have quipped that Donne's metaphysical poetry reminded him of the peace of God, which passeth all understanding. James always found time and re­serves of energy for theological argument. During the great controversy over free will centering on the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, par­ticularly during the Synod of Dort in 1618-1619, James played a heavy, if not quite weighty, and very ambivalent role, sending missives from Whitehall, ceaselessly badgering the hapless English delegates and anybody else who would listen to him. He skirted the details of government more than he had at any time before. Less inclined to play the king, he was also less likely to sound like a despot, if we are to credit Tillieres's crack.

Just how despotic did James sound? The obvious place to look for an answer to that question is in the speeches he delivered to Parliament. There is much assertion of his regality, with varying degrees of stridency. More­over, all four speeches in his Political Works, from 1604 to 1610, were given to the same Parliament, composed of the same members. Between its as­sembly on March 19, 1604, and its final prorogation, on December 6, 1610, this parliament sat in five sessions totaling twenty-five months. During this period, as James addressed his subjects, his speeches grew longer (save for his address of November 9, 1605, which was the shortest for a very good reason), from just under an hour for the first to one and one-half hours for the last.¹⁶ Consequently, James's repetitiveness fell on progressively deafer ears, each succeeding homily on kingship being less convincing than its predecessor. The leadership in the Commons, which was increasingly dis­inclined to cooperate with the crown and was beginning to take control of the House's own debate, found the king's sorties beginning to rile as well as pall.¹⁷

The king's earliest speech, delivered to both Houses at the convoca­tion of the first Parliament, on March 19, 1604, was relatively succinct and markedly gracious.¹⁸ James stooped to conquer without a hint of vulgarity. Touchingly, he ecstatically recalled the welcome extended him by his new subjects a year before, “their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affec­tion, their mouthes and tongues vttering nothing but sounds of joy.”¹⁹ His evocation of peace, foreign and domestic, was heartfelt, as was his plea for a union of his two kingdoms as well as his two crowns. His invocation of God in support of his project for the union was to take a liberty, but would have seemed entirely appropriate to contemporary ears. His care­ful confession of faith and analysis of religion in England were brilliant. What he believed as a mildly Reformed Protestant Anglican he revealed to all his subjects from the bully pulpit of Parliament. His clearly drawn dis­tinction between Roman Catholic clerics (to be banished if they continued to maintain Papal supremacy) and laity (to be tolerated and not punished in their bodies for the error of their minds if they eschewed sedition and subversion) was adumbrated in an appropriate forum: Parliament was the place for dealing with such problems. His curt dismissal of “the Puritanes and Nouelists^y,-he considered their demands disposed of by his proclama­tions of the year before following the Hampton Court Conference—neatly preserved his prerogative as the Supreme Governor of the Church not to treat ecclesiastical matters in Parliament.²⁰ And in his exhortation to the episcopate to be diligent in their care of souls, reference to himself as God's “Lieutenant” over the Church was no arrogation in the Supreme Gover­nor.

When he turned to the judges (the twelve of the courts of King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer attended Parliament as assistants to the Lords), he emphasized his responsibility to God, in some ways jointly with them, in others singularly as their master. He did not let slip the chance to both inveigh against too much legislative activity and to distance himself from tyranny as a “righteous and just King.”²¹ He gave away most in his defensive discourse on patronage, why he had rewarded many and yet not enough from the perspective of most of his auditors, while dealing with the implication that too many Scots and too few English supped at his ample table. His promise to do better, especially if his disappointed English suit­ors would only be less importunate, was unconvincing but not derisory.

The sting of the speech was in its tail. The king's apology for lacking eloquence concluded with a faintly veiled threat:

That it becommeth a King, in my opinion, to vse no other Eloquence then plainnesse and sinceritie.... [the former to avoid ambiguity, the latter so that] as farre as a King is in Honour erected aboue any ofhis Subiects, so farre should he striue in sinceritie to be aboue them all, and that his tongue should be euer the trew Messenger of his heart and this sort of Eloquence may you euer assur­edly looke for at my hands.²²

James was as good as his word: that is what alarmed his auditory.

The second speech, delivered on Saturday, November 9, 1605, was four days after James I, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons in Parliament assembled were to have been blown up by a cache of gunpow­der placed under the Parliament house. Word of the Powder Plot, or Guy Fawkes Plot—a conspiracy organized by a small group of well-born but madly fanatic Roman Catholic laymen who hoped the act would unleash a rebellion strong enough to return England to the fold—was leaked by one of the conspirators before it could be executed. The attempt had a profound effect upon James. It was heightened by a fear of death which for the king had begun in the womb. When his father Darnley murdered Riccio in the presence of Mary Queen of Scots, Darnley's companion the Earl of Gow- rie had held a sword to the belly of the Queen, six months pregnant with James. Less than a year later Darnley was strangled, possibly by the Earl of Bothwell with Mary's connivance, and his quarters blown up by gunpow- der—a fact that James learned very early. As a young king James lost his first regent (his uncle the Earl of Moray) to assassins in 1570 and his sec­ond regent (his grandfather the Earl of Lennox) in an affray in 1571 —James saw the mortally wounded man carried into his house. His fourth regent (the Earl of Morton) James himself sent to the ax in 1581 for complicity in Darnley's murder. James, aged sixteen, was for ten months held prisoner by a group of noblemen, Presbyterian ultras, after being kidnapped as a politi­cal pawn—by the same Earl of Gowrie. The lad had reason to fear for his life, and his rescue by the conservative noble faction threatened civil war. Eighteen years later, in 1600, another Earl of Gowrie, son of the first, along with his brother threatened James's life at Gowrie Castle; in the confusion that followed, James made sure that the two younger Gowries were slain by his retainers. James's fear of assassination was obsessive but in the circum­stances it was not neurotic. The king always wore in public a quilted dou­blet, perhaps with a mail-coat underneath, to ward off an assassin's blade.

Addressing his Lords and Commons, after the Gunpowder Plot had been thwarted, James expressed the deep satisfaction that, had he been launched heavenward on the Fifth of November in company with the Par­liament, at least he would not have died with ignominy in a bar or a broth­el. This illustrates Tillieres's point about the king's vulgarity in stooping to conquer.²3 Although this announcement fell far short of the conventional paean of thanksgiving, it was heartfelt. The sentiment was also consonant with James's careful exposition, in this same speech, of the respective roles and responsibilities of king and Parliament in what James graciously called “this Honourable and high Court of Parliament”:

which is nothing else but the Kings great Councell, which the King doeth as­semble either vpon occasion of interpreting, or abrogating old Lawes, or mak­ing of new, according as ill maners shall deserue, or for the publike punishment of notorious euill doers, or the praise and reward of the vertuous and well de- seruers.²4

There was nothing here that was not agreeable to the traditional under­standing of mixed monarchy—the interactive, interacting, balanced coop­eration of king and estates to avoid the polar extremes of absolute monar­chy and democracy. James spoke of what Sir John Fortescue had described, and it was the antithesis of absolutism in theory and in practice in the sev­enteenth century.²⁵

The third speech, March 31, 1607, was not delivered at the opening of Parliament. It was delivered more than half way through a stormy session which served up the most serious political defeat that any monarch had yet suffered at the hands of the estates since Henry Tudor captured the crown at Bosworth Field in 1485, or would suffer again until James was fought to a standstill over the Spanish Match by the Parliament of 1621. In 1607, James was in part the author of his own misfortune. The most reasonable and balanced of any of the king's speeches to Parliament, and the one that sounded his highest praise of England's institutions of governance and law while fulfilling his promise to speak his heart and the truth, this address was marred by an ineptly tendentious opening, full of cant and hyperbole. James preached all the oratorical virtues he himself did not practice. From “fewest wordes with most matter doeth become best,” to “Rex est lex loquens,... That the Kings will and intention being the speaking Law, ought to bee Luce clarius” to “I am euer for the Medium in euery thing,” the phrases rang false.²⁶ He gave the distinct impression that Rex est lex Loquens is best rendered as “The King is loquacious law,” and that so much talk provided more smoke than clear light.

“The errour was my mistaking,” James said at one point; “I knew mine owne ende, but not others feares.” That statement was all too painfully true. It can stand as the epitaph of this disquisition. What a pity: for after the first ten minutes the speech was a statesmanlike and brilliantly composed analy­sis of what would be gained by both England and Scotland by the organic union of the two kingdoms. The king's transparent sincerity in wishing only the welfare of both his peoples gave passion and persuasiveness to an astute rebuttal of the arguments against union. James dealt with the Scots' reser­vations, conceding that “there are many Piggots amongst them,” an allusion to the English MP, Sir Christopher Pigott, a Buckinghamshire patriot who a month before had launched a vitriolic attack against all things Scottish and the Scots as beggars, rebels, and traitors (in ascending order of depravi­ty?). James showed himself able to compare intelligently his two kingdoms' institutions, and his reiterated preference for the common law could only be pleasing, and his intention that the union would extend it to Scotland

flattering, to his auditory. His argument that the union would solve both the continuing threat posed by the Auld Connection, the Franco-Scottish alliance which was a sword at England's back, and the disorderliness of the Anglo-Scottish border was incontestable. Finally, his careful and temperate discussion of the Antenati, those Scots born before his accession as James I, and whether they would be accorded the same rights as native subjects in England was conciliatory and entirely correct in its prediction that in time this would cease to be a problem, if it really was one at all. Alas, more than words and assurances were needed to counter the issue, because the single greatest fear of the English governing classes was a horde of ravenous Scots immigrants. That chimera was the rock upon which the proposal for union was wrecked.

James and his experienced and sagacious chief minister, the Earl of Salisbury, then committed an inexplicable political mistake. Immediately following the king's speech, they adjourned Parliament for a three weeks' Easter recess, which prevented the speech from gaining momentum. It would have been better received had the speech been given upon the reas­sembly of the Parliament. In the event, Parliament refused the union, and James, to his everlasting regret, had to abandon it.

The last of James's four parliamentary speeches in The Political Works was given on March 21, 1610. Considering the gravity of the speech's con­text, much of it seems irrelevant to the great concerns of the session, though that was less James's fault than the Commons'. The session had opened six weeks earlier with a forthright demand pressed by Salisbury that Parlia­ment supply the King's fiscal needs by an extraordinary and comprehensive grant of taxes. This would retire the debt, provide for defense, and create an emergency reserve. Coupled with this demand was a request for an an­nual supply sufficient to meet about a third of the king's income and afford a sizable surplus over his existing expenditure (which had been prodigally high). The demand hinted at concessions, and the Parliament took up the challenge. While this meant routinely redress of grievances, it also had the larger potential of an agreement by the King to give up certain sources of ordinary revenue inhering in the crown in return for a settled annual sup­ply. Much of that ordinary revenue, including wardship of underage heirs, other feudal dues and incidents, and forced supply of the royal household with goods and services, were notable grievances because of their increas­ing exploitation by a financially embarrassed crown. Thus began the nego­tiation between King and Parliament for what Salisbury termed a “Great Contract,” a financial settlement that would certainly have made the crown less dependent on Parliament for revenue and therefore more negligent of grievances. No sooner proposed, the business was blindsided by one of those fugitive issues that a restless leadership in the Commons found useful to keep the MPs in line. The Commons caught the scent of an academic scandal. The king had, by his recurrent homiletics on the nature of kingship and statecraft, sensitized the House to just such a challenge as that present­ed by Dr. John Cowell, a civil lawyer at Cambridge, whose The Interpreter, published by the university press in 1607, was a useful and comprehensive dictionary of law.²⁷ James's imperious rhetoric on the divine origins and the quasi-divine character of monarchy, the rights of kingship, and the exalta­tion of the kingly person, the subordination of all other persons and all institutions to him, and the prerogatives that undergirded his power was balanced by repeated enunciation of the king's obligation to his subjects and responsibility to God. Dr. Cowell, however, had failed to be so mea­sured and conciliatory in preparing his dictionary's entries for Prerogative, Parliament, King, and Subsidy. The clear thrust of The Interpreter’s treat­ment of these topics was that the king's power was so absolute that the king alone—without the estates—could make law. The Commons gave chase. James and Salisbury snared the quarry first: the book was suppressed and ordered burned by the public executioner. Salisbury informed Parliament, on March 8, that

His Majesty said further that for his kingdom he was beholden to no elective power... [and] that, though he did derive his title from the loins of his an­cestors, yet the law did set the crown upon his head, and he is a king by the common law of the land.. .. But withal he did acknowledge that he had no power to make laws of himself, or to exact any subsidies [revenue grants] de jure without the consent of his three Estates.²⁸

James's speech a fortnight later was to bear this point home and make a pretty acknowledgment of his care to redress grievances while warning the estates that the hue and cry after grievances would have to stop short of se­dition and self-interested promotion. Though he argued the value of other legal systems, including the civil law, James was at pains to exalt the com­mon law, albeit admitting that in important respects it would bear reform­ing. He sought to end the unseemly free-for-all ofjurisdiction expansion by the courts for fees and forum shopping by litigants, recently made hotter by the Common Pleas' use of the writ of prohibition directed at ecclesiasti­cal courts and courts of equity—including Chancery—to enhance its own jurisdiction. The king was frank in charging the Commons to provide sup­ply, and equally candid in disclaiming any greediness for more than the nation could reasonably provide or more than he needed, “For that were to giue me a purse with a knife.”²⁹ He advanced an able defense of his mod­eration in dealing with Roman Catholics (that required some courage, for memories of the Gunpowder Plot were still fresh) by pointing out that his own new treatise, “An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance” (1607) had challenged not only English Catholics but Rome itself. And he ended by appealing to any subject who loved the chase with a call for preservation of game and woodlands.

In this address to the Parliament, what must stick above all else, were the king's two unequivocal statements:

For the King with his Parliament here are absolute, (as I vnderstand) in making or forming of any sort of Lawes.

I shall euer be willing to make the reason appeare of all my doings, and rule my actions according to my lawes.3⁰

These were not despotic utterances. They would satisfy Bracton, and we suppose Coke.

James's charge to the judges of assize, on June 20, 1616, can be grouped with the parliamentary speeches. It was delivered on the post-term day of Trinity, the last day of the legal year, just before the Long Vacation when the twelve judges of the common law courts prepared to go on their summer assize circuits. As was customary that day, the judges attended the Privy Council in the Court of Star Chamber to assist on points of law raised by pleas in mitigation of sentence. This work was done in camera after a copi­ous dinner about one in the afternoon The charged ended the morning sitting which had been devoted to motions in Star Chamber.

Though the charge was usually pronounced by the Lord Chancellor, this time the king himself gave charge. In opening it, James purposely chose as his text that most monarchical of King David's songs, Psalm 72, “Give thy judgments to the King, O God, And thy righteousness to the King's son.” He would play judge for the day, to remind those lions under his throne that the frame of jurisprudence was the law of the king, which the judges were to interpret just as the king settled the interpretation of God's law. The charge's thrust was appropriate to a jurisprudent who was not, and made no claim to be, a jurisperitus, one learned in the law: settling the jurisdic­tions of the courts and repressing the common law courts' prohibitions. Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, before he was booted upstairs from the Common Pleas to the King's Bench in 1613, had been the most frequent offender, and remained so.

What James had to say about the law here, how it should be reverenced, how it might be reformed, how it must be limited, was a well-argued essay in jurisprudential analysis that could not be excepted against, not even by James's most captious critics. It comports well even with our understand­ing of the rule of law. Most of what James had to say specifically about the law, he said to Coke. The king warned darkly that the “Starre-Chamber Court hath bene likewise shaken of late, and the last yeere it had receiued a sore blow, if it had not bene assisted and caried by a few voices.” This could be laid entirely at Coke's door.³¹ Two years before, Coke and two other Common Law judges sitting in Star Chamber, carrying a Privy Councillor with them, had almost managed to limit the court's jurisdiction in a criti­cal way with demeaning results.³² In fact, this speech was clearly monitory to Coke. In his wonted arrogance Coke chose to ignore the warning. Five months later, after a final act of obstinate, even contemptuous, defiance, he was removed from the bench.³³

Was Tillieres right? Read carefully, the speeches lead to a guarded “no.” Whatever categorical language James used there in exalting the kingly au­thority jure divino was balanced in good part by equally clear statements of the King's responsibility to God and hence to man, his subjects in par­ticular. There was nothing despotic about this. And if one seeks the tone of tyranny—which was really Tillieres's point—then he can find it only by much contextual wrenching. James might well have better chosen to soften his assertiveness. But he really was a plain-spoken man, sincere in deliver­ing his heart and his mind. If that was less than politic, it did not make him a despot. The problem of course with the spoken word is that it registers differently on different ears, in minds differently disposed. Parliamentary speeches raise particular perils, and James tended to lead with his best line of defense. In the whole debate, when analyzed by reading it retrospective­ly, James appeared less extreme, his arguments better balanced and properly qualified. Yet, in dealing with Parliament he could have heeded his own adolescent advice in a poem he wrote about 1582:

Since thought is free, think what thou will,

O troubled heart, to ease thy pain.

Thought, unrevealed, can do no ill;

But words passed out come not again.

Be careful aye for to invent

The way to get thy own intent.³⁴

Perhaps at sixteen James was too cynical. With age and regal success he had become more confident of himself, less fearful and more open. A mute king must appear to be so by malice, and he cannot hope to rule voiceless. Still, James talked too much, too often.

There has been one persistent Whiggish slander of James I: that he was a Scot and so did not understand English institutions, least of all Parlia­ment. Some of the mud in this statement may stick but the slander is false. James was not a skilled parliamentary manager, but that was never a king's job. He has been blamed for not having chosen better parliamentary man­agers (an accusation now undergoing some revision in the light of a new appreciation of the obduracy, immunity, and autonomy of Parliament dur­ing the later years of Elizabeth's reign). Insomuch as he sought to perform a leader's role in the estates, he increased the risk of the fate that stalked him in England, talking too much and too often. He had no doubts about the sufficiency of his knowledge of English government and governance. In the speeches he refers once to his “experience” and twice to his “apprentice­ship” of English governance, emphasizing that he had served two succes­sive apprenticeships, long seven-year stints. He was a quick study—and, as he reminded the auditory in the Star Chamber, he was an old king when he came to England's throne. If he erred at all in England in dealing with the estates, it was in giving his first Parliament's members too much time and continuity to become experienced in their own right and in pursuit of their own agenda. He did not repeat that mistake: 1614 saw one Parliament of a few weeks' duration, followed by seven years without another. Even 1621, harsh though it was, saw no concessions from the King to the Parliament in defeasance of his singular prerogative to conduct foreign affairs. His cata­strophic failure in 1624 was the work of his immature son and his ambi­tious favorite, inordinately driven by intemperance, hubris, and gratifica­tion with a vague and ephemeral popularity. It was small comfort to James that 1624 saw the king more popular with his Parliament than ever before; that popularity came at the cost of his lifelong passion for peace as Eng­land, with an unfortunate and ill-advised enthusiasm, went to war against Spain. If James demonstrated any frailty in his handling of the Parliament at Westminster it was in believing that he could persuade by authority and reason what was becoming an increasingly sophisticated and articulate, po­litically coherent, legislative establishment, a body that after 1603 would not accept what earlier members had been prepared to put up with in a previous century, in an age of schism and rebellion. Though James did not get everything he wished from his parliaments—most notably the union of the two kingdoms — and never enough supply (his extravagance assured that), James was far from the parliamentary failure that his son proved to be and which cost him his head. James was pragmatic, Charles merely du­plicitous.

Indeed, James VI and I was an experienced king as far as estates, their cultivation and uses, were concerned. Despite the considerable differenc­es between the Parliament of England and that of Scotland, the role of each within a “free monarchy” was much the same: supply, legislation, and maintenance of a national consensus in support of good order at home and defense against foreign threats. Mixed monarchy was the objective on both sides of the river Tweed. The estates offered the “free monarch” the arena within which his domestic enemies could be domesticated. Probably no crowned head of his age knew better than James VI the risks of noble factionalism. Few were more successful in curbing those risks by astute po­litical cultivation, including coercion, conciliation, prison, patronage, and parliamentary action. In the 1590’s, as an adult king, increasingly aggressive and confident in his role, James fashioned the Scots Parliament into a bul­wark of the monarchy. This meant advancing the interests and security of the lairds, the Scots gentry, in order to counterweigh the great lords. It was also advanced by reinstituting an episcopate as a parliamentary class capable of both bridling the earls and hobbling (though never quite gagging) the radical clergy, their noble adherents, and the town laity. For if James VI understood the dangers of aristocratic factions, he saw the real enemy as theocracy, or at least a clerocracy, with dominance by the clerical First Es­tate much more than by the noble Second Estate.

Three of the pieces in the Political Works, “An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance,” “A Premonition to all Christian Monarches, Free Princes and States,” and “A Defence of the Right of Kings, against Cardinali Per­ron,” were launched against the greatest clerocracy and most thoroughgo­ing theocracy of all, the Bishop of Rome and his claim to a triple-crowned supremacy over secular governments and polities. These essays had a uni­versal appeal, among Roman Catholic kings and princes as well as Prot­estant ones. Political theory had developed a line of argument during the sixteenth century—the route stretched from Niccolo Machiavelli to Jean Bodin to Giovanni Botero—that ultimately posited that the state was an ethical entity. The state, even if a collectivity of souls, is not a conscien­tious and ethical being. To attempt the equation would raise a true mon­ster more terrible that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in a word Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will” that has underlain totalitarianism for over two centuries. Therefore, against a papacy that claimed its authority was jure divino vested in the Pope, the highest authority to raise a counterclaim was a truly “free monarchy” headed by a servant responsible to God, not to God's vicar on Earth. James did not invent divine-right monarchy, but he refined it, armed it with a compelling rhetoric, and sent it off to battle the red-hats and triple crown itself.

McIlwain, in his introduction to the Political Works, comprehended the foundations of James's enmity toward Roman Catholic doctrine and eccle- siology:

James's real attitude toward Catholicism springs from the same root as his views on Puritanism. In both cases his hostility is more political than religious.... what made him hate equally a Scottish synod and Roman pontiff was their common denial of his royal power as supreme governor in matters and causes ecclesiastical, and nothing else.³⁵

“The Trew Law of Free Monarchies,” written in 1598 and first published in 1603, and “Basilikon Doron,” published 1599, were directed against the greater clerocracy closer to home and more dangerous to a free monarch. The Scots Kirk in the hands of the Presbyterian ultras went far toward prov­ing that “new presbyter” was less “old priest” than old pope “writ large.” “The Trew Law” was in fact a Te Deum sung over the near-prostrate form of the ultras who, since Melville had called the king “God's sillie vassall” in 1596, had increasingly lost control over the Kirk to the king. Save for the most extreme Presbyterians among the nobility, who were effectively excluded from positions of power around the king and his government, James had turned the nobility onto a parliamentary path that divided them and their interests from those of the ultras. James managed to reduce the influence of the urban laity in their support of the ultras, even removing his capital from Edinburgh to Leith for a season until the city fathers of the for­mer made a full, humiliating, and financially costly submission to the King for his return there. He reinstituted a parliamentary episcopacy. He secured increasing control over the agenda and the timing of the Kirk's General Assembly. And he managed to swamp the ultra influence by directly subsi­dizing and encouraging attendance at the Assembly by northern delegates, who generally favored royal powers. By the time he published “The Trew Law” upon his accession to the English throne, God's vassal had become a free monarch and equally the free governor of the Scots Kirk, and there were no longer Melville's “two Kings and two Kingdoms” in Scotland.³⁶

‘‘Basilikon Doron” has been characterized correctly as traditional in its approach to Scottish secular politics, albeit unconventional in its assertive and jure divino stance against the Kirk.³⁷ James's sound and sage advice given to young Prince Henry in matters of state, family, mores, and society certainly reflected conventional theory. The work was a thorough, unex­ceptionable example of mixed-monarchy analysis. Here, more than in the speeches or in “The Trew Law,” the King's obligations weigh heavier than his powers: of the whole, the Second Book, “Of a Kings Dvetie in His Of­fice,” is both the longest and the most earnest. James is here the schoolmas­ter, the Scots dominie, and his pupil is his son.

James had not known a father. If he had marked and inwardly digested a testament politique he found it in the hard lessons of his perilous childhood and challenging youth. But he had had a schoolmaster: George Buchanan (1506-1582), who tutored the young king throughout the 1570's in Classi­cal letters, modern languages, philosophy, religion, statecraft, and politi­cal theory. An elegant Latinist, accounted among the foremost Classical humanists who succeeded Erasmus, More, Colet, and d'Etaples, Buchanan was strict, demanding, laconic, and unsmiling. He frightened the boy-king with his displeasure and hardly reassured him with the small and infrequent tokens of satisfaction that greeted the lad's best work. A layman, but a staunch and early convert to Calvinism, Buchanan had served as moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk, and was an ultra. In his last years he finished a Latin treatise that was intended as much for his student as for the learned world and his countrymen to whom it was addressed. Buchanan's De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579) treated royal law, but it was founded on premises diametrically opposed to those that underlay James's works. For Buchanan, the source of political power is the people; the king is bound by the terms on which he receives the supreme power from the people; and a tyrannical king can lawfully be resisted, and even destroyed. Clearly this was an argument to frighten the uneasy head that wore the crown, and not surprisingly the Scots Parliament, with James's blessing, condemned the book in 1584. Buchanan's ghost acquired a more alarming aspect after that notable exercise of his doctrine of tyrannicide which took place outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall on January 30, 1649, when the public executioner cut off the head of “Charles Stuart, tyrant.” In 1683, Oxford University—always more royalist than the King and traditionally the home of lost causes—burned its copy of the work. That did not stop the Eng­lish, five years later, from disposing of (without bloodshed) another Stuart king.

James VI and I might almost seem to have devoted almost his whole scholarly life to refuting Buchanan and counteracting Buchanan's poison­ous doctrine. That appearance is deceiving. The one prevailing, consistent note in all of James's political works is the centrality of the king's divinely ordained and divinely derived obligation truly to imitate God in justice and righteousness. The just and righteous king was the kind of king Buchan­an taught James to be. James never repudiated this branch of Buchanan's teaching. However imperfectly and despite his notable human frailties and regal failures, he had tried to uphold that model of kingship. If he failed, this was the ideal that he failed at. Moreover, James always had before his eyes not only the divine displeasure and condign judgment that God would at the end of time visit upon him for his regal demerits, but also the present, temporal, fatal threat of the scorpion tail of Buchanan's doctrine. Charles McIlwain made few mistakes in his learned introduction to James's works, but he made a horrendous one in trying to explain the word “burreaux” in the “Basilikon Doron.”³⁸ After reminding Prince Henry that “a good King (after a happie and famous reigne) dieth in peace, lamented by his subjects, and admired by his neighbours,” James drew a stark contrast:

Where by the contrarie, a Tyrannes miserable and infamous life, armeth in end his owne Subiects to become his burreaux: and although that rebellion be euer vnlawfull on their part, yet is the world so wearied of him, that his fall is little meaned by the rest of his Subjects, and but smiled at by his neighbors.³⁹

“Burreaux” is the plural of the French word bourreau, the public execu­tioner. James, always the pragmatist, wholly distanced himself from his old master's approval of tyrannicide. But he was his old master's apt pupil in teaching his own pupil and beloved heir apparent that life does not always imitate theory, even the best of it, and that the crown of thorns that a tyrant wears in the next world might well be put on his bodyless head in this one. We suppose Prince Henry's younger brother, Charles, read “Basilikon Do­ron.” If he did, he ought to have heeded it better.