JAMES I. (1566-1625), king of Great Britain and Ireland and James VI. of Scotland, the only child of Mary Queen of Scots, and her second husband, Henry Stewart Lord Darnley, was born in Edinburgh castle on June 19. 1566. He was pro claimed king of Scotland on July 24, 1567, upon the forced abdi cation of his mother, but was kept in the castle of Stirling for safety's sake amid the confused fighting of the early years of his minority, until 1578. He was a weakly boy, and although he lived until he was nearly sixty, he was never a strong man.
James was brought up by the earl and countess of Mar. When the earl died in 1572 his place was well filled by his brother, Sir Alexander Erskine. The king's education was placed under the care of George Buchanan, assisted by Peter Young, and two other tutors, who gave the boy a sound training in languages and in theology. The scholastic quality of his education helped to give him a taste for learning, but also tended to make him a pedant.
James was only twelve when the earl of Morton was driven from the regency, and for some time after he can have been no more than a puppet in the hands of intriguers and party leaders. The so-called raid of Ruthven in 1582, was in fact a kidnapping enterprise carried out in the interest of the Protestant party. It was not indeed till 1583, when he broke away from his captors, that James began to govern in reality.
His work can be divided into the part which was a failure and a preparation for future disaster, and the part which was solid achievement, honourable to himself and profitable to his people. His native kingdom of Scotland had the benefit of the second. Between 1583 and 1603 he reduced the anarchical bar onage of Scotland to obedience, and replaced the subdivision of sovereignty, which had been the very essence of feudalism, by a strong centralized royal authority. In fact he did in Scotland the work which had been done by the Tudors in England, by Louis XI. in France, and by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain. But James not only brought his disobedient and intriguing barons to order but also quelled the attempts of the Protestants to found what Hallam has well defined as a "Presbyterian Hildebrandism." He enforced the superiority of the state over the church. Both before his accession to the throne of England (1603) and after wards he took an intelligent interest in the prosperity of his Scot tish kingdom, and did much for the pacification of the Hebrides.
James's methods of achieving ends in themselves honourable and profitable have made posterity unjust to his real merits. He boasted of his "king-craft" and probably believed that he owed it to his studies. But it was in reality the resource of the weak, the art of playing off one possible enemy against another by trickery. The marquis de Fontenay, the French ambassador, who saw him in the early part of his reign, speaks of him as cowed by the violence about him, and the terror in which he passed his youth sufficiently explains his preference for guile. He would make promises to everybody, as when he wrote to the pope in 1584 more than hinting that he would be a good Roman Catholic if helped in his need. His very natural desire to escape from the poverty and insecurity of Scotland to the opulent English throne led him to behave basely in regard to the execution of his mother in 1587, taking good care to do nothing to offend Elizabeth. His crafty methods did him harm in England, where his reign pre pared the way for the great civil war. In his southern kingdom his failure was complete. Although England accepted him as the alternative to civil war, and received him with fulsome flattery, he did not win the respect of his English subjects. His undignified personal appearance was against him, and so were his garrulity, his Scottish accent, his slovenliness and his toleration of disorders in his court, and his favour for handsome male favourites. In ecclesiastical matters he offended many, who contrasted his sever ity and rudeness to the Puritan divines at the Hampton Court conference (1604) with his politeness to the Roman Catholics. In a country where the authority of the state had been firmly es tablished and the problem was how to keep it from degenerating into the mere instrument of a king's passions, his insistence on the doctrine of divine right aroused distrust and hostility, though the doctrine had originated in a necessary assertion of the independ ence of the state in face of the "Hildebrandism" of Rome and Geneva alike. James's favour for his countrymen helped to defeat his wise wish to bring about a full union between England and Scotland. His profusion kept him necessitous, and drove him to shifts. Posterity can give him credit for his desire to forward religious peace in Europe, but his Protestant subjects could not see the consistency of a king who married his daughter Elizabeth to the elector palatine, a leader of the German Protestants, and also sought to marry his son to an infanta of Spain. The
king's subservience to Spain was indeed almost besotted, and allowed him to be befooled by the ministers of Philip III. and Philip IV. The end of his scheming was that he was dragged into a needless war with Spain by his son Charles and his favour ite George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, just before his death on March 27, 1625 at his favourite residence, 'fheobalds.
James married in 1589 Anne, second daughter of Frederick II., king of Denmark, by whom he had three children who survived infancy : Henry Frederick, prince of Wales, who died in 1612; Charles, the future king; and Elizabeth, wife of the elector palatine, Frederick V.
Not the least of James's many ambitions was the desire to excel as an author. He left a body of writings which, though of mediocre quality as literature, entitle him to a unique place among English kings since Alfred for width of intellectual interest and literary faculty. His efforts were inspired by his preceptor George Buchanan. His first work was a youthf .11 pro duction in verse, Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie (Edin. Vautrollier, 1584), containing fifteen sonnets, "Ane Meta phoricall invention of a tragedie called Phoenix," a short poem "Of Time," translations from Du Bartas, Lucan and the Book of Psalms ("out of Tremellius"), and a prose tract entitled "Ane short treatise, containing some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie." This tract shows acquaintance with the critical reflections of Ronsard and Du Bellay, and of Gascoigne in his Notes of Instruction (1575). In 1591 James published Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres, including a trans lation of the Furies of Du Bartas, his own Lepanto, and Du Bartas's version of it, La Lepanthe. His Daemonologie, a prose treatise denouncing witchcraft and exhorting the civil power to the strongest measures of suppression, appeared in 1599. In the same year he printed the first edition (seven- copies) of his Basilikon Doron, strongly Protestant in tone. A French edition, specially translated for presentation to the pope, has a disin genuous preface explaining that certain phrases (e.g., "papistical doctrine") are omitted, because of the difficulty of rendering them in a foreign tongue. The original edition was, however, translated by order of the suspicious pope, and was immediately placed on the Index. In his famous Counterblaste to Tobacco (published anonymously, James forsakes his Scots for Southern English. James's prose works (including his speeches) were collected and edited (folio, 1616) by James Mon tagu, bishop of Winchester, who also translated them into Latin, in 1619 (also Frankfort, 1689). "The True Law of Free Mon archies," appeared in 1603 ; "An Apology for the Oath of Alleg iance" in 1607 ; and a "Declaration du Roy Jacques . . . pour le droit des Rois" in 1615. In 1588 and 1589 James issued two small volumes of Meditations on some verses of (a) Revelations and (b) I Chronicles. Other two "meditations" were printed post humously.
See I. F. Henderson, James I. and VI. (1904) ; P. Brown, History of Scotland, vol. ii. (1902) ; and Andrew Lang, .Hzstory of Scotland, vol. ii. (1902) and James VI. and the Gowrie Mystery (1902) ; The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (1877, etc.), vols. ii. to S. R. Gardiner, History of England 1603-1642 (1833-84). A comprehensive bibliography will be found in the Cam bridge Modern Hist. iii. 847 (1904) For James's literary work, see Edward Arber's reprint of the Essayes and Counterblaste ("English Reprints," 1869, etc.) ; R. S.
Rait's Lusus Regius (1900) ; G. Gregory Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays (1904) , vol. i., where the Treatise is edited for the first time; A. 0. Meyer's "Clemens VIII. und Jacob I. von England" in Quellen und Forschungen (Preuss. Hist. Inst.), VII. ii., for an account of the issues of the Basilikon Doron; P. Hume Brown's George Buchanan (189o), pp. 250-261, for a sketch of James's association with Buchanan.
New Poems by James I. of England, from a hitherto unpublished manuscript, edited by A. F. Westcott (i9i I) ; Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Prince, Her Son; transcribed from a contemporary Venetian manuscript, edited by Robt. McClure (1913) ; The Political Works of James I., reprinted from the edition of 1616, with an introduction by C. H. Mcllwain, Cambridge, Mass. (1928) ; C. MacLaurin, Mere Mortals (1925).