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| When I was researching for this website, I came across a May 27 article by Daniel Burke of the Washington Post that said a lot about history and why I am attracted to it. Burke points out that in 1604, when James came to the English throne, the nation was polarized. Not between what we’d think of as liberals and conservatives. At that time, the liberals were the Puritans, who were rebelling against the establishment Anglicans and Roman Catholics. But the rifts were just as deep, just as threatening. The new king was afraid they would tear his country apart. “King James I does what any sensible monarch would do," Burke explains. "He orders a new translation of the Bible.” His statement made me laugh out loud! It wasn’t just Burke’s light, breezy style or the irony of attacking religious strife with a work of scholarship. It said several things about King James’s world: 1. It was a world in which people believed in God. 2. It was a world in which people had a sense that getting the words right would make a difference in people’s lives. 3. It was a world with a common language and a shared sense of reason. If the argument could be phrased in terms all could accept, a consensus could be reached. I sympathize with James—and in a sense I yearn for his simpler time. Whether or not his solution worked (and it didn’t), there was an enviable sense that something could be done, that people would be reasonable, that they shared common beliefs and that they cared more about truth than about winning. When Elizabeth I, the original Queen Elizabeth of England and the last Tudor monarch, died without heirs, her cousin James IV of Scotland ascended the English throne as James I, the first of the Stuart kings. The Tudor Age was a heroic age, an age of exploration, a period of expanded learning and literary flourishing. The discovery of the classics of Greece and Rome brought a revival of learning. The Reformation brought the Church of England, a compromise between Catholicism and extreme Protestantism. The works of Shakespeare represented the flowering of the English language. James was not a heroic figure. He had a classical education and a mastery of languages, but he knew little about politics or economics. When he was king of Scotland, the country had been deeply in debt for years. James paid his way to accept the English crown with 10,000 marks borrowed from the city of Edinburgh. As he rode from the stony mountains of Scotland to the fertile fields and meadows of England, from sparse villages to prosperous towns, people turned out in droves to get a glimpse of their new king. James was not the king they looked for. He lacked the culture and sophistication of Elizabeth. He had narrowly escaped assassination several times in Scotland. What he lacked in sophistication, he made up in fashion, purchasing fine wardrobes and a new pair of gloves a day while his queen wore the outmoded garments left by the late queen. He ran up debts with no concept of, or interest in, managing them. Within a few years, the costs of the royal household had doubled, while James spent most of his time reading, hunting and drinking. The English found James's Scottish courtiers greedy and ill-bred. The king himself seemed loutish and undignified in behavior. He talked constantly and hardly ever listened to anybody else. He insisted on his own strongly-held opinions. James was indifferent to the views of his subjects, because he believed in the divine right of kings. Rebellion against the king was not just illegal. It was blasphemy. This was a view contrary to the English concept of the limited power of the ruler. James lived in fear that Puritans and Presbyterians would overthrow the bishop of Rome and establish a religious democracy as they had in Scotland. It was his place to prevent that. "No bishop, no king," was his motto. His way to avoid Puritan ascendancy was to enforce conformity to the Church of England. "I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land," he vowed, setting the stage for the violent and bloody Civil War between King and Commons by his stubborn absolutism. |
| July 2011 |
| Billie Silvey |
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| King James of England |
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