The First Briton

James I, the wise fool who dreamed of a Great Britain

Four hundred years today Britain’s first king passed from this earth. James I of England – James VI of Scotland - was one of our wisest rulers and certainly one of the most learned. He presided over a period of growth as impressive as that of his predecessor Elizabeth, and his cultural and political legacy was arguably even greater, especially in the formation of a common British identity. Yet lacking the Virgin Queen’s glamour or ability to win hearts, and averse to military adventures, James’s contribution to our island story has largely been as a comic interlude.

It is true that James, ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’, was a rather unimpressive sight. He had a nervous habit of fiddling with his codpiece. He had a profound fear of assassins and would scan the room anxiously. Many couldn’t understand his accent. He was so slobbish that people said it was possible to identify every meal he’d had in the last seven years because they were displayed on his clothes.

He is also known for two obsessions, one of which makes him seem very distant to modern sensibilities and one very ahead of his time: witches and smoking. Among James’s published works was A Counterblaste to Tobacco in which he wrote that it was ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fumes it resembles the smoke of the pit that is bottomless.’ Probably an annoying thing to be told then, as now, but true nonetheless - and King James increased tobacco tax, from 2d per pound to 6s 8d per pound, starting a long British tradition.

James had a tough start in life. Born in 1566, he had come to the throne in his cradle amidst his parents’ disastrous marriage and his homeland’s political instability and religious extremism. His mother, the French Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, had returned to Scotland to take up personal rule in 1561, where she faced opposition by militants such as John Knox, who described a woman ruler as ‘a monster in nature’. Knox’s 1558 work First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women suggested that putting a crown on woman’s head was ‘as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow… a thing most repugnant to nature that women rule and govern over men’. In Mary’s first week at Holyrood, Mass in her private chapel was interrupted by a noisy demonstration outside by Protestant fanatics.

This was not helped by Mary’s disastrous choice in husbands. She had fallen in love with Henry, Lord Darnley and was ‘seized with love in ferventer passions than is comely in any mean personage’. Darnley was tall, well-educated and an expert in the manly arts of swordsmanship - he was also drunk and violent, and eventually murderous. Three months before their son was born Darnley led a group of men into Mary’s chambers who stabbed to death David Rizzio, her personal secretary. Darnley didn’t even attend James’s baptism, and may have been recuperating in Glasgow with syphilis.

Portrait by John de Critz from 1605

Darnley was murdered before James’s first birthday, and after Mary went through another disastrous marriage - to the prime suspect in that murder - the queen was forced to abdicate, her infant son James placed on the throne. Mary eventually fled to England where the Queen of Scots was imprisoned by her cousin Elizabeth for the next 20 years.

James grew up under a regent, Lord Lennox, who was Protestant but not Protestant enough for many, and as a teenager the young king had been briefly imprisoned by his radical enemies. Yet despite murderous faction fighting and occasional outbursts of religious rioting, James survived to take full control of his impoverished kingdom. He was also lucky to escape an assassination attempt, and the king would always wear a dagger-proof vest after.

In 1587 Elizabeth, having long prevaricated on the issue, finally had Mary executed, which James denounced as a ‘preposterous and strange procedure’ - yet it cleared the way for his accession, as the most senior descendent of Henry VII, and he had to maintain good relations relations with his southern neighbour. He bided his time, and worked on securing his dynasty, making a marriage to Anne of Denmark in 1589.

James always preferred male company, and was certainly attracted to men; the queen’s chaplain said that ‘the king himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together’. Which doesn’t sound ideal, but their marriage seemed happy enough, despite his sexual inclinations and the fact that in 1613 Anne shot and killed James’s favourite dog (remarkably, he was forced to apologise and give his wife an expensive jewel for losing his temper).

It was a visit to Denmark that sparked his interest in witches, and James went on to attend the famous witch trials in North Berwick, where Agnes Sampson was accused of causing a storm that affected the king as he crossed the North Sea. In 1597 his work Daemonologie was published, a response to sceptics who claimed that so-called witches were merely frauds.

Notorious dog killer, Queen Anne

Peter Ackroyd wrote in Civil War that James ‘had been nourished in fear. Yet he had by guile and compromise held on to his crown’. Indeed, he had acquired another one. Elizabeth died in March 1603, and later that month Sir Robert Carey arrived at Holyrood Palace ‘be-blooded with great falls and bruises’ from his arduous journey, informing James that he was now ruler of the entire island.

Scotland was incredibly poor and even before crossing the border James had written to the council at Westminster asking for money - he didn’t even have enough funds to finance his journey south. He travelled slowly, in order to avoid Elizabeth’s funeral, and as he made his way to London found himself stunned by England’s wealth; his first three years were ‘as a Christmas’, as he put it.

James was also amazed by how ‘the people of all sorts rid and ran, nay rather flew to meet me’, something that sat uncomfortably with a man who lacked Elizabeth’s crowd-pleasing touch. ‘He was awkward and hesitant in manner; his legs were slightly bowed and his gait erratic, perhaps the consequences of rickets acquired in childhood’, Ackroyd wrote. Contemporary courtier Anthony Weldon described him as forever ‘fiddling about his codpiece’.

He also had a horror of weapons and noticed anything or anyone unfamiliar in his presence, always prepared for the next assassination attempt. Indeed, soon after his accession, a conspiracy was uncovered in which Sir Walter Raleigh was implicated, and the famous explorer was arrested and sentenced to death.

Raleigh was reprieved at the last minute, and would instead spend more than a decade imprisoned in the Tower, where he lived comfortably enough to impregnate his wife, and enjoyed the use of three servants, one solely employed to bring him ale. While inside Raleigh also began a grand and ambitious book called A History of the World, but apparently lost heart in the project when he saw two men arguing in the courtyard and couldn’t work out what it was about. (‘And now to the question of the Holy Land.’)

James’s reign was dominated by the issue of religion. On his progress to London the king received the ‘Millenary Petition’ from 1,000 Puritan ministers calling for the removal of crosses from the baptismal ceremony, and suggesting that the words priest and absolution should be ‘corrected’ and the cap and surplice were not to be ‘urged’. (Today, their spiritual descendants would say ‘problematic’ or ‘inappropriate’).

He was not sympathetic to the more radical Protestants, having bitter experience of them in his homeland - where one, Andrew Melville, had even called him ‘God’s silly vassal’ to his face.

Yet the king loved doctrinal discussions and organised such a conference at Hampton Court in 1604, which led to the creation of the King James Bible, perhaps the single greatest work of the English language. As Ackroyd wrote, it ‘invigorated the consciousness of the nation and inspired some of its most eloquent manifestations’.

At Hampton, James accused the Puritans of creating a system where ‘Jack and Tom, and Will and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings’. ‘Away with your snivelling,’ he told them. When the Puritans suggested that baptism could be carried out by any layperson, he replied ‘a turd for this argument. I would rather my child were baptised by an ape as by a woman’.

He also faced problems with the other religious extreme, and was clearly left shaken by the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by a group of Catholics who, as Guy Fawkes had said under questioning, wanted ‘to blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains’. The Venetian ambassador reported afterwards that ‘the king is in terror, he does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms with only Scotsmen about him’. Courtier Sir John Harington wrote in 1606 that ‘The gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads’ and ‘I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sovereignty, as I have now done’.

Afterwards no Catholic was allowed within a 10 mile radius of London and an old law was revived banning recusants from practising as lawyers or doctors or travelling more than five miles from their home. Yet it could have been worse, and James said of the Catholics that ‘I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood, though sorely against my will’. His own wife, after all, was a Papist, and refused to take communion at his coronation ceremony; in 1591, James had even written an epic poem about the Catholic victory over the Turks at Lepanto, although adding that the hero Don Juan of Austria was a ‘foreign papist bastard’.

After they had tried to blow him up, James’s fears of Papists could hardly be called irrational, a feeling intensified by the assassination of France’s Henri IV five years later at the hands of a Catholic extremist. On hearing the news, the king ‘turned whiter than his shirt’, according to the French ambassador.

Paul van Somer’s 1620 portrait. In the background is Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House, which James commissioned

Perhaps related to that fear, James hated crowds and when people flocked to him, would swear at them and shout ‘what would they have?’ Told that they had come in love and reverence he replied in a broad Scots accent ‘God’s wounds, I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse’, and he would sometimes add ‘a pox on you!’ or a plague on you!’ to well-wishers. The Venetian ambassador noted that this made him unpopular, funnily enough.

James was resented for his use of favourites, in most instances suspiciously attractive young men. MP Christopher Neville said that courtiers were ‘spaniels to the king and wolves to the people’. Yet, while his favourites were unpopular, it was necessary to have such figures to draw any hatred away from the monarch. His most prominent, George Villiers, was especially loathed for his arrogance, not helped by him being the first person to use a sedan chair in Britain, which wasn’t good ‘ops’, as we’d say now. James addressed Villiers as ‘Steenie’, a diminutive that reflected an intimate relationship, and he often spoke to his ministers in strangely affectionate terms. When he rebuked Robert Carr, it was for his ‘strange streams of unquietness, passion, fury and insolent pride’ and his ‘long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary’. To his chief minister Robert Cecil, who was notably small, he said ‘before God I count you the best servant that ever I had, albeit you be but a beagle’.

He was obviously known to favour attractive young men; the Howard family tried to get a handsome and well-groomed youth, William Monson, to charm the king, but he ordered him away (obviously not his type). A fan of well-presented young men, the king sacked eighteen courtiers for not being smartly dressed enough, even though he was notably shambolic looking himself.

Certainly, the court of James was ‘notorious for its laxity, drunkenness and dissimulation, venality and promiscuity,’ in Ackroyd’s words, as well as practical jokes. The king put a frog down the neck of the Earl of Pembroke, who had a horror of the creatures, and Pembroke responded by having a pig placed in the royal bedchamber.

When the King of Denmark arrived in the summer of 1606 Sir John Harington wrote to a friend that the courtiers ‘wallow in beastly delights’ while the ladies ‘abandon their sobriety and are seen to roll about in intoxication’. Actors playing Hope and Faith in a play performed for the visiting monarch ‘were both sick and spewing in the lower hall’. The visit also saw a performance of Macbeth, the work of Shakespeare which most reflects Jacobean themes – Scottish history, witches and the danger inherent in regicide.

He was certainly not opposed to the people enjoying a bit of pleasure, as long as it wasn’t a smoke. In 1617 James issued the Book of Sports, which allowed dancing and archery, as well as leaping, vaulting and ‘May-games, Whitsun-ales and Morris-dances, and the setting up of May-poles’, although bear-baiting, bull-baiting and bowls were not permitted. The stricter clergy were not impressed by what became known as ‘The Dancing Book’.

James also attracted the ire of some clergy by permitting the divorce of noblewoman Frances Howard to Robert Devereux, her argument being that a witch had made him impotent – a guaranteed way to attract the king’s interest. During this ordeal of a divorce one churchman asked Devereux ‘whether he had affection, erection, application, penetration, ejaculation’ to prove and the hearings, one contemporary said, were filled with ‘indecent words and deeds’ - but then this was often how such investigations were undertaken.

Oh Sir Walter, Really!

After many years of imprisonment, James had released Raleigh with the proviso that he find the lost city of Gold, or Eldorado, but not only had he failed to find it – admittedly a hard task, as it didn’t exist – but Sir Walter had attacked a Spanish ship without permission. The Spanish ambassador protested, and James finally had the old pirate executed. Raleigh’s History of the World remained unfinished, and he had only got as far as the Second Macedonian War of 197 BC.

Before his death, Raleigh had written to James’s chief minister Robert Cecil, expressing his hope of the nascent colony of Virginia that ‘I shal yet live to see it an Inglishe nation’, and it was under James’s rule that the first of the American colonies was permanently settled, at Jamestown, although the king’s attitude to the New World was sceptical at best.

He had once suggested that anyone who took an interest in Virginia should walk around naked with feathers in their hair. He considered the natives to be ‘barbarous’, ‘beastly’ and ‘vile’. When Captain John Smith came back to England with some Native Americans, he ended up writing to Queen Anne, complaining that the king hadn’t entertained the visitors yet. When King James did receive them, he was hardly an impressive figure, and in Big Chief Elizabeth, Giles Milton described a scene where the visitors walked along a line of well-perfumed courtiers until they met a man who resembled a tramp with food in his beard and stains on his waistcoat. Neither Pocahontas nor Tomocomo had any idea that he was the leader until told afterwards.

James’s refusal to bow to radical Protestant pressure would help spur the American project. He had said of the Puritans that ‘I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse’, and indeed it was his refusal to concede which led, in 1620, to a number of them founding an even more influential colony, at Plymouth. And here, indeed, Jack and Tom, and Will and Dick, could meet and make laws themselves.

Pilgrims leaving Delfthaven aboard the Speedwell by Adam Willaerts

James was arguably the chief architect of not one but two global powers. In his history of the Union Jack, Nick Groom observed how important the king was in forging British identity. He talked of a ‘golden Conquest, but cymented with Love’, and ‘The blessed Union, or rather Reuniting, of two Kingdoms, anciently but one, under one Imperial Crowne.’

James cited Plato’s theory of paired lovers, that England and Scotland were each other’s perfect fit, and his joint crown had inscribed in Latin ‘What God has joined let no man separate’. He proposed the name ‘Great Britain’ and ordered that the two country’s laws, government and churches be brought together - although this wasn’t going to happen, with huge opposition from both sides. In 1607 the Scottish Parliament had actually passed an Act of Union, but the English House of Commons rejected the idea, stating ‘We should lose the ancient name of England, so famous and victorious’.

The Commons also opposed him assuming title King of Great Britain, but he was adamant: ‘I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head and it is my body’. Did they expect him to be a polygamist? James proclaimed himself king of ‘Great Britain’ on coins, and also commissioned the Earl of Nottingham to design the ‘Flag of the Great Union’.

Since James’s accession, all ships had been obliged to fly two flags, so English sailors flew their flag above, while the Scots did likewise - but under maritime convention that signified that a war had taken place, with the loser’s emblem placed below. (That’s why flags are flown at half-mast to symbolise that the invisible flag of death has triumphed).

The problem was that under the laws of heraldry it was not possible to give equal prominence to both countries. Quartering the two flags, or placing them side by side, would give one country prominence, and so the new flag went back to an earlier practice of ‘compounding insignia’, joining them together. That the St George’s Cross was placed over the St Andrew’s might suggest English supremacy, but the canton (the upper quarter nearest the hoist, and the most prestigious) being blue suggested the opposite.

The new flag was ordered in an Admiralty letter of 1 April 1606, which declared: ‘Whereas some difference hath risen betweene our Subjects of South and North Britaine travayling by Seas, about the bearing of their Flagges: For the avoiding of all suc contentons hereafter’, a new flag would be flown by all royal and merchant vessels from 12 April - but only at sea. It was the first Union Jack.

(The Scots, inevitably, objected to the design and their Parliament proposed further drafts, and a Scottish version with the St Andrew’s Cross in the foreground was also used, and survived until the time of Victoria.)

When James travelled to Scotland in 1617 he dismounted upon reaching the border and lay on the ground between the two countries, proclaiming that he symbolised the union. The king told his compatriots that they should be more like the English, and had nothing ‘more at heart than to reduce your barbarity to the sweet civility of your neighbours’.

Of course, it wasn’t all sweet civility down south, and James’s reign saw the first stirrings of Parliamentary dissent that would result in his son’s beheading many years later. King James was influenced by the political fashion of the time, absolutism, whereby the feudal anarchy of the past would give away to all-powerful sovereigns. But there was also a growing belief in Parliamentary sovereignty and an English constitution, pushed by men such as Edward Coke.

James told Lord and Commons in March 1610 that kings can ‘make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and casting down; of life and death; judges over all their subjects and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only’. They listened, but they did not agree, and ‘this rotten reed of Egypt’, as he called Parliament, were reluctant to grant him money, so that he was obliged to ‘live like a shell-fish upon his own moisture, without any public supply.’

England was increasingly wealthy and literate, and dominated by lawyers, whose numbers had risen 40 per cent between 1590 and 1630. As Ackroyd wrote, Parliament in his reign ‘acquired the beginning of a corporate identity largely lacking during the reign of Elizabeth’. In April 1613 James made a conciliatory speech to MPs where he asked for a ‘parliament of love’, before having five members committed to the Tower the following year in what became known as the ‘Addled Parliament’ - a sign of things to come.

Yet although his worldview was not as ascendent as he thought - many throughout history have been so mistaken - King James was prudent and pushed only as far as was wise. An observer said that ‘he apprehends clearly, judges wisely and has a retentive memory’. He was also very witty, ‘but delivered his droll remarks in a grave and serious voice’, in Ackroyd’s words (a very Scottish form of wit). The king even replied to abusive rhymes published against him with his own doggerel verse, and wrote on a range of subjects; in 1616 he collected all of his prose writing into a folio, the first British monarch to do.

He was a wise ruler, and notably kept England out of the war which engulfed the continent in 1618, despite the initial conflict concerning his son-in-law. The strain almost killed him. When he was described as ‘Jacobus pacificus’, it was not said sarcastically, nor were the comparisons with King Solomon - as he was depicted on the ceiling of the Banqueting House by Rubens - entirely sycophancy.

At James’s funeral the Bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, compared him to the Biblical king, remarking that he had ruled in peace and that ‘manufactures at home are daily invented, trading abroad exceedingly multiplied, the borders of Scotland peaceably governed.’ He had been a Good King, if not a loved one.

While James is often remembered by the phrase ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’, a line attributed to Anthony Weldon (although sometimes to Henri IV), it’s forgotten that Weldon – not a particular admirer - added that ‘he lived in peace, died in peace, and left all his kingdoms in a peaceable condition.’ He also set the path for his kingdoms, eventually to be joined in union, to assume genuine greatness in the following century. Quite a wise old fool in retrospect.