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| Her Majesty the Queen is the second-longest reigning monarch in British history, so far. She acceded to the throne following the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952 and she celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. |
James VI of Scotland did not have an easy start in life. As parental dysfunction goes, James had parents who made Jason and Medea's marriage look like the front cover of House and Garden. When he was still a baby, his father Lord Darnley was found dead amidst the smoking ruins of a house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Who authorised Darnley's assassination is probably one of the most famous unsolved murder mysteries in British history, but at the time suspicion fixed on James's mother - the ethereally beautiful and scandal-prone Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary was already unpopular with many of her subjects; most of them had embraced the new hard-line form of Protestantism known as Presbyterianism and so they subsequently resented their stunning young queen for her French upbringing and Catholic faith. Shortly after James's first birthday, she was overthrown in a Presbyterian-led coup and fled to neighbouring England. Nineteen years later, she was executed for her alleged complicity in plotting the murder of her Protestant cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
Robbed of both his parents, little James VI found himself king before he could walk or talk. The Scottish monarchy was pitched into another period of prolonged instability, with coups, rebellions and counter-coups shaping the young king's life. It's hard to doubt that James's adult obsession with defending the Divine Right of Kings sprang from his childhood experiences, in which he had seen the consequences of a monarchy that had been reduced to being the plaything of ambitious politicians. Everywhere he went, James's personal skills were limited by the all-powerful Presbyterian Kirk and the aristocrats who supported it - the so-called "Lords of the Congregation." James himself was phenomenally bright and very well-educated, but he had precious few opportunities to employ his talents and even his personal life was subject to the whims of his Presbyterian minders. As a young teenager, he fell violently in love with his French cousin, the handsome and sophisticated Duke of Lennox, but the Presbyterian lords around him disapproved; they lured James to Ruthven Castle where they kidnapped him and then banished Lennox back home to France. Lennox died eighteen months later, allegedly of heartbreak, and James wrote a poem in his memory called An Ode to a Phoenix, in which he allegorised Lennox as a beautiful bird killed by the envy of others.
Six years later, James did his duty and married Anne, the daughter of the King of Denmark and Norway (then ruled by the same monarchy.) Anne of Denmark (left) was a vivacious and fun-loving blonde, who found life in Edinburgh almost as difficult as her husband did. Presbyterians have never exactly been famous for being flash with their cash and Lutheran-raised Anne resented the fact that her allowance as queen was so restrictive. Despite James's teen obsession with the late Duke of Lennox, as an adult he produced seven children with his Danish queen - Henry-Frederick, Elizabeth, Margaret, Charles, Robert, Mary and Sophia. In 1603, James received news that his elderly cousin, Queen Elizabeth, had passed away in London and he was now King James I of England and Ireland. He and the queen travelled south to London, where they were duly crowned and Anne was finally given free rein to spend as she liked in the magnificent palaces of the English royals - Whitehall (the largest palace in Europe at the time), Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and Windsor Castle. Not content with these and the turtle-shell bed she felt was an essential purchase, Anne eventually decided she needed a little chez of her own and the King duly built the pretty riverside mansion called Queen's House in Greenwich for her, which stands to this day and was the sight for some of the equestrian events of the 2012 London Olympics. Dripping with jewels and spending like a maniac, I don't think Anne of Denmark missed life in the shadow of the Kirk too much. The lairds would have been even further riled to know that, in London, Anne openly expressed sympathy for the persecuted Catholic minority.
James, however, struggled with his new role as king of a united Britain. He had several key political aims - the first was to create a united British state, the second was to maintain the monarchy (rather than parliament) as the dominant political power in Britain and the third was to end England's long-running war with Spain. In the latter, he was certainly successful; with Elizabeth I and her old adversary, Philip II, both dead, their successors, James and Philip III, were able to end the hostilities that had persisted since the defeat of the Spanish Armada. With peace concluded, there was even talk of marrying James's son to Philip's daughter, Maria-Anna. (The talks fell through when pious Maria-Anna point-blank refused to marry a Protestant.) However, in his aims to create Great Britain, James was thwarted. England, Scotland and Ireland may all have had the same king, but each of them had their own parliaments that met in London, Edinburgh and Dublin; they had their own customs, needs and laws and they were reluctant to unify under one parliamentary system. Even the subject of a British flag was unpopular, despite James's enthusiasm for the idea. But perhaps his greatest failure as monarch was in trying to ameliorate the power of Parliament. Everything he did seemed to antagonise them.
As far as James was concerned, kings and queens were closer to God than they were to rest of mankind. Parliament's role was therefore simply to advise the king, but he was under absolutely no obligation to take that advice. When Parliament attempted to force the king to do things that he didn't want to do (like harsher measures against Catholics or an end to the extravagance of the royal court), then James would react with apoplectic fury. Where the late Queen Elizabeth had deftly manipulated Parliament by flattering them into voting her the money she needed, James I harangued them and demanded, not requested, their financial assistance. By the time James died in 1625, after twenty-two years on the British thrones, relations between Parliament and the monarchy were at an all-time low and James's twenty four year-old son, Charles I, inherited a particularly unenviable situation.
It would therefore be easy to write James VI/I off as a political failure. However, whilst the British Isles could not be united legislatively, they had been united by the monarchy and it would be this unity which eventually gave birth to the United Kingdom and, through it, the British Empire. He was also responsible for the mammoth cultural task of translating the Bible into perfect English - thereby giving the world the hauntingly magnificent King James Bible. He had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which aimed to blow up the King, his heir and the Houses of Parliament in retaliation for the penal laws in place against English and Welsh Catholics. He had been clever enough to balance the very different religious requirements of his kingdoms - he had been raised in the Calvinist-Presbyterian tradition in Scotland, but wisely did not attempt to impose the more liberal Anglican view of Christianity on them once he became Governor of the Church of England in 1603. He had admittedly done nothing to end the legal discrimination against Catholics or Puritans in England and Wales, but he had not caved in to populist demand that he start a kind of Protestant Inquisition against them, either. He had fathered heirs with his wife, despite the fact that he was far more attracted to his own gender. (After Lennox, he was obsessively devoted to the Earl of Somerset and, after him, the King got all in a fluster over the muscular legs of the gorgeous Duke of Buckingham, whom everybody else seemed to find insufferably annoying.) He had been a great patron of the arts, music, architecture and literature (Shakespeare received more backing from James I than he ever did from Elizabeth I.) He had overseen the expansion of British colonies in Ulster and America. And he had attempted to impose the new view of monarchy, prevalent with most European philosophers in the seventeenth century - that royal power should be absolute, that regional characteristics must be subordinated to a centralised culture and government, and that only a unified state could be a strong one. It's undeniable that James blundered and made many errors, but to dismiss his entire reign as a grotesque embarrassment is to misrepresent it. Whatever his failings, James I had arguably made the monarchy central to the emerging notion of being British. In doing so, he had successfully tied the Crown to a sense of national identity; the monarchy was, and arguably still is, far more central to the emotional identity of the British than parliament ever could be.
