He [James VI] was King of England, Scotland and Ireland [he also used the nominal title of King of France]. England (with Wales) and Scotland were two separate legal entities, and Ireland was a client kingdom of England under the same thing.
Keeping in mind that Elizabeth I, the Queen of England, ordered his mother’s execution, I’m wondering how all that could work. His first and primary loyalty had to be to Scotland, and he couldn’t exactly been in love with England given the past. Also, relations between England and France had always been iffy. I’m amazed that it worked out well for all concerned.
But first off, you can take France out of the picture. The monarchs of England were only pretenders to the French throne, claiming it at least as far back as Edward III in the 14th century, which led to the Hundred Years’ War.
They didn’t finally drop the claim until the French monarchy was abolished in the 1790s.
As for the personal union of the Scottish and English thrones under James, it was heavily influenced by the Protestant Reformation and religious conflicts of the times. To begin, Mary, Queen of Scots, was a Catholic in a Protestant kingdom. She was initially married off to the Catholic King of France, but he died, so she returned to Scotland.
She married again, to a Scottish member of the aristocracy, but fell out with him when he had her Italian secretary murdered. An ally of hers then murdered her husband, and she promptly married this guy. This along with her Catholicism became too much for her subjects, so they forced her to abdicate in favor of her one-year old son, James. Mary was then forced to flee for her life, putting herself in the hands of her English cousin, Elizabeth I, who imprisoned her for the next 20 years and eventually executed her for treason. (Mary was the focus of plots by Catholics in England to put her on the English throne instead of Elizabeth, who was Protestant.)
So James was raised as a Protestant, and he never knew his mother. He was surely raised to regard her poorly.
When he agreed to assume the throne of England, he promised his Scottish subjects that he would return to Scotland every three years, a promise he did not keep. (He only returned once.)
England was a much richer and more powerful kingdom than Scotland. James reportedly exclaimed that he was “swapping a stony couch for a deep feather bed.”
And the people of England were generally happy to have him as king because he was the right religion (Protestant) for those in power, especially with the Protestant Church of England in place for decades by then as the official state church—and despite the fact that he was also Scottish.
A recent Secrets of the Dead was about Mary, so this convoluted story is fresh in my mind. It was certainly a mess. I’d hate to have been a royal in those days.
That was a great post. I see it now. One last question if you can answer it. Mary seemed very ambitious and ruthless. Was she indeed plotting while in prison and thus deserving of the death penalty, or was her execution a bum rap?
I’m not an expert at all. I think she was plotting, if at all, to get out of her imprisonment. I don’t see that she had all that much desire to usurp Elizabeth’s place. I tend to lean towards “bum rap.”
Then again, with Henry VIII and his offspring, any form of “going against the King/Queen’s will” including “being a potential figurehead for those who would” tended to end very badly.
There seems to not be much doubt that she was involved in various plots, such as the one that finally proved to be her undoing, the Babington Plot, but I agree her primary goal was simply to be released from her long imprisonment.
But she was also never an active plotter, insisting merely giving her blessing via encrypted letters that were intercepted, decoded, and used against her.
She had earlier attempted to drop all claims to either throne and retire in peace, but her son James did not support her and instead signed an alliance treaty with Elizabeth, abandoning his mother to her imprisonment.
Wow, that is really harsh! I guess he put his own political ambition in front of his own mother which, if you think about it, shows that he was very much like her in terms of ambition. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Anne Boleyn was executed for failing to provide the king with a male heir along with the fact that the king had tired of her. So she was executed on trumped-up charges of adultery (which constituted treason as it threatened the succession.)
Catherine Howard was a young, rather foolish 18-year old who flirted with various men. She may have been engaged to one man and been involved sexually with him prior to her marriage to the king (which would have annulled her marriage to the king), and after her marriage was likely involved with another man at court. Enemies of her family (who had gained prominence from her marriage to the king) brought all of this to the attention of the king, who had Catherine and her supposed lovers tried and executed.
I think this is anachronistic way to think about it. Medieval monarchs did not feel that way at all, they were not the leader of a geographic and ethnic nation state like “Scotland”. They were the leader of the collection of aristocrats who owned them fealty, that may or may not correspond to a particular geographic region or ethnic group. If a group of more powerful and richer aristocrats decided to pay fealty there was no compunction about hanging around with them not his poorer less powerful vassals.
True it was by then the “early modern” period. But the people of the time didn’t know that, they didn’t receive a memo saying “hey stop with all that feudalism milarkey, it’s all about nation states based on precise geographic and geographic boundaries now!”
Good point, although I would say there was some definite—if nascent—nationalism going on by the time of James’ accession, exemplified by the refusal of the English Parliament and the Scottish Parliament to combine, or to officially combine the kingdoms of England and Scotland into Great Britain (as James would have wished to happen right away, but would take another century to legally put into effect).
As mentioned, James never displayed any great loyalty to Scotland. It had been a miserable place for him - as a child, despite being King from the age of one, he was a political pawn with no actual power but a ringside seat as various regents attempted to steer Scotland one way or another and got killed for their pains. His home life was fairly miserable - his household was run by Anna, Countess of Mar who by all accounts treated him well and kindly, but his tutor was George Buchanan, a humanist scholar and fierce Protestant, who taught James extremely well in terms of formal education but in a brutal fashion encapsulated by his remark to the Countess of Mar: “I have skelped his arse, madam, you may kiss it”. James was never particularly safe at this time - he was kidnapped aged 16 and held prisoner for months while being browbeaten by Protestant clergy.
In terms of his relationship with his mother - she was exiled from Scotland when he was one, he never saw her again. Given that the people around him were the ones who exiled him, it’s fair to say he was never going to get an unbiased view of her character and fitness to rule.
James grew up with a rigorously developed theory of his divine right to rule whichever kingdoms God saw fit to bless him with, (a rebellion against Buchanan’s equally rigorous attempt to teach him that kingship was limited) and the certain knowledge that the Virgin Queen would produce no heir to displace his presumptive claim on England’s throne. He certainly had the diplomatic savvy to ensure that any possible objections to his claim were minimised by e.g. remaining Protestant but favouring Episcopalianism, building relationships in the English court etc.
His ambition as mentioned was to unify the kingdoms not just in his personal rule but through one Parliament, law code etc. That didn’t come good, but he was proud of his ability to govern Scotland from a distance - “Here I sit and rule Scotland by the pen, which others could scarcely do by the sword”. This was fair saying, although his policy of staying in England meant that over time and into his son’s reign a certain amount of proto-nationalist resentment built up, which expressed itself in the National Covenant and in part kicked off the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, which added so much excitement to people’s lives.
(James VI was also obsessed with witches,an early anti-tobacco advocate, and gay as a box of fruitcakes. Sorry, I mean of course that he had a number of royal favourites to whom he appears to have been extremely close and his habit of showering whom with gifts caused disruption in court, but we can’t be certain this was anything more than deep friendship. Ahem.)
Acquiring extra kingdoms and territories via war/marriage/treaty/dynastic succession was just something kings did. What the inhabitants thought about it was irrelevant. Their duty was to obey the lord and king.
It was irrelevant but as his son discovered times had changed and the opinion of the inhabitants did matter (and not just the richest aristocrats whose opinion had always mattered)
