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  • James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government
  • Malcolm Smuts
Ralph Houlbrooke , ed. James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. xiv + 198 pp. index. $99.95. ISBN: 978-0-7546-5410-0.

James VI and I was an exceptionally voluble monarch, who published poems, religious meditations, and political tracts. This collection, which derives from a conference, focuses on "James's ideas and policies in presentation and implementation," especially the "intertwined concerns of kingly authority and religious policy" (1). Astrid Stilma examines the Dutch reception of the king's first published work, a poem celebrating the victory of a combined Spanish, papal, and [End Page 1443] Venetian fleet over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto, written around 1586 and printed in 1591. Some Scots criticized James for applauding a Catholic victory, even though a few verses in the poem indicated his rejection of Catholicism. But the Dutch appear to have had no such qualms after a Zealand minister translated James's work in 1593, but instead hailed the poem as a major literary achievement. Their anxiety to see James as an international Protestant leader may explain this response.

Susan Doran revisits the question of the degree to which James's concerns over the English succession shaped his policies as King of Scotland. She argues that before 1595 the effects were minimal but thereafter he grew increasingly alarmed, largely because the appearance of the Jesuit Robert Person's Conference about the Next Succession raised concerns that English Catholics and foreign Catholic states might oppose his claim. James therefore attempted to enlist support from Protestant powers, while mollifying Catholic states and seeking to recruit a party in England. He also encouraged the publication of English and Scottish tracts refuting Person's and, Doran argues, wrote The Trew Law of Free Monarchies to rebut the Jesuit's arguments.

John Cramsie explores James's advocacy of concepts of imperial kingship, deriving partly from fifteenth-century Scottish precedents that encompassed divine right theology with claims to supremacy over the church and elements of absolutist state-building. Alan Cromartie reexamines the Hampton Court conference, arguing that James made no meaningful concessions to the Puritans, and that he may be more to blame than Archbishop Bancroft for the crackdown on Puritan nonconformity that followed in the conference's wake. The king's reputation among historians as a flexible pragmatist who accommodated moderate Puritan dissent therefore needs reexamination. This article is complemented and implicitly reinforced by Laura Stewart's forceful essay, later in the collection, on the controversy surrounding the Articles of Perth, imposed by James on the Scottish Kirk in 1618. She argues that by imposing ceremonial changes James overplayed his hand, allowing radical Presbyterians who had previously been marginalized to regain the offensive, by associating bishops and royal interference in the assembly with the introduction of popish superstitions. By using manuscripts as well as printed tracts, the Presbyterians succeeded in rallying a substantial body of lowland Scots opinion against both the bishops and royal meddling in the Kirk, in ways that anticipated and helped prepare the ground for the Covenanters of the late 1630s.

Other chapters on religion include Christopher Durston's examination of James's hostile attitude toward anti-Trinitarian heretics and Mary Morrissey's instructive discussion of the use of Paul's Cross sermons to broadcast a view of the king's reign as a blessing sent from God. James's use of Paul's Cross sermons, Morrissey rightly points out, contradicts the view expressed by other historians, including myself, that he was not much interested in his public image. Jane Rickards contributes a nuanced account of James's use of scriptural exegesis to support his evolving policies, especially in international affairs and with respect to the English succession. James ultimately fell victim to his skill in adapting religious [End Page 1444] arguments to immediate political needs, since at the time of the Spanish Match in the early 1620s people were able to throw back at him his earlier anti-popish rhetoric.

A chapter by Peter Roberts on James's patronage of the theater and Houlbrooke's own survey of changing views of James from the...

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