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c h a p t e r 1 James VI and I and the Autobiographical Double Bind Only a few pages into Basilikon Doron, the handbook of advice he wrote for his son Henry, King James VI of Scotland (the future James I of England) gives the prince directions on a number of devotional matters. After treating the proper method of prayer and the appropriate approach to scripture, he abruptly slides into autobiography and then abruptly slides back out: “As for the particular poyntes of Religion,” he writes, “I neede not to d[i]late them; I am no hypocrite, follow your Fathers foote-steppes.” Although declining to get bogged down in specific points of doctrine may be sensible, by thrusting himself into the discussion the king makes the issue unexpectedly personal: it is his religion that readers are invited to contemplate, not the young prince’s or their own. No sooner has James focused attention on himself and his religion, however, than he irritably attempts to back offstage. Rather than telling his readers what his beliefs are, James defensively announces what he is not: a hypocrite. This sudden movement toward self-display that is also a refusal of self-display is characteristic of all the autobiographical moments that punctuate James’s prose. As with this passage, such moments tend to occur when the subject turns to religion, and specifically to religious controversy; James’s impulse toward autobiography is intimately related to his efforts to distinguish and discriminate among Christian denominations. Although James avoids specifying the “particular poyntes” that Henry should believe or observe, his autobiographical aside introduces James’s own religious history as if it were a legible model for his son to follow. But the king’s life does not provide a legible model, either in this passage or elsewhere. 22 oaths of allegiance Its illegibility is partly due to James’s narration—which, as in the above lines, tends to withhold as many details as it supplies—but his elliptical narrative approach is itself the product of the politically complicated facts of James’s religious biography. Born and baptized a Catholic in 1566, the same year that Scotland’s Reformation was ratified, James was crowned king just a year later, after his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to resign the crown in part because of her Catholicism. Given into the custody of Protestant noblemen after Mary’s exile and largely raised by his two Presbyterian tutors , the young king was subject to repeated kidnappings and the attempts of different religious factions to gain control over him and his government. James’s religious identity was thus a matter of national significance and national debate from the day he was born. Once he became a contender for the English throne this debate intensified, and the pamphlet literature of the day shows keen interest in the question of James’s “real” religious sympathies : were they Catholic or Presbyterian? And in either case, how could such a person become head of the English Church? In order to gain and retain his hold on power, James’s official beliefs had to shift more than once. This rendered his actual beliefs perpetually obscure, and perpetually the topic of speculation. If James’s beliefs were obscure to his countrymen during his lifetime, they are surely no clearer to us today. But despite the obscurity of James’s private faith, the basic facts of his religious biography are well established and were almost universally known by his contemporaries. James’s depictions of his religious identity in his prose are therefore not casual or incidental; they would have been written in the knowledge that some portion of his readers would be searching for clues to his beliefs or trying to square what they read with what they already knew of his background. James’s autobiographies , born in a context of religious controversy, are what I have described in my Introduction as confessions of faith: conscious attempts to explain or clarify his beliefs that wind up doing very little of either. James’s confessions of faith show him struggling to get past the problematic parts of his religious biography—the parts that could give rise to charges either of apostasy or of having at some point falsified his religion—but no explanation appears to be adequate. At times James seems reduced to reciting the barest and most basic of Christian tenets, in a kind of...

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