JAMES I OF GREAT BRITAIN

Family
James I of England was born on 19 June 1566 at Edinburgh Castle, he was the
eldest son and heir of Mary Queen of Scots and her second husband Henry
Stuart, Lord Darnley. He died on 27 March 1625 at Theobalds Park, when he
was 58 years old.
He was baptized “Charles James” on 17 December 1566 in a Catholic
ceremony at Stirling Castle, his godparents were Charles IX of France,
Elizabeth I of England and Emmanuel Philipert. He was descended through the
Scottish kings.
Eight months after James´s birth, his father was found murdered on 10
February 1567 at Church of Scotland. His mother married again but in the same
year, she was forced to renounce the throne of Scotland in favor of her son at
the eight months of age, because Mary´s rule over Scotland was insecure, for
both she and her husband, being Roman Catholics. Protestant rebels arrested
Mary and imprisoned her, she never saw her son again. She fled to England
where she was executed following Catholic plots against Elizabeth I in 1587.
His childhood and adolescence were unhappy, abnormal and precarious but
was weight with strong education until the age of 14, he studied Greek, French
and Latin.
He was intelligent and sensitive, but also shallow, vain and exhibitionist. He also
was board shouldered, awkward and ungainly, he had many phobias, was
vulgart, and his homosexual behavior which was damaging his prestige and
state affairs.
Through his youth, he was praised for his chastity, since he showed little
interest in women, he preferred male company. However, a marriage was
necessary to reinforce his monarchy, at the age of fourteen years old he
married Anne of Denmark, the couple were married formally at the Bishop´s
Palace in Oslo on 23 November. By all accounts, James was at first infatuated
with Anne, and in the early years they seem always to have showed her
patience and affection. The royal couple produced eight children, but only three
of them survived infancy, one of them, Charles would be his successor. Anne
died before her husband in March 1619.

Kingdom
When Elizabeth I of England died in March 1603 unmarried, James moved to
London and was crowned King James I of England, the first of the Stuart Kings,
at the age of thirteen months.
During his minority, James had four regents, the great Scottish lords: the Earl of
Moray, Earl of Lennox, the Earl of Mar, and the Earl of Morton. The coronation
was on 25 July 1603 at Westminster Abbey, with allegories provided by
dramatic poets and was received by numerous spectators and open casements,
“the streets seemed paved with men”, wrote Dekker.
In October he assumed the title “king of great Britain”. He was also King James
VI of Scotland at Stirling Castle, crowned on 29 July, 1567.
When James succeeded the kingdom had its problems, monopolies, taxation,
the war in Ireland had become a heavy burden on the government. By this time,
England had incurred a debt of 400000 pounds.
In the first year of his reign, he survived three conspiracies, which led to the
arrest. Those holping for governmental change from James were at first
disappointed when he maintained Elizabeth´s Privy Councillors in office, as
secretly planned with Robert Cecil; the Elizabethan´s chief minister; but James
shortly added long-time supporter Henry Joward and his nephew Thomas
Howard to the Privy Council, as well as five Scottish nobles. Cecil was assisted
by Thomas Egerton and Thomas Sackville. Thus, James was free to
concentrate on bigger issues, such as a scheme for a closer union between
England and Scotland and foreign policy.
James was ambitious to build on the personal union of the Crowns of Scotland
and England to establish a single country under one monarch, one parliament
and one law.
In foreign policy, He devoted his efforts to bring the long Anglo-Spanish War to
an end, until, thanks to skilled diplomacy on the part of Robert Cecil and Henry
Howard, a peace treaty was signed between the two countries, which James
celebrated by hosting a great banquet.
In four years of peace, James practically doubled the debt left by Elizabeth, and
it was hardly surprising that when his chief minister, Robert Cecil, Earl
of Salisbury, tried to exchange the king’s feudal revenues for a fixed annual
sum from Parliament, the negotiations over this so-called Great Contract came
to nothing. James dissolved Parliament in 1611.
The abortive Great Contract, and the death of Cecil in 1612, marked the turning
point of James’s reign; he was never to have another chief minister who was so
experienced and so powerful. During the ensuing 10 years the king summoned
only the brief Addled Parliament of 1614. Deprived of parliamentary grants, the
crown was forced to adopt unpopular expedients, such as the sale of
monopolies, to raise funds. Moreover, during these years the king succumbed
to the influence of the incompetent Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Carr was
succeeded as the king’s favourite by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham,
who showed more ability as chief minister but who was even more hated for his
arrogance and his monopoly of royal favor.
In his later years the king’s judgment faltered. He embarked on a foreign policy
that fused discontent into a formidable opposition. The king felt a sympathy,
which his countrymen found inexplicable, for the Spanish ambassador, Diego
Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar. When Sir Walter Raleigh, who had
gone to Guiana in search of gold, came into conflict with the Spaniards, who
were then at peace with England, Gondomar persuaded James to have Raleigh
beheaded. With Gondomar’s encouragement, James developed a plan to marry
his second son and heir Charles to a Spanish princess, along with a concurrent
plan to join with Spain in mediating the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. The plan,
though plausible in the abstract, showed an astonishing disregard for English
public opinion, which solidly supported James’s son-in-law, Frederick, the
Protestant elector of the Palatinate, whose lands were then occupied by Spain.
When James called a third Parliament in 1621 to raise funds for his designs,
that Parliament was bitterly critical of his attempts to ally England with Spain.
James in a fury tore the record of the offending Protestations from the House of
Commons’ journal and dissolved the Parliament.
The Duke of Buckingham had begun in enmity with Prince Charles, who
became the heir when his brother Prince Henry died in 1612, but in the course
of time the two formed an alliance from which the king was quite excluded.
James was now aging rapidly, and in the last 18 months of his reign he, in
effect, exercised no power; Charles and Buckingham decided most issues.

His relation with arts.

He was a supporter of literature and arts. He was concerned in the 1580s and
1590s to promote the literature of the country of his birth. He published: “Some
Rules and Cautions to be Observed and Escgewed in Scottish Prosody”, at the
age of 18.
James´s characteristic role as active literary participant and patron in the
Scottish court made him in many respects a defining figure for English
Renaissance poetry and drama.
Final years

When James was fifty years old, he suffered increasingly from asthritis, gout
and kidney stones. He also lost his teeth, and drank heavily. During the last
years, Buckingham was controlling everything with the objective of ensure the
Charles´s future, his son. Finally, he died on 27 March in 1625 at Theobalds
House, during a violent attack of dysentery, with Buckingham at his side. He
was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Legacy
James was widely mourned. He had largely retained the affection of his people,
who had enjoyed uninterrupted peace and comparatively low taxation.
He commissioned the king James Authorized Version of the Bible, it is a bible
wrote by him.
Under James, the plantation of Ulster by English and Scots Protestants began,
and the English colonization of North America started its course with the
foundation of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.