The last king of Scots

Meet the Regents

James’s early childhood was marked by a bitter civil war over Mary’s deposition, which resulted in his first regent, his uncle James Stewart, the Earl of Moray, being shot dead in Linlithgow in 1570. His second regent and grandfather, Matthew Stewart, the Earl of Lennox, was assassinated just outside Stirling Castle in September 1571 and died in front of his five-year-old grandson, an event which greatly traumatised him. The Marian civil war ended in 1573, but not before James’s third regent, John Erskine, the Earl of Mar, had died of ill health and was replaced by James Douglas, the Earl of Morton. 

James made his first foray into politics at the tender age of 11-and-three-quarters. In March 1578, he agreed to take up rule in his own name and removed Morton from the regency at the insistence of his kinsmen, the earls of Argyll and Atholl. This act triggered a long political apprenticeship for James, resulting in six palace revolutions over the next seven years. These included the restoration of Morton at the head of the royal council a month after his deposition as regent, following an assault on Stirling Castle which left one of James’s childhood friends dead. 

James was seized and placed under house arrest for ten months in 1582–3 by the Ruthven Raiders, a pro-English pro-Protestant group who were angry at the level of control James’s favourite, the French-born Duke of Lennox, had at court. They forced Lennox to flee the country, and he died in Paris shortly afterwards. In return, James enacted a brutal programme of revenge against the Raiders when he escaped, including the execution of their ringleader, William Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie. 

Crown and kirk

Despite this challenging start to life, James survived and thrived as a ruler during his personal residence in Scotland. James’s government began a far-reaching new legislative programme on the occasion of his 21st birthday in 1587, which continued throughout his reign. Acts included making landlords more accountable for the crimes of their clients and tenants, restricting kin-based violence (bloodfeud), and adding smaller landholders (lairds) as another representative group in parliament. 

From 1584 onwards, James attempted to bring the Scottish Protestant church, or kirk, under royal control. This was highly difficult as Scotland had adopted a Protestant settlement in 1560 in direct opposition to Mary and her first husband, Francis II of France, and had never been controlled by an adult ruler.

The crown and kirk had many conflicts over the two decades which followed, but by the time he went to England, James controlled when and where the church’s national General Assembly could meet, and had started to introduce bishops as key figures of authority within the church. James also presided over a thriving late Renaissance court, filled with music and poetry, where hunting played a central role. Another Trust place, Falkland Palace, became James’s favourite place in Scotland to relax. He would spend most of his summers there and conduct much of his business while chasing deer across the estate.

New relationships

The Duke of Lennox was the first of three high-profile intimate relationships James had with men, which we know of through James’s writing. The other two were with Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whom James met in England. Undoubtedly, James was passionately in love with all three and gave each man extensive wealth and titles. Historians have long puzzled over whether James was queer, gay or bisexual. However, applying our understanding of sexuality to James is very difficult, not least as James himself would not have self-identified with these terms. James presented himself first and foremost as a divinely appointed monarch and father figure to his family and nation.

By pre-modern standards, James had a successful marriage with Anna of Denmark, whom he personally collected from Norway at great risk in the winter of 1589 when storms stopped her from crossing to Scotland. They had seven children, three of whom survived to adulthood. Anna played a central political role at James’s courts, as a source of intercession to the king and a trendsetter in courtly culture. A considerable part of the reason that little resistance was made to James’s accession to the English throne on Elizabeth’s death in 1603 was because he was male, Protestant, and had a fully established family with heirs, which was only possible thanks to Anna.

Age of the Stuarts

James’s legacy was considerable. He cemented the Stuart dynasty on the British throne throughout the 17th century until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ousted the Catholic James VII and II, James’s grandson, from power. However, the Stuart cause remained alive among the Jacobites until their defeat in 1746, and today’s royal family can still trace its descent through the Hanoverian monarchs beginning with George I (r. 1714–1727) back to Elizabeth of Bohemia, James’s daughter.

James was arguably the most scholarly monarch ever to sit on a British throne, and wrote works on topics ranging from the laws governing kingship to the evils of tobacco smoking. 
His first publication, The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie, appeared when he was just 18. James was also the driving force behind the creation of the King James Version of the Bible (1611), a comprehensive English translation that has subsequently had the single most significant impact on the language globally.

He created peace with Spain after decades of costly war in England. He tried to pursue a policy of religious dialogue between Protestants and Catholics, both at home and abroad. This was not an easy line to walk, and there was considerable opposition among his English subjects on both sides of the religious divide. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which saw a group of Catholics led by Robert Catesby attempt to blow up James and his government in parliament, arose because the conspirators actually felt James was not doing enough to protect them as a religious minority.   

A complex legacy

There were several dark aspects to James’s reign. James had a truly terrible relationship with money, and the royal government endured a series of bankruptcies in Scotland due to his lavish spending. James used less than scrupulous schemes to manage the debt, such as forcibly depositing part of his wedding dowry with the town of Edinburgh and then demanding regular interest payments. James’s adult court incurred a deficit rising from £150,000 in 1582 to over £400,000 by 1599. This was only gradually paid off after 1603, when James could access the far larger revenues of the English crown. However, finance caused enduring tension with the English parliament, which demanded significant concessions in exchange for granting monies.
James and Anna narrowly survived a series of storms while travelling back to Scotland in 1590, and James became convinced that this was an attempt on the new royal family’s life by a coven of witches in North Berwick. This led to him writing a pseudo-scientific treatise on witchcraft, the Daemonologie (1597). He also initiated a series of large-scale trials that led to thousands of people, usually vulnerable women, being brutally tortured and executed as witches in Scotland across the 17th century. The last recorded execution was in 1706, though trials continued until 1727.

James and his government also experimented with various forms of forcible settlement and colonisation, beginning with the imposition of a group known as the ‘Fife Adventurers’ in the Isle of Lewis in 1598. The Adventurers were sent to ‘civilise’ the local populace and extract wealth from resources, including the rich fishing grounds in the Minch basin. While this endeavour was initially rebuffed, the Statutes of Iona (1609) attacked the traditional legal rights of clan chiefs in the Highlands and Islands. They ordered that their sons should be sent to school in the Lowlands, and made English the preferred language to Gaelic. James would go on to support several colonisation projects, including the settlement of Scottish Protestants in Ulster from 1606, the foundation of an English settlement in modern-day Virginia in 1607, and the arbitrary granting of land rights in Nova Scotia.

Even this brief snapshot of James’s life highlights that it was no less eventful than that of Elizabeth’s or Mary’s. Next time you’re at Falkland Palace or Alloa Tower, pause to think of the boy-king who enjoyed these spaces so much, and who went on to create a union of very different kingdoms that (for now) still endures.

Professor Steven Reid is Professor and Head of History at the University of Glasgow. His book, The Early Life of James VI, is out now.