James I: The Wisest Fool
What makes a good king? What, for that matter, makes a good leader? Nowadays, we might identify qualities such as charisma, presence, and – one would hope – intelligence in decision-making and genuine care for the wellbeing of the people governed. In a monarch, especially, is required – and has always been expected – that indefinable quality: majesty. In the early modern period, the question was hotly debated, nowhere more so than in Scotland, which had long endured royal minorities and which had recently forced the abdicated of a queen regnant in favour of her infant son. To classical republicans, a king should work for the good of the people and owed his position to them – a contract existed between ruler and ruled. To those of a Presbyterian persuasion (of which there was a growing number), a king was simply a secular arm of the state quite separate to the religious jurisdiction overseen by the Kirk and its ministers. To King James VI, a king was appointed and anointed by God; he owed his position and was answerable to no one else. A king was born to rule and the people to be ruled – whether they approved of their sovereign or not. It’s small wonder that this king looked with jealous eyes at his southern neighbour; in England, Queen Elizabeth was, he thought, not only universally obeyed by her subjects, but she enjoyed supreme governorship of her Church. James would candidly admit that he expected, in succeeding to the English throne, to enjoy a ‘towardly riding horse’ after long having to do with an ‘unruly colt’.
When the middle-aged monarch did gain England’s crown, it was on the misunderstanding that the realm had long been settled and needed only the steady hand of a continuity king. He’d battled long and hard to bring Scotland and its bolshy subjects to something like obedience, and he believed he could enjoy his new kingdom in peace, making no great religious alterations and applying himself to grand projects, such as the political merging of Scotland and England (by which he meant Scotland should bend to England in religious, legal, and cultural practices) and universal religious peace. If he had been right – if the Scots were willing to be anglicised and thereby cede their Kirk’s infrastructure and laws; if the English were willing to open up their realm to competition; and if religious activists were settled (in either kingdom) in moderate Calvinism – he might have had more success in his long-term monarchical agenda.
One of the joys of writing a biography is coming to discover what drives a subject: what their overriding goals and motivations are. Through spending months and years with them, poring over their letters and seeking answers to their (sometimes odd) actions, it becomes possible to see them in a whole new light. It’s a wonderful experience – it’s communing, as far as is possible, with the dead. James, thankfully, has always had a lot to say.
What surprised me most in tackling James VI and I is just how much my pre-existing attitudes to this infamous and often-overlooked monarch shifted. In beginning my research, I confess I was massively biased against him. Here, I thought, was the pedantic, slobbering, humourless boor of legend: the man who appears in fictional treatments fiddling with his codpiece, obsessively hunting witches, and drooling over male lovers. He would prove a dry subject, I thought.
What I found instead was a man who wasn’t always likeable but who was very far from the stereotype created by caricaturists. James was, to my surprise, neither a fool nor, exclusively at least, an inflexible intellectual. Rather, he was a colourful, extravagant figure who managed to combine an innate intellectualism with a love of jewels and display, emotional neediness, an almost pathetic craving to be loved, and a sometimes catty sense of humour that refused to be tamed. Beyond that, he was quite capable of projecting the aspects of majesty more often associated with his Tudor forebears. He could dress the part (and seemingly loved to), he had the requisite haughtiness (outdoing, often, Queen Elizabeth at her most high-handed), and he sat at the heart of a vibrant, colourful, sybaritic Renaissance court. His English reign, characterised for the most part by the peace in which he kept the country, was one of wild spending, irresistible scandal, and literary glory. It is no surprise that he gave his name to an age: the Jacobean era, rich in dramatists, love affairs, murder cases, and wits.
“The Wisest Fool” traces the king’s journey from birth until death: it investigates his reaction to (indeed, his complete rejection of) pedagogical attempts to fashion him as a classical republican prince whose power derived from the people; his curious relationship with his distant mother, who fascinated him (as she has fascinated millions of people down the centuries); his active bisexuality (which saw him prefer men romantically but pursue sexual relationships with men and women); his marriage to the politically astute Anna of Denmark; his successful attempts to raise the prestige of the Scottish Crown; and his laudable if ultimate unsuccessful peace policy in England. This is a James who could haughtily announce to parliament that he was ‘born to be begged of, not to beg’, who could dazzle in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of jewels at his daughter’s wedding, and who could immure himself in the countryside dashing off tracts in favour of the royal supremacy. It is a king whose dreams centred on creating a perfect family, a perfect kingdom, and a perfect Christendom, little realising that he didn’t live in a perfect world.
The question of whether James was a good king, then, is a complicated one, not least because he reigned in two kingdoms. In Scotland, after a difficult start (and a long one at that) he could boast that he had seen off noble rebellions and religious insurrections, emerging as an undisputed leader and successful dynast. In England, his grand projects came to nothing, mainly because there was little taste for them (especially as Europe was once more falling headlong into bloody religious warfare); yet he could be rightly eulogised as a monarch who had long kept the country out of conflict and who faced no major noble rebellions (unlike every one of the Tudor sovereigns). Here was no buffoon but a man who could present himself as the affable father and grandfather of the nation. Indeed, it is something of an irony that James, in keeping swords sheathed as long as he did, denied himself the crowning glory of an “Armada moment” and thereby allowed his political enemies, many of whom were intent on England becoming a continental Protestant military power, to blacken his name via false accusations of cowardice.
A constant throughout this book – and the real pleasure of writing it – has been discovering James the man, in all his brash, arrogant, spendthrift glory. I hope that readers will enjoy discovering what made this misunderstood and much-derided king tick as much as I did.
Steven Veerapen is a historian and novelist and the author of The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I.
