Abstract
in 1599 seven copies of Basilikon Doron, James VI’s account of kingship, were privately printed and given to his wife and son and to ‘some of my trustiest servants’, who included, at first sight surprisingly, the earls of Huntly, Erroll and Angus, those earls who had had a long run of defiance of the Crown in the late 1580s and early 1590s. What they thought, if they read it, of James’s condemnation of the Scottish nobility’s ‘natural sickness, that I have perceived … a feckless arrogant conceit of their greatness and power’1 can only be guessed at. What is certain is that this judgement of them has been subsequently endorsed by historians of James’s reign. James himself has been given credit for bringing to an end, before he left Scotland in 1603, the long struggle for control by the monarchy over a nobility which had for at least two centuries enjoyed too much power. He had, it is claimed, succeeded in curbing their political dominance, thereby ensuring the authority of the Crown; and apparently to give theoretical justification for his position, he had introduced, when he wrote the Trew Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Dor on in the late 1590s, a concept of monarchy which was totally new to Scotland, based on the theory that kings were answerable to God alone and not to their people. In terms of secular politics therefore the major issue of the reign is the place of the magnates in Scottish political life and their relationship with the Crown.
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Bibliography, and Guides to Further Reading
The best starting point for politics in the reign of James VI is James’s own works. There is an excellent edition of Basilikon Doron by J. Craigie, 2 vols (Scottish Text Society, 1944–50); and this and James’s other major works are now readily available with the welcome reprint of C. H. Mcllwain, The Political Works of James I (New York 1965), in which the Trew Law of Free Monarchies and the 1607 speech to the English Parliament are of particular relevance to Scotland. Other contemporary sources include The Historie and Life of King James the Sext, ed. T. Thomson (Bannatyne Club, 1825); David Moysie, Memoirs of the affairs of Scotland... from 1577... to... 1603, ed. J. Dennistoun (Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs, 1830); and David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, 8 vols (Wodrow Society, 1842–9), which is indispensable to the political as well as to the ecclesiastical historian. State papers and letters on both internal and foreign affairs are printed in The Warrender Papers, ed. A. I. Cameron, 2 vols (Scottish History Society, 1932); and on relations with England in Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI and Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and others, both ed. J. Bruce (Camden Society, 1849 and 1861).
Of modern works the best and most balanced account is that by Gordon Donaldson, who devotes a third of his book Scotland: James V–VII (Edinburgh 1965) to the reign; and the shorter chapter on the king in the same author’s Scottish Kings (London, 1967) is also valuable, as a more general statement of Professor Donaldson’s interpretation of the most successful Stewart king. D. H. Willson’s King James VI and I (London 1956; paperback edn 1963 and 1966) is the standard biography. His account of James in Scotland is full of intolerable magnates, and he is less than favourable to James personally; but his book is of value to Scottish historians, partly because it is a complete biography of James as king of both countries, and also because of its emphasis on James’s education, and its picture of a cultured king in a cultured court in Scotland— which is something worth stressing. The other major political biography is Maurice Lee, John Maitland of Thirlstane and the foundation of the Stewart Despotism in Scotland (Princeton 1959). This is a well-informed book which gives a wealth of detail about the early years of the reign, but it is the most extreme statement of the theory that James sought to break the power of the nobility; and its central thesis that Maitland, the very able secretary and chancellor whom James overworked and ennobled, taught this policy to the king is an obviously strained interpretation of the facts.
Anglo-Scottish relations are dealt with by Douglas Nobbs, England and Scotland, 1560–1707 (London 1952); and by a useful and detailed book which deserves more attention than it has recently received, in spite of its rather heavy-going narrative style, Helen G. Stafford, James VI of Scotland and the throne of England (New York 1940). For the period after 1603 there is an excellent article by D. H. Willson, ‘Relations between Scotland and England in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Scottish Colloquium Proceedings, I (University of Guelph 1968); and an interesting but sometimes unreliable one by Dame Veronica Wedgwood, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1603–40’ in TRHS, 4th ser. XXXII (1950).
On the Borders before 1603, the best work is T. I. Rae, The Administration of the Scottish Frontier, 1513–1603 (Edinburgh 1966); and after 1603, Penry Williams, ‘The Northern Borderland under the Early Stuarts’, in Historical Essays presented to David Ogg, ed. H. E. Bell and R. L. Ollard (London 1963), which shows how disastrous was any relaxation by the Government of the new and successful policy made possible by better relations and by union. Two works on the Highlands deserve mention: D. Gregory, History of the Western Highlands and Isles of Scotland from... 1493 to... 1625 (Edinburgh 1836; 1881)which is still well worth reading; and A. Cunningham, The Loyal Clans (Cambridge 1932) which discusses the Highlands in the context of government policy.
The many articles on the reign include those by W. Taylor, ‘The King’s Mails, 1603–25’ in SHR, XLII (1963), and the most recent attempt to make sense of the Gowrie Conspiracy, W. F. Arbuckle, ‘The Gowrie Conspiracy’, in SHR, XXXVI (1957). The recent book by R. Ashton, James I by his Contemporaries (London 1969) is a convenient and pleasant way of gaining a quick impression of the king and his reign.
This short note is necessarily highly selective; and it is therefore worth drawing attention to the invaluable and comprehensive list of works, both contemporary and secondary, on this period compiled by G. Donaldson in the Bibliography of British History, Tudor Period, 1485–1603, ed. Conyers Read (2nd ed. Oxford 1959), ch. XII.
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© 1973 Alan G. R. Smith, Jennifer M. Brown, Gordon Donaldson, S. G. E. Lythe, Christina Larner, John Bossy, Brian Dietz, Louis B. Wright, Menna Prestwich, W. J. Jones, G. C. F. Forster
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Brown, J.M. (1973). Scottish Politics 1567–1625. In: Smith, A.G.R. (eds) The Reign of James VI and I. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15500-2_2
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