King James VI and I, as Ralph Houlbrooke writes, “speaks to us as no other monarch does” (1). He authored political and theological treatises, poetry, and religious meditations; published speeches; and was a member of a circle of poets in his native Scotland before his accession in England. He took pleasure in the company of writers and scholars throughout his career. One of the merits of this rich collection of essays is that it contains work by literary scholars as well as historians. The king who emerges from these pages is far more complex and intellectually agile than the doctrinaire, inflexible, absolutist monarch who was once the central subject of historical accounts of his era. At the same time, as the contributors argue, his writings and his policies contain inconsistencies and contradictions, and his misjudgments and injudicious actions could undermine his projects.

Astrid J. Stilma, writing on “The Battle of Lepanto,” shows that the young James VI's epic poem, first published in 1591, accomplished two tasks. It celebrated the victory of the Catholic military hero Don John of Austria against the Turks and advanced a Protestant interpretation of the event. James stressed the power of Providence to bring about such a victory and then commented in the epilogue that although the “Antichristian sect,” the Church of Rome, might conspire against true Christians, God would turn events to their comfort and his glory. The poem's Dutch translator, Abraham van der Myl, assured his readers that this message applied to them by attaching a summary of the poem. “May the Lord grant that all tyrants who oppose his people will thus in their pride and tyranny be destroyed” (21). James was thus introduced to the Dutch as a potential ally in their struggle against Spain. John Cramsie argues persuasively that James advanced a coherent and consistent theory of imperial monarchy and that he used it effectively to create one realm out of three, helping to form Great Britain. James's theory combined Tudor imperium with older Scottish ideas within a biblical framework that emphasized Old Testament kingship. Despite Whig ridicule of divine-right theories of monarchy and belittlement of James, he advanced well-supported claims on behalf of a unitary imperial kingship that were contested in the spheres of ecclesiastical policy, legislation, the administration of law, and the finances of the state. Peter R. Roberts calls attention to important developments in the English theater and royal patronage of players. “Within ten days of his [James’s] arrival in London, the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, and later in the year the Lord Admiral's players were formally attached to Prince Henry's household” (81). The theater had “arrived” in both a commercial and cultural sense. Money-raising schemes that would have taxed theatergoers or theatrical performances failed to receive royal support. Royal patronage could thus be said to have given the companies, including Shakespeare’s, timely assistance and to have “averted an unwelcome challenge” to their finances (105). Jane Rickard takes a more critical view of James's literary activity, especially what she regards as his attempts to control the meaning of the scriptures for his subjects by his writings, his sponsorship of a new translation of the Bible, and his own translations of several of the psalms. The king claimed a special ability to interpret the scriptures, but his way of doing so was manipulative and sometimes contradictory. Thus, despite his claim that there was only one legitimate reading of key passages, namely his own, the effect was to “demonstrate the malleability of the word, even the divine word” (149).

Other essays deal with James's responses to religious and political divisions and his efforts to instill unity and purpose among his diverse subjects. In an astute analysis of the succession, Susan Doran denies that James was “obsessed” with it, but explains why he was concerned about it in the last years of Elizabeth I's reign. First, the book by the Jesuit Robert Persons (alias R. Doleman), A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England (Antwerp, 1594), questioned his claim. Second, he feared that the Act for the Surety of the Queen's Person of 1585 might invalidate his claim by linking him to the cause of his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, executed for plotting against Elizabeth. Finally, the Infanta Isabella, a possible rival, had arrived in the Spanish Netherlands in 1591 with her army. But James's sure-footed diplomatic and political activities allowed him to survive the fall of his ally, the Earl of Essex, and gain the support of Robert Cecil and others at court. Despite Persons's argument, Pope Clement VIII himself was sympathetic to James's accession in England. Alan Cromartie attacks “the accepted account of a pivotal event” (61), the Hampton Court Conference. He disputes that James's religious settlement in 1604, arrived at during three days of discussions with church leaders and a small group of Puritan spokesmen, was responsive to the views of the dissidents. Instead, James insisted on conformity in a way that even his most zealously authoritarian bishops did not. Concerning lay baptism of infants, confirmation, and absolution, the king adopted the views of the leading bishops. He rejected the Puritan proposal to make the Thirty-Nine Articles reflect the conclusions concerning predestination expressed in the more recent Lambeth Articles. “When all these qualities are found united in someone of a later generation,” he concludes, “we have no hesitation in calling such a person Laudian” (80).

Mary Morrissey analyzes Paul's Cross sermons, preached on political anniversaries, to study how James attempted to win the loyalty and affection of his subjects. Queen Elizabeth, by contrast, had used personal appearances to achieve this result. The king did not dictate preachers’ messages, but he prescribed the observances: his escape from the Gowrie plotters on 5 August 1600, his accession in England on 24 March 1603, and his and the nation's escape from the gunpowder plotters on 5 November 1605. The sermons typically described the blessings of God in bringing peace and stability to his people and thus militated against resistance theory, whether Calvinist or Catholic. Christopher Durston writes about what is now regarded as a cruel and barbaric act: the burning at the stake of the anti-Trinitarians Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, both in 1612. James took a definite interest in both cases. He disputed with Legate; Wightman confronted the king in person. The two were tried and found guilty of heresy by high-ranking officials of the Church of England and burned under the authority to punish heresy granted to the monarch by the Act of Supremacy. Durston says the burnings were probably legal, but public opinion mostly opposed them. He suggests that James learned from his mistakes; these were the last such executions in England. Laura Stewart argues that James's attempt to impose the Perth Articles on the Scottish Kirk in 1617 aroused far more hostility than his imposition of episcopacy some years earlier. There was more involved in this hostility than judgments about kneeling to receive communion—the most controversial provision. An early 1620s pamphlet, “Dangers to the republic,” linked political and religious issues: the king's lack of residence in Scotland, his neglect of the Scottish Parliament, and alterations to the government of the Kirk. Thus, Stewart contends, the controversy anticipated the rebellion in Scotland against Charles I in the late 1630s.

The collection closes with a superb survey of views of King James, “James's Reputation, 1625–2005,” by Ralph Houlbrooke. Opinions of James varied widely in the first two and a half decades from John Williams's eulogy at the time of the king's death to the scurrilous attack on the king attributed to Sir Anthony Weldon. Thomas May, in his history of the Long Parliament, saw the beginnings of the struggle between liberty and tyranny in James's disputes with his parliaments and his turn to extraparliamentary sources of supply. John Spottiswoode, one of the king's Scottish bishops, saw the king as having worked to establish a “decent order” in church and state and reported little opposition to James's rule in Scotland after 1603. David Calderwood, a leading Scottish presbyterian, described James as first admiring and then overthrowing the discipline and government of the Scottish Church. Houlbrooke's survey from the 1750s to the 1950s traces the emergence of opposing Enlightenment views, with David Hume on the one side and William Robertson on the other. But the Whig interpretation shaped modern views most profoundly. Houlbrooke summarizes the master narrative as containing certain key elements. “James had been more effective in Scotland than in England. He had failed to grasp the growing power and importance of the English parliament, underpinned by social and political developments which had advanced further than in Scotland. He also failed to understand the strength of puritan feeling, to conciliate, or to harness it to his government” (183).

The revisionism since 1960, Houlbrook states, “has arguably been more comprehensive and far-reaching than during the previous three hundred years” (183). Favorable assessments of James's reign emphasized the Hampton Court Conference, foreign policy, even-handed rule in Scotland, and efforts to encourage preaching and conformity. The king's attempts to reunite Christendom for European peace, to find consensus with Parliament, and to negotiate with various Scottish groups and institutions have coalesced into a more favorable view of James's style of and ability to rule.

Alongside these assessments have been analyses that show James as resolutely absolutist, inept, and duplicitous in his dealings with the English parliament; persistently anti-Puritan in his policies; and anxious to subordinate the Kirk. Thus, as Houlbrooke points out, revisionism paradoxically results in greater appreciation of James's character and skills as a ruler and greater awareness of his mistakes and failures. Houlbrooke might have added that historians also have a greater understanding than ever before of the daunting difficulties the king faced, especially after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. James and his son Charles faced them in markedly different ways, and on the whole the comparison greatly favors the father.