‘[S]hall it euer bee blotted out of my minde’, James VI and I rhetorically asked the English parliament in March 1604,

As another would put it some years later, and as the work of John Guy and others on the Elizabethan fin de règne has suggested, ‘the people were very generally weary of an old woman's government’.Footnote ¹ Four hundred years on, James VI's accession to the English throne was marked, if not with jubilation, then at least by the holding of academic conferences. The proceedings of two of those conferences, at Montpellier and Hull, have resulted in two collections of interdisciplinary essays, under review here alongside two new monographs covering aspects of English political history over the period 1601–5. The final peaceful resolution of the English succession problem comes as something of an anti-climax after the tension and radicalism produced by the ‘Elizabethan exclusion crisis’, to borrow Patrick Collinson's phrase, of the 1560s to 1580s.Footnote ² James VI was heir by lineal descent and, unlike his late mother Mary Queen of Scots, was acceptably Protestant. The conventional high political narrative would have it that, if his accession ever was in doubt, Sir Robert Cecil secretly saw to it that all would run smoothly in the end. It is perhaps because James Stewart's accession to the English throne on 24 March 1603 was so peaceful and seemingly unproblematic that it has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. The recent appearance of four books covering this period should therefore be welcomed.

The Machiavellian Cecil, engineer of the Jacobean accession and contriver of plots designed to discredit, disembowel, or merely decapitate his enemies, is the bête noire of Francis Edwards's The Succession, Bye and Main Plots of 1601–1603. Edwards, SJ, holds that Sir Robert Cecil contrived not only James's peaceful accession (implicitly the first of the ‘plots’ of the book's title), but also the so-called Bye and Main Plots of the summer of 1603, before turning his scheming mind to his ‘masterpiece’, the ‘last and greatest bogus plot’ (pp. 293, 315), the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. All this was done in order to rid Cecil of his ‘rivals’ for power and to ensure the survival of Calvinism as the religion of the English state. In the exposition of this thesis, Edwards's style is that of a religious polemicist, fluent and offensive:

Calvinism's guiding ‘principle’ was, apparently, ‘“total depravity”’ (p. 309), and Cecil, of course, was just such a Calvinist: how else could he justify such ruthlessness in the destruction of his enemies?

There is nothing to commend in this book. The sources used are well worn and the tone and interpretation reminiscent of earlier Jesuit ‘histories’ of the period, and no more convincing.Footnote ³ Eight chapters, taking up roughly half of the book, are dedicated to scene-setting, presenting a tired account of the Elizabethan succession problem, occasionally enlivened by such patent absurdities as Edwards's claim that Robert Persons's Conference about the next succession ‘was written “with all courtesy and impartiality with prejudice to none”’ (p. 29). The Bye and Main Plots, and their aftermath, are dealt with, tediously, over the remaining hundred and fifty or so pages. To descend to particulars, central to Edwards's case that Cecil masterminded these ‘pseudo-plots’ is the identification of George Brooke as an ‘agent provocateur’. Brooke, it is claimed, worked on the Secretary's behalf and deliberately encouraged the development of the two interlocking conspiracies – the first, the Bye Plot, to capture the king, change his ministers, and compel him to accept a toleration of Catholic worship; the second, the Main, to kill ‘the king and his cubs’ (pp. 157–291, passim). This is not new: for an effective refutation of this argument and its evidential and interpretative basis, one may turn to Gardiner's History of England.Footnote ⁴ Even when the evidence seems so clearly to point to the king's own initiative in dramatically staying the executions of the alleged plotters Ralegh, Cobham, Grey, and Markham at Winchester in December 1603, Edwards cannot resist looking for the hand of Cecil: ‘What was it all about? What part did Cecil play in this? … the bizarre scene at Winchester falls neatly into place: a shift altogether worthy of “Robert the Devil”’ (pp. 285–91). Mark Nicholls's works on the plots of 1603–5 remain easily the best and set these conspiracies and treason trials in their true context of the raised and disappointed hopes of the Jacobean accession.Footnote ⁵

By contrast, Diana Newton's The making of the Jacobean regime is a refreshing and original study of the opening two years of James's reign in England. Newton does not concentrate on the ‘traditional foci’ of the political historiography of 1603–5, the Hampton Court Conference, and the Gunpowder Plot, contending instead that ‘James's reign in England can only be understood by panning out from the usual “edited highlights” and looking carefully at his first years in the round’ (p. 4). The purpose of this ‘holistic’ approach is to present an account of James's ‘education as king of England’. Newton's view of James's kingship in England is overwhelmingly positive – in line, broadly, with his historiographical rehabilitation over the past twenty-five years. From his first arrival in his new capital, Newton argues, James showed himself ‘consistently anxious to get to grips with the governmental processes that he had inherited’ (p. 34). Peace with Spain and the drive for conformity among the clergy of the Church of England, however, produced grievances among puritans and raised expectations – and fears – of toleration for Catholics. James responded to petitioning campaigns by Catholics and puritans over these years by tightening up administrative processes, particularly at a local level, since ‘James, that dogged seeker after the facts of the matter in civil and ecclesiastical spheres was determined to receive adequate and precise information when it was needed’ (pp. 74–5 et passim). Newton concludes that ‘King James emerges as energetic, vigorous, intelligent and flexible’ (p. 146).

There is much here that is praiseworthy. Although Dr Newton's focus is on the government of England, she is careful to highlight the ways in which James's Scottish subjects paid close attention to their king's policies south of the border. Her contention that, by the summer of 1605, James had become ‘less confident of his abilities to govern his two kingdoms simultaneously than he claimed’ (p. 116) merits further investigation. The administrative actions of the ‘Jacobean regime’ identified by Newton over 1603–5 are traced through manuscript collections in the archives of a dozen counties.

These efforts would have been still more impressive had the significance of ‘traditional foci’, such as the Hampton Court Conference, not been dismissed so early on in this ‘holistic’ work. Consequently Newton's central argument, that the Northamptonshire petition in support of non-conforming clergy was a more formative experience in the education of the king in the religious sensitivities of his new subjects, is not entirely persuasive. Dr Newton presents no evidence that Sir Francis Hastings, the ringleader of the Northamptonshire petitioners, ‘bearded’ James (p. 97) on 9 February 1605, confronting him with a critique of his lenient policy towards Catholics and harshness towards Protestants of ‘tender conscience’. Indeed, even on the basis of Newton's findings, it would seem that the efforts of Hastings and others to make James change direction came to very little, failing as they did to halt the deprivations of clergy, although a more rigorous attitude towards Catholic recusancy may have ensued. Furthermore, whether the reign in England as a whole ‘can only be understood’ by such a study of its opening two years is unproven. Surely ‘the Jacobean regime’ – or should it not rather be regimes? – changed over time. It may be added that this is not so much an examination of Jacobean government ‘in the round’ as a contribution to the study of religious politics and policy at the start of the reign. Greater awareness of the input of James's counsellors to ‘his’ government would have led to rather different conclusions, and this is linked to the major weakness of the book: Newton's approach to the nature of government in a personal monarchy is over-literal. James is said to have commanded this, ordered that, and paid detailed attention to administrative business. Yet there is scarcely any acknowledgement that any of these royal actions were the result of counsel received or that James's input may have consisted of little more than agreement to a previously established policy and authorization by signing the necessary warrants.

Indeed James's engagement in the government of his new kingdom could be even less hands-on than that. Newton cites a series of letters and warrants from James to the ‘Grand Council’ of peers and former Elizabethan privy councillors as he journeyed south as the newly proclaimed king of England in April and May 1603 (Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1729, fos. 39–90, 97). However, a number of these apparently royal commands may well have been written on blank sheets of paper, signed by James previously and sent ahead of the king's hunting party to be filled in at London after consultation with Sir Robert Cecil and other English privy councillors who knew better what to do.Footnote ⁶ This does not mean that James would not have agreed, after the fact, with what had been written for him many miles away, but it seems unlikely that this ‘remarkable series of letters … that covered an impressive range of matters, both domestic and foreign’ attests to James's ‘rigorous attention to his new obligations’ (pp. 3, 17–32). We might say instead that, from early on in his English reign, James was practising his not inconsiderable skills of delegation.

Very occasionally we are given (albeit unintentionally) glimpses of the complexity of policy-making and implementation. The key role of privy councillors in these processes is seen, for example, in Cecil's comment to the clerk of the signet Thomas Lake, that ‘“the B[isho]ps … know in the generall his Ma[jestie]s minde, & in the particular have had direction”’. From whom did they receive such ‘particular’ direction, one wonders. Similarly, ‘“the council meets every day, and contrary to his practice the king is present”’ (pp. 92 and 111, emphases mine). This would rather suggest that James did only take ‘a spasmodic interest in administrative matters’, as has ‘traditionally’ been argued (p. 133). In this context, it is worth noting that the hunting lodge at Ampthill, designed so that ‘as many as ten privy councillors’ could wait on the king during his absences from London, was never actually built – a fact overlooked by Newton (p. 142). We are told that on 23 June 1605 ‘the privy council drew up “Orders conceaved fitt to be putt in execucion in the severall Counties of this realme for the better preservacion of his Majesties subiectes in peace order & obedience within the same”’. These were, essentially, instructions for assize judges (p. 117). A little later, this has become the king's own doing: ‘He emerged … as a king of real political sagacity and ability … taking the opportunity to energize local government through issuing a comprehensive series of privy council orders on 23 June 1605’ (p. 119). The elision of conciliar initiative and royal command is not helpful in establishing Newton's case for an active and interventionist king. It is a shame, therefore, that it occurs throughout her book. We should not return to a view of James VI and I as simply lazy, a cipher for a Salisbury or a Buckingham. But, after more than two decades of revision, we need to get beyond exoneration of the king from charges of fecklessness to a comprehension of his place in the wider systems (cultural, political, and institutional) of personal monarchy in his multiple kingdoms. Newton's findings on heightened early Jacobean attention to ‘the supervisory and regulatory elements of the administrative process’ at county and parish level (p. 59 et passim) may prove valuable in the study of governance generally, but not, I suspect, as part of the ongoing reassessment of Jacobean kingship.

The succession struggle in late Elizabethan England: politics, polemics and cultural representations, edited by Jean-Christophe Mayer, is derived from the conference papers presented at Montpellier in March 2003, together with some specially commissioned pieces. The eighteen essays are arranged in four sections, covering Anglo-Scottish politics and diplomacy, the political thinking of James VI and I, religion and religious polemics, and the succession and the stage. Unhelpfully, especially in a book of this length (over 400 pages), there is no index. The volume is interdisciplinary and most of the contributions are from literary scholars. In his introduction Jean-Christophe Mayer makes much of the merits of interdisciplinarity, writing of ‘confronting our methods and approaches’. It would be churlish to deny that scholarly encounters between historians and literary scholars can be fruitful. I doubt, however, whether historians really need to be told that ‘polemical works can harbour elements of artfulness, of creative fiction, which are manipulative and thus closely resemble the devices used in literary texts’ (pp. 19–20).

Many of the contributions to this collection are disappointing. Nick Myers on ‘The gossip of history: the question of the succession in the state papers (domestic and foreign)’ is little more than a survey of materials in some of the printed calendars, for instance, and Michèle Vignaux's ‘The succession and related issues through the correspondence of Elizabeth, James, and Robert Cecil’ is similarly reliant on too thin a base of printed sources, engaging with no historiography more recent than Marie Axton's The queen's two bodies and (in one footnote) Patrick Collinson's ‘Monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’.Footnote ⁷ Margaret Jones-Davies, writing on one of James's chaplains, Richard Field, is heavy-going and seemingly takes no account of the work of Lori Anne Ferell and Peter McCullough on court preachers and sermons: a remarkable omission for someone working on this subject.Footnote ⁸ Annoyingly (and ironically, in a collection which champions the creative confrontation of divergent scholarly disciplines), too little attention is paid by too many of the contributors to the possible wider implications of their work. However, taken as a whole, these essays demonstrate that the succession to Elizabeth's throne was the subject of tense discussion and remained problematic after 1587: it was, as the collection's title declares, a political and cultural struggle. There is an interesting piece by Catherine Lisak on George Puttenham's Justificacion of Elizabeth's actions in executing Mary Queen of Scots, presenting Elizabeth and Puttenham wrestling with the dilemmas that this posed for the English queen's conscience. Patrick Collinson's concise overview of political and polemical manoeuvrings by English puritans and bishops, and by James VI himself during the 1590s, is a useful addition to the literature on the subject, and the two contributions by Susan Doran and Glenn Burgess are equally deserving of a wide readership.

Dr Doran, through a study of three late Elizabethan succession tracts and their political and polemical context, argues that the unsettled succession to the English throne was ‘a matter of grave concern amongst late Elizabethans and a subject of intense polemical debate in the later 1590s’. Those who wrote in defence of James VI's claim and against Robert Persons's Conference about the next succession to the crown of England did not believe that the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 had left the way ‘comparatively clear’ for the Stewart claim. ‘As a result of Doleman's [i.e. Persons's] book and Elizabeth's continuing refusal to name him heir’, Doran contends, ‘James believed he might well have to fight for the throne on Elizabeth's death.’ The Scottish king responded to this challenge by sending agents and embassies to England and abroad to persuade his Tudor cousin to designate him officially as her heir and to muster foreign support and weaponry should that fail. He also ‘resorted to the pen’, commissioning tracts in answer to Persons and in support of his claim, and, in his Trew law of free monarchies, responding himself to the theory that a parliament could alter the succession (pp. 97–100). Doran's conclusions that these polemical defences of the Stewart claim in the later 1590s emphasized divine right – as opposed to the idea that the queen and parliament could ‘“limit and bind the crowne … the descent, limitation, inheritaunce and government thereof”’ – and that James's accession ‘strengthened divine right monarchy’ merit further investigation, especially in the light of the recently perceived shift during Elizabeth's ‘second reign’ away from ‘monarchical republicanism’ and towards more ‘absolutist’ and ‘authoritarian’ political thinking (pp. 115–16).Footnote ⁹ By presenting the Elizabethan succession as politically and diplomatically problematic until at least 1601 and by underlining how seriously James VI took Persons's tract, this piece complements Doran's arguments recently published elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁰

In his contribution to Mayer's volume, Glenn Burgess seeks to explore the ways in which James VI adapted his political thinking to the environment of his new kingdom as James I after 1603. Burgess contends that ‘the concept of office’ was important to James in his new role as king over multiple kingdoms and, in a reversal of Jenny Wormald's view, he concludes that James ‘was one person but two kings’. Although he was a ‘free monarch’ in all his kingdoms, subject to no other human authority, according to Burgess, James accepted that there were variations between the constitutions of his realms and that his two offices of king of Scotland and king of England existed in differing institutional and legal contexts. James's sense of constitutional diversity, inherent in the distinction between his person and his two offices of kingship, allowed him to develop ‘a considerable degree of flexibility and nuance’ into his political thought, although his political instincts remained ‘less well honed’ in England than they had been in Scotland before 1603 (pp. 143–75). This is an ingenious line of argument, covering a lot of ground and a range of material succinctly. It does constitute, as the author hopes, ‘a start’ in thinking about ‘the problems faced [in England] by a foreign king after 1603’ (p. 175). Perhaps, however, Burgess offers too neat a solution to the apparent contradictions within Jacobean kingship to be wholly convincing. For instance, although James VI and I may well have believed, in Burgess's phrase, that ‘a godly king would act in religious matters only with the advice of his clergy’ (p. 167), as Alan MacDonald has recently demonstrated, he showed little practical regard for a principle of ‘constitutional diversity’ between the churches of his kingdoms: on anglicizing reforms of Scottish worship, he sought the advice and support of English-beneficed clergy.Footnote ¹¹ Often, as Burgess comes close to admitting (on p. 168), James's pronouncements should perhaps be attributed to ‘those who spoke for him’, rather than to the king himself – can such instances, therefore, be readily cited as evidence of James's political thought? What of the concept of ‘office’ in the sense of a ‘duty’ as well as a ‘position’? Administrative and legal systems were diverse, yet, even though he would later write that a lot of the detail in his Basilicon Doron had been about ‘the governement of Scotland in particular’, James clearly thought that the kingly ‘office’ – the moral obligation of a king towards God and his subjects, to rule with justice and equity – could be discussed in generally applicable terms.Footnote ¹² In this sense, James was one person with one office of kingship over three kingdoms. Moreover, too firm a distinction between the person and office of a king – to put it another way, between a king's two bodies – was just the sort of idea that James sought to demolish in his denials that there could be any right of resistance to authority. I am not entirely sure that Burgess is not here attributing a ‘political thought’ to James with which he himself would have disagreed.

The accession of James I: historical and cultural consequences, edited by Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer, and Jason Lawrence, is the more successful of the two interdisciplinary volumes under review here. Opening with a masterful introduction by the editors, the book contains twelve essays which seek to add to our understanding of the historical, literary, and legal impact of James's 1603 accession and its relationship to ‘the long-term narratives of English and British history’ (p. xviii). Indeed, in the last of these essays, Daniel Hulsebosch widens the horizons still further in an examination of the transatlantic repercussions of Sir Edward Coke's report on Calvin's Case of 1608, the test case by which it was determined that Scots born after James's accession to the English throne – the so-called post-nati – held legal rights under the Common Law as English subjects. This book is a valuable addition to Jacobean historiography.

Of particular note among the gems in this collection is the first chapter, ‘1603: the end of English sovereignty’, by the late Conrad Russell, to whose memory the book is dedicated. Russell revisits James's project for a union of his multiple kingdoms within the larger entity of a kingdom of Great Britain and how that project was scuppered by the insularity and incomprehension of his English subjects in parliament. Russell's argument that James's aim in promoting the Union was to bring the laws of succession for his two kingdoms into line with each other, is extremely persuasive. The Union is a familiar topic, but it is explored here with Russell's typical elegance of expression and penetrating intellect.

Union of the crowns and the Union project are the subject of many of the contributions. Tracey Hill and Philip Schwyzer examine literary responses to union in a London Lord Mayor's Show and King Lear respectively. John Kerrigan shows Jacobean dramatists grappling with the problems of British union, empire, and ethnicity through stage representations of Wales during the Roman occupation. Arthur Williamson analyses David Hume of Godscroft's quasi-republican, civic humanist vision for the united Britain. Jenny Wormald considers the impact of 1603's union of the crowns on Scotland, arguing that James's northern kingdom was well equipped to deal with absentee kingship given its long experience of previous royal minorities and that the accession of ‘the Anglicized King Charles’ was of far greater significance: ‘The real impact of union would come not after 1603 but after 1625’ (p. 84). Given how divisive James's anglicizing religious policies were in Scotland during the late 1610s and early 1620s, it is difficult wholeheartedly to agree with the conclusions of this stimulating piece.Footnote ¹³

Other contributors similarly question the significance of 1603 as a turning point. Curtis Perry, for instance, points to the Elizabethan origins of the Jacobean language of complaint against corrupt, libidinous favourites manipulating an effeminate monarch.Footnote ¹⁴ Pauline Croft argues powerfully that the ‘Jacobean’ policy of peace between England and Spain was really ‘the last chapter of Elizabethan foreign policy … largely written by the leading Elizabethan politician in James's privy council, Robert Cecil’ (p. 140). The Cecilian policy during the later 1590s had been to seek to bring Spain to the negotiating table and the prerequisite to peace would be the defeat of Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland and an end to Spanish interference there. Tyrone's submission on 30 March 1603 meant that ‘all the necessary pre-conditions for negotiations with Spain were at last in place’ (p. 147), but Elizabeth's death six days earlier meant that this Elizabethan policy would come to fruition during James's reign. Croft demonstrates how little James was actively involved in Cecil's negotiations for the Treaty of London (1604). He needed to do little more than agree to the peace: ‘Rex Pacificus could afford to go hunting’ (p. 151). As we have seen, Dr Newton's Making of the Jacobean regime would have benefited from such scepticism about the king's own role in government. This is a brilliant work of revision and whets the appetite for Croft's forthcoming monograph on Cecil. Along with the best of the publications reviewed here, it encourages us to think again about late Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and the significance of the shift from Tudor to Stuart on 24 March 1603.