Contributions
King of Scots from 1567 as James VI, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, he came in 1603 to the English throne as James I: for the first time, a single head wore the crowns of Scotland, England and Ireland. Learned and theological, he authored several works — Basilikon Doron, The True Law of Free Monarchies, Daemonologie, and a fierce Counterblaste to Tobacco. Above all he commissioned the translation of the Bible that bears his name, the King James Version (1611), a monument of the English language. A patron of the court masque, he brought together the poet Ben Jonson and the architect Inigo Jones, who introduced Palladian classicism with the Banqueting House at Whitehall. He ended the long war with Spain (Treaty of London, 1604) and placed Shakespeare's company under his protection, as the King's Men.
Significance
James was the architect of the dynastic union of the three kingdoms, a prefiguration of Great Britain. His court extended and crowned the golden age: Jacobean theatre, with Shakespeare at the height of his art, flourished under his patronage, and the King James Version lastingly shaped English prose and faith far beyond his reign. The nuance, however, foretold the storm: a theorist of the divine right of kings, he entered growing tension with a Parliament jealous of its prerogatives — the root of the conflicts that would bring his son Charles I to the scaffold. His Daemonologie fed witch-hunts, his favourites (among them Buckingham) and his love of display drained the finances, and his pacific diplomacy disappointed the war party. A transitional figure — he died in 1625, at the hinge of the age — he closed the English Renaissance and opened the Stuart baroque. His reign remains the one in which the island, for the first time united under a single sceptre, gave itself a Bible and a theatre made for eternity.
Influence
The King James Version stamped the language and religion of the English-speaking world for centuries; Jacobean theatre prolonged the Elizabethan surge. His doctrine of divine right nourished English constitutional debate, and the colonisation of Virginia (Jamestown, 1607) bears his name. His calvinist and erudite education, under the severe George Buchanan, made him a scholar-king, while Scottish traditions and the plots of his youth — the Gowrie affair, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 — forged his distrust and his theory of monarchy.
Anecdote
In January 1604, at the Hampton Court Conference, the Puritans pressed the king to abolish the episcopate. James, who had suffered in Scotland from Presbyterian intransigence, met them with a cutting phrase: "No bishop, no king." From that conference, where he rejected almost all their demands, nonetheless came an immense decision: the commissioning of a new official translation of the Bible, which appeared in 1611 and became the King James Version.