James I - The Union of the Crowns Documentary

On the twenty-sixth of March, 1603, a rider reined in his horse before Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, filthy after three days almost without sleep in the saddle, and knelt before King James the Sixth of Scots. He was Sir Robert Carey, and he had ridden roughly four hundred miles from London in defiance of a formal order that no one carry the news north ahead of the official council. He carried a sapphire ring, drawn from a dead woman's finger by his own sister, as proof of what he had come to say. Elizabeth the First of England was dead. James, thirty-six years old, was about to become the first person ever to rule Scotland and England as a single king. He was born on the nineteenth of June, 1566, inside Edinburgh Castle, the only child of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her second husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. His parents' marriage had already curdled into open hostility by the time of his birth. Darnley was murdered less than a year after the christening, in circumstances still argued over by historians, and his mother's own downfall followed fast. Forced from her throne in 1567 amid rebellion and scandal, Mary abdicated in favour of her infant son. James was crowned King of Scots at Stirling on the twenty-ninth of July, 1567, at just thirteen months old. He would not see his mother again. Scotland ruled a baby through a chain of regents, and the chain was violent. Two of his first three regents were killed in office — one assassinated, one hanged after military defeat — in a kingdom split between rival noble factions and between Protestant and Catholic loyalties still raw from the Reformation. The boy king was raised at Stirling under the strict Presbyterian scholar George Buchanan, a formidable classicist who beat Latin, Greek and a deep suspicion of unchecked royal power into his pupil in roughly equal measure. James later called him his pedagogue without much warmth. He read voraciously anyway, and grew into one of the most genuinely learned monarchs Europe would produce that century. He took the government into his own hands in the late 1580s, still a teenager. Scotland remained a rough school: he survived at least one attempted kidnapping by disaffected nobles, the Ruthven Raid of 1582, and spent his early personal reign carefully balancing the country's competing lords and its Kirk, the strict Presbyterian church establishment that watched his every move. In February 1587 Elizabeth had his mother executed at Fotheringhay after years of imprisonment and a trial for alleged involvement in a plot against her life. James protested formally but did little more; he was already, quietly, positioning himself as Elizabeth's likeliest heir, and a public breach with England served no purpose he could see. The English pension that followed his restrained response was not, historians generally agree, a coincidence. In 1589 he married Anne of Denmark, sister of the Danish king, by proxy first and then in person. When storms scattered her fleet and stranded her on the Norwegian coast, James sailed out himself that winter to fetch her — an unusually bold personal gesture for a monarch of his caution — and the two were formally married in Oslo. The voyage home was rough enough that James briefly and famously blamed witchcraft for the weather, a belief that was not idle curiosity: he personally oversaw the North Berwick trials that followed in Scotland through the early 1590s, and in 1597 published a book called Daemonologie arguing in serious philosophical terms for the reality of witchcraft. It sits oddly beside his other major works. In The True Law of Free Monarchies, published the same year, and Basilikon Doron, written as private advice for his son Prince Henry in 1599, James set out a closely reasoned defence of the divine right of kings — the idea that royal authority came from God alone and answered to no earthly institution, Parliament included. Few reigning monarchs before or since wrote so much, or so carefully, about the theory of their own job. Of his children with Anne, three survived infancy: Henry, Elizabeth and Charles. Prince Henry, widely admired and groomed for kingship, died of what is thought to have been typhoid in 1612 at just eighteen, leaving the more reserved Charles as heir. Elizabeth died childless at Richmond Palace in the early hours of the twenty-fourth of March, 1603. James's claim ran through his great-grandmother Margaret Tudor, Henry the Eighth's elder sister, who had married into the Scottish royal line nearly a century before. No marriage created the union that followed — English and Scottish crowns were never joined at an altar. It was inheritance, plain succession law, and a Privy Council that preferred an orderly transition to a contested one.