A ‘perfect union’? James VI and his three kingdoms

Gabriel Glickman

James VI and I

Royal depositions and assassinations

• 1567- deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots

• 1584 – assassination of Prince William of Orange by Balthasar Gerard (French Catholic)

• 1589 – assassination of Henri III by Jacques Clement (Dominican friar)

• 1610 – assassination of Henri IV by Francois Ravaillac

Andrew Melville (1545-1622)

‘there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland: there is king James, the head of the commonwealth; and there is Christ Jesus, the king of the Church, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, not a lord, not a head, but a member’.

Political thought of James VI

• “it follows of necessitie, that the Kinges were the authors & makers of the lawes, and not the laws of Kings... The King is above the law”(Basilikon Doron).

• “this pernicious opinion; that Popes may tosse the French King his Throne like a tennis ball, and that killing of Kinges is an acte meritorious to the purchase of the crowne of Martyrdome”. (An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance).

• Union of England and Scotland “a perfect union, a blessed union... Reuniting of these two mightie, famous and ancient Kingdomes of England and Scotland, under one Imperiall Crowne”, speech in Westminster parliament, 1604.

James I, coronation medal

Union Jack, 1606

Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612)

Forms of political union in C17th Europe

• Dynastic union: king only common element e.g. England and Scotland, 1603.

• Confederal union: some shared common institutions but local institutions still most powerful entities e.g. United Provinces.

• Incorporating union: one country assimilated into the institutions of another – e.g. Spanish Indies, status of Wales under English crown.

Bacon and Savile – only an incorporating union will be stable and durable.

Core elements to Jacobean Union policy

1. Attempted legal and parliamentary union of England and Scotland 1603-1608.

2. Religious union –establishment of common Protestant Church united under King James Bible, 1611-1618.

3. Plantation of Ulster as a full ‘British venture’. Francis Bacon - ‘unions and plantations are the very nativities and birthdays of kingdoms’

The plantation of Ulster

John Donne, Meditation, XVII (1624) - written against the background of European war

“No man is an island,Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,Europe is the less.”