As opposed to his son, where I would describe my opinion only getting slightly modified, not really changed, over the years, I really did do a turnaround on James. For a long time, basically neither of the two main associations I had when thinking of him were to his credit: a) when his mother was about to be executed, James lodged a token protest with Elizabeth but simuiltanously sent a letter to Leicester to ensure it wouldn't be taken too seriously, and b) he wrote one of those ghastly books encouraging witchhunts in the 17th century, with devastating results. Yes, I also knew that during his reign, the English equivalent of the Luther bible was created (i.e. just as Luther's translation of the bible into early modern German is a major major step in the develpment of the language and was to prove influential for writers up to and including the decidedly not religious Bertolt Brecht, the "King James bible" did the same for early modern English), but since as opposed to Martin L., James didn't do the translating himself, I did not consider this to be a plus in his favour.
I think the first to make me question this low or at least limited opinion was
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jesuswasbatman, who had just watched Howard Benton's play about James and Anne Boleyn (in two different timelines, obviously), and then
deborah_judge who was also an advocate. A decade, some biographies and a few podcasts later... Okay, I admit it: He was, to tongue-in-cheekily quote a current day translation of a very different epic, a complicated man.
As to not making more than a token protest: given he never knew his mother (he'd last seen her when he was four months old and she had left the country when he was a little more than a year), and was raised by a gallery of her bitterest enemies who kept teaching him she was the worst, this is really not surprising. What is actually interesting is that both James and Mary inherited their Scottish throne as babies, had regents until they were adults and became responsible for a nation with a lot of internal strife, an uncomfortably powerful neighbour next door and nobles with a power that the British nobility had lost post Wars of the Roses, but the results when they took over became very very different. Yes, in a sexist age James had the advantage of being a man and also of not being a Catholic in a country with a majority Protestant population. But he still deserves credit for being the first Scottish ruler in a long time who managesd to stablize the country, lead it well and avoid costly wars with the English. (The fact that he was King of Scotland for a staggering 58 years - to the 22 years of his English and Irish Kingship - tends, I'm told, to be overlooked on the English side of the border in the public consciousness. Even if you discount his childhood and youth., i.e. the years before his personal rule, that's still an impressively long reign.) And he did after a childhood which was if anything even tougher than that which had served as a tough apprenticeship to Elizabeth Tudor (and was so crucially different to his mother Mary's childhood as the darling of the French court): his uncle and first regent, Moray, was shot in 1570, followed by his second regent and grandfather, whom a five years old James saw bleeding to death because Lennox was equally assassinated. This bloody regent turnover continued and got accompagnied with uprisings. When James was eleven, Stirling Castle was raided by Catholic rebels. At sixsteen, he was kidnapped by William Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, and imprisoned for ten months. And then there was his teacher, George Buchanan, who managed to get him fluent in Scots, English, French, Greek and Latin, but did so via constant beatings and humiliations. Buchanan had the declared aim of teaching him about not just his mother being the worst but all the Stuarts being rotten and that as a King he was to exist for his subjects, not for himself. Unsurprisingly, what James actually learned when those lessons where conveyed via beatings was to dissemble, and conclude that it wasn't his ancestors but but rebels who were "monstrous". He also had Buchanan's writings on limited Kingship forbidden as soon as the man was dead.
By now, I've come across a considerable number of royals whom in modern terms we'd classify as gay or at least as bi with a strong preference for men, of which James definitely was one, and who were married because that was par the course for royalty. This often, but not always, means misery for their wives. Compared some of the truly castastrophic to at least very cold marriages (Henriette Anne "Minette" of England/Philippe d'Orleans "Monsieur", Edward II/Isabella of France, Frederick II of Prussia/Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick etc.), James and Anne of Denmark didn't do badly. They even had a sort of romantic origin story, in that Anne, after being married by proxy as was usual, was supposed to be delivered to Scotland via ship, terrible weather made it impossible and her ship ended up in Norway instead, so young James, for the first and last time making a grand romantic gesture for a woman instead of a man, instead of waiting tilll weather and sea were calm enough for Anne to make the trip from Norway instad took the boat to Norway himself, united with his bride and brought her home to England. (His son Charles would decades later try to accomplish something similar by travelling to Spain to woo the Spanish Infanta. It did not have the same results.) This resulted in a good start to the marriage, but also in a dark time for some other women in Scotland because James believed all the bad weather was undoubtedly the result of witchcraft and someone had to be punished for that. Later on, the biggest disagreements James and Anne had weren't about his male favourites but about who got to raise their children, specifically the oldest son, Henry. Anne wanted to do this herself. James, whose own childhood had been a series of bloody turnovers in authority figures (see above), wanted Henry to be raised in the most secure castle in Scotland and by an armed to the teeth nobleman. This made for a lot of rows and repeated attempts by Anne to get her oldest son by showing up at his residence and demanding he be handed over, with the last such occasion coming when James was already en route to England to get crowned.
James' iron clad conviction of the dangers of witchcraft still is chilling to me, but even that is more complicated than, say, the utter ghastliness that was going on in German speaking countries in the 17th century, because James in his later English years actually paired his anti-witchcraft attitude with the admoniishment of judges not to be fooled by conmen and -wen, superstituions and local feuds, and the few times he got personally involved in England (as opposed to earlier in Scotland) it was in the favour of the accused. This doesn't mean women and men didn't die on other occasions in the realm(s) ruled by a monarch known to fear witches, but I still can't think of a parallel among the "theologians" who wrote their anti-wtiches books simultanously in my part of the world, and who never would have admitted the possibility of false accusations, let alone admonished their judges to be sceptical and discerning.
Some of what got James a bad press back in the day now looks good to us, most of all the fact he genuinely and consistently disliked war. BTW, this was less different from Elizabeth I's own attitude than historians and propagandists for a long time presented it. Elizabeth had avoided actual war with Spain for as long as she could, and hadn't been very keen on supporting the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands directly, either, much preferring it if she got someone else to do it. Once the war was there, of course, it had to be fought, but those eighteen years of war had left both England and Spain exhausted and with enormous debts, and one of James' signature policies, the peace of Spain, was undoubtedly to the benefit of both countries. That in the later years of his reign a majority of people yearned for war with Spain again, for a replay of the late Elizabethan era's greatest hits (without considering the expense of all that national glory), and that James still held out against it is to his credit, especially given the results when his son Charles actually pursued such a policy after ascending to the throne. Something that's also to James' credit as a monarch though not as a father is that he kept England out of the 30 Years War while he lived despite the fact that his daughter Elizabeth and his son-in-law were prime protagonists in its earliest phase and might never have become King and Queen of Bohemia if the Bohemians hadn't believed that surely, the King of England (and Scotland, and Ireland), leader of Protestants, would support his daughter against the Austrian Catholic Habsburgs if they elected his son-in-law as a counter condidate to said Habsburg. He also was ruthless enough to deny his daughter and son-in-law sanctuary in England once they were deposed and on the run, which wasn't very paternal but understandable if you consider that this was before his son Charles was married (let alone had produced an heir of his own), meaning that if he, James died and Charles ruled, Elizabeth was the next in the line of succession, and the thought of her husband, the unfortunate "Winter King" of Bohemia whose well-meaning but inept leadership had kickstarted the war, becoming the King of England if anything should happen to Charles gave James nightmares. In conclusion: not participating in one of the most brutal wars fought in Europe ever and in fact trying his utmost diplomatically to prevent it was a good thing. But in centuries where "manly" and "warrior" were going together in the public imagination, it's no wonder that it didn't make James popular.
Mind you: a misunderstood humanist, James wasn't, either. And something that can definitely be laid as his doorstep (though not exclusively so) is that his relationship with the English (as opposed to Scottish) Parliament went from bad to worse every time there was one during his reign, which definitely played a role in what was to come once his son Charles became King. (ironically,
Prince Charles had his first and as it turns out last time as a firm favourite of Parliament when he led the opposition to continued peace with Spain and the pro War party in the last year of his father's life.) Why do I qualify this with "not exclusively"? Because Parliamentarians didn't always cover themselves with glory, either. I mean, as I understand it, James' first English parliament went like this:
James: Here I am, fresh from Edinburgh, your new King. Thanks for all the enthusiasm I encountered on the road, guys. Well, seeing as I am now King of England, Scotland and Ireland, I propose and will coin a phrase: A United Kingdom of Great Britain! How about that? Starting with an English/Scottish Union, not just by monarch but by state?
English Parliament: NO WAY. Scots are thieving beggars who are by nature evil and will deprive us of our FREEDOM and RIGHTS and PRIVILEGES if they are treated as citizens of the same country. WE HATE SCOTS. You excepted, because that would be treason.
(Meanwhile in Scotland: Are ye daft, Jamie? We hate those English murderous bastards!!!!!)
James: So basically no one except for me wants a United Kingdom of Great Britain, got it. I still think I'm right and you're wrong, but fine, for now. How about some money for me, my queen, my kids and my lovers?
EP: About that....
Which brings me to the topic of the Favourites. Most monarchs have them. They're usually hated. (It's easier to count the exceptions.) Ironically, one of the very few exceptions, the only one of Elizabeth I's favourites who wasn't hated while being the Favourite, the Earl of Essex, had all the qualities royal favourites are usually hated for - he held monopolies that provided him with lots of money (and one of the fallouts between Essex and Elizabeth was when she refused to prolong said monopoly), his attempts at playing politics were disastrous (and also outclassed by his rival Robert Cecil), and the only thing he had going for himself really were good looks and cutting a dashing figure when raiding Spanish coastal cities. In over forty years of Elizabeth's reign, a court culture wherein the male courtiers played at being in love with the Queen had been established, and certainly all her long term favourites were framing their relationship with her in romantic language. Now presumably when James became King, people who hadn't been paying attention to gossip from Scotland had expected things to go back to the Henry VIII model where certainly the King still had his faves but the romantic language was out . But lo and behold, while it's impossible to prove James actually had sex with any of the young handsome men he favoured, the language used in his letters to at least two of them (Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham) is certainly suggestive, and he did kiss them and others in public. While men kissing men in that day and age wasn't necessarily coded erotic, especially coming from a monarch, James did it often enough for ambassadors to notice and report. And certainly when courtiers wanted to remove the current Favourite, they tried it via presenting young good looking men to James. (This worked in one case - the toppling of Somerset in favour of Buckingham, though there were other factors involved as well - but failed when Buckingham's earlier sponsors, realizing they had just traded Skylla for Charybdis, tried to do the same thing again. No matter how many sexy young things were presented, Buckingham remained James' Favourite till James' death.) Favourites were on the one hand certainly a symptome of the corruption inherent int he absolutist system, but otoh also hhighly useful in that they offered an out for both King and subjects in whom to blame for unpopular policies. Instead of critiquing the King, the opposition could frame its complaints in being the venting of loyal subjects about the Evil Advisors (tm), while the King could sacrifice a scapegoat if things went too badly to quench public anger. As opposed to his son, James was ready to do that if needs must. But his Favourites still contributed to the overall perception of the court as a den of sin and corruption. (Which, yeah, but as opposed to which previous court?)
(BTW, and speaking of the usefulness of scapegoats for monarchs, my favourite example for the story about Henry starting out as this charming well meaning prince going bloodthirsty monarch only after he didn't get his first divorce and had a tournament accident being wrong remains the fact that when Henry ascended to the throne at age 18, one of the first things he did was to accuse two of his father's more ruthless tax men of treason and have them beheaded in a cheap but efficient bid for popularity. Now, no one could deny said two officials, one of whom, Edmund Dudley, was the grandfather of Elilzabeth's childhood friend and life long favourite Leicester, had been absolutely ruthless in their mission to squeeze money out of the population by every legal or barely legal trick imaginable. But they had done so under strict instructions from Henry VII, and the accusation of
treason for this was ridiculous. Note that Henry VIIII could simply have dismissed them when he became King. But no. He went for legal murder from the get go. However, since everyone hates tax men, absolutely no one minded and many celebrated instead of thinking of the precedent. This is why the Tudors, by and large, when governing had a genius for (self) propaganda the Stuarts just didn't.)
I wouldn't agree with one of the latest biographers, Clare Jackson, that James was the most interesting monarch GB had, but he certainly
is interesting, and far more dimensional than younger me gave him credit for.
The other days
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