Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder found in a cellar beneath the House of Lords (1605)
The Gunpowder Plot; Guy Fawkes was taken in the small hours of 5 November
Monarchs · Stuart
James I
1566–1625
House of Stuart — the Union of the Crowns
In office: 1603–1625
James VI of Scotland, king there from the age of thirteen months, inherited the English throne in 1603 on the death of his cousin Elizabeth I, uniting the two crowns in one person for the first time. A learned, argumentative theorist of the divine right of kings, he presided over the Gunpowder Plot, a new translation of the Bible that still bears his name, and the flowering of Jacobean drama, while quarrelling steadily with parliaments over money and prerogative.
How to spot them
- ▸The wisest fool in Christendom; son of Mary, Queen of Scots; king of one kingdom from infancy and of another from 1603
- ▸Divine right of kings; The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron
- ▸Favourites: Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, then George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham
- ▸Died 1625 at Theobalds; buried in Westminster Abbey, in Henry VII's vault
In the reign
A new English Bible produced by six companies of scholars at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge (1611)
The Authorised Version, commissioned at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604
The crowns of two neighbouring kingdoms come to rest on one head for the first time (1603)
The Union of the Crowns; a full parliamentary union was refused and had to wait a century
A royal pamphlet denouncing smoking as a custom loathsome to the eye and hateful to the nose (1604)
A Counterblaste to Tobacco, published anonymously
England's first permanent settlement in North America, founded on a marshy Virginia peninsula (1607)
Jamestown, named for the reigning king
Inigo Jones builds a Palladian hall in Whitehall, later the scene of a royal execution (1622)
The Banqueting House, with a Rubens ceiling added in 1636
The Commons record their right to debate any subject, and the king tears the page from their Journal (1621)
The Protestation of 1621, over the Spanish Match and foreign policy
Settlement of Scots and English on confiscated land in the north of Ireland (1609)
The Plantation of Ulster
Quick-fire facts
- •Son of Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley; he became King of Scots in July 1567, aged thirteen months, after his mother's forced abdication
- •His claim to England came through his great-grandmother Margaret Tudor, elder daughter of Henry VII
- •Married Anne of Denmark in 1589; their children included Henry Frederick (died 1612), Elizabeth of Bohemia and the future Charles I
- •Through Elizabeth of Bohemia and her daughter Sophia of Hanover, his descendants supplied the Hanoverian succession
- •Wrote Daemonologie (1597), a treatise on witchcraft, and personally attended witch trials in Scotland
- •The nickname 'the wisest fool in Christendom' is traditionally attributed to Henri IV of France or his minister Sully
- •His reign gave its name to Jacobean drama: Shakespeare's company became the King's Men in 1603
- •Died at Theobalds House, Hertfordshire, on 27 March 1625, leaving England close to war with Spain
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- The Royal Household — James I (r. 1603-1625)
- W. B. Patterson — King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom