ABSTRACT

JAMES VI, THE INFANT for whom Moray and Morton had ruled, grew up to be the most intelligent of the Stewarts, the last intellectual to grace the throne of Scotland, and, more important, the biggest success of them all. He was conscientiously educated to do credit to his royal position, and responded to the education. At eight he was translating freely from French to Latin; at sixteen writing tolerable verses and a sound analysis of the principles of poetry. Unfortunately, the education, and the aptitude it displayed, ignored the more creative aspects of the intellectual life of the day. In all that James regarded as a proper subject for learning he was a good practitioner; at the classics, theology, the ancient world, literature, but it was all a study of past achievements. He never had an inkling of economics or finance, he was an amateur at military science, and he learnt his politics by watching and listening. His regents and tutors had done well for him, but they had not done as well, for instance, as Charles IX of Sweden did for Gustavus Adolphus, with his training in modern

languages, mathematics, war, and government. It was as if James had taken firstclass honours at a modern university in all the older and non-expanding subjects. It is customary to sneer at the king for his pedantry and his cowardice. But James had as much scorn of the pedant as anyone. His love of learning was natural and went deep, his command over language vigorous and effective. What other king has written and published books? Could any other have put it on record that ‘it becometh a king to purifie and make famous his owne language’? What other, in this island, since Alfred, has done so? Perhaps only Elizabeth of England. Elizabeth showed a sense of style in her speech, but she had not James’s academic interest in it. As for cowardice, the historian living in an age provided with policemen at home and peace abroad cannot help being astonished at the splendid nerve displayed almost invariably by the public figures of the sixteenth century, but this came from a value of public reputation as well as from mere courage. James, physically uncouth, friendly, and informal, had little basic dignity, and though he loved furious and dangerous riding, had a marked distaste for shows of violence and the weapons that accompanied them. He gave this away every time he dubbed for knighthood with his eyes turned away from his own naked sword-blade.1 We have an account of his horror and fear at the first rumours of the gunpowder plot, but he had good reasons for his terror. James often let it be seen that he was frightened, but he never allowed himself to be deflected from his chosen policy by danger. A typical coup d’état by one of his nobles could be terrifying while it lasted. Sir James Melville describes an attempt by the Earl of Bothwell and his friends in which the royal palace was full of ‘reilling, robling with halbertis, the clakking of ther colveringis and pistolles, the duntling of melis and forehammers, and ther crying for justice’, in which the attackers tried to burn out James’s Chancellor from his refuge in a tower; but through the very real risk that these alarms carried James remained constant. Early in his teens the movements for and against Morton began a series of coups and counter coups. James resented, as his grandfather had done, being the subject of this sort of baronial treatment, but instead of merely resenting it, he studied how to deal with it. First he had to learn to keep his own counsel-to restrain the tears of rage or the shake in his voice. Soon after the Ruthven raid of 1582 the English ambassador complained that he could no longer get hold of the little key to the box of James’s private papers. As James grew older he continued to keep his policy in his own hands, but he was open about its general drift. Because of this his reign has no single great minister with whom he worked, no Burleigh of England, no Oxenstierna of Sweden. And in the book of advice he

wrote for his son, the Basilikon Doron of 1598, he offers us a key to his general ideas on the government of his realm.