ABSTRACT
James VI and I should be regarded as ‘two kings or one?’ (219). It is a question both pertinent and timely, as James has in recent years begun to escape from the hapless supporting role in impending disaster to which traditional English historiography assigned him. The hoary Whiggish assumption of a ‘high road to civil war’, along the early stretches of which James was commonly held to have stumbled, has finally been undermined by further search for the origins, and the mechanics, of the breakdown of Stuart government under Charles (88).
