ABSTRACT
The accession of James Stuart, King of Scots, to the English and Irish thrones in 1603 was to open a reign in which some of his subjects succeeded, where those of Elizabeth had failed, in setting up enduring overseas plantations. To describe 1603 as the start of 'imperial' kingship is to use language anachronistically. Early-modern European usage still thought of the Holy Roman Emperor when it used imperial phraseology, and most European kings had been closing their crowns with arches and vociferously claiming that they were 'imperial' since the later Middle Ages. In a hierarchical social world where everyone was supposed to be subject to somebody, it was basically a claim to be subject to nobody except God. King James was quite clear that his kingship was of this kind. He was unusual among English kings in being an articulate intellectual who wrote books. In 1598, he had published The True Law of Free Monarchies, and he republished it after he reached England. It argued that the monarch's sovereign power derived from God alone, and that theories of rights of resistance to royal authority, cultivated by both radical Roman Catholics and radical Protestants, were profoundly misguided. Similar views had been expounded by Elizabethan clerics in the authoritarian 1590s, notably by Hadrian Saravia, who was to survive to be one of the translators of the Authorised Version of the Bible in the reign of James, Saravia's De Imperandi Authoritate, which derived Elizabeth's power from God and denied the right of subjects to limit it, was an official view. 1
