James I's reign is remembered as the "Golden Age" of literature and the arts, with writers such as Shakespeare inspired to pen their works.
The royal wedding which took place in February 1613 between the Stuart Princess Elizabeth, daughter of
James I, and Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, was an event of major importance.
There had been various late medieval and Tudor riffs on the original statute, several continental commentaries on authority (especially Jean Bodin's) or on the legitimacy of tyrannicide, the disparate utterances of jurists such as Sir Edward Coke and Sir John Davies on the common law and its nature, and all manner of case law relevant to the theory of sovereignty (for instance Calvin's case in the very early part of
James I's reign), itself critical in turn to the definition of treason.
Half of those quizzed did not know that her successor,
James I, was Scottish.
IN 1605, the Gunpowder Plotters planned to seize
James I's daughter Elizabeth from nearby Coombe Abbey, where she was being educated, and proclaim her queen.
It was Sir Henry Wotton, Ambassador to the courts of Venice and Bohemia under
James I, who originated the remark, and what he said was, "An ambassador is an honest (not 'good') man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country (not 'sent abroad to lie for')."
James I and his circle, including William Alexander, William Fowler, and
Manlove traces the line of Scottish fantasy from early ballads through
James I's The King is Quair up to the present day.
In contrast the essays by Patrick Collinson (a rather 'blokish' piece which still bears the marks of its oral delivery, on the Martin Marprelate tracts), Jenny Wormald (a robust defence of
James I's political shrewdness and relatively liberal values which were hopelessly misread by those in the paranoid Tudor state over the border), Jim Sharpe (on the frequency of rebellion, sedition, and the articulate sense of being excluded among many of the lower classes, in the 1590s), Richard McCoy (on the poetry of Francis Davidson, whose poetry, according to McCoy, 'exposes the tensions and resentments behind the smooth facade of the cult of Elizabeth), and Guy himself (on the sharp move to the right in the ecclesiastical establishment), all support the dramatic thesis of the collection.
In this respect the most interesting chapter in the book is that on the building of the new hall (still standing) for Trinity College in 1605, which was to become King
James I's favourite playing-place, in spite of everything that Inigo Jones could construct at court.
He wrote Poems (1614, 1616), Flowres of Sion (1623), and Forth Feasting (1617), a poem celebrating
James I's visit to Scotland in that year, and he was apparently the author of Polemo-Medinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam (1645?), a macaronic piece intermingling Scots and Latin.