General Notes

Event 1 1567 King of Scotland, James VI at Sterling
Event 2 24 MAR 1602/03 Ascended English throne

king of Scotland (as James VI) f rom 1567 to 1625 and first Stuart king of England from 1603 to 1625, who styled himself "king of Great Britain." James was a strong advocate of royal absolutism, and his conflicts with an increasingly self-assertive Parliament set the stage for the rebellion against his successor, Charles I.
James was the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her second husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. Eight months after James's birth his father died when his house was destroyed b y an explosion. After her third marriage, to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, M ary was defeated by rebel Scottish lords and abdicated the throne. James, one y ear old, became king of Scotland on July 24, 1567; Mary left the kingdom on May 16, 1568, and never saw her son again. During his minority James was surrounded by a small band of the great Scottish lords, from whom emerged the four successive regents, the earls of Moray, Lennox, Mar, and Morton. There did not exist in Scotland the great gulf between rulers and ruled that separated the Tudors and their subjects in England. For nine generations the Stuarts had in fact bee n merely the ruling family among many equals, and James all his life retained a feeling for those of the great Scottish lords who gained his confidence.
The young king was kept fairly isolated but was given a good education until the ag e of 14. He studied Greek, French, and Latin and made good use of a library of classical and religious writings that his tutors, George Buchanan and Peter You ng, assembled for him. James's education aroused in him literary ambitions rare ly found in princes but which also tended to make him a pedant.
Before James was 12 he had taken the government nominally into his own hands when the Earl o f Morton was driven from the regency in 1578. For several years more, however, James remained the puppet of contending intriguers and faction leaders. After f alling under the influence of the Duke of Lennox, a Roman Catholic who schemed to win back Scotland for the imprisoned Queen Mary, James was kidnapped by Will iam Ruthven, 1st Earl of Gowrie, in 1582 and was forced to denounce Lennox. The following year James escaped from his Protestant captors and began to pursue his own policies as king. His chief purposes were to escape from subservience to Scottish factions and to establish his claim to succeed the childless Elizabet h I upon the throne of England. Realizing that more was to be gained by cultiva ting Elizabeth's goodwill than by allying himself with her enemies, James in 15 85-86 concluded an alliance with England. Thenceforward, in his own unsteady fa shion, he remained true to this policy, and even Elizabeth's execution of his mother in 1587 drew from him only formal protests.
In 1589 James was married to Anne, the daughter of Frederick II of Denmark, who, in 1594, gave birth to their first son, Prince Henry. James's rule of Scotland was basically successful. He was able to play off Protestant and Roman Catholic factions of Scottish nobles against each other, and through a group of commissioners known as the Octavians (1596-97), he was able to rule Scotland almost as absolutely as Elizabeth r uled England. The king was a convinced Presbyterian, but in 1584 he secured a series of acts that made him the head of the Presbyterian church in Scotland, wi th the power to appoint the church's bishops.
When James at length succeeded to the English throne on the death of Elizabeth I (March 24, 1603), he was already, as he told the English Parliament, "an old and experienced king" and one with a clearly defined theory of royal government. Unfortunately, neither his experience nor his theory equipped him to solve the new problems facing him;